Deity · Slavic · c. 1113 CE
Veles
Also called Volos
Perun's opponent, god of herds, wealth and the world below — and one of the clearest cases of a god converted directly into a devil.
Narrow source base
The reconstructed Slavic myth has Perun in the sky and Veles below, with Veles stealing cattle and Perun pursuing him with lightning. After Christianisation the pattern is unmistakable: Veles' name and attributes were transferred onto the devil, and *volos* appears in later folk usage attached to devils and unclean spirits. He is a well-documented example of the process this compendium is about, and one where the conversion happened late enough to be traced in written record.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Kyiv again, and the detail is the whole point: his idol stood down in the Podil by the river rather than on the hill with Perun. The god of herds and the world below was kept at the level of the merchants.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Named there as
- Volos
- Rank
- God of Cattle and the Underworld
- Pantheon
- Slavic
- Order
- Slavic pantheon
- Base of operations
- Kyiv again, and the detail is the whole point: his idol stood down in the Podil by the river rather than on the hill with Perun. The god of herds and the world below was kept at the level of the merchants.
- Era
- c. 1113 CE
- Traditions
- Slavic
Traits
- Domain
- Cattle, wealth, magic, the underworld, oaths of trade
- Traditional form
- Serpentine or bear-like; the adversary of Perun
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
Vladimir's idols stood here from 980 until he had them pulled down in 988 — Perun on the hill above the town, Veles down in the Podil by the river.
Down in the Podil by the river, not on the hill with Perun.
50.450, 30.524 · Wikidata Q1899
5 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 5 offices attributed to Veles, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- divination1
- material1
- transformation2
- malefic1
divination
material
transformation
malefic
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Veles, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Volos, Veles
Rus oaths are sworn by Perun and by Volos, god of cattle; his name is later attached to the devil in folk usage.
Survival as a figure of speech. Two centuries after the conversion a secular poem calls its own poet the grandson of Veles, with no apparent sense of transgression — the god is neither worshipped nor denounced, he has become the word for what a poet inherits. The corpus needs the stage between cult and folklore, and this is the cleanest example of it anywhere on the site.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Veles?
Is Veles the same as Satan?
What rank is Veles?
How else is Veles spelled?
What is Veles said to do?
How old is Veles?
Nearest in the corpus
If Veles is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Dazhbog
The Giving God · Slavic
The Slavic sun god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose people are still calling themselves his grandsons in a poem written two centuries after they were baptised.
Perun
Thunder God · Slavic
Chief god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose idol was thrown into the Dnieper at the conversion in 988.
Stribog
Lord of the Winds · Slavic
The Slavic wind god of Vladimir's pantheon, whose grandsons in the Tale of Igor are the winds themselves, blowing arrows across the steppe at an army.
Chernobog
The Black God · Slavic
The Slavic black god, known from one sentence in one hostile German chronicle — and the foundation of everything later written about Slavic dualism, which is more than one sentence can hold.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
Hades
Lord of the Underworld · Greek
Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.
The books behind Veles
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Primary Chronicle & Slavic Folk Record
Attributed to Nestor and later compilers · c. 1113, describing earlier practice · Old East Slavic
Read The Primary Chronicle & Slavic Folk Record in full ↗Cover: Public domain · from the Middle Ages, unknown · Wikimedia file page
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
Anonymous; tr. from the Old East Slavic · c. 1185 · Old East Slavic
Read The Tale of Igor's Campaign in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.