THE REPRESENTATION OF RITUAL (IM)PURITY THROUGH METEOROLOGICAL METAPHORS IN FOLKLORIC LANGUAGE

Abstract

For the mythical-magical thinking of archaic and traditional communities, ritualistic purity represents a fundamental dimension of the entire universe, most often linguistically expressed through a reference to its antinomian pair, with the help of the clean-unclean opposition. According to the degree of contamination with various impure things, such as the multitude of good and evil spirits that populated the world, both space and time were qualitatively differentiated in good places and bad places, good hours and evil hours. People themselves had, in turn, to fulfil this condition of ritual purity, before beginning an important activity. If they were not pure from this point of view, they would be unsuccessful whether it was about working in the fields, going to church, or travelling somewhere. However, these metaphors from folkloric language, long discussed in Romanian ethnological literature, will be invoked only as points of reference in our study, since we intend to closely analyse here some of the least investigated meteorological metaphors, such as morning dew, mist, clouds and rainbow. We consider that they too deserve close attention, considering that a person, as a passing being, is represented in many folkloric creations as a forever wanderer, who begins their path With morning dew on your feet/With mist on your back. Starting from the image of the bathed person and, thus, purified by the morning dew, but burdened by the thick, impure mist that they symbolically carry on their back, we will attempt to remake the imaginary scheme that connects the pure and the impure in the archaic mentality, a scheme organised not after the principle of antithesis, but of the ambivalence specific to symbolic logic.

Keywords

• pure
• impure
• morning dew
• mist
• cloud
• hail
• dragon
• silver
• rain
• rainbow