Incantation (Zamovliannia)

Zamovliannia are magical verbal formulas by which, in folk belief, one influenced nature, health, fate, or an enemy. It is one of the oldest folklore genres, reaching back to pre-Christian times; it unites the ritual word with action (gesture, water, fire, herbs). There are healing incantations (against fright, fever, toothache), household, love ('charms'), and protective ones. Compositionally, a zamovliannia is often built on parallelism and the formula 'as… so also…,' on enumeration and the 'diminishing' of an illness. A classic corpus of Ukrainian incantations was collected and published by Petro Yefymenko and, later, by Mykola Moskalenko in the collection 'Ukrainian Incantations' (1993). The magical word of the incantation echoes in the imagery of the Modernists, notably Lesia Ukrainka's 'The Forest Song.'