PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES IN THE RITUAL STRUCTURE OF UKRAINIAN WEDDING

Abstract

The article is devoted to the construction and study of the structure of the cycle of Ukrainian wedding rites, and it is a kind of continuation of the author’s publications, who uses a structural and functional method to study the national family ritualism. In the course of the study, it turned out that, after the division of rites, there were extra episodes that cannot be attributed to any of the rites in which they occur - neither matchmaking, nor wedding, nor dowry. And since such unaccounted episodes are at the beginning of pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding small cycles, the researcher proposes to include them in the prologues of each of these cycles. At the same time, these three prologues should be considered full-fledged rites to give the structure greater harmony and functionality. The correctness of the division of prologues into episodes is checked using five criteria of division: new-level or generalized repetition of the event, material and spiritual metamorphosis of the characters of sacred action, change of sacred chronotope, the principle of constant renewal and change of character of the action. According to the latter criterion, episodes that are adjacent but do not change the nature of the action cannot be considered as individual episodes, but only as variations of the same episode. The prologues created in this way for the three small cycles of the Ukrainian wedding took the first, eighth and fourteenth places in the structure, respectively, and the cycle of fourteen rites increased to seventeen. Two of the three prologues - wedding and post-wedding - have no culminating episodes. The prologue of the pre-wedding cycle is at the same time the general prologue to the whole great cycle of rites. The presence of prologues implies the need to identify epilogues for both the large ritual cycle and each of the small cycles. Such epilogues, according to one version, can be considered the last rites in small cycles - hiltse, komora and perezva. On the other hand, the epilogues may be the final episodes of the said rites, which are after the culmination. This version is supported by the absence of culmination episodes in two of the three prologues. But none of the options is important for the existence and functioning of the structure, because the created structure does not need to be divided into epilogues, and prologues are important from the point of view to include all the available episodes in the ritual action.