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The Ethnology Notebooks. 2019, 2 (146), 423—429

UDK 394.262.5 (477.86)
DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/nz2019.02.423

SYMBOLIC-FUNCTIONAL PECULIARITIES OF PLANTS IN THE HYDROMANTIC ACTIONS OF THE INHABITANTS OF POKUTTIA (FRAGMENTS OF WINTER AND SUMMER RITUALS)

SEREBRYAKOVA Olena

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1039-2920

Candidate of Historical Sciences,

research worker of the Department of the modern ethnology

Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

15, Svobody Avenue, 79000, Lviv, Ukraine

Contacts: e-mail: o-sereb@ukr.net

Abstract. The relevance of the article is due to the fact that there is still no special research about local peculiarities of the existence of hydromantic practices in Pokuttiа region. They are the important constituent of all varieties of girlish fortunetelling about marriage. The purpose of the study is to highlight the custom of ritual and world-view phenomena associated with the divination. Among them — varieties, prophetic signs, ritual prescriptions, prohibitions, mythological presentations, archaic elements, etc.).

The object of the research is the traditional world view, the custom and ritual culture of the inhabitants of Pokuttia, and the subject is divination with plants and water, which carried out to during various holidays of winter and summer calendar cycles. The basis for the article is materials of the author’s field research during 2013—2014, 2016—2017 in the villages of Kolomyjs’kyj, Sniatyns’kyj, Tlumats’kyj, Tysmenyts’kyj and Gorodenkivs’kyj districts of Ivano-Frankivs’k oblast’, local lore articles and works of the end of nineteenth and twentieth centuries (comparative material from other regions of Ukraine). The author’s research contains information about not only divination in Pokuttia region, but also traditional culture of other people of the world.

The author uses a comparative-historical, comparative, structural-semantic and method of cross-cultural comparisons.

Mantic traditions related to the ceremonial use of plants and water in the fortunetellings of the winter and summer cycles of holidays of the inhabitants of Pokuttia are analyzed. Their functionality, semantics, symbolism of attributes, modifications, and also degree of preservation of investigated pheno­mena in modern time are revealed. Most of them are hydromantic actions performed by girls and rarely guys. Аll divinations are the same in their functions (marriage, tanatological) and similar in semantics. Some of them are explained on the basis of semantic opposition or the corresponding interpretation of signs in the sense of marriage symbols (flowering branch).

It was found out that the ethnolocal version of the calendar hydromantic actions with plants in the inhabitants of Pokuttia is included in all-Ukrainian canvas, while preserving its peculiar features. In spite of partial loss of separate elements of divination and their modification, they still exist to this day. In some villages they are only remembered by old local people. It gives an opportunity in future to study the investigated phenomena on this territory.

Keywords: water, plants, Pokuttia, calendar holidays, hydromantic actions (divination), girls of marriage age, marriage.

Received 7.03.2019

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