Interpretation
The origin of the badnjak is explained by the events surrounding the Nativity of Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of Luke 2:1–20, Mary Theotokos gave birth to Christ at Bethlehem, wrapped him in cloths and laid him in a manger. By Holy Tradition, the manger was located in a cave near that town. An angel of the Lord appeared to a group of shepherds who were keeping watch over their flock by night in that region, and told them that the Savior was born at Bethlehem. They went there and found the baby lying in the manger, as the angel described to them. By folk tradition, the shepherds brought firewood to the cave and built a fire to warm the newborn Christ and his mother throughout the night. The burning of the badnjak commemorates this event.
While blessing the badnjak, some priests chant the following prayer: "O Lord Jesus Christ, our God, who did plant the Tree of Life in paradise so that it might bestow upon us eternal blessedness, bless also now this tree which is a symbol of Thy cross and the Tree of Life in paradise, and which reminds us of Thy holy birth and of the logs which the shepherds of Bethlehem kindled to warm themselves when they came to worship Thee, the divine infant, and thereby prefigured Thy salvation-bearing cross."
Scholars regard the badnjak customs as practises inherited from the old Slavic religion. In the pre-Christian religion of the Serbs, as shown by Serbian scholar Veselin Čajkanović, there were trees seen as dwelling places of spirits or divinities. Čajkanović argues that there were also trees seen as divinities per se. He considers the badnjak as a convincing example of the latter. Salutations, prayers, and sacrifices such as grain, wine, and honey are offered to him (the name badnjak is of masculine gender in Serbian); he is consistently treated not as a tree but as a person.
German scholar and folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt holds that the log represented an incarnation of the spirit of vegetation. The sacrifices offered to the badnjak were meant to guarantee the fertility of fields, the health and happiness of the family. Its burning symbolized sunshine, and was intended to secure the vitalizing power of the sun in the ensuing year. The lighting of the log could be regarded as a fusion of tree worship and fire worship, attested in Slavic customs; e.g., Istrians fed the logs lighted on St. John's Day by sprinkling wheat upon them. Čajkanović characterizes the pre-Christian badnjak as a divinity who dies by burning to be reborn, comparing it in this respect with Attis, Osiris, Adonis, and Sandan. He also proposes that the crosses made from the thicker end of the log may have originated from idols representing deities comparable with the Roman Lares, the cruciform having developed from an anthropomorphic shape of the idols. The badnjak is preferably cut from an oak, which was the most respected tree in the old Slavic religion, associated with the supreme god Perun.
Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was a guest in a Serbian highlander family in the region of Krivošije, Montenegrin Littoral. Analyzing the practices, he concluded that the badnjak customs were connected with ancestor worship. The lighting of the log on the ognjište could be seen as a solemn annual rekindling of the sacred hearth fire, regarded as the center of the family life and the seat of the ancestors. The belief that ancestral spirits dwell in the domestic hearth was attested among Slavic and other peoples. Fire worship in the old Slavic religion was mostly transformed into the cult of domestic fire, and thus joined with ancestor worship. A trace of sacrifice to the fire is the coin thrown into it by the polaznik after the ritual of making sparks fly from the badnjak.
Fire from the domestic hearth was under no circumstances given out of the house on Christmas Eve, not even to a neighbor whose fire had gone out. The reason for this prohibition, according to Čajkanović, was the belief that the Eve is a time when the ancestral spirits, guardians of the family's happiness and prosperity, are especially active in this world. Christmas Eve dinner is a feast prepared in their honor, and they join the family at it. They gather on the straw spread over the floor, and on the hearth. These spirits could be removed from the family if any piece of their fire were taken away by an outsider. In people's words, fire should not be given lest the luck be taken away from the house, or for better crops, or because of bees. Referring to the latter explanation, Čajkanović argues that, in the old religion of the Serbs, the bees were regarded as pure and sacred insects, in whom ancestral spirits could dwell. The same explanation, "because of bees", is also given for the aforementioned custom of putting a piece of the badnjak's first splinter in the dough for the česnica.
Russian philologist Vladimir Toporov has proposed that the felling of the badnjak was originally a reenactment of the mythical fight in which Mladi Božić ("young god") slew his father Stari Badnjak ("old Badnjak"). Božić, the diminutive form of the noun bog, meaning god, is also the Serbian for "Christmas". The characters of Stari Badnjak and Mladi Božić are found in old Serbian Christmas songs, where they are not explicitly referred to as father and son, and no fight between them is mentioned. By Toporov, the former personified the last day of the Old Year, the climax of the power of Chaos, and the latter personified the first day of the New Year, the beginning of reestablishment of Cosmic Order. He regards Stari Badnjak and Mladi Božić as originating from respectively the dragon and the dragon slayer of the Proto-Indo-European mythology. Stari Badnjak would be related to both the Vedic serpent Ahi Budhnya ("the Dragon of the Deep") killed by Indra, and the Greek dragon Python killed by Apollo. The words badnjak, budhnya, and python stem from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhudh-, denoting bottom, foundation, depths, and related notions.
According to Russian philologist and mythographer Boris Uspensky, Stari Badnjak and Mladi Božić have analogues in East Slavic tradition—Nikola's Dad and Nikola. The name Nikola is a popular reference to Saint Nicholas of Myra, whose feast falls nineteen days before Christmas, on 6 December, his "dad" being celebrated the day before. Nikola is portrayed in East Slavic folklore as merciful and protective towards the common people, patron of animals and agriculture, connected with riches, abundance, and fertility. Uspensky argues that this saint took on attributes of the serpentine god Volos, whose cult was very strong among East Slavs before Christianization. He was the adversary of the dreadful thunder-god Perun, who is in this case reflected in Nikola's Dad.
The notion of a quarrel between Nikola and his "dad" is present in a number of legends. The connection between the father–son pairs of Stari Badnjak–Mladi Božić and Nikola's Dad–Nikola is corroborated by the fact that, in many East Slavic regions, practices characteristic for Christmas have been transferred to the Feast of Saint Nicholas. There is, however, an inversion in the comparison between these two pairs. In the former pair, the first stems from the mythical dragon, and the second from the dragon fighter, while in the latter pair it is vice versa. This inversion explains, by Uspensky, the fact that in some areas Nikola's Dad is celebrated on the day after his son's feast, rather than on the eve of it. In that way, the "dragon" (Nikola) comes before the "dragon fighter" (Nikola's Dad), as is the case with Stari Badnjak and Mladi Božić.
Serbian ethnologist Petar Vlahović has proposed that the noun badnjak and the related adjective badnji (attributive "Christmas Eve") are derived from the root of the verb bdeti ("to be awake"), referring to a custom of staying awake through the night before Christmas Day. The same etymology of the adjective badnji has also been proposed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 19th-century Serbian philologist, systematizer of oral literature, and ethnographer.
Read more about this topic: Badnjak (Serbian)