Christian churches were keenly aware, however, of the risk that popular belief could slip from harmless folk tradition to deviance and even heresy. Church fathers in east and west drew on patristic and conciliar texts of the early Christian centuries to rail against deviations of two types. One, sometimes called high or occult magic, emanated from a rich antique literature on astronomy and astrology, medicine and healing, mathematics and other sciences; the other represented non-textual folk traditions, shamanistic and animist beliefs and practices. In early modern Russia, the 1551 Church Council and a sixteenth-century domestic handbook (the Domostroi) railed against the occult, producing lists of banned books taken from Byzantine sources. But this was not a major source of religious deviance in Muscovy. Few antique medicinal, astronomical, and scientific texts were translated into Slavonic; some came to Russia by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from humanist and Jewish circles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and provoked heresy trials. By contrast, in the late fifteenth century monk Efrosim of the St. Cyril- Beloozero Monastery produced a compendium of biblical, hagiographical, and pietistic texts along with secular tales, medical texts, and works on divination, without suffering consequences. Overall, high-level magic and occult had little circulation in illiterate Muscovy.
More problematic for early modern Russian churchmen was deviant lay and even clerical practice. Penitentials, sermons, and encyclicals railed against laymen's use of amulets, spells, and almanacs; the 1551 Church Council railed against clergy allowing people to secrete objects—salt, soap, cauls—at the altar to be blessed by proximity to the sacrament. It condemned licentious revelry at holydays, especially the eves of Christmas, Epiphany, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and Trinity Sunday (which coincided with winter and summer solstices) and key moments in the agrarian calendar. The Council's bishops condemned minstrels as agents of the devil, with their songs, dancing bears, and quasi-spiritual authority (minstrels were believed to ward off evil spirits from wedding processions). Such critiques—paralleled in Catholic and Protestant efforts against magic and superstition—were continued by the Zealots of Piety and later the Old Believers in the seventeenth century.
Many of these official critiques might have been formulaically repeated from canonical Byzantine sources, but there is plenty of contemporary (as well as later ethnographic) evidence that Muscovite laymen integrated non-Christian beliefand practice into Orthodoxy. Parish service books contain supplicatory prayers said by clergy and laymen alike on occasions of personal need and daily life (illness, falling in love, going to court); such prayers deeply intertwine Christian and animist belief. They prayed to some natural spirits along with Christian figures for benevolence, while they identified evil in the Devil and in other natural forces. They combined references to Old Testament figures, saints, Jesus, and Mary with invocations of a "folk otherworld," in Eve Levin's phrase. Holy oak trees, mythical islands and oceans, the light of dawn and sunset intertwined with Christian spiritual intervention. Local cults of saints attributed miracle-working powers to relics, saints' bodies and shrines, and their icons in ways that made the official Church quite anxious.
Muscovites indulged in magic, at all levels of society, including the ruler's court. Since the time of Ivan III European doctors had been recruited to Kremlin service, often bringing with them the typical early modern European doctor's combination of antique healing arts, potions and prayers, astrology and astronomy, and science. Some, such as Ivan IVs doctor Eliseus Bomel and Aleksei Mikhailovich's doctor Daniel von Haden, went to their deaths accused of black magic and heresy; most, however, thrived in the circle of the "Apothecary Chancery," established by Aleksei Mikhailovich to import western medicine, herbal remedies, books on astrology, and learned experts to Russia. By the seventeenth century rulers and elite were intrigued by such ideas: Aleksei Mikhailovich and regent Sofiia Alekseevna both had palace rooms decorated with astronomical symbols; Sofiia's advisors Sylvestr Medvedev and Prince V. V. Golitsyn had connections with male witches. Aleksei Mikhailovich had herbs collected for magic and he and his father Mikhail Romanov recruited magicians to protect them, even as rulers also constantly feared magical spells cast against them. Several late seventeenth-century treason trials involve members of the court elite (stolnik Andrei Bezobrazov, Grigorii Talitskii) patronizing people with magical powers.
Laymen turned to magic in their love lives—charms and potions helped women to find a good husband, men to entice a woman into sexual dalliance, or couples to revive marital affection. Often such charms invoked Christian deities along with magical powers. The primary locus of magical arts was in healing through the use of spiritually powerful potions, herbs, grasses, and spells, often in the hands of identified healers. Even Orthodox manuals on healing often combined physical medicine with magical incantations and rites. Such healing was ubiquitous, but its practitioners ended up in court accused as witches when someone was harmed. Others were accused of witchcraft when an inexplicable calamity befell an individual, family, or community. In Muscovy, those accused as witches were primarily men, in contrast to most early modern European and American cases; as Valerie Kivelson argues, this might be explained by the tendency to accuse outsiders, and most people with mobility in Muscovy were men—soldiers, peasants traveling to market or sent to the city to earn income to pay cash dues back home. Clergy, with their esoteric knowledge and spiritual authority, were also often accused of witchcraft. Secular courts litigated accusations of witchcraft as criminal harm, and punishments ranged from fines and minor corporal punishment to death according to the offense.
What early modern Russia lacked was the phenomenon of witch crazes and the rhetoric of satanic possession as it developed in Europe under the influence of the Inquisition. Certainly Orthodoxy's beliefs about witchcraft emanated from the same early Christian sources, and Russian sources do refer to witches as influenced by the devil. But the early modern European discourse was highly sexualized (the witches' "Sabbath" was an orgy with Satan) and personalized around Satan himself. In Muscovy accused witches were not interrogated with this concept in mind, nor was possession of magical powers described in this way until the Military Code of 1715 borrowed the concept of satanic possession from German and Swedish sources. This generated a few accusations of satanic activity in the eighteenth century, but interest in witchcraft as a crime faded in this century of Enlightenment and skepticism. By the time of Catherine II, magic was treated as fraud in the "Courts of Equity" rather than as a criminal act or religious deviation.
As for the beliefsystem ofthe laity, historians have suggested that the concept of "dual belief" be replaced with a more complex understanding of"lived Orthodoxy." Clearly this was a society that Christianity had deeply penetrated, but it took the form, well into the nineteenth century, of what Gregory Freeze calls "Russian heterodoxy." Across regions and across time, practice and belief integrated local custom into a panoply of diversity that learned churchmen might identify as deviant or even heretical, but which laymen considered good Christianity. By the nineteenth century Russia, some scholars argue, could even be called a more Christian country than its counterparts in post-Reformation Europe, since it lacked the growing traditions ofskepticism and atheism that weakened Christianity's hold on society. In Russia, Christianity, however flawed from a canonical perspective, was fervently embraced.