Astrological Traces in the Ancient Bulgarian Religious World View: Sources, Epoch, Development and Practices

The article is an attempt at a theoretical consideration of the role of astrological traces in the functioning of the organized Bulgarian worldview during the Early Middle Ages. To achieve this, it puts forward a new interpretation of the evidence by the Byzantine patriarch Photios, dated 867, referring to the Christianization of Bulgarian society, which is then related to the few written sources about the specifics of the early medieval Bulgarian religious views. The definition of the Bulgarian religiosity as a “Hellenic superstition” point to a direct association with the astrological practices characteristic of the Hellenistic epoch. The general orientation towards the problem is achieved by analyzing the Bulgarian ethnocultural model in its pre-literary stage, dominated by the mythological consciousness. This is where the research tasks in different spheres of scientific knowledge on cultural genesis, political history and spiritual outlook arise. Among them are the cosmological concepts within the collective imagination, embedded in ideology, institutionalized ritualized practice, the calendar system of rites, myth, epos and folkloric forms (various types of oral memory). All of them achieve their contents through semantic codes, implicit in the culture, which are research subjects of the vast scope of humanitarian sciences. In theoretical terms, the Bulgarian early medieval culture is considered through the spiritual regulations of a strong solar accent and the cyclic order of the zoomorphic calendar, in its role as a structuring model between experience, knowledge and understanding of astrological contents, in the conditions of mythological consciousness