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Very little is known about the religion of Kievan Rus before the conversion to Christianity in 988 A.D. This is because very few religious documents exist from this period. What we do know is that the religion of Rus was founded on nature and its phenomena. Ancient poets and chroniclers, like the author of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, have preserved the names of the some of the greater deities and traditions. The Russians did not seem to have either temples or priests in the proper sense of the word. They erected crude idols and offered sacrifices. They had sorcerers, similar to the Tartar Shamans, whose counsel held great weight in the courts. The early Russians believed in the veneration of their ancestors. The family or clan (called rod) was worshiped in both the literal sense and the more figurative sense as an offspring-producing spirit (called rozhanitsy)