Witch or demon? Fairies, vampires, and nightmares in Early Modern Spain
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Tartalom: http://real.mtak.hu/57436/
Archívum: MTA Könyvtár
Gyűjtemény: Status = Published

Type = Article
Cím:
Witch or demon? Fairies, vampires, and nightmares in Early Modern Spain
Létrehozó:
Campagne, Fabián Alejandro
Kiadó:
Akadémiai Kiadó
Dátum:
2008
info:eu-repo/date/embargoEnd/2028-12-31
Téma:
GT Manners and customs / néprajz, szokások, hagyományok
Tartalmi leírás:
Any scholar devoted to the study of the witch figure in Early Modern Spain will soon realize that the Iberian
bruja
is a peculiar character in European folklore. The Spanish
bruja
was a malevolent agent specialized, almost exclusively, in the murder of newborn babies. Her infanticide compulsion was associated with vampirism. She possessed the extraordinary capacity to enter rooms through the smallest chinks in doors or walls. She had amazing metamorphic powers. When she attacked the sleeping adults, she threw herself upon them, crushing them with her weight. On occasions, she was considered the victim of a tragic destiny from which it was impossible to escape. Some specific behavior, such as drinking the wine kept in cellars or washing clothes at the side of rivers, was also attributed to her. In these traits, the specialist in Mediterranean folklore and comparative mythology inmediately discovers the basic characteristics of a series of clearly identified mythical figures: the child-killing demon, the vampiric revenant, the fairy society and the Nightmare, specific avatars of the archaic mythology of the Double and the nocturnal spirits of the
mahr
-type. We can postulate, then, that the Spanish
bruja
, before embodying in Spain the figure of the satanic worshipper at the sabbat, gave name to a Pyrenean variant of the pan-European nocturnal demon. The evidence provided by diverse peninsular testimonies about the original meaning of the terms
bruxa
and
xorguina
, between the decades of 1280 and 1480, cover in an almost perfect way the spectrum of activities attributed to those fiends of the night. The historical evidence reinforces, then, the elements provided by the morphological analysis and by comparative mythology.
Nyelv:
magyar
Típus:
Article
PeerReviewed
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Formátum:
text
Azonosító:
Campagne, Fabián Alejandro (2008) Witch or demon? Fairies, vampires, and nightmares in Early Modern Spain. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 53 (2). pp. 381-410. ISSN 1216-9803
Kapcsolat:
https://doi.org/10.1556/AEthn.53.2008.1.12
Létrehozó:
info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess