The Structure and Genesis of One Type of Magic Spell Against Children’s Insomnia among Slavic Peoples

Abstract

Among Slavic charms for children who suffer from insomnia, there are texts depicting mothers going out of their houses, carrying their babies while looking at the forest or a single tree and reciting a magic spell addressed to a mythological character, asking for the creature’s help in taking away the baby’s cries and restoring the baby’s sleep. One variation of such texts originates from a manuscript called Summa de confessionis discretione. This text was compiled in Latin by a monk named Rudolf, evidently in the middle of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. The fact that the magic spells for insomnia in children seem to have existed already in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they were widely spread on the broad territory where Eastern, Southern, and Western Slavs lived, testifies to the ancient origins of this type of magic spell.