ABSTRACT
The Slavic god called Svarozhich is first mentioned in Bruno of Querfurt's letter to Henry II, King of Germany. Quoting St. Paul, Bruno compares Svarozhich with the biblical Belial, who became the personification of the devil in the Christian tradition. The author contrasts him with St. Maurice—the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. Svarozhich is also the only Slavic god mentioned in both the West Slavic context and in East Slavic sources. An anonymous fifteenth-century East Slavic author interpolated the following into the fourteenth-century anti-pagan composition, Word of a Certain Christ-Loving Person. However, given the purely local nature of all other Slavic gods, the author of this interpolation could well have learned the name Svarozhich from Western sources. The identification of "Svarog" with Hephaistos is based on the identification of Svarozhich as the god of fire, which corresponds more to the Roman Vulcan than to the Greek Hephaistos.
