"List do św. Piotra" w pochówkach XVI-XVIII w. w świetle ówczesnych praktyk pogrzebowych oraz modlitw apokryficznych

ENThe article discusses an element of the funeral rite characteristic of the Orthodox and Uniate traditions in the context of the cultural phenomenon of correspondence with heaven practiced at Polish-Belorussian and Polish-Ukrainian cultural and religious borderland. The custom is to put the so-called consent prayer (Russian разрешительная молитва) in the Old-Church-Slavonic language in the dead person’s hand before burial, while an accompanying ‘garland’ (a strip of paper with the formula of Trisagion) is placed on their forehead. The prayer can also be sung by a priest. In principle it is only a priest that has the consent prayer at his disposal, as it includes the formula of absolution; it clears the dead person of forgotten or unrecognized sins as well as of curses put on them and of their unfulfilled promises. The faithful view the consent prayer as a letter of recommendation, a pass or passport to heaven, as is evidenced by the names it is given in various historical and ethnographic sources and by records from contemporary field research in eastern Podolia. In Old Russia the consent prayer was addressed to St Nicholas, to whom the dead person was commended with a testimony of their piety. According to Western sources, in the late 16th and 17th c. in Belarus and the Ukraine the prayer was directed to St Peter, regarded as the keeper of the gate to heaven in Western Christianity.At that time the custom became the subject of the satirical Hramata pisana do Swietoho Pietra [A letter written to St Peter], which parodies the practice in the Belorussian language, linking it with the stereotypical image of ‘the dim-witted Ruthenian’. Another relevant source is the Latin poem Roxolania (1596) by Szymon Szymonowic, which describes the rite by analogy to the ancient image of the fate of the human soul (its passage through water with a guide) in a very solemn mood, reflecting very faithfully the context and structure of the rite and recording the content of the prayer. It is likely that the two texts are interrelated: the satire may have been a pastiche of a fragment of the poem, written in the context of religious polemics. In the Russian Orthodox Church the consent prayer was unified after Nikon’s reforms. Nowadays it is available to the faithful in churches as a form, into which the name of the deceased can be inscribed. The contemporary formula of the prayer, based on fragments of the Liturgy of St James the Just, addresses it directly to Christ. Boris Uspiensky considered ‘the letter to St Nicholas’ a uniquely Russian phenomenon. It seems, however, that in the light of letters to St Peter, apocryphal letters from heaven, prayer spells (the so-called sacred words ascribed to Jesus or the Holy Mother) or Jewish prayer notes the custom should be viewed in a wider context of correspondence with heaven (letters to and from heaven), in which the basic form of communication was a manuscript. This kind of religious expression has proved to be long-lived: heavenly letters and ‘sacred words’ have resurfaced in the form of documents that were to protect one from sudden death and secure ‘a good death’ (with the last rites) in times of disturbance and danger, also in Catholic communities, until the 1990s.