Original article (in Serbian) was published on 2/12/2025; Author: Stefan Janjić
After a tense and uncertain 2025, the year 2026 is upon us. But what will it be like? The answer to this important question – judging by articles on domestic news portals – depends on whether you are a hornet, a pearl pike, or perhaps a bearded frog. These are, namely, the signs of the so-called Slavic horoscope, which is claimed to be “one of the most accurate zodiacs in the world” and something our ancestors supposedly used.
In this article, FakeNews Tragač will not concern itself with the meaningless nature of the predictions themselves (the “Slavic” horoscope is, like any other, mere superstition). Instead, we are interested in whether our ancestors truly believed in any horoscope system. To shed light on this, we examined the available literature, reconstructed the path by which the “Slavic horoscope” gained popularity, and consulted experts on Slavic mythology.
An ancient, very ancient horoscope
Our search for the earliest sources on the “Slavic horoscope” began with domestic newspapers and television archives. We found nothing relevant. The Searchable Digital Library, whose corpus of books, newspapers, and other publications spans four centuries, didn’t return a single result. A standard online search was not much more generous either: if we ignore minor Facebook posts and YouTube comments, it appears that domestic websites “discovered” the ancient “Slavic horoscope” only in 2020. An analysis of Google Trends shows that users showed no interest in this term until the start of the pandemic.
The situation is similar with English-language sources, although a few posts from around 2010 can be found. However, once it finally attracted attention, the “Slavic horoscope” became a real hit: zodiac almanacs and tapestry patterns with “your sign” are sold, and the media began publishing monthly and annual forecasts inspired by the “beliefs of our ancestors.” This year alone, it has been covered by Mondo, Srpski telegraf, Novosti, Alo, Kurir, Informer, Pink, NS uživo, Dnevnik, and Luftika.
Until we narrowed the search to Russian sources, it seemed as though the fiery horse, the bearded frog, and the bull with golden horns had appeared out of nowhere.
“I heard about it on the radio”
Conventional online sources in Russian go back to the early years of the 21st century. One of the earliest detected – the website “Krivič” – offered a school of Slavic gymnastics and a Slavic horoscope. The promoter of this unexpected combination was a certain Gennady Adamovich, who published Gymnastics of Slavic Sorceresses in Minsk in 2004. Writing about this book, a group of authors in the prestigious journal Social Epistemology note that Adamovich combines gymnastic exercises with a “pseudo-Slavic horoscope.”
We wanted to check whether scientific literature contained texts in which the “Slavic horoscope” appears without the prefix “pseudo.” We found only one such paper – extremely modest (two and a half pages) – published in a Brazilian conference volume. The paper is authored by Veronika Vinogradova and Irina Krajewskaya from the Pedagogical University of Tomsk, Russia. Since they mention the “Slavic horoscope” as a regular zodiac system and provide a very limited list of sources, we contacted them and suggested that it might be a late-20th-century novelty. Surprisingly, we received an affirmative reply:
“As for the origin of the horoscope, we cannot but agree with your assessment that it emerged at the end of the 20th century. Sources from the Russian online space refer only to thematic portals and women’s forums.”
The Slavic horoscope has also been discussed by the Russian linguist N. A. Kozulina (1, 2), but exclusively from a media and linguistic perspective. She concludes that after perestroika there was an “explosion of new astrological vocabulary,” as well as a spread of esoteric terminology in the Russian press, along with various “subtypes” of zodiac systems.
We then arrive at the furthest point detected: a text by a certain I. S. Smetanikov from 1996, which states the following:
“It would be more appropriate to use something closer to us in spirit—the Slavic horoscope, especially since such a thing exists in nature, and it features animals pleasing to the Slavic eye. Thus, the year of the blue boar (1995) according to the Eastern horoscope corresponds to the year of the white bear according to the Slavic one. I learned this news quite accidentally and unexpectedly from some radio program, but here’s the problem: I didn’t catch the name. And known sources in the literature do not contain such information.”
Thanks to this honest note – in which the author admits he heard the information on “some radio program” and could not find any support for it in the literature – we can hypothesize that the idea of a “Slavic horoscope” emerged in the 1990s in the Russian-speaking world, as part of the zodiac trend also described by N. A. Kozulina.
Unlike the classic horoscope, which stubbornly adheres to a “12-sign system” even after being shown to be entirely meaningless, the so-called Slavic horoscope is a true collage of different approaches (1, 2, 3), which we attempt to present in the following table:
| Horoscope motif | Determination of signs | Signs |
|---|---|---|
| Animals | According to the day of birth within 12 periods (as in the classic horoscope) | deer, hornet, wolf, squirrel, pearl pike, bearded frog, wild boar, white owl, snake, fox, curled hedgehog, eagle, spider, rooster, bull, fiery horse |
| Deities | According to the day of birth within 33 periods | Perun, Stribog, Radegast, Jarilo, Lada, Dodola, Veles, Dazhbog, Maya, Svarog, Simargl, Morana |
| Flowers | According to the day of birth, within 12 periods (as in the classic horoscope) | yellow narcissus, thistle, immortelle, mistletoe, oleander, mimosa, poppy, lily, foxglove, magnolia, hydrangea, dahlia, lily of the valley, purslane, chamomile, bellflower, daisy, tulip, water lily, violet, rosehip, sunflower, black-eyed Susan, Rtanj tea, camellia, lilac, freesia, orchid, peony, gladiolus, dandelion, lotus, edelweiss |
Although the “ancient horoscope” of the Old Slavs is described as the most precise, you will only receive a prediction once you manage to determine your sign, which is no easy task at all. For example, the author of this article is simultaneously a fiery horse, Svarog, and a camellia. Writing about “flower signs,” the Bašta Balkana portal correctly notes that “they have attributed to the Slavs knowledge of flowers and plants they could not possibly have known.” And indeed, this is true: the camellia mentioned above arrived in Europe from the Far East only at the end of the 16th century.
Experts: We have never heard of a “Slavic horoscope”
The editorial team of FakeNews Tragač also contacted experts in Slavic mythology to check whether they had encountered any data on an “ancient zodiac” of our ancestors in their work.
Dr. Jiří Dynda from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences told Tracker that he had never heard of a “Slavic zodiac”: “It seems to me this is a typical example of inventing tradition within alternative spirituality. The same case as ‘Slavic yoga’ or ‘Celtic tarot.’ In other words—pure nonsense.” He adds that, as a scholar, he is “quite allergic” to claims that such concepts are based on the “wisdom of our ancestors.”
The response of Dr. Pavel Horák from the University of Vienna is very similar. He told Tracker that this is an invented tradition with no connection whatsoever to any Slavic source he has studied. His assumption is that the so-called Slavic horoscope “probably originates in the second half of the 20th century, because the connection with animals, as well as with the Chinese zodiac, is so striking. Take the Celtic calendar as an example: it was created in a similar way, except that trees were introduced instead of animals, and the whole thing was assembled in the mid-20th century.”
In this light, the creation of the “Slavic horoscope” can be seen as the product of two trends: the construction of a pseudo-mythology of the Old Slavs (about which you can read more in our Mythopedia) and the boom in astrology at the end of the 20th century.
