Pour nous, la Patrie, c’est le sol et les ancatres, c’est la terre de nos morts.
(Maurice Barrès)
Even a fewer decades ago, the celebrations of the Feast of the Dead active Mazovia and Podlasie with a rich folk rite, which was a relic of pre-Christian times. Today, the old customs are gradually displaced by church rites, services and prayers celebrated by priests in cemeteries. Among them are, for example, the alleged "remarks", which are a kind of prayer that is recited in cemeteries, combined with the names of the dead buried there. Embroidery and bouquet of artificial flowers besides appeared on the graves.
On 1st and 2nd November, cemeteries are visited by crowds of people who effort to at least halt at the burial sites of their loved ones. On the flowered graves, the candles burn. According to Polish tradition, their flames besides illuminate forgotten and abandoned graves, which no 1 from relatives visits. They can be seen, among another things, on the many unnamed forest and field soldiers' graves in Mazovia. For the breaths are besides a day of national memory, erstwhile we light fires on places of execution, insurgent graves, soldiers' quarters, at memorial plaques dedicated to the memory of the deceased and murdered during various wars, as well as on graves of people who deserve Poland and on graves of cultural creators.
However, the part devoted to ancestors is not an invention of Polish culture or even Christianity, but an component of the universal first tradition, present in all known cultures of the world. In Slavic lands, too, heartening rites were among the most crucial rituals. They were celebrated respective times a year, accompanied by elaborate forms of worship, prayers, and offerings primarily from food and drink. It took centuries for these ancient rituals to be composed and merged with the fresh Christian faith, and many of these traditions of the surviving were inactive late in the folk culture of Mazovia and Podlasie and are worth looking at.
According to the folk tradition of November, at the beginning of which the Souls come, is the period in which the stems, the colds, the elephants, the cyrans, the berks, the doves of bruises, the herons and the corn muddy fly away. erstwhile it is snow and cold, gills, mistletoes, crucifixes, furry gerbils and Chechets arrive, remaining later until the end of February or early March. November besides occurs in the folk calendar under the names of November, six - saint or spider. Its inactive preserved and most popular name derives from the falling leaves this month.
The old folk custom, inactive in the 19th century cultivated in Lithuania, Prussia, Kurland and in the east regions of Poland, ordered secretly to gather on a suffocating day in cemeteries or in abandoned houses standing close cemeteries, where the souls of the dead were then called up for a feast specially prepared for them. In the cemeteries themselves and sometimes in their vicinity, mourners were besides held that day.
Among east Christians in Podlasie and among the people of Kresów, the customized of “soul conditioning” has long been preserved. It consisted of leaving on home tables for the night in front of the Souls cooked on the erstwhile day beaver, pea, lentils, kutia (a kind of food made of wheat, poppy and honey, served in the east of Poland as a Christmas meal, as well as on the suffocating dates and ceremonies) as well as a glass of vodka, so that the souls of the dead could feed on them that night. On Soul Day, these dishes were carried to the cemetery, where they were left on graves, besides pouring vodka on the graves.
In time, the form of celebrations softened, and the first ceremony feast replaced the specially baked loaf of bread or pie, which was carried to the cemetery and donated to the poorest, that is, the alleged "ecclesiastical grandfathers" and thus persisting with questions of devout pilgrims who traveled from church to church. On the day of all the saints and on the suffocating day they could always be met loudly praying under the walls of the cemetery.
They were offered a part of cake, bread, or a cup of hot grits, as well as a glass of vodka, asking in return for a prayer for a named deceased household member. Bread or cake were thus divided into as many pieces as the dead were in the family. As the priests began to fight the church's grandparents with vodka, the victim in the form of food and drink was replaced with the money given to the grandfathers. It was believed that the prayer of the grandfather, so “the man of God”, would be answered.
Eating was sometimes left straight on the graves of the dead, for it was believed to be later utilized by the souls of the dead ancestors. On Podlasie there was known the habit of lighting up at road breaks or close fire cemeteries where souls returning to the afterlife could warm up. Soul fires were besides set on the graves of people who died by violent death, especially those buried in unholy ground under a cemetery wall of suicides. The fire was to defend the surviving from evil spirits and ghosts.
To defend himself from a werewolf, his hands were bound with a line after death, a stone was put in his mouth and the body was turned to the ground. This was to prevent him from getting out of his grave even on the night before the Soul. Born of the seed of Satan and the parent of a vampire witch, you could be disabled by cutting off his head after he died and laying it in his legs.
This was crucial due to the fact that on the night before the suffocating day, the shadows of the dead went to a procession at a church or cemetery chapel, where at midnight they listened to Mass celebrated by the deceased parish priest. The stories of many witnesses who heard the beating of church bells that night, the voices and singing of the participants of the service, saw the cord of the wandering souls, and even participated in these extraordinary events themselves.
In memory of the Mazovia people, even stories about grave robbers, who, on that night, came to the underground feast of the dead, to leave her, to find herself later in a completely different time – many years after it turned out to be their long-term disappearance.
The cemetery was 2 or 3 days before the feast of the dead to clear the graves of weeds and leaves. The old agrarian cemeteries and mid-field graves of Mazowsza and Podlasie frequently vanish today, surrounded from year to year by ploughing or covered with dense bushes. Many specified abandoned cemeteries can be found in the central part of the Kampino Forest, where after 1975 the inhabitants of the settlements and villages that have existed there since the 19th century were gradually displaced. present it is barely possible to see the muddy figures and moss - covered wooden crosses lying among the fallen graves.
The agrarian cemeteries were divided into parts for the rich and for the poor. In unconsecrated land under the barrier or in the corner of the cemetery, there was area for hanging men, drowning men, unbaptized children, etc. A peasant funeral, frequently without a priest, ended with a folded coffin board in a previously dug pit. erstwhile money was missing on a brick tombstone, a lime tree, birch tree, or beige bush was planted in the burial site so that after years it was easy to find the grave of loved ones. The graves were lit with hand - made animal - fat lights or candles. If the grave was tuned with flowers, it was only alive.
There was besides an old habit of throwing through a passing grave – not necessarily on a hearty vacation – freshly broken branches of trees. This tradition was applied to Slavic burning rites, during which branches were thrown into the burning pile on which the corpse was burned. The habit of throwing branches on a passing grave was common in Mazowsze even in the 19th century, while in any areas it remained until the mid-20th century.
For example, in the place of the Kampinos Forest, called the Mogil Bridge, even in the years prior to planet War II, passersby lay a branch of trees. This was done in remembrance of the execution done there on a girl headed from the village of Comfort to the church in Lomna. The killings were to be carried out according to local applications by a hiker who had stayed in the local inn the erstwhile day.
When the drought that was thrown by the passersby had already accumulated much, individual from the surrounding inhabitants came in spring and set fire to the rampage so that the soul of the murdered individual could be cleansed of his sins in the fire. This customized was described in the 19th century by folklorist and varsavianist Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki (1807–1879), and was cultivated until the inhabitants of the local peasant villages were displaced.
Already from Christian times comes the tradition of bringing on a day suffocated by faithful priests of groats, flour, milk, cream and cheese. In the evening, everyone would gather later, most frequently in a home or somewhere else to remember the dead and sing to commemorate their songs. At night they were to wander through the area in the form of fireballs or misfits, the souls of the dead surveyors, who would leave the graves to re-measure the misdirected peasant pursuits in life.
The remainder of the pre-Christian times in Mazowsze, however, are not only the Mogilny Bridge: in the Osiecki Forests there is, for example, a solemn place called the Black Churches. In the vicinity, traces of a Roman burial ground were discovered, and peculiar activity was to be demonstrated by devilic powers. The ravine called the Magic Valley arose erstwhile the Devil plucked stones from that place and erected a church from them in the Dune of Bratosovce, where the later name of the solemn was derived.
At the top of another dune, known as Dąbrowecska or Burned Mountain, which is located in Celestynowskie Forests, there is simply a ceremony called White Mountain. Unlike the lower slopes, the top of the dunes does not grow in pine and is covered with bright sand. According to local applications, this is due to the fact that it is under the authority of unclean forces and there were covens of witches. specified covens were besides to take place on Lysá Góra at region Street in Otwock. The attribution of specified a function is simply a distant echo of the existence of a formerly pagan place of worship.
At the ceremony of Jośka close the village of Szkolanka until the beginning of the 20th century there was a large stone, which has been a centre of folk worship since the times of the Praslavian times. During the spring solstice in his pits, victims were offered in the form of food and tiny coins, which later gathered beggars. The inhabitants of the area thought that the depths of the boulder were traces, feet, elbows and beards of the Lord Jesus. Unfortunately, the parish priest from the close Kołbiela in 1907, ordered the stone to be broken, from which remains were laid stairs leading to the parish church. At the site of the erstwhile boulder stood the chapel with the figure of St. Anne, in which the faithful gather on Easter Sunday for mass, which until late ended with a large folk play.
Traditional forms of ancestral worship are mostly dead present and it is no longer possible to return to them. They reflected awareness of the conventional society before Weber's “disenchantment of the world”. Today's traditionalism is not about artificial reproduction of old symbols and rituals. Julius Evola (1898-1974) rightly criticized specified actions in his essay against the “neopogans”. What we can learn from our grandparents and great-grandfathers is the awareness of co-being with ancestors and supernal beings, with whom a peculiarly close relation was established, among another things, on a hearty day.
Our peasant grandparents inactive surviving in the spiritual universe of conventional culture did not gotta “believe” in the presence of their dead ancestors in their regular lives, due to the fact that they were simply aware of this presence. The ancestors lived and inactive live among us, the planet perceived by senses and understood by reason is only 1 aspect of the appropriate level of reality, which in turn is just 1 of many existing levels. Our grandparents saw their ancestors, heard them, felt their presence around them. Just as a boy does not gotta “believe” in the presence of his father due to the fact that he simply sees him all day and is aware of his presence, so the people of Tradition do not gotta “believe” in the presence of dead ancestors.
The rituals and folk rites known from the folklore of Mazovia and Podlasie are not a reflection of the naive awareness of the "nobility savages" who have not yet experienced the dubious benefits of cutting us off from everything that fable and romanticist cool blade of reason and civilization. These rituals and rites were a reaction to people's perception of the conventional society of all the decks of reality upon which they locked the modern people with murky fumes of rationalism and empirism.
So the conclusion to which we should learn about the conventional worship of our grandparents is not to effort to reconstruct the old rituals, but to realize what they were meant to service and to realize what was reflected in them. The real return to Tradition will be the re-awareness that our life does not have only a material dimension, and the planet is not limited to its elements known sensually or rationally.
Then the celebrations of the soulful day will cease to be simply a sentimental reminiscence of those who have departed from us, and will become a ritual for establishing a peculiar relation with the ancestors and with another large spirits of the past, specified as national heroes, creators of culture or fallen defenders of Homeland. With the cyclically repeated ritual of renewing this bond, we will make it a surviving and pulsating bond.
We will draw vital and creative forces from it, both as individuals and as full ethnos. spiritual and physical rejuvenation of ethnos, the elimination of the effects of entropy which is subject to, its regeneration, the revival of cultural forces in the community of life is possible through a ritual which reproduces the bond of this community with the land inhabited by it and with the ancestors of this community. The homeland is “earth and ancestors”.
Ronald Lasecki
Bibliography:
Master Zenon, Rats, Kusaki, spanked Monday. Celebration year in folk customs and applications, Warsaw 1989.
Herz Lechosław, Kampinoska Forest, Pruszków 2006.
Kałuszko Jacek, Ajdacki Paweł, Otwock and the surrounding area, Pruszków 2006.
Garden Barbara, Polish yearly rites and customs, Warsaw 2012.
