Pripegala

Pripegala is a god of the Polabian Slavs, mentioned in a 1108 letter by the Magdeburg Bishop Adelgot, calling for a battle against the pagan Veleti. Among the images of Slavic crimes and atrocities contained in the document was a description of the worship of a god named Pripegala, juxtaposed with the Greek Priapus:

There is general agreement that the notation Pripegala is distorted and many scholars have proposed their own reading. The contemporary transcript is read as Pribyglav/Pribyglov. The analysis shows that the Slavic cluster *Prib- in medieval German Latin is rendered as by Prib, cf. Pribe, Pribizlav, or by Prip, cf. Pripslaff "Polish given name Przybysław", Pripgnewe, Pripignewen "Przybygniew". The Slavic vowel ⟨y⟩, on the other hand, was written as the letter e, as it was often done when writing Polish names. The last element of the theonym, -gala, should be read as an element -glov or -glav, which was reduced to -gla as a result of the adaptation of this element to the phonetics of the Low German language, and then expanded with the vowel ⟨a⟩ to avoid a consonant cluster that would be difficult to pronounce for foreigners. Thus, the theonym would consist of the Proto-Slavic stem *priby- "to increase, to arrive" and *golva "head" and literally meant "let there be more heads", "gainer of heads", "one to whom heads arrive", etc. Michał Łuczyński reconstructs Proto-Slavic form as *Pribyglovъ.