SYMBOLS OF INTIMITY FROM THE ROMANIAN FAIRY TALE. (V) THE INSTITUTION OF OLD AGE

Abstract

The imaginary, through the totality of beliefs, speaking about the stage of the oldness is well emphasized and structured for a good contouring and phenomenological reception of the symbols of intimacy from the Romanian fantastic fairy tale, the subject claiming a particular approach. Representing a biological and spiritual-ethical reality, this final stage of life manifests and maintains a subtle “network" of mythological, mental, psycho-social and cultural interferences. Endorsements from numerous and various anthologies of fairy tales invariably talks about the carnal body perishability, about the effects of biological degradation occurring over time. Moreover, the features used by the anonymous creator of fairy tale, are all in this directory of the ephemeral and the overwhelming proportion counter to the young youth with virile hero fairytale “displays" in front of such old persons. Distracted for a certain period of their time (knowned and physically limited), discovering, experimenting and living part of a historical Times, these fairy-tale heroes are disturbed by its limitations. Sometimes they discover magical remedies that rejuvenate an aging body, discovering, experiencing and / or living, even temporarily, a seductive myhtologist like the realm of eternal youth. Sometimes they can live forever, they can enjoy the presence of extremely beautiful and young female beings, but then they seem to want old age and / or death more and more! Other times, in personalist ontology, the hero will discover that what originally seemed to be a noematic gain (the eternity of his ephemeral life) slowly changes into a continuous loss, in a non-natural negative. In the great majority of the fairy tales, the symbolic intentionality of the change of consciousness over the time (to live) is evident, through which the divine-profane relationship can be overthrown, as well as the specific significance of its meaning in illo tempore, the divinity between man's ephemerality and the ideatic desire to transcend his perishability condition. As such, starting from a composite and ideological epistemic concept (oldness as an ideologem), in this study we tried to discover and analyze what are the main-ideas of this “institution of old age" from the fantastic Romanian fairy tale, at the level of the cultural-social imagination. Thus, we have brought into discussion both the mythical dimension of such a concept (the archetype of oldness) and the structural-narrative, with the forms and contents supposed or taken at the level of the fantastic epic fantasy (the posology of old age, magic cures and rituals un-aging, paradisiac realms of eternal youth).