A sheaf of this year’s crop is mixed with the seed for the coming year… children wander from house to house, asking permission to serenade the occupants, and expecting an edible reward in return… masked young couples engage in ribald games that presage marriages…
These are but a few of the 19th century winter holiday traditions of Russian villages. And, as with many Russian folk traditions, they have often been described as influenced by dvoyeveriye, “dual faith/belief.”
The concept of dvoyeveriye began with the Slavophiles, a nineteenth-century philosophical movement, whose members believed that Russia’s future lied in validation of its own heritage, not in the adoption of western institutions (opposed since the time of Peter the Great by the Westernizes who argued that Russia should embrace western traditions). Relying on native Russian traditions, including the folk traditions and the Orthodox faith, the Slavophiles argued that Russia had a distinct national identity from the nations of western Europe. The Slavophiles claimed that the Russian narod (“folk”) had retained its pre-Christian traditions nearly intact throughout the centuries. By contrast, in Western Europe such ancient connections had been eradicated through the influence of the Christian church. The Russian peasant was therefore said to participate in two belief systems: paganism and Orthodox Christianity.
This 19th century notion of dvoyeveriye was later exploited by Soviet cultural and political theorists. At first, the revolutionary government sought to create a utopian society by removing all traces of the past, including folk ritual practices. According to dvoyeveriye, folk rites were a tie to religion, which the government hoped to eliminate. They were also a connection to an outmoded, backward and patriarchal way of life supposedly uncharacteristic of the new utopia.
In the 1930s, Stalin reversed course. Realizing that rituals and folk traditions were a tool the authorities could use to form stable social and familial units, to enhance discipline and order, Stalin made pronouncements about the value of ritual, and officials began to create a series of public rites of all kinds for the new society.
Yet folk rituals represented a dilemma: they were still associated with Orthodoxy. Nimble theorists seized on the concept of dvoyeveriye to argue that these rites were actually not Christian at all. Peasants celebrating them were in fact using the folk material to undermine church authority and, as a result, they were the first “revolutionaries.”
There is little concrete evidence for this claim. Ritual participants may have taken shots at the social hierarchy by making fun of the nobility and priests. But their aim was to negotiate their positions within the existing culture to their greatest advantage, not to overthrow an oppressive church or government.
Nonetheless, folk rites were rehabilitated as a sign of the folk’s awareness of tsarist and church oppression. Folk ritual could now be tapped to create a new national identity in the Soviet Union, to preserve cultural values espoused by decades of Russian wisdom.
At the same time, Stalin had reversed course by abandoning the revolutionary ideals of remaking the family into a new, more egalitarian unit. The traditional family roles found in folk rituals fit well into this reversal. Stalin wanted to create a contented, conservative nation that would not challenge the governmental power structure. Domestic happiness was key in this process.
These political machinations notwithstanding, researchers have recently begun to challenge long-standing views about dvoyeveriye. Slavophiles, Soviets and many scholars, they argue, have failed to take into account peasants’ actual attitudes toward their religious rites. True, many Russian folk rites were inherited from pre-Christian practices, as is true in most Christian countries. Yet, the people performing these rites did not consider themselves any less Christian. Nor, as far as we can tell, did they actively alternate between belief in pagan (pre-Christian) religion and Russian Orthodoxy. Rather, they merely reinterpreted older forms of ritual from the point of view of their Orthodox faith and its symbols, even if they did not correspond to official church doctrine. A look at traditional winter holiday traditions helps to illustrate this.
zimniye svyatki, the Christmas season, began in November with the pre-Christmas fast, which lasted from November 28 to January 6 (all dates are given according to the Old Style calendar used by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is 13 days later than the secular calendar). It included three major holidays, beginning with Christmas on January 7, St. Vasily’s Day on January 14 (New Year) and ending with the Feast of Christ’s Baptism on January 19. On each holiday, a feast was held to commemorate the religious events as well as the beginning of the secular new year. The most important celebrations occurred on the eve of all three holidays. People believed that miracles occurred at midnight on each holiday eve. For example, the heavens would part, water would turn to wine, and stones to bread.
On Christmas Eve (January 6), the celebration began when the first evening star was seen, reminiscent of the star of Bethlehem. The father of the family then said a prayer before the meal. The meal included bliny (pancakes) with honey, pies filled with mushrooms, potatoes or grains, pirozhki (pies) with berries, kutya – a grain dish made of wheat and dried fruit typically served at funerals, and grain porridge cooked in water. Because the fast had not yet ended, the meal included no meat or dairy products.
The focus of the feast was a commemoration of the ancestors, who joined in, hence the kutya and bliny, both characteristic of funeral meals. A plate with these foods was set aside for the dead. The Russians also lit fires made of straw and manure for their forebears to warm themselves. They threw in linden branches, used in the traditional steam baths, so that the ancestors could steam themselves as well. Typically the major Christmas service was held on Christmas Eve.
Russians did not have a tradition of a fir tree at Christmas; it was imported for the Soviet New Year’s celebrations. Rather, they brought in the snop – the first or last sheaf of grain harvested the previous growing season, decorated with ribbons. It was placed in the icon corner during svyatki. Then the grain from that sheaf was mixed into the seeds for the next year’s crop.
At this time of year, the farmers relied on the magic of Christ’s birth and their appeasement of the souls of dead ancestors to influence household prosperity for the upcoming year. On Christmas Eve they baked cookies in the shapes of animals and birds, so that they would flourish. They brought straw into the house to have abundant crops, which was also a parallel to Christ’s birth in a manger.
While all these practices may have had a pre-Christian origin, they were reinterpreted from the point of view of Orthodox doctrine. Prayers and offerings of food and steam baths to the dead were not part of a pre-Christian ancestor cult, but represented a bridge between the living and God, a practice also found in Catholic countries. Christ’s birth in a manger allowed people to commemorate that event by bringing symbols of the barn and animals into the home, which would in turn encourage Christ to bring them abundance in the new year.
On Christmas Day, families received visitors announcing Christ’s birth and wishing villagers good fortune in a rite called kolyadovanye (caroling; see illustration, front cover). This ritual was accompanied by kolyada (songs or carols); the word kolyada derives from the Latin calendae (first day of the month). Various groups, from beggars (in the morning) to children (from morning to afternoon) to young unmarried adults and/or newlyweds (in the evening) would visit over the course of the day.
The carolers would arrive, call out the head of the household, and ask permission to perform. The songs brought good fortune to the family and abundance on the farm in the new year. The residents were obligated to carry food out to them as a reward. Carolers might also have been invited into the house, and then would sing a song in honor of each member of the household. The carolers were considered to be blessed by God and upon entering, would say “I am in the house and God is with me.” The gifts they received included baked goods, especially svyatki–a ritual bread, or the cookies in the shape of animals, fatback, sausages, nuts, fruit, beer, and rarely money or yarn. A family was at risk if it offered nothing in return for the songs. They would have a bad year both financially and personally. The carolers might also accuse them of stinginess and curse or threaten them in humorous ways.
Carolers visited each house, typically moving from west to east, and skipped only those households where there had been a recent death in the family. After the visits, the carolers gathered and divided the spoils or ate a meal together. Individual families also had another holiday meal in their homes, featuring meat, dairy products and beer and wine, to celebrate Christ’s birth and the ending of the Christmas fast.
A week later, on St. Vasily’s Day, Russians celebrated his feast day and the beginning of the secular new year (image, page 34). On St. Vasily’s Eve the family gathered for a meal that generally featured a roast pig, because Vasily was seen as the Saint who watched over pigs (just as John the Baptist was said to watch over cattle during his summer holiday). The family lit candles before their icons and prayed to Vasily. They then began the meal. The father took the head of the pig and apportioned its meat out to the family members, using his hands, not a knife. Russians believed that sharp objects would “prick” and drive away the spirits of the dead. To invite St. Vasily and the ancestors to join in the meal, to ask for their help, and then to use a knife would have been an insult to them. For that same reason, funeral meals were generally not eaten with forks or knives, but with spoons. This belief also led to a protection ritual; for example, brides had pins placed in their dress to ward off evil spirits.
At the end of the meal, the head of the household asked St. Vasily for health and abundance for his family, a successful harvest and protection for his livestock. Once again, in a gesture to the ancestors, they prepared kutya, often with fat or with poppy seeds. They often would invite the frost (moroz), under the name Moroz Vasiliyevich (note that Frost bears Vasily’s name, so that even this supposed “pagan” gesture related to the saint), to share their meal and offer him kholodets, pork in aspic.1
Vasily was associated with merriment, and on the eve of this holiday people celebrated with mumming parties. As on Christmas, young unmarried people would visit each house, only this time in costume (mumming did sometimes occur on Christmas as well, but was more characteristic of St. Vasily’s Day, while kolyadovanye occurred on all three holidays). Mummers dressed as animals, especially as goats, bears, moose, wolves, foxes, and storks; or as evil spirits; or as nobility; or as professionals, such as doctors, robbers, blacksmiths, millers; or as various nationalities, including Roma, Tatars, and Jews. The evil spirits were associated with the belief that God would open the gates of hell (as well as heaven, where the ancestors were), so that devils could also celebrate Christmas.
Their costumes were typically made of animal skins, horns, straw, tree branches, rags, torn cloth and old shoes. Mummers always covered their faces with masks of birch bark, leather, paper, fur, flax, wool, fabric, or lace with a face drawn onto them, or with soot, chalk, flour or dye. They carried props (a broom for a witch, cards for a Roma fortuneteller, a shroud for a dead person, a pitchfork for a devil) as well as whips, nooses and sticks. Mummers made a great deal of noise as they progressed through the village, by ringing bells, hitting pans or spoons together and yelling. They went from house to house and even from village to village, trying to scare people.
There was a distinctly erotic tenor to the mummers’ performances.2 When they went into a house, they would dance or perform skits, often with suggestive jokes or acts, as in one skit where the “nobleman” would carry a stick between his legs, which he used to lift up girls’ dresses. Often householders would be in costume and would join in the revelry. Mummers often performed mock weddings, with cross-dressed participants, during which the nearly naked blacksmith would “forge” implements for the wedding in suggestive ways. A mock funeral was also common, during which girls were required to kiss the “corpse,” who tried to pinch them or lift up their dresses. Unlike the carolers, mummers were considered to be putting their souls as risk by performing these acts, so that they had to wash away their sins as part of the rituals on the Feast of Christ’s Baptism.
Divination was common throughout this period, and especially on St. Vasily’s Eve, the beginning of the new year. The most common theme was fortunetelling about one’s marital prospects or one’s fate in the upcoming year. Unmarried girls of marriageable age performed an array of rites designed to find out what the year ahead held in store for them. They would gather, for example, on St. Vasily’s Eve and each put a ring or other small item on a plate covered by a cloth. They then sang songs, which told of marriage, death, good fortune, one’s future mate (rich, poor, good- or ill-tempered), spinsterhood, etc. At the end of each song, a girl would pull out a ring, and the song they had just sung would tell her fortune for the year. In a variant of this practice, girls also picked from clay (a symbol of death), coal (poverty), a ring (marriage) and a brush (an old husband) on a covered plate.
The girls might also visit the bathhouse at midnight and ask the bannik (bathhouse spirit) to foretell their fates in the upcoming year. They would then stick their hands into the bathhouse for the bannik to touch. If a girl felt cold skin, she would have a poor and/or cruel husband; if fur, then she would marry a rich man; if rough skin, then she was fated to marry an average farmer, if soft skin, then she would marry an easygoing man. The location and timing of the divinations were important to its success; the bathhouse was a magical place, far from the house, an interstice between the human world and the fearsome world of spirits and the forest. Similarly, midnight was a magical time, at the interstice between two times, especially on a holiday eve, when miraculous events might occur.
The Feast of Christ’s Baptism, on January 19, culminated the Christmas season. The main meal was on the evening before, but was, like Christmas, a Lenten meal, which included kutya, bean dishes, dried fruits, bliny, and baked goods. They threw the first spoon of kutya up toward the ceiling, lit a candle for the dead, and apportioned food from each dish for the ancestors. The evil forces God had released were driven off Earth on this holiday, so that after the feast they hit sticks on fences, shot off rifles, and made noise to drive them away. All symbols of Christmas were taken out of house, e.g., the straw that had been brought into the house and the snop. All ritual foods that remained (bread, kutya, bliny from all three ritual meals) were mixed with grain and holy water and fed to livestock.
The main ritual event on this date commemorated Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan. On the eve of the holiday, the priest cut a hole in the ice on a nearby river or lake in the shape of a cross, and it was believed that one could see Christ as a child bathing there. Christ’s presence on Earth continued until the next day. Russians started a fire of straw when the church bells rang before mass, so that Christ could steam himself after his baptism in cold water. The entire village went to mass and, led by the priest, processed to the place where the ice had been cut. The priest read a prayer and lowered a wooden cross with a carved dove into the water three times, asking for God’s blessing. People would then take the holy water and pour it over themselves. Young men and boys who had dressed as mummers jumped into the water to cleanse them of their sin after their contact with evil forces. The water stayed holy for three days, so that no one would wash clothes or throw any trash or dirt into it during that time.
People believed that this holy water could heal and ward off illness, scare off evil forces, and protect people from sin. They brought water home to sprinkle around the house and onto entrances and windows, after reading a prayer to stave off evil. They also drew crosses with chalk, garlic, dough, or coal on doors, windows, gates, and fences to protect from evil spirits.
dvoyeveriye, it seems, was an illusory intellectual concept.
Orthodox believers in the nineteenth-century village had certainly inherited practices from the pre-Christian tradition. However, those that were retained were reinterpreted from the point of view of the Orthodox faith. The winter cycle began with an Orthodox fast, which ended with the celebration of Christ’s birth. Russian villagers called upon Him to bring them good fortune in the year, not upon some pre-Christian deity. On New Year’s, they honored St. Vasily, so that he too would intercede for them. The last major holiday in this cycle, the Feast of Christ’s Baptism, returned the focus to Christ and his power. Throughout the period, they also asked their ancestors in heaven to protect and help them as well. Any contact with the non-Orthodox spirit world, mumming for example, was cleansed by the church.
None of these behaviors is outside of the realm of the broader Christian tradition, and they do not support the contention (of Slavophiles, Soviets or scholars) that the peasantry actively moved between two existing belief systems. There were non-doctrinal elements to their celebrations and to their interpretations of them, but they were still couched in a Christian belief system. While Russian Orthodoxy is generally known for the rites surrounding the Easter cycle, Christmas was an interesting and important ritual complex as well. Celebrations of the new year and the shift in seasons were not just a reason for a good party, but honored the religious figures at the heart of Orthodox faith. RL
1 The invitation to Frost, or to wild animals and birds, to share the meal also occurred at meals to celebrate Christmas and the Feast of Christ’s Baptism.
2 The eroticism common in these celebrations was most likely connected to the upcoming marriage season. In the nineteenth-century village, marriages occurred twice a year, in the fall after the harvest, before the Christmas fast began, and for a month after the Christmas celebrations. During both periods, young people gathered at work parties called posidelki to meet potential mates. Young women would bring their spinning and sewing and work for several hours. The gathering would culminate with the arrival of young men, who engaged in ribald games with their future spouses, after the women welcomed them with songs.
ADDITIONAL READING: Intrigued by Russian divination, folk magic and the themes raised in this article? Seek out a copy of The Bathhouse at Midnight, Magic in Russia, by W.F. Ryan. (Penn State Press, 1999).
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