Little Almanac

Kupala and Koliada

Slavic religion before conversion is the worst-attested of the major European traditions. There is no insider text of any kind: everything comes from Greek, Latin and German outsiders, from Christian chroniclers writing after the fact, or from folklore collected in the modern period. That evidential position is the first thing to state, because it governs everything that can be said afterwards.

The two customs

Kupala is a midsummer complex: fires, leaping, bathing and water, wreaths floated on rivers, herb-gathering, and an all-night vigil. It is attached to the eve of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, which is the same ecclesiastical host the midsummer fires of western Europe are attached to. See Midsummer and St John's Eve.

Koliada is a midwinter complex: house-visiting parties, songs exchanged for food and drink, costume and mumming. It is attached to Christmastide, and the name is shared with the carol-songs themselves across several Slavic languages.

Both are documented in volume and in detail, with regional variation that can be mapped, from the early modern period onward. Both are living practice in places. Neither is attested in any source predating Christianity in the regions where they are found, for the good reason that no such source exists.

Contested

At issueHow much of the received Slavic pantheon and ritual year is reconstruction?

Two positions, both scholarly; this entry reports them.

The comparativist reconstruction reads the outsider chronicles, the folklore and the linguistic evidence together against an Indo-European frame, and recovers a structured pantheon and a seasonal cycle behind them 1. The frame it uses, Dumézil’s trifunctional scheme, is itself now contested, which is part of the argument.

The hypercritical position holds that most of the pantheon is a scholarly construct assembled from evidence that is too thin, too late and too often misread to carry it, and that the method generates the structure it claims to find 2.

What survives both readings is short. A thunder god with a secure Indo-European pedigree, whose name has cognates across the Baltic, Indic and Norse material, is about the safest single claim available. The customs described above are secure as customs. Their antiquity is not.

The eightfold Slavic wheels

Ritual-year diagrams giving eight Slavic festivals with fixed dates and matched correspondences circulate widely. They are recent compositions: folk customs collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mapped onto the eightfold scheme that was assembled in Britain around 1958 and travelled internationally with modern Paganism from the 1960s. See The Wheel of the Year.

Assembling a liturgical year out of older and newer parts is what liturgical years are, and the process has been documented across Europe in domains that have nothing to do with religion at all, from national costume to civic ceremonial 3. A calendar composed in the twentieth century out of genuine nineteenth-century folk custom is a real calendar with a real and traceable history. It is a different object from a pre-Christian ritual year, and the only thing this site asks is that the two be labelled correctly.

The reconstructionist movements that keep these calendars are themselves datable, are organised in named bodies, and describe themselves in public. The site’s standing position applies here as everywhere: a tradition belongs to the places and periods in which it is practised, and never to an ancestry.

Gap in the evidence

What the pre-Christian Slavic ritual year contained is unknown. The outsider notices describe cult sites, idols and divination practices at named places, and they do not describe a calendar. The gap between those notices and the folk customs recorded eight centuries later cannot be crossed on present evidence, and this entry does not attempt it.

The literature this entry cites is in Polish and English respectively, and no complete published English translation of the Polish work could be found. That is a real limitation on what an English-language reader can check, and it is recorded here.

References

  1. Aleksander Gieysztor. Mitologia Słowian. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2006. ISBN 9788323502340 recordscholarly

    Third revised and expanded edition, 2006. The standard sympathetic comparativist reconstruction of Slavic religion, heavily indebted to Dumézil's trifunctional scheme. First published in 1982 by Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe in the series Mitologie świata. No complete published English translation was found; catalogue records giving an English title are rendering the Polish one, not describing a translation.

  2. Judith Kalik, Alexander Uchitel. Slavic Gods and Heroes. New York: Routledge, 2019. https://www.routledge.com/Slavic-Gods-and-Heroes/Kalik-Uchitel/p/book/9780367588649 recordpeer reviewed

    The hypercritical position: that much of the received Slavic pantheon is a scholarly construct assembled from thin, late and misread evidence. Author, title, publisher, place and year confirmed from the review notice in Slavic Review, which gives the extent as xii, 186 pp.

  3. Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger (ed.). The Invention of Tradition: Cambridge University Press, 1983. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed

    The general study of how traditions are assembled. Cited here to make the point that this is not a problem peculiar to modern Paganism: the same processes produced the Highland kilt and much of the British monarchy's ceremonial.