Ethno-Psychological Aspect of Incantations and Swears in Folklore of the Transcarpathian Ukrainians

Author

Oksana Tykhovska

Ph.D. in Philology, associate professor at the State Higher Educational Establishment Uzhhorod National University’s Ukrainian Literature Department

ORCID ID 0000-0003-4663-5960

Ethno-Psychological Aspect of Incantations and Swears in Folklore of the Transcarpathian Ukrainians

Abstract

The article aims at reconsidering the psycholinguistic aspect of incantations and swears, which folklorists Petro Svitlyk, Stefan Rosokha, and Fedir Potushniak recorded in the territory of Transcarpathia in the early to mid-XXth century. While studying the topic, the authoress applies the following methods: psychoanalytical, philological, comparative, analytical, and structural-semantic.

The article considers love, medicinal, familail and household, and calendar incantations, which were performed mainly by women and girls. Most of them are based on the principle of analogy and the laws of contagious magic. Such verbal formulae are often aimed at influencing the sphere of the unconscious of a person and promoting of the negative Shadow archetype’s assimilation, as well as protecting a person from uncontrolled acts of aggression and evil. The article emphasizes the connection of magical verbal formulae with the rites of passage and time limits: the incantations uttered during a nuptial ceremony were to change the life of a speaker at the next border (motherhood stage). The incantations on Easter night (when the boundaries between the world of the living and the dead allegedly became quite nominal) were believed to be also effective.

A swear, from a psychological point of view, provided a person with inner discipline, human balance and focus on the implementation of a certain action or refraining from certain ones. A swear made at a border was considered the most dangerous, because the border, a road or a crossroads was perceived as a place of transition between the world of people and the afterlife. Evidently, a physical boundary (the boundary between some two land plots) was identified with the limit between consciousness and the unconscious, while a devil that could appear on the boundary is apparently a personified image of the negative Shadow archetype.

The article examines fragments of ancient curses and swears, whose meaning has become incomprehensible nowadays; they contain such words as navkhtema, navramakhta, ssena, pek, and mara. Using such words imparted a certain mystique to a person’s speech, sacralized the desire expressed by him/her. A mindset to perceive words as energy, and an incantation – as a certain rhythm that arranges time and space, is manifested in the specificity of combining lexemes in a magic formula. A performer mechanically reproduces a text of magical formulae, while their latter’s projection allegedly builds a new, desired scenario of reality, as well as influences the sphere of the unconscious and metaphorically protects a person from possible manifestations of destructive, antisocial behavior.

Keywords

archetype, incantations, swear, magic word, curse, magic ritual, psychoanalysis, Ukrainian folklore.

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