Twelve Years Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria; Being a Revised Edition of a Residence in Bulgaria. (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. BULGARIAN SUPERSTITIONS. Paganism and witchcraft tolerated by the Church?Feast of all Nature? Switch day?Dipping day?Bacchantes?A day of mortification for the dogs ? All Souls ? Feast of Constantine ? Miraculous fish ? Feast of serpents?Old Mother March?St. George's: why lambs are sacrificed? The Panagia?Feast of pigs?Novel sins?The Vampire?Fountain spirits ?Spirit treasure-guardians?Ghosts of the Turks?Our success as exorcists ?Notions of a future state. As in all Evil there is a substratum of Good, so from the fact that the Greek clergy?interested in their Bulgarian flocks merely as a means of revenue?care but little what may be their morality, and are equally indifferent to what, how much, or how little they believe, so long as their faith or its absence does not diminish the exchequer of the Orthodox Church, it results that the antiquarian in search of ancient Slavonic superstitions, habits, customs, legends, and even rites dating from Pagan times, will find in Bulgaria a rich and untouched field for his investigations. Unfortunately, a total absence of all the books necessary for reference and collation forbids us attempting to make a special study of the subject, and we are forced to content ourselves with a mere catalogue of some of the superstitions prevalent in our immediate neighbourhood; but such is the originality and genuineness of the old Slavonic traditions in these provinces, that even the meagre and imperfect details which we give may not be without interest for the lovers of that folk-lore which is so rapidly disappearing from Europe. In those Slavonic countries which profess Roman Catholicism, the clergy, with their almost mathematical rigidity of principle, havePAGANISM AND WITCHCRAFT. 2r cast down the images, abolished the feast...