Farewells to the War and Military Magic in the Folklore of the Cossack Period: Relationship with the Funeral Rite

Author

Ivannikova Liudmyla

a Ph.D in Philology, a senior research fellow at the Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Folkloristics of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0617-5082

Farewells to the War and Military Magic in the Folklore
of the Cossack Period: Relationship with the Funeral Rite

Abstract

The articleis aimed at the studying the military magic of Zaporizhzhya, Register and Black Sea Cossacks, as well as the rituals associated with their farewell to a land and sea campaigns. Main research methods include descriptive, comparative and comparative-historical ones. The source base is formed with folklore texts of the 16th–18th centuries, in particular, Ukrainian folk dumas, songs, prayers and incantations, as well as ethnographic descriptions of rituals and magical practices related to war. The authoress uses both previously published materials and her own recordings made during the last decade. The theoretical basis for the article consists of the works of predecessors, Ukrainian scientists of the 19th–20th centuries Mykola Kostomarov, Mykola Sementovskyi, Vasyl Myloradovych, Dmytro Yavornytskyi, Kateryna Hrushevska, Prokop Korolenko, and others, who have published a number of primary sources and attempted to analyze them. The scientific novelty of the work concerns the fact that it is the first comprehensive folkloristic study where a comparative analysis of collective and individual magical practices of the Cossack period is carried out. They are supposed to ensure the victory of the Cossack army over the enemy and save the life of every Cossack. All available materials indicate that the ritual of the farewell to war in Cossack times belongs to the rites of passage and is most closely related typologically to the funeral ritual, namely to the symbolic funeral. It duplicates such key elements of the funeral as preparation for death (preparation of new clothes, confession and communion of the Holy Mysteries), a ritualized form of farewell to relatives and the whole community, the use of occasional folklore forms (wishes, blessings, formulas of reconciliation with neighbours), ritual bringing the Cossacks out of «their» cultural space (house, yard, village), mourning a Cossack who goes on a campaign, a joint meal. The same places of farewell also appear: a threshold, a gate, the border of a settlement. Thus, sending off to war can be considered one of the forms of a symbolic funeral.

Keywords

anthropology of war, farewell to war, farewell to the army, military magic, apotropaic magic, magical folklore.

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