Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Eastern Orthodox Priest's Report on Superstitious Practices Concerning Icons among the Peasantry (1853)

  

Village Priests’ Reports on Religious Practices of the Peasantry (1853)

 

“Peasant Rituals,” trans. Carol Apollonio Flath, in Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience and Expression, an Anthology of Sources, ed. Robin Bisha, Jehanne Gheith, Christine Holden, and William Wagner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 236-41. Used by permission of Indiana University Press. Some explanatory notes draw from notes in this edition.

 

Here a parish priest describes what he considers remnants of pagan practices in his parish—practices he dismisses as superstition.

 

When a village is threatened with an epidemic (for example, the recent cholera), several old maids—elderly, unmarried women known for their Christian way of life—will meet at night and walk together in a circle around the village, carrying an icon and lighted candles in their hands and singing religious songs. (Bryn Geffert and Theofanis G. Stavrou, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016], 325)

 

Further Reading


Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons