It is very difficult to penetrate into the general annual structure of the pre-Christian calendar, since the mobility of the Easter cycle of the church calendar shifted the dates of the holidays in the range of 35 days (Easter was celebrated between March 22 and April 25). Depending on Easter, the ancient Maslenitsa and other holidays were shifted 49 days before Easter and 50 days after Easter.
The annual cycle of ancient Russian festivals consisted of different, but equally archaic elements, dating back to the Indo-European unity of the first farmers or to the Middle Eastern agricultural cults adopted by the original Christianity. One of the elements were the solar phases: the winter solstice (the sun turns towards summer), the spring equinox (the beginning of the predominance of day over night, the closeness of the spring work cycle) and the summer solstice (high summer, the nearness of the harvest). The autumnal equinox is poorly noted in ethnographic records.
The second element was a cycle of prayers for rain and the effect of vegetative force on the harvest (from early May to early August). The third element was the cycle of harvest festivals (from the first fruits in early August to early September). The fourth element was the days of commemoration of ancestors (rainbows). The fifth could be carols, holidays in the first days of each month. The sixth, introduced, element was the Christian holidays, some of which also celebrated the solar phases.
These agrarian-calendar differences, due to geographical features, places of origin, created an uneven perception of the Christian calendar in the Russian environment. In addition, the Christian Easter calendar, which correlated the principles of solar and lunar calculations, made great confusion in the timing of the celebrations. The entire Easter cycle (from the beginning of Lent to the Trinity and the Spirit of the Day) covered 14 weeks, or 98 days; Easter Sunday fluctuated within 5 weeks (from March 22 to April 25), and the Great Lent preceding it and the post-Easter holidays (Ascension, Trinity, Pentecost - Spirit Day) moved along with Easter. The entire period of possible movements in the year took 19 weeks in the range from February 2 to June 15. Some Orthodox holidays were added to the Byzantine calendar by the Russian Church in the 11th - 12th centuries: the day of Boris and Gleb (May 2), the Protection of the Virgin (October 1).
As a result, a very complex and multifaceted system of Russian folk holidays was gradually created, in which the ancient pagan incantatory and thanksgiving prayers appear quite clearly.
A significant cycle of festivities is associated with the meeting of spring and the first stage of field work - plowing and sowing. The month of March, which for a long time was the beginning of the new year according to church accounts, opened with itself a whole series of various rituals, from baking spring larks from dough on March 9th and ending with the holiday of the first shoots of spring bread on May 2nd. The March carriage is associated with the beginning of March.
The main March holiday was Shrovetide, celebrated in pagan times, most likely on the days of the spring equinox around the Christian holiday of the Annunciation (March 25). By March 24, Belarusians have a holiday of "comedians" (an analogy to the Greek "comedies" of the archaic time) - the holiday of the awakening bear. The bear (komos) was the beast of Artemis, corresponding to the Russian goddess Lada.
Spring festivities were to be attached to the solar phase, and only the Christian Great Lent, the beginning of which fell either in February or March, pushed the pagan Shrovetide outside of its original place in the calendar. On Shrovetide they burned bonfires, burned a scarecrow of winter, rolled the wheel of fire into the river, etc. (For a detailed description of spring rituals, see the attached book by V. K. Sokolova "Spring-summer calendar rites of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians". M., 1979.)
Shrovetide ritual cookies - pancakes - have survived in Russian life to this day. It has long been suggested that pancakes are a symbol of the sun and their production and collective eating marked the victory of day over night, light over darkness. In Russian villages of the 9th - 10th centuries. Known are round earthenware pans with jagged edges and with a cross, the sign of the sun, drawn on the wet clay. They were probably made for baking pancakes. The whole small frying pan (diameter 20 cm) with its radiant edges was like a model of the sun.
The cult of eggs, as the source of life, is also associated with the spring holidays, largely absorbed by Easter. Preserved extremely archaic cosmogonic images on Easter eggs-pysankas, containing the myth of two heavenly moose cows in labor, a myth that arose several millennia before Christianity. In Kievan Rus, clay Easter eggs are widely known, which date back to the 11th-12th centuries .. For spring holidays in ancient Russia, as in the 19th century, special towels were embroidered, on which the main plot was the image of the meeting of spring, reflected in the ritual song-spring:
Eat spring, eat
On horses of gold,
In the green say
On a plow gray
Cheese-land of aruchi
Right hand seyuchi ...
Ethnographer-musicologist Y. Krasovskaya, from who studied the rite of the spring spell, found that short lines of spring flowers were sung very long, like a call from afar. The performers of the ritual (which took place on the hills, on thawed patches, and sometimes on the roof of a building) raised both hands to the sky, which was also entrenched in Russian ritual embroidery. On towels, surrounded by many lines of symbolic patterns - "letters", the ancient goddess Makosh was depicted with her hands raised to the sky, to which two other goddesses (Lada and Lelya) were also riding on horses from both sides, with plows in toroks (Lada and Lelya), also with their hands up.
According to the book: Rybakov BA Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M., 1981. - Chapter 13. Pagan rituals and festivals of the XI - XIII centuries.
