Formation The spread of Christian teachings in Russia (especially early on) influenced the people's
mythopoetic worldview Nikolai Semyonovich Gordienko, following
Boris Rybakov, believed that, in Russia, "there has been a long, centuries-long, coexistence of Byzantine Christianity with Slavic paganism: at first as separate faith systems functioning in parallel, and then—up to the present—as two components of a single Christian religious-celebrity complex, called Russian Orthodoxy." According to Gordienko, dual faith (first explicit and then hidden) was formally overcome by Russian Orthodoxy through accommodation: "Byzantine Christianity did not eliminate Slavic paganism from the consciousness and everyday life of the peoples of our country, but rather assimilated it by including pagan beliefs and rituals in its belief-cultural complex." The non-canonical culture of the Balkans and Byzantium (which came to Russia with Christianity) was also an influence, as were the Finno-Ugric, Scandinavian, Baltic and Iranian peoples bordering the
East Slavs. This fact calls into question the adequacy of the term "
Dvoeverie" in relation to "non-canonical" beliefs. However, some authors, relying on already outdated studies, point to the "leading" role of Slavic paganism in "folk orthodoxy". In itself, "folk orthodoxy" is a dynamic form in which both archetypal mythopoetic ideas and orthodox canons are combined. According to historian Vladimir Petrukhin: Another follower of the concept of dual faith,
Igor Froyanov noted the more pagan nature of society, especially the peasantry in Russia up to the 14th and 15th centuries, an analysis that relies primarily on the B. A. Rybakov's hypotheses, as well as the nature of warfare, the tradition of drunken feasts before the prince, and other indirect signs. However, only one or two mentions of
Rusali (and those as dates of the agricultural calendar), are found in the birch bark charters. Even accusations of "witchcraft", which is not necessarily synonymous to "paganism", are found in no more than two of more than four-hundred and fifty deciphered documents. In contrast, the use of the orthodox calendar to describe the agricultural cycle of work appears in the 13th century and points to the spread of Christianity at that time. By the end of the 14th century, peasants generally refer to themselves as "Christians", which emphasizes their assimilation of Christian identity. Urban dwellers begin to identify themselves as Christians no later than the 12th century.
The Trinity Mixed-hypostatic icons of the
Trinity were borrowed from Catholic countries. In Russia, they were officially banned because they contradicted the canon. Such icons did not reflect Russian folk beliefs but were a subject of folk religion. Popular orthodoxy is a social and cultural phenomenon. It developed gradually with the spread of Christianity in Russia. At first, "the masses had to at least minimally master the ritual and dogmatic foundations of the new religion." The people's ideas about God and the Trinity generally coincided with the Christian doctrine: God is the Creator, Provider, and Judge of the world; God is one and in three persons. Already the more specific question of the essence of the trinity put the peasantry in a stalemate. Thus, the conception of the trinity was essentially reduced to the belief of the existence of three separate persons of the Trinity: • With God the Father, the peasants connected more the idea of the paternal relationship of God to men, rather than the personal characteristic of the first person of the Trinity. • God the Son was thought of as the Lord
Jesus Christ, not as the second person of the Trinity eternally begotten of the Father. • Especially vague was the idea of the
Sacred Spirit. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the studies of people's perceptions of God undertaken by the church author Alexei Popov concluded that: By the 19th century, Russian peasants had not yet mastered the basic dogma of Christianity about the trinity. In explaining this fact, church authors referred to the peasants' lack of Christian education. The theological-dogmatic category of the trinity was found to be reinterpreted on a domestic level. In the research literature, this phenomenon is associated with the coincidence
Pentecost and the cycle of ancient Slavic
Green week feasts. The associative-integrative nature of medieval thinking and the entire folk culture manifested itself in the perception of the trinity as
Mother of God. In oral poetry, the trinity was perceived as the Mother of God, which is reflected, in particular, in some Green week songs with the famous opening "Bless, Trinity-Mother of God...", sung as early as the second half of the 19th century. This image of the Holy Trinity found expression in iconography as well. This is an example of everyday folk myth-making, which filtered the Christian dogma through the prism of pagan concepts. A. N. Veselovsky wrote: "Thus a whole new world of fantastic images had to be created, in which Christianity participated only in materials and names, while the content and the very construction came out pagan." According to Archbishop
Macarius Bulgakov, author of the multi-volume
History of the Russian Church, many of the Christians practically remained pagans: they performed the rites of the holy church but retained their parents' customs and beliefs.''. Late 16th – early 17th centuries Popular religiosity differed from, and even opposed, official Christianity. At the same time, the church accepted some folk worship and cults and adjusted its teachings. For example, the popular cult of the Virgin Mary was, by the 12th century, supported by the church. Under the influence of popular veneration of "holy poverty" and notions of social justice, by the 12th century the emphasis of veneration shifts from the cult of the formidable God the Father, and
Christ-Pantocrator, as rulers of the world, to the cult of Christ-Redeemer. Domestic orthodoxy is a peculiar "edition" of the Christian religion. It was created by the
peasantry, and condemned by the Church. Christian religion, as asserted by
clergy, could not penetrate the depths Russian village life and, having taken the form of agrarian and domestic beliefs, domestic orthodoxy was the source and the foundation of the appearance of superstitious representations,
magic, and peculiar interpretations of the real world. As far back as the 19th century, it was noted that Christian holidays were celebrated by the people as
kudes—rituals that were "rude" and "dirty" and received the church's most serious condemnation. In the early 20th century, it was said that: According to some researchers, folk religious ideas should not be understood as two-faith—"layering and parallel existence of the old and the new", not as a haphazard formation consisting of the pagan cultural layer proper and the later ecclesiastical overlays—and as "people's monotheism", a holistic worldview that does not divide into paganism and Christianity, but forms an integral, though fluid, and, in some cases, somewhat contradictory system. In the
USSR, the question of everyday orthodoxy as a functioning system and as a socio-cultural and socio-historical phenomenon remained insufficiently studied.
Ethnography , on
Maslenitsa holiday, in
Belgorod Ethnography in late-nineteenth-century Ukraine documented a "thorough synthesis of pagan and Christian elements" in Slavic folk religion, a system often called "double belief" (, ). According to Bernshtam,
dvoeverie is still used to this day in scholarly works to define Slavic folk religion, which is seen by certain scholars as having preserved much of pre-Christian Slavic religion, "poorly and transparently" covered by a Christianity that may be easily "stripped away" to reveal more or less "pure" patterns of the original faith. Since the
collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a new wave of scholarly debate on the subjects of Slavic folk religion and
dvoeverie. A. E. Musin, an academic and deacon of the Russian Orthodox Church, published an article about the "problem of double belief" as recently as 1991. In this article, he divides scholars between those who say that Russian Orthodoxy adapted to entrenched indigenous faith, continuing the Soviet idea of an "undefeated paganism", and those who say that Russian Orthodoxy is an out-and-out syncretic religion. Bernshtam challenges dualistic notions of
dvoeverie and proposes interpreting broader Slavic religiosity as a
mnogoverie ("multifaith") continuum, in which a higher layer of Orthodox Christian officialdom is alternated with a variety of "Old Beliefs" among the various strata of the population. According to Ivanits, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Slavic folk religion's central concern was fertility, propitiated with rites celebrating death and resurrection. Scholars of Slavic religion who focused on nineteenth-century folk religion were often led to mistakes such as the interpretation of
Rod and
Rozhanitsy as figures of a merely ancestral cult; however, in medieval documents Rod is equated with the ancient Egyptian god
Osiris, representing a broader concept of natural generativity. Belief in the holiness of
Mat Syra Zemlya ("Damp Mother Earth") is another feature that has persisted into modern Slavic folk religion; up to the twentieth century, Russian peasants practiced a variety of rituals devoted to her and confessed their sins to her in the absence of a priest. Ivanits also reports that in the
region of Vladimir, old people practiced a ritual asking Earth's forgiveness before their death. A number of scholars attributed the Russians' particular devotion to the
Theotokos, the "Mother of God", to this still powerful pre-Christian substratum of devotion to a great
mother goddess. Ivanits attributes the tenacity of synthetic Slavic folk religion to an exceptional quality of Slavs and of Russia in particular, compared to other European countries; "the Russian case is extreme", she says, because Russia—especially the vastness of rural Russia—neither lived the intellectual upheavals of the
Renaissance, nor the
Reformation, nor the
Age of Enlightenment, which severely weakened folk spirituality in the rest of Europe. Slavic folk religious festivals and rites reflect the times of the ancient pagan calendar. For instance, the Christmas period is marked by the rites of
Koliada, characterized by the element of fire, processions and ritual drama, and offerings of food and drink to the ancestors. Spring and summer rites are characterized by fire- and water-related imagery spinning around the figures of the gods
Yarilo,
Kupala, and
Marzanna. The switching of seasonal spirits is celebrated through the interaction of effigies of these spirits and the elements which symbolize the coming season, such as by burning, drowning, or setting the effigies onto water, and the "rolling of burning wheels of straw down into rivers."
Slavic saint cults With the spread of Christianity in Russia, the former beliefs of the Slavs did not disappear without a trace. The interaction of pagan and Christian cultures led to the transformation of the images of Christian saints in popular culture. They turned out to be "substitutes" for pagan gods and some pre-Christian traits transferred to them. The Slavs' folk representations of Christian saints and their lives sometimes differ greatly from their canonical images. In
fairy tale and
legend, some of them sometimes organically perform the function of good helpers, and others even play the role of pests in relation to the peasant. This was especially strong in the images of
Theotokos,
Nicholas the Wonderworker,
Elijah the Prophet,
George the Victorious,
Vlasius,
Florus and Laurus,
Kasian,
Paraskeva Friday, and
Saints Cosmas and Damian. The Mother of God's patronage of women in childbirth is due to the traditional perception of the maternal beginning in her image, which is emphasized by the etymological connection of her name with the word "birth". The Virgin Mary was usually approached with a request for help in difficult deliveries; on the day of the Nativity of the Virgin, pregnant women prayed for the easy release from the childbirth. The Virgin Mary was also perceived not only as the Mother of God, but also as the birth mother for all people. In this sense, she correlated, in peasant consciousness, with the Mother of the raw earth. This relationship is also found in the traditional notions of swearing: in the popular environment it was believed that it offends the three mothers of man—the Mother of God,
Mat Zemlya, and the native mother. The Russians have a well-known saying: when one swears in foul language: "the Mother of God falls face down in the mud." According to Tatyana Zuyeva, the image of Yegoriy the Brave in the folk tradition merged with the pagan
Dazhbog. Two images of the saint coexist in folk consciousness: one of them is close to the Church cult of St. George—the serpent-slayer and Christ-loving warrior—the other, quite different from the first, to the cult of the cattleman and farmer, master of the land, patron of cattle, who opens the spring fieldwork. Thus, in folk legends and religious verses, the feats of the holy warrior Egorii (St. George), who withstood the tortures and promises of the "Tsar of Demianish (Diocletianish)" and struck "the fierce serpent, the fierce fiery one", are glorified. The motif of Saint George's victory is known in the oral poetry of the Eastern and Western Slavs. The Poles have St. Jerzy fighting the "Wawel smok" (the serpent of Krakow Castle). The Russian ecclesiastical verse, also following the iconographic canon, lists
Theodore Tiron (see ) as a serpent-fighter, whom the Eastern and South Slavic traditions also represent as a rider and protector of cattle. In
Lower Angara, Yegoriy the Brave was honored as the patron saint of horses; they did not work on horses on his day. In
Pirin Macedonia (
Petrich), it was believed that St. George was the lord of spring rain and thunder; together with
prophet Elijah he rode a horse across the sky, and this made thunder be heard. In the villages near
Plovdiv, the saint was perceived as the master and "holder" of all waters: he killed the serpent to give the people water. "washing milk from cows" at the end of winter. Traditional representations of St. Blaise go back to the image of the Slavic cattle god Volos. The combination of the images of a pagan deity and a Christian saint in the popular consciousness was probably facilitated by the sonic proximity of their names. In Russia, with the
Baptism of Russia churches of Saint Blasius were often erected on places of pagan worship of
Volos. According to the hagiography, during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor
Licinius, Saint Blasius hid in the wilderness and lived on Mount Argeos in a cave, to which wild beasts meekly approached, submitting in all things to Blasius and receiving from him blessings and healing from illnesses. The motif of the patronage of cattle is reflected in the iconography of Saint Blaise. He was sometimes depicted on a white horse surrounded by horses, cows, and sheep, or only cattle. In Slavic folk tradition, St. Blasius was called "the cow god", and the day of his memory was "the cow holiday". (Belarusian.) – On Vlas take with a ladle of oil", and on Onisimus the Hornless, "winter becomes hornless."
Paraskeva Friday The cult of saint
Paraskeva of Iconium is based on the personification of
Friday, known in Russian as Pyatnitsa, as a weekday. According to a number of researchers, some signs and functions of the main female deity of the East Slavic pantheon,
Mokoshi, were transferred to Paraskeva Friday: connection with female works (spinning, sewing, etc.), marriage and childbearing, and the earthly moisture. In the stories, Paraskeva Pyatnitsa spins the yarn left by her mistress (similar to
domovyi,
kimora,
mar), According to
Ukrainian beliefs, Friday walks stabbed with needles and spindles of negligent hosts who have not honored the saint and her days. Until the 19th century, the custom of "leading Friday"—a woman with her hair loose—was preserved in Ukraine. In
bylichka and spiritual verses, Paraskeva Friday complains that she is not honored by not observing the prohibition on Fridays—they prick her with spindles, spin her hair, clog her eyes
Kostrakostra. According to beliefs, Paraskeva Friday is depicted on icons with spokes or spindles sticking out of her chest (cf. images of , ).
Saint Nedelya, personification of Sunday In Slavic folk representations, Saint Nedelya is a personification of the day of week,
Sunday. She is associated with
saint Anastasia (in Bulgaria, also with the saint
Kiriakiya). Prohibitions against various kinds of work are associated with the veneration of
Saint Nedelya (cf. the origin of the Slavic
week from
not to do). The Belarusians of
Grodno province believed that the day of rest,
nyadzel, was given to the people after a man once hid the holy Week from the dogs that pursued it; before that there were only weekdays. The Ukrainians of Volhynia said that God gave Saint Nedelya a whole day, but told her herself to see to it that people did not work on that day. According to Croatian beliefs, Saint Nedelya has no hands, so it is especially sinful to work on this day. Saint Nedelya comes to those who violate the prohibition of work on Sunday (spinning, weaving, treading flax, digging the ground, going to the forest, working in the fields, etc.).
Saint Nedelya appears as a woman or girl in white, gold, or silver clothing in Belarusian tradition, with a wounded body. She complains that she is poked with spindles, her hair is spun (while pointing to her torn scythe, according to Ukrainies), chopped, cut, etc. In the Ukrainian legend, a man meets a young woman on the road, who confesses that she is Nedelya, who people "spelt, boiled, fried, scalded, sliced, eaten" (
Chigirinskiy uyezd). In the West-Belarusian legend, Saint Nedelya appears paired with the dressy and beautiful '[Jew's Nedzelka]' (that is, the Sabbath, revered by Jews) and complains that the Jews revere their "week" and that "you do everything in the week, then my body was purely paabrava." The veneration of Saint Nedelya is closely related to the veneration of the other personified days of the week, Wednesday and Friday, which, in popular beliefs, are related by kinship ties. The Serbs believe that
Paraskeva Friday is the mother or sister of Saint Nedelya (cf. the successive days of St. Paraskeva Friday – 28.X/10.XI and St. Anastasia – 29.X/11.XI). According to the Hutsul people, "Week is the Mother of God" (the Mother of God asked for protection on all the days of the week, agreed week, i.e., Sunday; cf. the pan-Slavonic notions of the Virgin Mary, Saint Paraskeva Friday, Saint Anastasia as patronesses of women and women's work, and similar prohibitions associated with the Virgin feasts, Friday and Sunday).
Apostles Peter and Paul In Slavic tradition,
Peter and
Paul are paired characters (cf.
Saints Cosmas and Damian,
Flor and Laurus), who may often appear in a single image:
Peter-Paul, Peter-Paulo, Petropavlava. The Bulgarians considered them brothers, sometimes even twins, who had a sister,
Saint Helen or
Saint Mary (
Fire). Peter is the younger brother and the kinder. He allows the farmers to work on their feast day. Paul is the elder. He is formidable and severely punishes those who violate holiday customs by sending thunder and lightning from the sky, burning sheaves. According to Serbian legend, "the division of faiths into Orthodox and Catholic occurred after a quarrel of the apostles: Peter declared himself Orthodox (Serbian), and Paul said that he was Catholic (
Šokci). In the Slavs' representation, Peter and Paul occupy a special place, acting as guardians of the keys to paradise (cf. the Belarusian name of the constellation Swan – , which is also perceived as a key to paradise). The Bulgarians also considered St. Peter the guardian of the
Garden of Eden, guarding the golden tree of paradise, around which the souls of dead children fly in the form of flies and bees. In the traditional worldview of the Russian people, the Apostle Peter was among the most revered saints. In tales and bylichkas he appears under the name of the apostle-king. There was a belief among the
Gutsul that St. Peter kept the keys of the land all year round, and only in spring did
Saint George the Victorious take them from him. On Peter's day the keys are returned to Peter, and then the autumn comes. In Serbia, the Apostle Peter was pictured "riding a golden-horned deer across the heavenly field over the sprouting earthly fields."
On icons and rituals The Soviet art historian
Mikhail Alpatov believed that, among Old Russian icons, one could distinguish those that reflected folk ideals and that the folk idea of saints was especially clearly manifested in icons depicting patrons of cattle (George, Vlasius, Florus, and Laurus) and in icons of Elijah the Prophet, a kind of "successor" to the god of thunder and lightning
Perun. In addition, he admitted that some ancient Russian icons reflected folk dual beliefs, including the cult of
Mother of the Raw Earth. According to Doctor of Historical Sciences , this cult of the mother earth, the patroness of crops, which once existed among the Slavs, reflects the icon of the painted in the late 19th century. examines the rites of slumping and girding the temple, rites of invocation of rain, rites connected with protection from thunder and hail, and some others as a symbiosis of Christian and pre-Christian customs. == Folk prayers ==