Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/94

 70 dominating power over Nature, had something to do with the great tide of freedom on which the human instinct, everywhere, has swept to claim its just superiority, and conquer its noblest privileges; but in this time and place the process of evolution was in its earliest phase, and Northern Russia was content for many a year to stammer its religious feeling, to con the alphabet of freedom, to practise with it in the most rudimentary of forms. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Finnish tribes of the Vodskaïa-Piatina—the present Government of St. Petersburg—worshipped trees and stones, and made their offerings to them. To these folk the world was still peopled with fantastic beings: a winged viper with a bird's head and a proboscis that could blow destruction over the face of the whole earth; a ten-headed dragon; a plant that looked like a—and produced lambs. The Russians of that period showed caps trimmed with the fur of these monsters to their foreign visitors.

The orthodox clergy, while generally opposing these superstitions, favoured them occasionally. Some of its members themselves composed books of spells, contrived to introduce them into the ecclesiastical literature, and made a great deal out of them. Men who called up spirits were to be found in the very monasteries. Ivan the Terrible, at the close of this century, had sorcerers in his household. In the most pious Christian families, certain pagan deities still held their ground—the rod and the rojanitsy, amongst others, which presided over birth and death, must receive offerings; and amongst these offerings was the koutia, the funeral dish, adopted by the Church.

Under the influence of these’ superstitious beliefs, the most trifling incidents of life took on mysterious and prophetic meanings. The cracking of a wall, a buzzing in the ears, an itching finger, presaged a journey; the quacking of ducks, a quiver of the eyelashes, betokened the approach of fire. The generic name of Rafli was given to a whole literature devoted to the interpretation of these portents and to the meanings of dreams, which were considered of great importance. Pregnant women gave bread to the bears led about in troops by wandering jugglers (skomorokhy), and judged the sex of the unborn child according to the creatures' growls. These skomorokhy, generally sorcerers themselves, and magicians, too,—priests of the half-Christian, half-pagan faith held by the inhabitants of the country—enjoyed a prestige which all the thunders of the Church could not destroy. They armed a man against his Sovereign's displeasure by making him carry an eagle’s eye wrapped in a handkerchief under his left armpit. They took up a little earth under the feet of one who was to be got rid of, and the man was surely doomed to death. For