Vocabularul magic în textele vechi românești (sec. XV-XVIII)
Magic Vocabulary in Ancient Romanian Texts (15th-18th C.)

Summary/Abstract: We explore here the functional semantics of the terms descântători, fermecători, vrăjitori (disenchanters, charmers, sorcerers), as designating practitioners of Romanian folk magic, by analysing their occurrences in ecclesiastical and literary writings from the 15th to the 18th centuries: homiletics from Coresi’s prints (The Interpretation of the Gospel at the Judgment, The Interpretation of the Gospels or First Homily, The Gospel with Teaching or Second Homily), the nomocanons (The Rule of the Saint Fathers, The Seven Mysteries of the Church, The Rules of Vasile Lupu, The Rules of Matei Basarab), the Psalters (pre-Coresi, Coresi, Alba Iulia, Dosoftei), and finally the Descriptio Moldaviae by the great polymath, the prince Dimitrie Cantemir, and the Ţiganiada by the most illustrious representative of the Transylvanian School, Ion Budai-Deleanu. Despite their levelling to the point of confusion in dictionaries and translations, the mentioned terms carry in popular magical practice a strong axiological and functional distinctiveness, well attested by ethnographers and folklorists since the mid-19th century: through the intentionality and finality of their action, disenchanters (descântători) oppose charmers (fermecători) and sorcerers (vrăjitori), just as “white” magic opposes “black” magic. We show here that this distinction is also obvious, more or less explicitly, in the old Romanian texts, which present us with the first written occurrences of the respective terms, even if the entire set of magical practices designated by them appears as an object of criticism and condemnation by the Christian churches. The research also brings some contributions to the issue of sources, revealing the originality of some homilies from the Coresian prints that were generally considered as simple translations (especially the The Interpretation of the Gospel at the Judgment, and passages from The Interpretation of the Gospels), or of the Dosofteian translation of the Psalms compared to other versions, with new research leads for the relationships between the pre- and post-Coresian Romanian psalters (starting from the revealing variants of Psalm 57.4-5, respectively 58.5-6 in other numbering).

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