The present work is concentrating on the discovery of some elements of the contemporary folklore that do not represent anything else but some popular forms of cherishing and transferring some segments of primordial knowledge, of handing down traditions. We dare to call this complex "primordial tradition" bearing in mind first of all a universal tradition that is inherent in the whole Universe from the beginning of the world, as Guenon says (Guenon 1987) We discover the mentioned segments precisely in contemporary legends, myths, tales of religious patterns, rituals and traditional symbols that mobilise the man's spirit in order to make a restoration of the integral treasure of authentic truth. In this short analysis, we shall pay special attention to a small part of the organon called "primordial tradition", that is the archetype of initiation, viewed on the threshold of the third millennium. Therefore, we shall make an attempt to analyse the archetype of initiation in the contemporary Macedonian folk literature via a mytho-ritual sequence.
Regardless to their real origin and significance, rites of initiation must have originated from man's deep need, for it is obvious that they exist among many nations. In this sense we could completely agree with B. Betelheim who categorically says that juvenile rites are in relation with something so primitive that it is common to the whole humanity (Betelheim 1979, 9). However, according to Propp, initiation is one of the institutions that are immanent to clan system and this ritual was being practised in the beginning of sexual maturity. Through this ritual, the young man is being introduced to the clan, he becomes an equal member of the community and acquires the right to marry (Propp 1990, 90). It is interesting to see the parallels that exist between the archaic forms of ritual initiation among contemporary nations in the phase before the appearance of the alphabet on one side, and all we have inherited or received from the collective unconscious found in contemporary folklore, on the other side. Many authors (Henderson 1973; Guenon 1946; Eliade 1959) have written about the archetype of initiation by modern man.
The initiation as a phenomenon signifies a training, a particular institution that generally takes place during puberty, the aim of which is transition from one life period to another that is higher and more developed. Anyhow, according to Pierre Riffard, initiation is a series of trainings and practices which in a particular kind of mytho-ritual scenario realises itself through three essential and determinative moments:
temptation, death and rebirth (Riffard 1989, 166-168). It is interesting, that all investigators of the phenomenon of initiation focus its significance about the mystery of birth, death and rebirth.1 What lies in the base of this mystery, is the dynamics of the notion of death and life, i.e. the connotations that are immanent to them. Namely, in this mytho-ritual connection we should first of all see the primary, i.e. the dominant component of Death: that is, its power of fecundating (for after Death comes a new birth, and that is a universal law), for humans it represents a path to true immortality (...) Death means fertility, and vice versa, fertility tends to come up from Death, which in that way becomes a fertiliser of all that is born (Moren 1981, 129). About the ambivalent nature of the notion of Death, tells us perhaps most conveniently the term of initiation itself, its Latin expression initium means a beginning, initiation (Riffard 1989, 166; Gennep 1981, 130) while the Greece equivalent tevevtaw is completely antinomic to the Latin word and means killing, causing death in some way, so that this killing is considered to be transition, i.e. the entrance into something new (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1987, 206; Riffard 1989, 171; Gennep 1981, 130).
As we have already said, we will pay attention strictly to the analysis of the specific forms of initiation experience that we find in the material of Macedonian folk literature - they are sparagmosis and anthropophagy.2
The tearing of the neophyte into pieces, then the division of his organs, as well as cases of ritual cannibalism, show in a particular way the specific form of experiencing initiation death, and these are pointed out as the most dominant themes of the initiation rebirth. This form ofinitiatory temptation, besides being swallowed by different monsters or substitution with rape, represents one of the most expressed artistic forms, which signify maturation through initiation.
Through analysis of particular literary segments which represent paradigmatic examples or Macedonian folklore we shall try to discover in which cases sparagmosis and anthropophagy are experienced as an initiation temptation and through what, de facto, the neophyte acquires his rebirth, i.e. the creation of a new personality.
In typical topics of folk tales there occurs usually one of the following themes: the hero is usually raped by a monster or is subjected to face several difficult temptations that appear in form of sparagmosis and anthropophagy. The theme of a novice who is cut into small parts and in that shape neophyte must endure the darkest temptations until his body and spirit reach the degree when they can be reunited again to an entity and form a new and mature personality is worldwide.3 That is precisely the aim of initiatory mythical ritual seances. Actually, the attitude that all anthropologists and psychoanalysis take is that in fact the pain during the initiation is equal to the price paid by the adolescents in order to obtain the privileges of maturity (see Betelheim 1979, 44). As an illustration of this, we shall quote one example found among the material:
| He took the child and took out his eyes. His sister began to cry. But he put him into the kettle to boil. His sister said to him: 'Please, give me his bones to bury them. With his flesh you can do whatever you want to!' He grasped the flesh and cut it into pieces, separating the bones. The girl took the bones, put them in two little sacks and tied them on the horseback. 'Let's go, little horse, let's go for a walk with these bones.' (AIF tapen. 556)4 |
All these exploits acquire one unique sense in initiation context: after the ritual activities, such as tearing the body apart, boiling it in a cauldron or eating it, followed by recomposition of its pieces. This renovation has only one goal: the neophyte has to acquire some supernatural abilities that would lead him to the right path - the creation of a real hero (man). After the planned initiatory seance, separated parts of the body are restored into a whole and in that way the hero is made:
| He took the bones and put them together He provided everything ( ) He killed the hedgehog, and let it bleed (AlF tape n 556) |
The process of reanimation can be various it can be developed by a reunification of the separated parts or by means of a life-givmg substance, as in the previous example, or with spring water.
When the boy came and stood at the door, he fell asleep, and the little beardless man chopped his body into bits with a knife and hid the pieces When the girls came out of the bath, they saw the boy cut into pieces And one of the girls sprinkled some of the spring water over the boy and he stood up (Verkovic 1985 4, ex 102, p 436).
How surprising is the similarity between our available material, in which we find traces of juvenile initiation, and those kinds of initiation which are found in shamamc communities and the communities of medicine men Eliade's work about shamanism deals with the question in more detail, he talks about initiation associations of future shamans, pointing out separation and restitution of the parts of the body of the future shaman as a central theme of initiation rituals (Eliade 1990, 53).
Contrary to the theme of separation and restitution of the parts of the body of the initiated one, sometimes it is expected from the neophyte to stay alive and be rejuvenated after having been long boiled in the kettle:
| 'Fine, lad, I'll give you my daughter in marriage,' said the czar to him, 'but only if you can do a couple of things I tell you, you will marry her First you must do this you will sit in a cauldron in water to the neck and I'll boil you for an hour, if you stay alive, you'll marry my daughter, but if you boil, I'll throw you to the pigs to eat you ' (Cepenkov 1986 1, tale n 69, p 327) |
Probably an artistically more expressive moment is when parents cook their own child in an oven so that the ill grandfather could eat him and recover This anthropophagy is usually motivated as a temptation of the parents' faith in God who appears m the guise of the sick grandfather:
| 'I was told,' said the grandfather, 'that you have to find somebody who has a single male child, if you kill him and bake and eat a little of him, you'll get well at once, but I don't believe that anyone could do this'' (Sapkarev 1976 5, tale n 88, pp 148 149) |
This is the complex we find with Abraham and Isaac, later with Iphigeny and Agamemnon, and so on. However, the priority for our theme is the execution of the act which, according to the rules of the archaic logic, represents initiation death and new birth: killing through sparagmosis and anthropophagy and revival from that appears to be the fecund dimension of Death incarnated in these two acts:
The parents killed the child, put him into a pot and brought to an oven to have him baked. (...) The husband brought him back home and put him in front of the old man. The old man ate a little bit of the baked child and got completely well immediately. Then he blessed the child and the boy resuscitated. (Sapkarev 1976 5, tale n. 88, p. 149)
In another variant of this tale, in an explicit way there is given the neophyte's passage from childhood to the so-called mature exploit period.
| The husband opened the oven to see if the bake was ready. When he opened the door, he was utterly surprised and frightened from the miracle: the oven and the whole house burst into light that was coming from the child; the pan and the child were of pure gold and shone like the sun; the child was sitting on the pan like a big boy, handsome and merry, shining and sane; on his head there was a crown of pearls and jewels; on his belt, on the hips, there was a sabre; in his right hand he was holding a book with golden letters, while in his left hand there was a sheaf of wheat spikes, and all that was shining with a light lighter than fire, for everything had turned into gold. (Sapkarev 1976 5, tale n. 89, p. 151) |
The interpretation of this complex could be developed so that the act of the child being entered into the oven is considered as his return to embryonic stadium5 - where the oven6 represents the symbol of vulva and uterus from where he finally comes out as if reborn. Thus, without any doubt, we could talk about the obstretic value of this initiation act in which the elements obtain their primordial embryological and uterine symbolism. The previous example justifies again our goal to tell something more about the homology established between initiation and alchemy. Namely, during the alchemic procedures which are homologous to "torture", "death" and "resurrection" of the neophyte, in fact it comes to a change of the substance, the matter which reaches the state of transcendental essence: it turns into "Gold" which is the symbol of immortality (Eliade 1983, 166). The alchemic symbolism mirrors the initiatory symbolism of the child who, after a rather long cooking process in the oven, i.e. after the execution of the initiation act, turned into gold, which on a ideation plane would mean derogation of death and penetration into the field of immortality, which is the fundamental scheme of initiation process. Here is an example of a fairy tale from Novgorod in which the child is sent to the "forest grandfather" for a particular training, which is specific for every institution of initiation. This example could serve as proof for the thesis that these appearances have a universal character and that we could find them in any culture as paradigmatic models:
The grandfather threw the child into the oven and the child began to twist. Then the grandfather took him out of the oven and asked him:
| 'Do you know anything?' - 'I don't know anything' (and this was repeated for three times; the oven was already red-hot). 'But have you anything learnt yet?' - 'I have learnt much more than you have, grandfather,' replied the child. The training was finished, the forest grandfather called for the father to come to take his son home. (Smimov 1917, tale n. 72)7 |
Burning, baking or boiling of the neophyte as a very frequent moment of the ritual initiation exists among the Australian Aborigines which is known thanks to the investigations of Spencer and Gilen. Here is one episode of the rituals of initiation that could serve as precious material in the sense of discovery of the essential uterine symbolism these rituals costam. Namely, one digs in the earth a hole big enough to put a man's body into it. This hole actually represents an "oven", a "furnace". One of the actors goes down into the hole, the second kneels by his legs and the third by his head. The latter two represent the men Arunta who bake the man in the oven of the earth. Each one of these two pretends to water the baked man and put some coal over his body; during this act the sound of a burning flash - crackling and growling - is imitated brilliantly (Propp 1990, 155). Bearing in mind that this ritual was developing symbolically, there is one reason more to take it into consideration as a comparative base for our folkloric material. Besides, the burning, baking or frying of the neophyte which appears already on the earliest stages of the ritual of initiation, leads towards a benefit-that is a benefit at which aims the whole ritual, and these are the capabilities of each equal member of every tribal community (Propp 1990,157). This relationship is almost identically transposed from the space of the ritual activities to the space of the mythological and folklore world where on artistic plan the neophyte's passage from the infantile to the world of the adults is demonstrated Otherwise there are many mythical subjects that witness the beneficial function of this ritual activity for instance, every evening Demeter used to put her son into a hot oven; Thetis did the same thing to her son Achilles This was done in order to burn, destroy the mortal nature of these children and to secure their immortality (Propp 1990, 160-161, Dune 1987, 4).
To this family of images such as the oven, furnace, cauldron, pan, pot, hole dig into the earth, i e the pit, which show the primordial symbolism - regressus ad uterum - we would also add the symbols of house, a forest cabin, the stomach of the demon, beast or monster which also symbolise the mother's stomach, or more precisely the uterus, where the death of the neophyte represents the return to the embryonic stadium 8 In this way, anthropophagy is euphemised into swallowing, swallowing into stay We shall give one more example, in which Eliade explicitly points to the mentioned initiation symbolism the ideas of gravidity and childbirth are expressed through a sequence of homologous images the introduction into the stomach of the Big Mother (= Mother Earth), then into the body of a monster or an animal All these representations together with the initiation cabin obviously belong to the same family of images (Eliade 1959, 115-116) Already Gennep stresses the analogous symbolism the neophyte comes out of the pit or hole dug in the earth, all in blood, the same way as a new-born baby comes out of the mother's womb (Gennep 1981, 132) Agreeing with the multitude of analogous interpretations regarding the mentioned primordial symbolism of the neophyte's regressus ad uterum I quite agree with Eliade's standpoint according to which the gynaecological symbolism in the clearest form is found in the representations linked to the Earth-Mother while in anthropogony (we are keen to add in the initiation too [L S ]) we often use the expressions proper to embryology and obstetrics (Eliade 1983, 33-43). In this sense we would like to join Moren's attitude according to which every lonely, quiet and dark place reflects the presence of death and carries a new birth (Moren 1981, 142). Exactly this uterine symbolism will produce the holy place as a projection of the archetype of femmoid intimacy.
One of the most essential coincidences between the shamanic initiation and the one that we find in Macedonian folklore material is surely the period of dream in which the process of identification in the form of separation of the body parts, its devouring or boiling in a cauldron actually takes place Here is an example of an initiation dream by the Samoyedic shamans "The master of the Low Country took him to the Low Country where its inhabitants took his heart out and put it into a big pan ( ) Then a man cut off his head, separated his body into small pieces, and put everything in a cauldron So the body cooked for three years ( ) Then the blacksmith took out his bones, put them together and covered them with flesh " (Eliade 1990, 5 5-56) Dyrenkowa in her work The Acquisition of shamanic capabilities according to the conceptions of the Turkish tribes refers to identical symbolism in which she reports of a Teleutic woman who had become shamaness since she dreamed of some unknown people cutting her body in bits and cooking it in a cauldron (Dyrenkowa 1990, 57,Propp 1990, 150) This image is pointed out as a specific shamanic vision before the fulfilment of shamanic functions. However, as Propp himself has already noticed, there is always the question why all shamans hallucinate the same way and why the images of those visions sometimes are in details identical to the ritual seances that appear in America, Africa, Polynesia, Australia, on one side and the folklore material on the other side? Our boys are also transforming themselves into genuine heroes by means of their initiation dreams that are sometimes very explicitly expressed, while sometimes they are deeply hidden in textual background Our hero (Verkovic 4, tale n 102) had dreamed of his initiation birth too, as well as in the case of the "young shepherd Stoyan", who was torn apart by three oreads his daydream can be by an allusion recognised through the variants of this song
| Fairies came around and took | |
| Stoyan by surprise, | |
| they threw him from tree to tree, | |
| they elevated him from one top to another | |
| and tore him into pieces, one by one. | |
| His flock ran away. | |
| (Zhivaya starina 1892, 1, pp. 24-25; SbNU, 28, pp. 206-207) |
This song reminds us extraordinarily of its Serbian, Croatian and Istrian variants, which have been paid much attention to. It is quite enough only to mention the study of M. B. Stulli who had interpreted this as a nightmare dream (Boskovic-Stulli 1968, 20-36), or the analysis by Miodrag Pavlovic, according to whom this song is simply a trace of the sacrificial rite (Pavlovic 1986, 19-24).
| 'Get up, Radoye! | |
| Your sheep entered the garlic garden.' | |
| 'Let them be, my little sister, I can't move; | |
| Witches eat me: | |
| My mother took out my heart | |
| While my aunt held the torch light.' | |
| (Karadzhic' 1932, 1, song n. 237) |
The Vuk Karadzhic's variant very explicitly locates the space of the dream in which this initiation birth is experienced. The very beginning is very indicative:
| All the sky was full of stars, | |
| and the flat field full of sheep, | |
| there was no shepherd to the sheep | |
| but a boy by the name of Radoye, | |
| and yet he was asleep. | |
| (Karadzhic' 1932, 1, song n. 237) |
We think that this song in all its variants contains those constants that make up, as we have already said, the shamanic birth experienced through dream.
Unavoidably, in this context there are mythological songs in which the fairies undertake the action of separation and the tearing apart of the neophyte's body. In these songs (The Blonde Stana and the Oread -Miladinovic song n. 5 and Angelina and the Sea Fairy - Miladinovic Song n. 7) it is also about a certain rethinking of the mentioned ritual so that this sparagmosis executed over our young neophytes is experienced as a hubris of young and angry fairies, while the initiation birth could be expected outside the textual representation:
| The Fairy got angry | |
| and extracted his brown eyes, | |
| his brown eyes from his face, | |
| his white arms from his shoulders, | |
| his speedy feet from his knees. | |
| (Miladinovic 1861, song n. 5, p. 5) | |
| 'Judas Oread! Let my brother go, | |
| you, who have been loving him for nine years!' | |
| The Oread then got very angry | |
| and elevated him high to the Almighty God, | |
| and cut him into the smallest pieces | |
| so small that an ant could carry. | |
| (Miladinovic 1861, song n. 5, p. 5) |
An extraordinary realisation, product of the folk thought, divided between contradictory feelings such as destruction and creation, in a particular way reminds us of the initiation principle, carrying the skeleton of archaic religiosity. It is about the song in which haydouts force the parents to cut into pieces the body of their child, then to bake it, and in the end, to eat it piece by piece, and to do it all singing and dancing, in a sort of ritual trance. This song is full of so much archaity and originality, constituents of a primordial tradition which, on one hand, we meet among the actual so-called primitive communities throughout the world, while, on the other hand, the same comes out from the earliest written documents of our civilisation. In this context we shall fix our attention to one of the segments of this tradition which gives us the idea that most probably springs from it the memory of the most ancient ceremonies of initiation rituals in which the tearing apart of one's own children during the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries took place.
| We found a little boy |
| and a young woman with a male child; |
| we took the child from her |
| and we killed it, |
| we killed it and tore it into pieces |
| and put it in front of them to eat it. |
| (Author's own field research).9 |
This poetic segment, which probably represents one of phantasmagoric images of our culture, reminds us extraordinarily of the most dramatic part of the myth of Dionysos Zagreus - it is the part when the Titans tear apart the body of the child and throw its parts into a cauldron where they cook them and then bake, and according to some researchers, they even eat them (Eliade 1991,312-313, Dune 1987,26-27) In the crime committed by the antique Titans should be recognised the ancient initiation scenario which in the course of time has faded out and acquired a new connotation We should not forget the fact that the Titans took on the role of "initiation masters" and so they killed the neophyte in order to enable its rebirth into the world of higher existence In the context of the mentioned model of initiation, we should not avoid the fact that Jeanmaire reminded us at the right moment - that cooking in cauldron, or the passage through fire, represents the initiatory rites in which the final objective is the acquisition of immortality (Jeanmaire 1951, 387, Eliade 1991, 313) Bearing in mind all this, we should not avoid the representations of hearth (the woman, the uterus) on which the male is burning - the fire (Durand 1991,214) The same representations, within the framework of the initiatory scenario could be specified as a femmoid cauldron, which is warming up from the male element - the fire - and which can be represented, in the most religious sense, as a dish, that is a kettle, which is preparing the rebirth of the initiated So, for instance, in the initiation rituals of South India and Borneo, the Big Mother is usually represented in the shape of a dish in which will come forth the novice's rebirth (Eliade 1959, 125) This covers only partly the of the extremely complex uterine symbolism 10 Complementation of these images or symbols comes from Jung, Bachelard, Bastide and Durand who discover for us a whole phenomenology of images which starts from the mother's uterus, the aim of which is, through multifarious alternations of holes and cavities in the earth, which remind the cave, house, hearth,11 church, temple, tabernacle, arch, etc, to bring us in a sensitive way to the end of this sequence where we meet chalice and glass In the just mentioned sequence, death is euphemised to its antiphrase by means of numerous symbols - images of the intimacy by which can be assumed the picture of the intrauterine world in order to find and rediscover prenatal peace and tranquillity.
In addition to the mentioned examples, we would only like to say that the ritual songs that celebrate the male and female initiation and which are performed within the ritual activity (for instance the role of Koledari and Lazarki) even today represent an active segment of the cultural tradition in Macedonia, and we know quite well that the traces of these mythical patterns are much older than Christianity in which they are presently incorporated (Koleva 1973, 63-66; Koleva 1974a, 163-185; Koleva 1974b, 74-85; Balusok 1994, 31-36).
In this context, analysing the archetype of initiation we would like to point out that all examples of the folk poetry and prose that we have already quoted or interpreted are still being performed on the Macedonian field with which we would only like to support the thesis of survival of the primordial tradition.
As a conclusion, we would like to stress the fact that we have to come back again to the essential relation between the phenomenon of consecration and the phenomenon of death, that is, the determinative moments of analysis of initiation: death- birth, which quite normally give us the fundamental determination of the comprehension of the sparagmosis and anthropophagy as initiation experience. In this sense, our standpoint completely corresponds to the definition given by Moren:
since the initiation in advance takes up its symbol from the death, the initiation will become its symbol and during this process it comes to a dialectic conversion of that similarity; death as a transition into something else will become a real introduction (Moren 1981, 134-135). And let us outline once more the essential qualitative features of these ritual acts: both the sparagmosis and the anthropophagy contain in themselves an essential creative function if they happen to be observed in an initiatory ambience and they present themselves to us as archetypes that rise from the mythical primordiality.
1) In this context we must not avoid the excellent studies devoted to the phenomenon of initiation: Spencer, B. & Gillen, F. J. 1899: The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London; Webster, H. 1908: Primitive secret societies. New York; Gennep, A. van 1909: Les rites de passage. Nourry, Paris; Jeanmaire, H. 1939: Couroi et Couretes. Lille; Guenon,R 1946 Apercussur I'initiation, 1949 Melanges, Eliade, M 1959 Naissances mystiques Gallimard, Pans, Betelhajm [Betelheim], V 1979 Simbolicne rane [Symbolic wounds] Kultura Beograd
2) The rites of sparagmosis (tearing into pieces of the human body) and omophagy (eating of crude meat) till now are discussed in the following studies Brunei, Rene 1926 Essai sur la confrene religieuse des Aissaoua au Maroc Pans. Eissler, R 1928 Nachleben dionvsis chen Mystenenntus ARW, pp 172-183, Eissler, R 1951 Man into Wolf London,? 112 et passim, Jeanmaire, H 1951 Dionysos Histoire du culte de Bacchus Payot, Pans, p 259 et passim, Eliade, M 1983 Istorija verovanja i religijskih ideja [Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses, Payot, Pans 1983] I, pp 304-314, II, pp 147-154, Prosveta, Beograd
3) This form of initiation temptation, except the juvenile initiation which we meet as a model in literary folklore (see Propp, V Historical roots of fairy tales), appears as a pattern in many other kinds of temptations, too As an essential point of orientation will serve us the bodies of "dying gods" cut into pieces during the ancient Mysteries, whose cultural pattern is certainly Dionysos Extraordinary analogies are established between the initiation visions and hallucinations of the shamans, illusions and dreams of the alchemists, which finally direct us to the fundamental scheme of all the ancient initiations The analogy that appears between the human and alchemist initiation is the following the sense and the goal of the ritual initiation is the transmutation of man via the initiation experience of death and new birth the neophyte changes his ontological status, while in alchemy this temptation is transposed to Matter (see Eliade, M 1983, 155-168, Jung, S G 1954 Von den Wurzein des Bewusstseins, Zurich, Rascher) The process of separatio that we meet in the alchemic works is described as tearing into pieces, division of the human body (Eliade 1983, 165, n 7)
4) Archives of the Folklore Institute of Skopje
5) It is a commonly accepted belief that the oven represents the uterus where the new birth is prepared (Chevalier, J & Gheerbrant, A 1987 Dictionary of Symbols, p 489)
6) Here we would like to stress the essential characteristics in relation with the symbolism of the oven or the furnace Namely, in the European metallurgic terminology the oven in which is hardened enamel is called "uterus", "mother's womb" (Mutterschoss) The identification of the human activities where the fire is used (metallurgy, drop-forge or cooking) with the development of the embryo in the uterus secretly still lives in the European vocabulary (cf. Mutterkuchen, 'postelica' [placenta]) (Eliade 1983, 38). This relation established between the oven, i.e. the furnace and the uterus is so much stressed that in certain cultures the drop-forge furnaces are gynaecomorphous (Eliade 1983, 38). In the alchemist procedures, the receptacle in which some alchemical processes are made is usually called uterus which symbolizes the centre and gives life (Jung 1984, 188),
7) Quoted according to Propp, V, 1990: Historijski korijeni bajke. Syjetlost, Sarajevo.
8) More about this see: Thumwold, R. 1940: Primitive initiations -und Wiedergeburtsriten. Eranos Jahrbuch. VII, 1940, pp. 321-398;
Gennep, A. van 1981: Les rites de passage. Paris, pp. 91-163; Eliade, M. 1959: Initiations, rites et societes secretes. Paris, pp. 109-131;
Betelhajm [Betelheim], B. 1979: Simbolicne rane [Symbolic wounds]. Prosveta: Beograd; Propp, V. 1990: Historijski korijeni bajke [Historic roots of fairy tales]. Sarajevo.
9) The variants of this song can be found in: Miladinovic, song n. 227; Verkovic II, song n. 72, 142, 154; III song n. 49; Petrovic III song n. 23; Kaeanovski song n. 52; Iliev, p. 80; Draganov I p. 75,76, 78, 79; AIF tape n. 567; 3453, while on the comparative level of the Balcan Slavs see Krstic, B. 1984: Indeks motiva narodnih pesama balkanskih Slovena [Index of motifs of folk songs of the Balkan Slavs]. Beograd. -entry B 11,2, l,i.e.-p.v.216.
10) A more complex image of the uterine symbolism is given by Eliade, M. 1959: Initiations, rites et societes secretes. Paris, pp. 118-126.
11) For the analogous symbolism, pointing out the obstetric function of the birth-giving Mother Goddess in the shape of a house, see: Uausidis, N. 1994: Mitskite sliki na Juznite Sloveni [The Mythical images of the South Slavs]. Misia: Skopje, pp. 200-213. About the initiatory moment in this complex see p. 210.
Balushok, V. 1994: Elementi davnoslov' janskih iniciacii v ukrainskkomu vesilli. Nar. tvorchist ta etnografia No. 1, pp. 31-36. Betelhajm (Betelheim) 1979: Simbolicne rane [Symbolic wounds]. Kultura. Beograd.
Boskovic-Stulli, M. 1968: Balada o pastiru i tri vestice (The Ballad of the shepherd and the three witches). Narodno stvaralastvo. Folklor. 1. Beograd.
Causidis, N. 1994: Mitskite sliki na Juznite Sloveni (The Mythical images of the South Slavs). Skopje.
Cepenkov, M. 1989: Makedonski narodni prikazni (Macedonian folktales). Vol. I.Skopje.
Chevalier, J. & Gheerbrant, A. 1987: Rje cnik simbola (Dictionnaire des symboles). Zagreb.
Durand, G. 1991: Antropoloske strukture imaginarnog (Structures anthropologiques de 1'imaginaire). A. Cesarec. Zagreb. Duric, M. N. 1987; Istorija helenske etike. Beograd. Eliade, M. 1959: Initiations, rites et societes secretes Naissances mystiques. Paris.
Eliade, M. 1983: Kovaei i alhemiCari (Forgerons et alchimistes. Paris 1977) Zagreb.
Eliade, M. 1990: Samanizam i arhajske tehnike ekstaze (Le chamanisme eties techniques archaiquesdel'extase. Paris 1968). Sremski Karlovci.
Eliade, M. 1991: Istorija verovanja i religijskih ideja (Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses. Paris 1983). I, II. Beograd.
Gennep, A. van 1981: Les rites de passage. Paris.
Guenon, R. 1987: Mracno doba. Cacak.
Henderson, J. L. 1973: Drevni mitovi i suvremeni covjek. C. G. Jung 6ovjek i njegovi simboli. Ljubljana, pp. 104-157.
Jeanmaire, H. 1951: Dionysos: Histoire du culte de Bacchus. Paris.
Jung, C. G. 1984: Psihologija & alkemija (Psychology & Alchemy). Zagreb.
Karadzic, V. St. 1932: Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian folksongs). I. Beograd.
Koleva, T. 1973: Proishozdenie vesennih devichih obichaev u nekotorih juznoslavjanskih narodov. Makedonski folklor. 12, pp. 63-66.
Koleva, T. 1974a: Institut des initiations en Boulgarie. Ethnologic/Slavica. 5. Bratislava, pp. 163-185.
Koleva, T. 1974b: Vesennie devichi obichai u nekotorih juznoslavjanskih narodov. Sovetskaja etnografia. 5. Moskva, pp. 74—85.
Miladinovic, D.-K. 1861: Balgarski narodnipesni (Bulgarian folksongs). Zagreb.
Moren, E. 1981: 6ovek i smrt (L'homme et la mort). Beograd.
Pavlovic, M. 1986: Obredno igovomo delo (Ritual and speaking work). Beograd.
Propp, V. 1990: Historijski korijeni bajke (Historical roots of the fairy tale). Sarajevo.
Riffard, P. 1989: Rjeenik ezoterizma (Dictionnaire de 1'esoterisme). Zagreb.
Sbornikza narodni umotvoreniya i narodopis. 1914, vol. 28. Sofia.
Sapkarev, K. 1976: Izbrani dela (Selected works). Vol. 5. Skopje.
Verkovic, S. I. 1985: Makedonski narodni umotvorbi (Macedonian folksongs and tales). Vol. 4. Makedonska kniga. Skopje.
Zhivaya starina 1892:1. St.-Peterburg.