[2] His cult lost its importance through time, and in the ninth or tenth century he was replaced by Perun, Svarog and/or Svetevid, which explains his absence in the pantheon of Vladimir the Great.

[11] Rod and the rozhanitsy were offered bloodless sacrifices in the form of bread, honey, cheese and groat (kutia).

Rybakov relied on the Word of St. Gregory Theologian..., where the Slavs first sacrificed to wraiths, then to Rod and rozhanitsy, and finally to Perun, which would reflect the alleged evolution of Slavic beliefs from animism through cult of natural forces to henotheism.

[4][14] The sculpture known as Zbruch Idol was supposed to depict Rod as the main Slavic deity according to Rybakov's concept.

They believe that Old Russian authors, when describing Rod and rozhanitsy, used ready semantic blocks borrowed from other sources, mainly the Bible and writings of Greek theologians that were misinterpreted: in Byzantine Empire the horoscope was called "genealogy", which can literally be translated as "rodoslovo".

After Benveniste he compares him to the Roman Quirinus, whose name comes from *covir or curia, which can be translated as "god of the community of husbands", to the Umbrian Vofionus, whose name contains a root similar to the Indo-European word *leudho, Anglo-Saxon leode ("people"), Slavic *ludie and Polish ludzie, and to the Celtic Toutatis, whose name derives from the Celtic core *teuta meaning "family", but rejects connecting Rod with Indian Rudra.

[19] According to Andrzej Szyjewski, Rod "personifies the ideas of family kinship as a symbol of spiritual continuity (rodoslovo)."

Rod was also to direct the souls of the dead to Vyraj, and then send them back to our world in the form of clods of earth cast down or entrusted to nightjars and storks.

Rod transformed into a ghost – a patron of the family, a "home grandfather", and later a guardian of newborns and honoring ancestors.

In the times of Kievan Rus in the 11th and 12th centuries, the cult of Rod was to be particularly important for princes because he was considered the patron of the unity of the clan, and the right to the throne and land of ancestors depended on it.

[10] Russian volkhs Veleslav (Ilya Cherkasov) and Dobroslav (Alexey Dobrovolsky) describe Rod as a life force, the god "all-pervading" and "omnipresent."