Illnesses of Human Body: Magic and Curative Actions, Manipulations, Exerting Influence on Body Through Clothing, and Other Healing Practices in Ukrainian Traditional Culture Iryna Ignatenko1 1. Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Department of History, Sub- department of Ethnology and Local Studies, Volodymyrska St, 60, Kyiv, Ukraine, 01601 (Email:
[email protected]) Received: 05 June 2016; Accepted: 19 July 2016; Revised: 10 August 2016 Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology 4 (2016): 239-250 Abstract: Based on the archival ethnographical sources and author’s field records, the article reviews Ukrainian magic curative rituals, performed over a patient’s body or its symbolic substitutes. Among these, most widely used actions are: curing the sickness with an egg or bread (cleansing), measuring body with a thread, “re-baking” in an oven, pulling (dragging) body through certain apertures, as well as face wash, sprinkling, bathing in an enchanted water, etc. Manipulations performed upon a sick person’s clothing are also examined. It is shown that, according to Ukrainian traditional beliefs, these symbolic actions should have led to a practical result, recovery, which, in turn, required patient’s unquestioning assurance in the effectiveness of all these magic actions and manipulations. Keywords: Human Body, Illness, Clothing, Magic, Ritual, Procedure, Tradition Introduction Folk medicine has been drawing attention of Ukrainian ethnologists and of amateur collectors, beginning from the very first stages of ethnological science’s origin. Moreover, one of the “firstborns” of Ukrainian ethnological science was the research dedicated to folk medicine, namely: “Malorossian superstitions, believed in by few” (1776) composed by A. Chepa who belonged to a family of the small Cossack starshina (by that time, Ukrainian quasi-military class of nobility and land tenants) in Poltavschina (currently Poltavska oblast).