An Important Component of Ritual Actions

Author

Balushok Vasyl

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Center Department 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/0000-0003-1362-8270

An Important Component of Ritual Actions

Abstract

The circular movements of widdershins, common in traditional culture, particularly among Ukrainians, both symbolic and actually performed in a certain space, are analyzed in the article. These movements have been an important structural part of many rituals, as well as pragmatic actions. Circular movements are considered as a part of completely different practices, starting from antiquity: the Old Russian poliuddia, feudal land grants of the Middle Ages, those included tours of the areas provided by the suzerains, circular tours of the workshop space by members of craft corporations during the re-election of their leaders, calendar (spring game dances, caroling, other Christmas and New Year events), wedding, mowing, craft rituals, etc. They have been a part of technological operations, constituting important elements of the rituals of craft technologies – pottery, building, and others. In addition to the rites themselves, ritual circular movements are woven organically into generally pragmatic actions, giving them ritual-symbolic meaning, being associated with archaic ideas about the surrounding world, the place of a person and the collective in it, and the correlation between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Thus, rotational movements and turning actions have been considered as a repetition of the movement of the sun across the sky, and they are also an element of various actions to develop space: by the ruler, leader, owner, or possessor of a certain microcosm, limited by a larger or smaller locus (poliuddia, admission to the rights of guild foremen, detours by new owners of feudal grants, etc.). Widdershins ritual circular movements are traced from ancient times to the modern period. The variety of practices where they have taken place or are conducted is very significant. Sometimes, in the cases of contact with the other world, ritual inversion is assumed: the same movements, but in the opposite direction (when making utensils for witchcraft, during the burial of a midwife, etc.). All this leads to the idea that these circular movements have an important ritual meaning and give it to the pragmatic actions. In addition, they are distributed very widely, especially in the past, and their search is of interest to researchers of folk culture.

Keywords

circular movements, widdershins, ritual, ceremony, space.

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