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Paper short abstract

Students of folklore sometimes argued that the pre-Christian Slavonic religion included the cult of Mother Earth as a separate deity. This hypothesis does not seem to be correct. The presentation aims at assessing the data on Earth’s image in Russian popular culture of the last centuries.

Paper long abstract

Since at least the mid-19th century, students of East Slavic folklore and popular culture argued that the pre-Christian Slavonic religion included the cult of Mother Earth as a separate and especially venerated deity and that “folk Orthodoxy” (viewed as “double belief”) preserved certain notable survivals of this cult. This point of view was supported by specialists in comparative mythology and various modernist writers and philosophers (referring, in particular, to the image of Mother Earth in Dostoevsky’s novels). On the other hand, it found certain resemblance in European scholarship on Classical antiquity (especially by Albrecht Dieterich) and “primitive religions” in general. Later in the 20th century, the image of this “invented goddess” was promoted by various groups of “neo-mythological” scholars (including Russian structuralists), and more recently by feminist and pagan authors.

This presentation aims not only at deconstruction of scholarly and literary mythologies related to the imagined East Slavic cult of Mother Earth but also at assessing the data on Earth’s image in agrarian culture of the last centuries. It seems likely that these beliefs, rituals, norms, and prohibitions intertwine local ontologies related to various natural objects with certain religious metaphors borrowed from both the Bible and the Christian tradition. I intend to demonstrate how this combination “worked” in agrarian communities and how it was (mis)interpreted and transformed by Russian scholars and writers.