Round songs
The dances are connected with many calendar holidays. V. I. Dahl listed the following rounds (according to the calendar): the Rainanets, Trinity, All-Vyatka, Petrovsky, Friday, Nikolsky, Ivanovo, Il’in, Uspensk, Semyonin, Kapustin, Pokrovsky.
Round dance songs on their role in the dance are divided into type (they started), passing and collapsing (they ended). Each song was an independent game, a finished work of art. The connection with the ancient spellcasting rituals determined the thematic focus of the choral songs: they presented the motives of the agrarian (or commercial) nature and the love-marital motives. Often they were united (“They sowed millet, sowed.”, “My hops, hmelyushko.”, “Zainka, by senechka Walk, do walk.”).
Gradually the dances lost their magical character, their poetry expanded at the expense of lyric songs, they began to be perceived only as entertainment.
At the end of spring and early summer, on the
Yards and huts outside and inside were decorated with birch branches, the floor was sprinkled with grass, young felled trees were planted near the hut. The cult of the flowering vegetation that came into force was combined with pronounced female rituals (men were not allowed to participate in them). These rites went back to the most important initiation of the pagan Slavs – the acceptance of the matured girls as new mothers.
The birch curled in the semic room. Girls with songs went to the forest (sometimes accompanied by an elderly woman – the ritual master). Two young birches were chosen and their tops tied, bending to the ground. The birches were decorated with ribbons, wreaths
When the birches curled the girls were kissing – kissing Through the birch branches, and exchanged rings or handkerchiefs. They called each other a goddess. This rite, not associated with the Christian notions of nepotism, was explained by Veselovsky as a custom of posestrinism (in ancient times all girls of the same genus were indeed sisters). They also took the Birch tree as their family circle, sang about it ritual and majestic songs:
Let’s have a poo, cuma, pokumitsya
We will buy a Seven-Birches birch tree.
Oh, Did Lado! Honest Semiku.
Oh, Did Lado! My birch tree.
On Trinity day went to the forest to develop a birch tree and raskumlya-fox. Wearing wreaths, the girls walked in them, and then threw them into the river and made their fortune: if the wreath floats along the river – the girl will get married; If he is beaten to the shore, he will remain for another year in the parental home; The drowned wreath presaged death. A ritual song was singing about this:
Red girls
Wreaths curled,
Lyushechki-Lyuli,
Wreaths curled up.. ..
They tossed into the river,
The fate was made.
Bystra River
Fate guessed.
To whom to girls
To marry to go.,
To whom to girls
The age of the age.,
And to whom unfortunate
In a damp ground to lie.
There was also a kind of rite: the decorated birch tree was decorated (and sometimes dressed up in women’s clothes). Before Troitsyn’s day she was carried around the village with songs, called, “treated” her in the huts. On Sunday they carried them to the river, discharged them and threw them into the water for mourning. This rite preserved the echoes of very archaic human sacrifices, the birch became a substitute sacrifice. Later, throwing it into the river was seen as a rite of causing rain.
A ritual synonym for a birch tree could be a cuckoo. In some southern provinces “they did not make tears out of the grass”: they wore a small shirt, a sarafan and a kerchief (sometimes – in a bride’s costume) – and went into the woods where the girls were cuddling together and with a cuckoo, then they put it in a coffin and On Trinity day, the cuckoo was dug out and put on the branches. This version of the rite clearly conveys the idea of dying and the subsequent resurrection, i. e. initiation. Once, according to the ancient ideas, the initiated girls “died” – “were born” women.
Troitskaya week was sometimes called Mermaid, because at that time, according to popular beliefs, mermaids appeared in the water and on trees – usually girls who died before marriage. The mermaid week might not coincide with Troitskaya.
Belonging to the world of the dead, mermaids were perceived as dangerous spirits that persecute people and even can destroy them. In women and girls, mermaids allegedly asked for clothes, so they left their shirts for them. Staying mermaids in the rye or hemp field promoted flowering and harvest. On the last day of the Mermaid Week, mermaids left the land and returned to the next world, so in the southern Russian regions rituals of mermaid wires were performed. A mermaid could be portrayed by a living girl, but more often it was a straw effigy, which, with songs and dances, was carried in the field, burned there, danced around the fire and jumped through the fire.
This type of ritual was also preserved: two were ridden by a horse, also called a mermaid. The mermaid-horse was led to the field by the bridle, and after her the youth led round dances with farewell songs. It was called to spend spring.
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