Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia

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.

Let's start with the fact that on the heads, that is, on the upper, occipital parts of the Severodvinsk and Tarnogsky warriors, made of damask and velvet, as a rule, cherry, crimson or scarlet, are depicted embroidered with gold or silver threads on the "map" (cardboard templates) strange zooanthropomorphic creatures. As a rule, each of them is presented in a characteristic spread frog pose, typical for a woman giving birth. Under the main, central figure, on whose hands birds or snakes are sitting, the second image is placed. In Tarnog Borushki it is placed between the widely spaced legs of the first creature, as a rule, horned, the second, almost completely identical to the first horned creature, also in a characteristic spread-out pose. The central figure is connected to a second, smaller, thin strip - the "umbilical cord" (ill. 1).

Fig. 1. Borushka tarnogskaya. 19th century. VOKM 20927. Photo by V. Tarosovsky.

In Severodvinsk, specifically Cherevkovsky povoiniks, the central figure is connected by a strip, which also descends between widely spaced legs, with a triangle or three-stage pyramid. But the triangle and the step pyramid in many ancient agricultural cultures since the Eneolithic times were a sign of the female productive principle, a symbol of birth and reproduction8. So, E. V. Antonova, speaking about the origin and semantic load of signs on the statuettes of the Anau culture and comparing them, in particular, with signs on the Trypillian clay plastic, concludes that the triangle and the stepped pyramid throughout the early agricultural Eurasian Oykumen meant a woman, birth, growth9. A. P. Pogozheva comes to the same conclusion10.

Fig. 2. Severodvinsky Povinik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore. Inv. No. 3439/16. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

Since (which is especially emphasized by B. A. Rybakov in "The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs") folk symbolic and ornamental memory is distinguished by amazing conservatism and the ability to preserve motives created in antiquity for thousands of years, we can assume, following the named researchers, that the stepped pyramid and triangle Cherevkov warriors are the same thing with the second component of the compositions of Tarnog Borushki, a zooanthropomorphic creature in the pose of Rozhanitsa.

The specificity of the pose, as well as the fact that the upper and lower figures are connected by a thin strip, very similar to the umbilical cord, give us, I think, grounds for assuming that we have before us images of two Rozhanitsa goddesses, and in this compositional scheme the following

a component is the woman herself, who wears this warrior: she must continue further an infinite chain of births and, by all the logic of this incantatory ornament, must repeat the act of birth, reproduction.

It must be said that such images, made of pearls, beads, cut mother-of-pearl or bugles, are also characteristic of Kargopol kokoshniks, where a stylized figure, somewhat exaggerated in its sprawl, with raised arms and legs wide apart is almost always placed above the forehead.

It is interesting that women wore hats with such ornaments only during the reproductive period of their lives, often even only in the first years of family life, before the birth of a child 11, and then changed to less decorated ones; getting old, they switched to other, old women warriors.

The strength of the tradition was so great that, having almost lost the ancient idea of the meaning of these images, which they called "toads" or "rokastitsy", embroiderers nevertheless, even in seemingly completely baroque compositions, so far from pagan symbolic, still retained the ancient scheme: while changing, transforming, it retains the most important thing, the basis of compositional construction - the spread-out central figure. One of the characteristic details in the images of Rozhanits on the North Russian warriors was the horns that adorned the heads of these zooanthropomorphic creatures.

It seems that this is also not an accidental detail 12. The fact is that researchers have long noted that a number of Russian hats the moat has horns; these are Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, Tambov, Kursk kichki, magpies and kokoshniks, this series also includes the famous Voronezh ships and one-horned Kargopol kokoshniks. They all bring the same element to the look of the woman wearing them - a woman likened to a cow or a goat, creatures considered from antiquity to be associated with the symbolism of fertility.

Fig. 3. Severodvinsky Povinik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore.Inv. No. 3439/22. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

Probably, the horniness of the Rozhanits embroidered on the headdresses, on the one hand, emphasizes their connection with the sphere of the sacred, and on the other hand, unites the goddess with her possible archaic prototype - the cow. B. A. Rybakov, speaking about the closeness of two Rozhanitsa, mother and daughter, to the ancient Greek Leto - Latona and Artemis, - emphasizes the connection of these Greek goddesses with the cults of fertility. But almost all the most ancient goddesses of the fruiting forces of nature in Eurasia and North America are in one way or another associated with the cow. Whether it is Isis or Ishtar crowned with cow horns, hair-eyed Hera or Io, turned into a cow, Europe, originally embodied in the guise of a cow, etc., we repeat, all of them in a zoomorphic version are associated with the cult of the same animal. It is interesting that one of the supposed analogs of the Old Russian Rozhanitsa - the goddess Artemis in the guise of Selena - was also depicted as horned, like Ilithia, helping women in labor, and in its Asia Minor version, it appeared to be many-breasted, with a whole host of cows on her body. All of these goddesses listed above have one more thing in common - they are somehow connected with the most ancient lunar cults, since the moon was the giver of fertility in the form of rain, dew and moisture in general in many ancient cultures.13 But the moon in the same cultures was usually associated with a cow or a bull14, since the moon, water, cow and bull have long been closely interconnected and interchangeable in various mythological systems. In addition, the marriage partners of many fertility goddesses also appear, as a rule, in a zoomorphic form, in the guise of the same animal - a bull.

Fig. 4. The Severodvinsk type povoynik. XIX century. Vologodskaya Oblast. Museum of local lore. Inv. No. 3439/25. Photo by V. Tarasovsky.

So, in the numerous headdresses that existed in the vast territory of Russia, the woman, who was a kind of earthly hypostasis of the goddess-woman in labor, was likened to a horned creature - a cow. Emphasizing the signs that associate a woman with a cow, and at the same time, the constant horniness of the Rozhanits depicted on the warriors suggests that since the women, and ultimately the goddess-Rozhanitsa, are horned, it is possible that god should have been depicted as horned Genus.

This assumption is supported by the conclusions of B. A. Rybakov about the genetic relationship of Rod and Baal, Rod and Gad, Rod and Apollo. Zeus, Jupiter, Dionysus and, finally, the Christian hosts, whose antagonist was the god Rod in church teachings against paganism15. However, both Baal and Gad (gods of fertility, water, and birth) had one zoomorphic incarnation - a bull 16. Apollo, as Pausanias wrote, loved bulls most of all17. Zeus of Crete was personified in the form of a bull. In the form of a bull or goat, the god of fertility and the elemental forces of nature, Dionysus, were embodied. And, finally, the prototype of Sabaoth - the ancient lord of the gods Ilu - was also depicted in the guise of a bull18.

In this series of analogues of the Sort, one of the most important, if not the most important, I think, can be called the most ancient Vedic (Aryan) god Rudra, about whom the famous Soviet Indologist N. R. Guseva writes: “In the Vedic pantheon, the god Rudra also played an essential role, which appears in the Vedas under many names and is the bearer of a number of functions. He is described as a benevolent creator of all living things, the son of the dawn and at the same time as an angry deity of storms. <...> Being a Vedic, that is, an Aryan deity, Rudra probably became an object of cult worship of the Aryans not in India itself, but was known even in the pre-Indian period of their history. Let's turn to some comparisons. The ancient Russian pagans had a god Rod - a formidable and capricious ruler of the sky, “who owned clouds, rain and lightning, from whom

all life on earth depended. " The meaning of the name "Rudra" repeats these definitions: formidable, mighty, god of thunder, benevolent. The name of the Slavic Family is also explained as red, shining, sparkling. There are Slavic words “ore” in the meaning of “blood”, and “ore”, “red” (“red color”). In Sanskrit there is also an ancient root “rudh” (“to be red”), from which “rudhira” is formed ("Red", "bloody", "blood")19. The connection of the name of the East Slavic god Rod with the words "ore" (blood), "ore", "red", "rodry" (red) is also noted by B. A. Rybakov 20. But Rudra in zoomorphic incarnation is a bull, like a mighty bull he is sung in the hymns of the Rig Veda.

It must be said that one of the oldest traditions recorded in art forms, combining the cult of a female giving birth deity and the cult of the bull, symbolizing the masculine principle, takes us back to the 7th millennium BC, into the Anatolian proto-urban culture of Chatal-Huyuk. “The bull is one of the two main characters in the mythology of the inhabitants of Chatal Huyuk, at least that part of it that found expression in pictorial forms. The second (and perhaps the first) character was "Goddess" - the mother of animals (bulls and, apparently, rams) and people, portrayed as giving birth to them. <...> In some cases, two "goddesses" were depicted, one of whom was younger than the other (italics mine. - S. Zh.)… The image of a younger deity is associated with the idea of the renewal of the life of nature "- writes E. V. Antonova about the images in the temples of Chatal-Huyuk 21. But we encounter a similar situation in the Trypollian culture, where the same scheme is repeated: a female deity is depicted, often in the pose of a woman in labor; the masculine principle is embodied in the image of a bull, bull heads or horns22