Paper Short Abstract:

On the basis of field research, the paper will present how contemporary pagans living in urban communities transfer calendar rituals form ethnographic sources to completely new performative situation and reshape them in order to adjust to contemporary living conditions and needs of believers.

Paper Abstract:

Rodzimowierstwo (native faith) is one of the branches of contemporary paganism, which refers to the pre-Christian religion of the Slavs. It is a movement composed mainly of educated people, living in cities and working in various areas of the modern economy. Due to the limited number of historical sources concerning the Slavic culture from the pagan period, in the formation of their religious practices, believers often refer to ethnographic materials from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, treating folk beliefs and customs as the Christianized remains of the religion of the ancient Slavs.

Using the concepts of unwriting and rewriting, I would like to show how believers of Rodzimowierstwo try to transfer and transform calendar agricultural rituals in such a way as to adapt them to their needs and living conditions in modern urban societies. In particular, I will analyze two aspects of these transformations. The first one can be defined as a process of unwriting of written ethnographic sources, that is, restoring their performative dimension and revitalizing them as rituals composed of words, sounds, gestures and movements, as well as smells and tastes. The second one we can term as a kind of rewriting of rural calendric customs, which means their significant reshaping, namely, removing Christian content, adding Pagan content, and adjusting to the spatial and temporal conditions of a particular rite.

The basis for my considerations will be data collected during field research that I have been conducting among the followers of Rodzimowierstwo since 2018.