Russian ethnographers in the nineteenth century indeed found animist and pagan
beliefs and practices widespread among titular Orthodox. Stella Rock even argues
that by then Russian religious syncretism or“dual belief”(dvoeverie, a modern
term) constituted a parallel belief system wielded in opposition to Church and state,
but for many it was simply normal Orthodoxy.
Across the European Christian world, east or west, conversion to Christianity
involved assimilation of local belief and practices. Saints were assigned in the place of
local deities. Among the East Slavs, St. Elijah was associated with the god Perun; a
cult arose around St. Paraskeva that combined Byzantine Christian cults with
veneration of the female deity Mokosh; Christian holydays were matched to many
agricultural and calendrical festivals. The Church was complicit in some of this: in
rural France, Germany, and Russia, for example, clergy participated in agrarian
ceremonies of animist origins. In Russia, peasants venerated arable land as“Mother
Earth”and safeguarded key moments in the agricultural cycle with fertility rituals.
The start of plowing in some areas involved the men of the village praying with an
icon and a loaf of bread at thefields and plowing a single,first furrow before working
the wholefield. Harvesting was inaugurated by a village woman chosen for her virtue:
she lit candles before icons, ceremonially cut thefirst sheaves and arranged them in
the shape of a cross; priests later blessed the grain that they yielded.
Christian churches were keenly aware, however, of the risk that popular belief
could slip from harmless folk tradition to deviance and even heresy. Church fathers
in east and west drew on patristic and conciliar texts of the early Christian centuries
to rail against deviations of two types. One, sometimes called high or occult magic,
emanated from a rich antique literature on astronomy and astrology, medicine and
healing, mathematics and other sciences; the other represented non-textual folk
traditions, shamanistic and animist beliefs and practices. In early modern Russia,
the 1551 Church Council and a sixteenth-century domestic handbook (the
Domostroi) railed against the occult, producing lists of banned books taken from
Byzantine sources. But this was not a major source of religious deviance in
Muscovy. Few antique medicinal, astronomical, and scientific texts were translated
into Slavonic; some came to Russia by thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries from
humanist and Jewish circles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and provoked heresy
trials. By contrast, in the latefifteenth century monk Efrosim of the St. Cyril-
Beloozero Monastery produced a compendium of biblical, hagiographical, and
pietistic texts along with secular tales, medical texts, and works on divination,
without suffering consequences. Overall, high-level magic and occult had little
circulation in illiterate Muscovy.
More problematic for early modern Russian churchmen was deviant lay and even
clerical practice. Penitentials, sermons, and encyclicals railed against laymen’suseof
amulets, spells, and almanacs; the 1551 Church Council railed against clergy allowing
people to secrete objects—salt, soap, cauls—at the altar to be blessed by proximity to
the sacrament. It condemned licentious revelry at holydays, especially the eves of
Christmas, Epiphany, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and Trinity Sunday
(which coincided with winter and summer solstices) and key moments in the agrarian
calendar. The Council’s bishops condemned minstrels as agents of the devil, with
Varieties of Orthodoxy 259