Customs of Birth and Death and the Worship of the Elements of Nature During Early and Middle Byzantine Times. An Interdisciplinary Research

The present paper examines the veneration of natural elements—such as earth, stones, sun and moon, fire, water—rooted in pre-Christian folk beliefs and persisting within Christian practices, particularly those associated with birth and death, during the early and middle Byzantine periods. The geographical scope of the analysis encompasses key regions of the Byzantine world, including Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the territory of modern Greece. Responding to the need for a broader perspective on the everyday life of non-elite populations in Byzantium, the study focuses on birth and burial customs, as these rituals offer a particularly rich body of evidence for contemporary cosmological conceptions related not only to death but also to the life course of the individual. Bringing Byzantine studies into dialogue with anthropology and folklore studies, the paper examines written sources, most notably the works of the Church Fathers, in conjunction with archaeological evidence, as well as anthropological and folkloristic theories that enable a deeper understanding of the beliefs underlying ritual practices. I will begin by outlining several key theoretical premises, including the concept of syncretism, the coexistence of pre-Christian, profane, and even magical elements alongside religious and ecclesiastical ritual, and Arnold van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage. This framework leads to a central question: in an era in which Byzantine subjects were exhorted to live as devout Christians in accordance with the teachings of the official Church, why did they persist in maintaining non-Christian practices condemned by the Church Fathers and associated with pre-Christian eschatological and cosmological beliefs?