Светлана Жарникова – Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia (страница 8)
Ornamentation of shirts, which were, along with headdresses and belts, a sacred element of clothing, was "closely associated with the magic of fertility. It was believed that the richer the shirt is decorated, the higher the reproductive power of a woman dressed in it and her ability to increase the fertility of everything around. One can therefore assume that, decorating the hem of the shirt with images of a toad or a diamond with hooks, the woman hoped, touching the hem to the ground and grasses, to convey to them the power of fertility hidden in the coded embroidery ornaments.
This process was probably thought of as reversible, that is, the woman, in turn, through such ornaments, when they came into contact with the ground and herbs, acquired great reproductive power.
The conclusion about the sacred significance of ornaments of this type is also confirmed by the abundant material provided by embroidery on women's headdresses - kokoshniks (povoiniks, collections, etc.) of the North and North-West of Russia. If in the ornament of the hem of the shirts we see geometrically transformed forms, then in the patterns of women's headdresses we encounter an even more archaic system of images.
Strange zooanthropomorphic giving birth creatures literally filled the heads of warriors (Fig. 3, 4) 4. As a rule, they have raised or lowered animal legs, branches, snake-arms; their "legs" are widely spaced to the sides. Before us is an almost naturalistic depicted act of childbirth: between the "legs" of a mythical creature, embroidered on damask or velvet with gold or silver threads, as a rule, another similar creature of a smaller size is depicted, connected to the mother's womb by a thin strip - an umbilical cord.
Sometimes these Rozhanitsy have two or three pairs of hands instead of one, inside the body there is a rhombus, a cross, a swastika or a small man. Always turned to heaven, to the home of the gods or deified ancestors, images on the back of the head of women's hats, almost in unencrypted form, they asked for one thing - fertility. And they survived in the most remote, remote places of the North Russian region, where the way of life, customs and rituals of farmers and hunters changed extremely slowly from century to century.
Yes, indeed, it was there, as G. P. Durasov correctly noted, that the slash-and-slash farming system still existed, but not because it was more productive. Due to the remoteness of these places, there were still huge untouched forest tracts - the only condition necessary for such system agriculture.
In addition, many archaic features of the way of life have been preserved here. And it is not surprising that it is here that we meet the image of a two-headed eagle and a goddess (women with raised or lowered hands), and often the latter is placed inside a two-headed eagle, in the place where the coat of arms with the figure of St. George the Victorious was usually placed in the official composition, i.e. in the absolute semantic center of the ornamental composition.
Figure: 3. a, b - gold embroidery on the quarters of the Tarnog warriors.
Vologda province. XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, inv. No. 18660 and 20927).
Figure: 4. a, b - gold embroidery on the quarters of the Tarnog warriors. Vologda province. XIX century. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, inv. No. 27078/5).
This circumstance in itself suggests that this particular female image, hidden a peasant embroiderer inside the official state symbol of tsarist Russia, was given exceptional importance.
So, a two-headed eagle and a woman inside, above or near him. Here we again return to the question we posed earlier: whose place did the eagle take in this composition, whom did it replace, if the earliest, quite readable images of it we meet in embroidery only from the 17th - early 18th centuries, and the whole compositional scheme is ancient, stable and almost unchanged?
Who was portrayed from ancient times in the place that the two-headed eagle occupied? And here we again remember the ancient images of the goddess in labor. Is it not she, giving life to all life on earth, preserved by the memory of many generations, revered and immortalized in embroidery on the hem of shirts, the ends of towels and on the heads of kokoshniks of North Russian women, was until the 17th - early 18th centuries in the center of the compositions we are considering?
This assumption is fairly easy to verify by superimposing one compositional scheme on top of another. And what? The outlines of the figure of the goddess fit surprisingly well into the image of a two-headed eagle, which in the composition, the distribution of masses both vertically and horizontally, is built on the same principle as the ancient image of the goddess in labor. This can be clearly seen in the attached samples of embroidery on the heads of the Tarnogsky warriors (Fig. 3, 4).
The replacement of one composition with another, later one can be illustrated even more clearly by the example of changes in the ornamentation of the finials of the Yaroslavl teremkovs spinning wheels (Fig. 5).
Figure: 5. a, b, c - tops of the Yaroslavl teremkovs spinning wheels. XIX century. Gryazovets district of the Vologda province. (Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore, No. 24468, 15005, 24463).
If type a presents the most detailed ancient scheme, where the merged images of horses, birds, dog-headed creatures and snakes seem to form the figure of an ancient pagan goddess, then in the top of type b the composition is drier, more schematically, the heads of the snakes rise up, the trefoil that crowned the previous top, approaches the crown in outline; finally, type c shows us the replacement of the ancient pagan serpentine complex with the image of a two-headed royal eagle, crowned with a crown.
The new form - the two-headed eagle - freely and easily layered on the old (archaic), the meaning of which as a wish, a reliable amulet has not yet been lost, the meaning of the ancient composition in all its details began to be forgotten. Probably, the image of the ancient goddess of life - Rozhanitsa to the farmer of the 10th - 15th centuries spoke much more than his distant descendants in the XVII-XIX centuries.
However, the significance of this deity, apparently, was still quite great at a later time, since not everywhere and not always it is completely removed from the composition. Very often we meet, as G. P. Durasov absolutely rightly noted a two-headed eagle and a woman inside him or above his head. And in places remote from the noisy roads of the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions, we can still find towels, shirts and hats in the chests of old women, where the ancient pagan goddess of life, Rozhanitsa, is depicted in all its glory, performing the great act of creating everything on earth.
Photo by V. Tarasovsky 1988
19 век Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province. 19th century
Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province. 19th century
Towel. Velsky district of the Vologda province
Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna
Reflection of pagan beliefs and cult in the ornamentation of North Russian women's headdresses
(Based on the material from the fund of the Vologda Regional Museum of Local Lore)
The special significance of the female headdress in the Russian folk tradition has been noted more than once, it is enough to recall the well-known works of N.I. Gagen-Thorn1, G. S. Maslova2, articles by L. N. Molotova 3 and other researchers. The specific connection between the female headdress and the symbolism of fertility was noted in the book by D. M. Balashov, Yu. I. Marchenko, and N. I. Kalmykova, Russian Wedding, published in 1985, a study devoted to various variants of the Russian wedding that existed before recently in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region. The authors write: “A very ancient custom with elements of magic was told to us in Ilez and repeated in the Lower Spas (that is, it can be assumed that the custom was once known throughout Kokshenga). Before a matchmaker or matchmakers left home for the success of the businessю They were whipped or pelted with women's headdresses"4. It is well known that the moment of the wedding, associated with the covering by a young female warrior-kokoshnik, is practically the end of the wedding ceremony, that the mere hairiness of a woman in public was considered a sin and shame, etc.
Such an important element of clothing was adorned with great care in the Russian North. Of course, we are talking about festive, ceremonial headdresses, distinguished by the richness of decor and often enormous cost, which stimulated their careful storage and transmission from generation to generation (naturally, not every peasant woman could afford the luxury of having a warrior, the cost of which was equal to the cost of two milk cows or horse)5. The motives, basic compositional schemes, the world of images of embroidery of these headdresses are far from the ideas of orthodox Orthodoxy.
Here we will talk about the cult of the ancient East Slavic pagan deities, Rod and Rozhanitsy, which until recently remained in our science to a large extent a dark spot. The question of whether the Eastern Slavs had a developed cult of the supreme god Rod and Rozhanitsy in antiquity was raised by B. A. Rybakov in his fundamental monograph "Paganism of the Ancient Slavs", published in 19816. B. A. Rybakov convincingly proves that the Eastern Slavs, long before the introduction of Christianity, had a rather complex and syncretic cult of the supreme female deities - Rozhanitsy and the supreme god of the Family (the god of rains, thunderstorms, moisture in general, fertility and consanguinity), essentially similar in functions Christian creator god Sabaoth. He isolated from the numerous, often very complex ornamental motifs of Russian folk embroidery, those compositions in which one can assume the presence of images of two Rozhanitsa goddesses, although in stylized, often extremely geometrized schemes, these figures are read with great difficulty. Materials of the North Russian gold embroidery and, in particular, the embroidery of hats, where these images are more specific, I think, allow us to join the point of view of B. A. Rybakov7 and assume that the cult of Rozhanits really existed and remained for a long time in the north of Russia, not eradicated and not destroyed by Christianity, as is convincingly evidenced by the ornamentation of such a sacred element of clothing as a female headdress.