The Chuvash call their old faith ‘the tradition of the old” (vattisen yaly). Today’s Chuvash pagans are called “the true Chuvash” (chan Chavash) or undipped. Though christening of the Chuvash began in Ivan the Terrible’s time, it mainly covered only northern regions and even then sporadically. Southern regions retained their paganism. In many places the armed Chuvash resisted, in other regions people hid in forests, cellars in order to save themselves from christening.

If we attentively, step by step examine the old Chuvash faith, especially questions concerning the memory of God, we can find considerable difference, for example, with the pure shaman faith of the Altai Turki. The cult of kind and evil spirits waned, and the role of a pagan priest disappeared. However, the notion that the only God exists distinctly emerges in today’s faith of the Chuvash, and this in no circumstances resembles paganism. Russian researchers V.A. Sboyev, V. K. Magnitsky couldn’t mark out this peculiar property of the Chuvash mythology without great knowledge of the language and the subject, that is why they based their opinion on the following: since it is the question of paganism, black faith, then consequently every spirit and figment of imagination is God. And they adapted every meaningless word taken from sacrificial prayers to this notion and called it God, even the names of certain diseases without any systematization and knowledge of the language.

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