Christianity and Slavic Folk Culture: The Mechanisms of Their Interaction

Svetlana M Tolstaya

doi:10.3390/rel12070459

Abstract

In Slavic folk culture, Christianity is a foreign, borrowed cultural model, while the oral tradition is native and familiar. The different areas of folk culture were influenced to varying degrees by the Christian tradition. The most dependent area of Slavic folk culture on Christianity was the calendar. In many cases, it only superficially accepted the Christian content of calendar elements and reinterpreted it in accordance with the traditional mythological notions. The same can be said about the folk cult of saints. The Christian saints replaced pagan gods and over time were included in the system of folk ideas, beliefs and rituals. The mechanism for regulating the balance between man and the world is a system of prohibitions, the violation of which is recognized as sin and is punished by natural disasters, death, disease and human misfortunes. The Slavic folk tradition adapted not only the individual elements, structures and semantic categories of Christianity, but also the whole texts, plots, motifs, and themes developed in various folklore genres. Therefore, the pre-Christian folk tradition of the Slavs was able to assimilate many Christian concepts, symbols, and texts, translate them into its own language and fill them with its own content.

Highlights

The Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 119334 Moscow, Russia; Abstract: In Slavic folk culture, Christianity is a foreign, borrowed cultural model, while the oral tradition is native and familiar
Christianity and the oral folk tradition represent two different cultural models that have coexisted in the same ethno-cultural space since the adoption of Christianity by the Slavs
The oral folk tradition has its roots in deep antiquity, and Christianity, as a cultural model, emerged in more recent historical times— it, too, draws largely on folklore

Summary

Folk Calendar

The most dependent area of Slavic folk culture on Christianity was the calendar, which adopted the Christian system of holidays and weekdays, fasts and meat-eating as the structural basis of the entire ritual annual cycle. The personification of holidays and other parts of the annual cycle derive from two different sources It is the book-written, ecclesiastical tradition of designating and interpreting holidays in connection with the names and images of Christian saints which gives the calendar characters and personified holidays a sacred status and makes them objects of veneration together with the canonical saints. It is an oral, folklore tradition that involves calendar time in the sphere of mythological representations. The Christian saints themselves are subject to mythologization in the oral tradition see (Tolstaya 1995)

Sacred and Magical in the Folk Cult of Saints

Folk Ideology and Axiology

Christian Motifs in the Oral Tradition