Mythology of Infants’ Excessive Crying and Certain Mythical Characters in the Folk Culture of the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine

Abstract

Basing on the materials from expeditions to the Ukrainian and Rusyn villages of the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, we describe two groups of beliefs concerning excessive crying in infants. According to one group of beliefs, such crying represents something similar to a magical infection and can be transmitted from a crying infant to a non-crying one by manipulations with the crying infant’s bath water. According to another group of beliefs, infant crying results from the human child being exchanged for a non-human child by a female mythological creature connected with wind and forest. This creature is also known in the Balkans, and is probably genetically related to the Western European, especially Irish, fairy. We also suggest that the spell for curing infant crying describing an exchange of crying for non-crying between a human woman and a “forest woman”, known in Slavic traditions since the 14th c., might be a reduced refl ection of the belief in changelings in Slavic areas.