Veles is the Slavic god described as Perun’s foe and ruler of the underworld. He is a chthonic deity associated with the earth, waters, cattle, wealth, magic, and the realm of the dead.
In the traditional scholarly reconstruction of the central Slavic myth, Veles appears as a serpent who rises from the underworld and challenges Perun, the thunder god of the heavenly realm. Their conflict is often connected with the theft of cattle, people, or divine property. Perun pursues Veles with lightning, and the struggle explains storms and the return of rain.
This story should be treated cautiously: the surviving sources do not preserve a complete ancient myth, and modern scholarship has criticized or revised the reconstruction. Even so, Veles’s underworld and chthonic character is well established in descriptions of Slavic religion. The name is also written Volos, and his cattle association links him with prosperity as well as death and the underworld.