Pripegala was one of the Baltic Slavs' gods. We know that the Baltic Slavs, as well as those who used to live between the Odra and Elbe Rivers, were a thorn in their neighbours' – Christian Germans' – side, and that these two peoples fought fierce and bloody battles. While the Slavs stubbornly clung to their paganism, the Germans endeavoured to force Christianity upon them, either willingly or unwillingly. To increase the motivation of the German warriors, catholic bishops practiced some sort of war propaganda or mental manipulation that was based on twisting the facts about the nature of the Slavs' religion. Slavic cults were therefore represented as extremely bloody, the Slavs were said to practice offering human sacrifice, and Slavic gods were portrayed as savage bloodthirsty deities, especially inimical to Christians. We will ignore the fact that some of these allegations were based on real events, although not to such a large extent, since what we deal with here is primarily war propaganda, not uncommon even in the times we live in. We will focus on the importance that these warmongering writings of German bishops have when it comes to the study of Slavic mythology, because some of these records are the only written sources we have on some Slavic deities and their cults.
Relying on these records, we can learn a lot about Svetovid, Radgost, Podaga, etc, regardless of the fact that they provide information that we cannot consider valid. This is particularly true of those parts of the text that equate Slavic deities with demons such as Prijape and Belphegor, and proclaim Radgost the supreme demon, or Satan. Such identifications are of course fictitious, since Satan and the abovementioned demons are not a part of Slavic, but Christian religious system. One of the texts that is similar to those describing the nature of Svetovid, Radgost and Podaga is the text that mentions the god we will analyse in this essay – Pripegala.
The author of the text featuring Pripegala is Adelgot, the archbishop of Magdebourg, and the text dates from 1108 AD. In it, archbishop Adelgot claims that Pripegala's priests offer human sacrifice to their god and that they are violent towards the Christians in every way imaginable. "They came like a flood to our lands", says Adelgot. "They cut off Christian heads, and then offer them as a sacrifice… they keep vessels full of blood in front of their temples, and howling around them shout in a penetrating voice: Rejoice, because Christ is defeated; the victory belongs to victorious Pripegala." It is obvious that archbishop Adelgot purposefully portrays the Slavs as bellicose bloodthirsty savages, a complete opposite of the "civilised" Germans that were "cultivated" by Christianity. Pripegala thus looks like an insane deity whose only characteristic is bloodlust. Regardless of German archbishop's subjectivity, Spasoje Vasiljev thinks that Propegala's bloodthirstiness can be considered to have been one of his actual characteristics. He identifies Pripegala with a Latvian god named Pikola, that was worshipped by the Latvians as a god of death. Pikola was represented as an old gray-haired man dressed in white, human and animal skulls lying at his feet, which makes us conclude that Pikola was the Latvian version of Slavic Pripegala, in whose honour the Slavs used to behead the Christians. Vasiljev connects the root pega, that is a part of Pripegala's name, with the Sanskrit root peg, meaning "to spoil" or "to destroy". Due to that, Spasoje Vasiljev thinks that Pripegala can be considered to have been a god of destruction. But the list of his roles cannot be narrowed down just to this one.
There is another interpretation of Pripegala's role which makes him a deity of solar characteristics. This theory, proposed by Louis Legé, was later supported and advanced by Spasoje Vasiljev. According to this theory, the root of Pripegala's name is the verb pripeci, that has a form pripekat in the language of the Pomerania Slavs. Since the verb pripeci can be related to the Sun's activity (=to scorch), the two authors think that Pripegala could have been one of the Sun's epithets. The word pega (=freckle; sunspot) can also be related to the identical word in the Serbian language, and similar words can be found in Polish, Czech, Russian and Croatian. On the other hand, Brikner, the researcher, thinks that Pripegala's name should actually have the form Pribihvala, denoting a deity that deserves all the gratitude. He supports this theory by the fact that there are many names in the Slavic languages beginning with the root Pribi, such as Priboj, Pribislav and Pribimir.

            by Vesna Kakasevski
translated by Snježana Todorović