Trepetnicele „de semnile ominești” și divinația fiziognomonică în cultura populară română (sec. XVIII - începutul sec. XIX)

Abstract

The “trepetnic” (coming from the Slavic trepet, meaning “spasm”) comprises predictions based on the uncontrollable movements of the limbs, viewed as divine signs. The “trepetnic” is usually a list that includes all parts of the human body, from top to bottom, from head to toes. The spasm of each body part is correlated with a particular omen. This type of prediction is part of palmomantia – a very ancient divination art, of Assyro-Babylonian origins, which passed over the centuries through Hellenistic culture into the Slavic culture of the Balkans and of Russia. In the Romanian Principalities the palmomantic literature comes from the Balkans Slavs. The oldest extant such document dates from 1639. Throughout the entire region, Wallachia and Moldavia included, the “trepetnic” have a similar, list-type, structure. The Romanian “trepetnics” are manuscript and, with a few exceptions, are yet to be published. Discovered by the philologist Moses Gaster at the end of the 19th century - he was the first to signal their importance by publishing two pieces - the “trepetnics” also attracted the marginal attention of the philologist N. Draganu. In the only study on this topic (from 1921-1922), Draganu published the oldest “trepetnic” (the one from 1639), which, according to his argument, served as a model for all the other documents of the same category. Since Draganu, no historian, nor philologist paid any interest in the “trepetnics”, apart from Olga Șerbănescu in 1995-1996 and Gabriel Mihăilescu in 2011. The “trepetnics” published in the present study (one printed from 1816 and five manuscripts dating from the second half of the 18th century) are previously unpublished. Like other documents from the same category (apart from those, very numerous, which began to be printed from the 19th century onwards), the “trepetnics” are part of larger manuscript miscellanea, along with other types of anonymous writings (such as apotropaic religious fragments, lists of naturist remedies, tables of zodiacal signs, talismans, etc.), all belonging to what scholars usually call “popular culture”. As these predictions are intimately linked to the body, we suggest to consider them not only in the context of palmomancy, but also of physiognomy. Therefore, we propose labelling these omens “physiognomonic divinations”. Throughout the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, physiognomy was not only used to decipher a person's character, based on their facial and bodily features, but also to predict the type of attitude and behaviour the person might adopt in the future. The "trepetnics" chosen for this study share the same features, typical for these sources: a list of body parts from top to bottom, each part accompanied by a particular prediction, occasional reversal of type (good or bad) of the omen, linked to the right or to the left part of the body (traditionally viewed as positive or negative), extremely varied nature of the predictions, in relation to the most common aspects of daily life (birth of a child, illness, marriage, wealth or poverty, success in business). Apart from that, the predictions concern exclusively the men, as the women are seldom mentioned. A particularity of the Romanian "trepetnics", in comparison to the Slavic ones from the Balkans and Russia, is the almost exclusively positive character of the omens associated with the hands. If for the other body parts the omens are usually mixed (positive and negative, regardless of the part – right or left – to which they are linked), in regard to the two hands the predictions are, almost invariably, positive. I suggest that the role played by the hands in the daily life of the peasants, as the essential tools for working and obtaining food, might be an explanation for these positive connotations. This is one of the possible distinctive features of the Romanian “trepetnics”. Others could be added as progress is made in the study of this, little known, vast corpus of palmomantic or divinatory physiognomy.