The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe

Chapter V The Historical Development of“Charm” Terminology in Hungarian

Chapter V The Historical Development of “Charm” Terminology in Hungarian Vilmos Voigt 1. Our beloved Hungarian folklore and language offer a treasure house for comparative philology and religion—but only if scholars examine the facts without bias and are not fooled by false preconceptions. One of the most common fallacies is the way of thinking that asserts that all Hungarian words, texts and rituals are historically invariable, and that they automatically represent something prior to the Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin in AD 896. (See, for example, the endless literature concerning Hungarian “shamanism” from the remote past of Siberia up to the recent Harnerian trance workshops on Villányi road, Budapest.) On the other hand, it can quite properly be said that early or medieval Hungarian texts very often represent the oldest traceable Finno-Ugric or Turkic semantic data, and these are very important sources also for any comparative history of beliefs and religion in Europe, Central Asia and so on. 2. The common Hungarian word for “charm” is báj-. (The other Hungarian key word for “magic” is the similarly interesting varázs-. However, in my paper I shall not make any analysis of the second word.) Báj- is from an Old Turkic loan word in Hungarian, which in its derivatives has been equated, as early as Albert Szenci Molnár’s Dictionarium Latinoungaricum (Nürnberg, 1604 and in various later editions) with “incantatio”.1 1 More precisely, on page IN we read: “Incantamentum Megbüvölés bajolás— Incantatio Idem—Incantator Büvös Bajos—Incanto Meg büvölöm bájolom”. In the reverse part of the dictionary, Dictionarium Ungaricolatinum (same year, 118 THE POWER OF WORDS The Hungarian derivations (such as bájolás, “making charms” or bájoló and bájos, “charm-maker”) occur in Hungarian codices from 1456 and from 1506 onwards. In early Hungarian written documents (1519, 1565, and so on) we find also an interesting double synonym: bű-báj, bű-bájos and cognates, where the Hungarian bű, “enchanted, magic(al)” may be derived from another Old Turkic word.2 The Turkic baγ has a primary meaning of “strip, knot, binding/bound, rope” and so on, and it is also connected in modern Turkic languages with words that mean “magical binding, magical tie”. Hungarian linguists refer to the following data: Uighur bögü, Chagatay büyü, Cumanian bügü, Ottoman Turkish büyü and so on, which come from a very old Turkic word meaning “magic”. The Hungarian reduplication bű + báj, “magic” + “charm” is easily explicable: see, for example, the equally redundant German Zauberspruch, “magic” + “charm”. Since the Turkic and Hungarian words belong to a very old religious vocabulary, it is not easy to prove what their actual meaning was, and at what time, in the available documents during the period from about the tenth century AD until today, either in Hungary or among the Turkic peoples. 3. Very fortunately, a famous Protestant printed collection of sermons, Ördögi kísértetek (Temptations by the Devil), by Péter Bornemisza (printed in Sempte, 1578) at the end of part 5 (“Contemporary events”) contains (on pages 805v –809) the full texts of eight Hungarian bájoló imádság or “charming prayers” from an old woman (see the critical edition: Bornemisza 1955, 134–7). Bornemisza, an extremely well-educated humanist and priest, also mentions in his book the name of the “informant”, the village where she was living, the fellow priest who wrote down the texts, and so on. The rendering of the texts is same place) on page BA we read: “Bájolas Incantatio”. On page BV there are further important references: “Büvölés bájolás Incantatio, incantamentum— Büvölöm bájolom Incanto—Büvösbajolás Cantatio, Incantatio—Büvösbajos Incantator, -trix. Veneficus/a.” See the reprint edition: Imre, ed., 1990. In my paper here and hereafter I have simplified the Hungarian orthography of the old sources, but this will make no difference to my philological conclusions . 2 See the data in Benkő 1967, I, s.v. I have here simplified the orthography of Turkic data too. 119 The Historical Development of “Charm” Terminology thus in fact word-for-word. Bornemisza relates an exorcism story of the woman, and refers to the practice of charming (four times) as bájolás, and in the subtitle above the...