The Wandering of the Mother of God with the Child in the Folk Tradition of the Border Between Slavia Orthodoxa and Slavia Catholica: Apocryphal and Folklore Motifs

Abstract

The narrative of the wandering Mother of God with the Child is popular within the corpus of the Folk Bible circulating on the frontier between Eastern and Western Christianity. In vernacular oral traditions transmitted on the borderlands of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, we find not only interpretations of the canonical source of the New Testament motifs “Flight to Egypt” and “The Massacre of the Innocents” (Mat 2:13–19), but also some parabiblical motifs reaching back to apocryphal texts of the first centuries of Christianity (e.g. Prot. Jas., Arab. Gos. Inf.). The latter reflect traditional developments, incorporating portrayals of biblical characters into the native worldview of narrators. The motif of the wandering Mother of God with the Child is found in several types of oral transmission: a) The Nativity/Christmas ritual: carols, pastorals, church songs, sermons and homilies, fairground performances; b) in traditions relating to Marian devotion (folk Marian songs, iconography in Eastern Christianity); c) in axiological and moral traditions: songs, legends, charms. This paper presents collected variants of the motif of Wandering in folk culture and analysis of the origin of the motifs and their adaptation in the environment of vernacular tradition and of the social, religious and theological messages contained in the texts.