During the lecture Casting a Weaver’s Spell, delivered during the 20th Feminist Seminar titled Cursed Knowledge, I showed that Belarusian weaving and local magic spells were mutually complementary. Testimony to this are numerous names of local ornaments that appear in magic texts. I sought to determine whether the two could be recognised as the same thing that occurs in a visual or verbal form. It turns out that it’s not entirely so. 

Weaving and magic spells are the two foundations of rituals and ceremonies, which, aside from their purely utilitarian role, also have magic functions. Apart from similarities in naming, they also share certain basic rules, fundamental for the shaping of broadly understood tradition. They bear testimony to a dialogue held in the past between people and deities, ancestors and the external world. Songs sometimes repeat certain motifs found in spells, for example by evoking a sacred tree, as in the well-known Slavic song about a linden tree. Lyrics sometimes mention the names of saints and gods, but references to human problems strip them of their magic character. Even though the names of around thirty local weaving ornaments have their counterparts in magic spells, the picture dictionary of ornaments compiled by the most perspicacious researchers of the topic does not contain a single symbol with negative connotations (the sign of divine and male protection from evil has a positive tone). Local names of thirty patterns, which appear in magic texts and are handed down from generation to generation by female weavers, relate to the visual form and concentrate on the meaning only to a lesser extent. Ritual towels and patterns on folk attire were free from negative content, as opposed to spells. Only positive notions were woven, and this appears to be a characteristic feature of folk art, which mainly sought to depict beauty, holiness and goodness.

Spells differ from rituals in their topics and functions. The former were used for protection from all kinds of evil and misfortune: illness, attack of wild animals, falling prey to the evil eye. They more seldom served to put a curse on someone. Ritual towels followed the “like produces like” principle. They were not women’s lament, but a counterpart of today’s affirmation in the form of visual handicraft. Cultural scholars usually state that women wove what they desired or the things for which they piously asked God. Ornaments that represent cows and other kinds of livestock were absent (initially, in the ancient times), but such animals are frequently mentioned in spells that serve to protect them from being harmed or killed by snakes and vipers. No traces of ornaments that represent illnesses have also been found. Patterns had positive meanings, and only those were featured. Songs, however, could express sorrow, especially caused by leaving the family home by a newlywed woman or by romantic dilemmas. Ritual towels had the most in common with spells because they played a sacral role – deities or God and the saints were frequently addressed in spells, while towels were hung in temples or on gravestone crosses as well as used during funerals, weddings and religious holidays.

All Belarusian rituals, folk culture and traditions bore at least some of the below listed characteristics:

Collaboration in pursuit of greater prosperity

Fig. 1. Weaving ornament representing a manifold increase in the abundance of crops and the size of the family

Before Christmas, songs were sung that praised God and earth for the abundance of crops in the fields and expressed joy at the prospect of savouring meaty delicacies. The song for Saint George’s Day went as follows:

George, rise in the morning,

Open up the earth,

Let the dew out

For a warm summer,

For lush rye.

Weave wreaths

For good years,

For dense rye (…).

Let’s head, girls,

To the meadows, to dewy oats,

To black buckwheat,

To white cabbage.

Improving fertility

Fig. 2. Pattern representing fertile soil, increase in the abundance of crops, fertile woman and large family

As the wedding cake, the so-called korovai, was being cut into pieces, the newlyweds received wishes of a son in every corner.

The cult of ancestors

Fig. 3. Symbol of ritually pure soil, virtuous chaste girl, performer of the ritual, the celebration of Forefathers’ Eve and the ancestors

It was believed that land must not be worked until one week after Easter. Infringement of this prohibition posed a deadly threat to a family member. During the Radaŭnica holiday, the deceased were fed first, which meant that a glass of alcohol was poured on the graves of the ancestors who liked spirits, whereas pancakes or boiled eggs were left for the others.

Children were given the names of their grandmothers and grandfathers, and immediately after the wedding ceremony, before the wedding reception, the newlyweds used to go to the cemetery to pay respect to their ancestors.

The rule of pre-established order

Fig. 4. Masculine order, pure sacral hearth, purifying energy

The first action taken determined the future of the human being, which was why considerable importance was attached to the first year of a child’s life. First hair was cut and hidden in the sacred corner of the house, decorated with ritual towels and holy images. If the first person to visit the house in the new year is male, the whole year will be fortunate.

The “like produces like” rule

Fig. 5. The sun, masculine solar sign, male fertility, dynamics, the fire of life

Fig. 6. Motion, life, light, sun, prosperity

Similar visual ornaments had close meanings. Fever, known as the green disease, was treated with frog soup. Pastries in the shape of stork’s feet were supposed to bring birds back from seasonal migration.

The law of ritual reversal

It was present mainly in funeral traditions. A person dying in pain was moved to the floor with her or his head in the direction of the exit. The body of a dead person was taken out of the house in the opposite way – with her or his legs to the front. Benches and stools on which the coffin stood were turned upside down with one’s leg in order to prevent anyone living from sitting on them (under the threat of sudden death).

Pairs of opposites

Up – down, right – left, front – back, one’s own – someone else’s, even – odd, red – white, empty – full, beginning – end. In weaving, numerous antonyms were present in ornaments, magic texts, and already at the level of defining the composition of a towel.

The right side of a peasant house was associated with the male part of the family, and the left side – with the female part, which means that on the left side of the kitchen and dining space stood the stove and looms, and on the right side stood the table and the sacred corner with icons.

Everything that was situated in front of a person carried positive energy, whereas everything behind her or his back carried negative energy. Fairy tale characters were prohibited from looking back.

The sky was the place of gods, the horizon belonged to humans and spirits of fields, houses, forests. The underground belonged to the dead.

When a bride left her family home to live with her husband’s family, she was called a stranger in song lyrics. She was supposed never to return to her parents and siblings, and was expected to sever almost all ties with them and her childhood friends. A young married woman was nowhere in a place she could call her own – she lamented in the songs: I don’t know how to walk around someone else’s house, I don’t know how to please someone else’s father.

Fig. 7. Virgin soil

Fig. 8. Sown field

Full rhombus, with a dot inside that stood for seed, represented a full – sown – field, whereas empty rhombi stood for virginity (with reference both to soil and women).

The consistent symbolism of the elements

Fig. 9. Pure sacral hearth

Fire symbolised the joy of life, hope, brightness of the soul. The stove was widely used in numerous wedding and funeral rituals. It was forbidden to pour water on fire, spit on it, walk above it, touch it with a knife or speak ill of it. Quarrelling next to burning fire was also forbidden.

Fig. 10. Blossoming soil

It was necessary to wake soil up after a long winter by means of a range of rituals, such as rolling eggs on it at Easter. Graves were tidied up during a certain spring holiday so that the dead would ensure abundant harvest. Since the dead rested in the ground, they were considered its rulers.

Fig. 11. Fiery water

Red bands (fig. 11) between patterned bands were called fiery water.

Water – a powerful, obscure and mysterious substance was a source of life but could also bring about death. It was believed that water could take revenge for infringing generally accepted prohibitions. Water was talked to like a living being, prayers and spells were whispered to it, sacrificial offerings were made. In the presence of water it was forbidden to yell, quarrel, speak foul language, spit into it, beat it with a stick, pour it from the bucket back to the well, throw impurities into it. A vessel with water always needed to be closed or covered.

Aside from ordinary water, two kinds of water with supernatural properties were distinguished: dead water, which took power away from humans and came from the ablution of a dead body. On the contrary, drinking living water offered immense power; it could even revive a dead person, and it came from a spring.

The universe as a road, an action

Fig. 12. Symbol of the road, eternity, immortality

The ritual towel is a road; it takes the shape of a path when unfolded. Each band is a stage of such road and a period. Striped patterns between uniform bands of white and red represent stages in human life separated from each other, sections of the universe. Towels were usually not displayed by hanging them vertically by the upper corners. The uniform centre of the tapestry was hidden behind icons. Only then could the two ends, on which the ornament was not symmetrically distributed, form a harmonious whole.

The road was also travelled in the imagination, yielding to the suggestive power of spells, which visualised a journey to a sacred place, usually a sacred tree.

Multifaceted symmetry

The composition of a towel and the spatial layout of a house were not random; the two were analogous. The floor plan of a house had one axis of symmetry: single-roofed living spaces in the shape of an elongated rectangle comprised an apartment for the living and a long kurgan for the dead. Interspersed on the same axis were living quarters for people and separate spaces for animals with storage spaces for food and hay, which corresponded to the old mythological scheme of making sacrificial offerings. The same scheme is present in the ritual towel, often used as such an offering in a temple or a burial place. Moreover, the composition of laments for the dead has a three-tier structure, which corresponds to the tripartite composition of the towel, the three-generational structure of the family and the three spheres of the mythological-poetic model of the universe.

Figures: http://ornaments.shuma.by

Text and photographs (fragments of the display at the F. G. Shklyarov Vetka Museum of Old Believers and Belarusian Traditions): Katarzyna Sienkiewicz

Bibliography:

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Bielaruskaja narodnaja tvorčasć. Akademija Nawuk Bielaruskaj SSR, Instytut mastactvaznaŭstva, etnahrafii i faĺkloru. Minsk, Belarus: Nauka i Tekhnologiya, 1986. 

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Švied, Anatoĺjeŭna Ina. Mifalohija kolieru ŭ bielaruskaj tradycyjnaj duchoŭnaj kuĺtury: manahrafija, edited by Lis Arsień. Minsk, Belarus: A.S. Pushkin BrDU, 2011. ISBN 9854737853.