ly rooted in the heart of the Russian peasant, is not entirely, and necessarily, always Christian in its nature. The conversion of the Russian people in the Middle Ages was sudden, and easily accomplished at the command of its princes, and was, in the same degree, superficial; the spirit of Christianity never permeated the masses so thoroughly, nor triumphed so completely over the ancient religions as elsewhere in the West. Many pagan ceremonies were partially engrafted on the services of the Church, while much of the old pagan superstition remained in the hearts of the people, covered up and concealed by a Christian exterior, but still exercising, even to the present day, unconscious influence over their religious conceptions.
The ceremonies of the Church recall to them the magical incantations of their heathen ancestors. The peasant imagines that the priest possesses the secret of propitiating the heavenly powers by the rites of the altar; that St. Vlas, the cattle-preserver, St. Elia, the rain-giver, St. George, the patron of wolves, all yield to priestly intercession. By it he can secure good harvests and increase of his flocks.
Attributes of pagan deities have been transferred to popular saints of the Russian calendar, and the whole universe teems with imaginary beings of superhuman nature, who, to the peasant, have a real existence; he believes that when Satan fell from heaven his hosts found refuge, some under the earth, as gnomes, others in the elements of earth, air, and water, or about the domestic hearth, as sprites; when hunting, he offers to the Lyeshi, or wood-demons, the first game he kills; if he be sick, he leaves in the forest a bit of bread or salt, with an invocation to the sylvan deity. The leaven of this pagan mythology still ferments in the peasant mind.
