We are used to imagining a Russian folk wedding as a multi-day unrestrained gaiety: the guests dashingly drink, eat well, dance until they drop, sing until they are hoarse, and fight with honeycombs with rapture. But in reality, these festivities are only the second part of the folk wedding ritual, once called the "red table". The first part of it - the "black table" - is almost completely forgotten.
In ancient times, according to the rules of the "black table", the bride had to go to church not in a festive dress, as is often shown in films, but in a mourning dress, as if to a funeral. Yes, this was her ritual funeral, and in the eyes of those accompanying the betrothed was nothing more than a living dead. The rudiments of these ideas could be found in Russian villages at the beginning of the 20th century. And even now, their shadows sometimes appear among the carefree wedding fun.
The idea of a bride as a liminal (from the Latin limen, liminis - threshold, gate) being located between the world of the living and the world of the dead, has its roots in the era of pre-class societies and is found among many peoples. We are talking about the rudiments of the so-called rites of passage (initiation), with the help of which a person changed his existential status: birth - coming of age - marriage and death (the number of stages varied among different peoples). All these ceremonies had one thing in common: they were needed for successful contact with the world of the dead.
So, a born baby in the archaic era was perceived as a creature that came from the world of spirits, and a rite was needed that would break his connection with the dead kingdom. Otherwise, the dead could cause significant harm to the living through it. During the funeral, on the contrary, it was important that the dead man would go to his ancestors forever and not torment his relatives with his terrible visits.
But birth and death are situations at the boundaries of the life cycle, requiring an unambiguous separation of the two worlds. With the transformation of adolescents into adult members of the tribe (coming of age for boys and marriage for girls), the situation was more complicated. The fact is that the concept of spirits in early societies is always ambivalent: the dead can be both good and evil to the living. Therefore, the dead were not only feared, but also revered as a source of various kinds of knowledge: predictions, advice and experience.
In particular, it was believed that the knowledge necessary for a person to become an adult can only be given by deceased ancestors. And in order to obtain this knowledge, it is necessary to go to the kingdom of the dead, that is, to die temporarily. A journey to the afterlife was not an allegory: among modern primitive peoples it is still believed that a person really leaves this world during initiation. The situation was rather difficult: first you had to die successfully so that your ancestors took you for their own, and then safely return to this world without losing human nature and not becoming a werewolf. This is what amulets and special rituals were supposed to guarantee.
In reality, the initiate went to established places where it was believed that contact with another reality was possible. There he spent some time, from several days to three months, while the priests and shamans performed the appropriate rites on him and passed on knowledge available only to adult members of the tribe. The feeling of the reality of contact with another world, presumably, was complete: the participants in the ritual took hallucinogens, entered a Trance and were forgotten in sacred dances. All this time, the initiate was considered a living corpse and a real source of danger for his living fellow tribesmen. It was in this position that the bride was also after the betrothal and before the defloration on the wedding night (with the adoption of Christianity - usually before the wedding).
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Of course, among the Slavs, like among other European peoples, the original meaning of what is happening was forgotten many hundreds of years ago. No one went to the dead, but the vague feeling that something was wrong with the bride could be caught in the peasant rituals that our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers still remembered.
The living Dead
According to tradition, after the home engagement, the bride immediately put on mourning: in some areas, white shirts and sundresses (white is the color of snow and death among the Slavs), in others - black (the influence of the Christian idea of grief). In the Arkhangelsk province, in general, the bride's head was covered with a doll, in which they usually buried. After that, it was time for the girl to perform the ceremony of mourning her fate.
We have become accustomed for many centuries to believe that this is how the bride said goodbye to her parents' house. But in fact, from the text of the farewell songs, it is clear that we are talking about death: “for three forests, three mountains and three rivers,” that is, in the abode of the undead. At least, this is how Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) deciphers this formula in his famous book The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale. The bride mourned herself as a deceased: in the Novgorod region, for example, it is still sung about the shroud, which she wants to receive as a gift. Often a girl in tears turned to the cuckoo with a request to convey the message to her parents. This is also no coincidence: the cuckoo was considered a bird that flew freely between two worlds.
In many countries, brides were forbidden to talk, laugh, go out, sometimes even sit down at a common table. They are dead, they cannot do anything except a dowry, and that is only because, according to legends, female souls in the other world are allowed to spin and sew. The very word "bride" means "unknown" (from "not knowing"), that is, impersonal, like all the dead.
Some customs keep the memory of the fear that parents once experienced in front of their "dead" daughters. It was he who formed the basis of the tradition of locking brides in a closet. In the 19th century, this custom was still practiced, of course, purely symbolically, in the villages of the Ryazan and Pskov provinces. For brides, special shirts were also sewn with sleeves below the brushes so that they did not touch people and things - the touch of a dead man could be destructive.
Finally, the traditional veil, which was later transformed into a veil, was originally a means to hide the bride's gaze, which was once perceived as the same as a witch. In Ryazan, brides are still called "mermaids". Now this is a metaphor, but earlier it was not: in Russian demonology, the mermaids were pledged dead, that is, those who died before their due date: those killed not in the war, drowned or laid hands on themselves. They turned into the living dead, wandering between two worlds and bringing evil to the living, until they survived their age and disappear to the dead forever. The brides were the same.
In this context, the original meaning of the custom of arranging a bath for the bride on the eve of the wedding becomes clear. This is nothing more than washing before the funeral. In the Karelian villages, the newlywed was then even laid, like a dead man, in the red corner under the icons.
Over a long history, this custom has been rethought many times. In most cases, it was perceived as a ritual marriage with the spirit of water - so that there were more children. Since the 15th century, the bathhouse has also been used for the last girls' party (by the way, there were no bachelor parties at that time).
The groom for the wedding had already been initiated and accepted as an adult member of the tribe, otherwise he had no right to start a family. An echo of this custom sounds special folklore names of the newlywed, preserved in some regions of Central Russia. So, in the Smolensk province in the 19th century, the groom was also called the "wolf", and in the Vladimir province - the "bear". The assimilation to the beast was a forgotten testimony that the groom went through the rite of entering into a male union, during which the young men had to "transform" into their totemic ancestor. And the wolf and the bear were considered mythological ancestors by most of the East Slavic tribes.
So the groom belonged to the world of the living.
Accordingly, his task was to go to the world of the dead, find his bride there and bring her back to life, making her a woman. The very farewell of the groom to his parents and relatives before leaving for the bride reproduces the speech of a man lying on his deathbed.
Arriving at the bride, the young man discovered that her friends would not let him into the house. In the Nizhny Novgorod province, the "guards" directly stated that there was a dead man in the house. The only way to get there is to pay the ransom for gates, doors, stairs, etc. In archaic representations, this is a typical situation for a living person who has fallen into the other world. Initially, it was necessary to correctly name the names of all inputs and outputs in order for them to open. Something similar was described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Later, the naming ritual was transformed into a demand for a ransom.
Girlfriends who do not want to let the bride go act here as her afterlife companions. Equally dressed, they demanded from the groom that he should guess his betrothed among them, in other words, remove her deathly facelessness from her. It was necessary to guess up to three times. If all attempts were unsuccessful, it was considered a bad omen - the marriage would not be strong.
But the groom did not come to the bride alone either, he had a boyfriend (the chief steward of the groom's married relatives) and a tysyatsky (godfather of the groom) with him. These are what Propp calls "magic helpers," like the Little Humpbacked Horse. Without them, the living in the world of the dead is very vulnerable, since it risks meeting much more insidious inhabitants of the other world than the bride's bridesmaids. Hence a huge number of wedding charms - more than four hundred. Tysyatsky was the holder of the wedding treasury and bought everything that was required according to the ceremony. And the friend wielded a whip, whipping them crosswise, frightening away the demons. He could also help the groom find a bride. He had a special towel tied over his shoulder - a towel embroidered in red. It was a symbol of the path to another world: on towels they lowered the coffin into the grave, and sometimes even laid them on the deceased.
After the blessing of the bride's parents, the wedding train left for the church. The bride rode with her matchmaker and in some cases lay down on her lap, pretending to be dead. In her hands was a broom - a talisman against evil spirits, so that she would not keep her from returning to the world of the living. In the Kostroma and Rostov provinces, the wedding train stopped by the cemetery on the way so that the spirits of the ancestors would not be offended that what once belonged to them was taken away from them.
But all the precautions were taken, the bride was bought out, taken to the church, married and brought to the groom's house. Here all the wedding participants were sprinkled with well water, and the carts drove through the laid out fire: it was supposed to cleanse themselves after communicating with the world of the dead. The same rite, incidentally, was observed
at home, and at funerals. In her husband's house, the bride wore a white shirt with colorful embroidery and a festive red skirt (skirt). The maiden braid was cut off, and a kitsch was put on the head - the headdress of married women. After the young people were escorted to the bedroom.
The next morning, a newly born person appeared in front of the guests, and in ancient times this was understood literally: the one who became a wife changed not only her surname (family name), but also her personal name. This metamorphosis was “officially” consolidated the next day through the ceremony of the relatives searching for the bridegroom in the house of her parents: there was a man and no. The search for the deceased was carried out for the same purpose. This is how the ritual point was set.
Not scary at all
Over the 20th century, the content and order of the traditional wedding ceremony was completely forgotten. From some sacred act of awakening the feminine principle, the wedding turned into a big party on the occasion of two young people receiving a stamp in their passports. The bride's snow-white dress has nothing to do with mourning. The groom from a stranger cautiously creeping through the world of the dead became the absolute master of the situation. He redeems the bride himself and himself guesses the riddles of her friends, which became fashionable in the 1950s.
The witnesses who replaced the friend are needed only to put their signature in the registry office. The toastmaster or the restaurant manager does everything for them. Their former role is reminded only by the ribbon over the shoulder, into which the funeral towel was transformed. The ritual broom has long turned into a bride's bouquet. The veil is not required: the gaze of the newlywed does not scare anyone now. From the old custom, only the prohibition on the newlyweds to look into each other's eyes during the exchange of rings remained, otherwise they will change.
There is no need for the bride to cry now either. One can cry only in the morning before the arrival of the groom. Instead of a cemetery, newlyweds now stop by the eternal flame or monuments. The offering of the loaf, the shedding of grain and coins have been preserved - this is understandable: you want family harmony and prosperity at all times. For the same reason, numerous amulets remained.
A vague reminder of the resurrection of the newlywed is the rite of stealing her at the end of the wedding banquet, but here there was a clear confusion with the Caucasian tradition. And now it is not her relatives who are looking for her, but the young husband - so it is more logical from the point of view of common sense, because no one remembers the true meaning of the tradition.
“Interesting newspaper. The world of the unknown”№2 2013