THE VISIBLE/INVISIBLE WORLD DICHOTOMY ACCORDING TO THE BULGARIAN FOLKLORIST AND ETHNOGRAPHER DIMITAR MARINOV

Abstract

Fundamental for the knowledge of Bulgarian folk culture are the works of the famous scholar and public figure Dimitar Marinov. From 1875 he began extensive collecting activities of folklore and ethnographic materials in Northwestern Bulgaria (Vidin, Lom): he recorded folk beliefs, rites, rituals, typical practices of Bulgarian common law. At the end of the 19th century Marinov promulgated the collected materials in a series of five books Living Oldness, a kind of encyclopaedia of the thinking, sensuality and cultural communication code of the Bulgarians over the centuries. For the purposes of this paper, the emphasis will be placed on one of the books, People's Faith, because Dimitar Marinov presents Bulgarian folk cosmogony through the dichotomy between the visible and the invisible world. In People's Faith the visible world, according to Dimitar Marinov's interpretation, can be presented as distant and close. The distant visible world includes celestial bodies and aerial phenomena, while the near visible world includes earth, water and fire, as well as flora and fauna, material culture and the human concept. In turn, the invisible world includes the understandings of its order (God, angels, devil, etc.), diseases are included here, but also supernatural beings. The continuity between the visible and the invisible world, the notions of dynamics and development typify the nature of mythological images, with an emphasis on their material being. Of interest is the metamorphic state of circumstances and supernatural characters pointed out by Dimitar Marinov - many of the beings from the invisible world have their existence in the visible world. A striking example are the samadivas and samovils, witches and vampirites, dragons and dragonesses.