Bóg się szerzy. A fragment of Polish folk cosmology against the Slavic background

Abstract

The article discusses the formula Bóg się szerzy (“God is spreading”), known from four ethnographic records of Polish winter ritual songs (“carols”). It appears as an emphasis of the miracle of cattle multiplication in the manor, which implicitly takes place during the celebration of kolędowanie (carolling), as an expression of blessing from the singers to the people hosting them. In pointing to the uniqueness of this formula (and its absence in other, related Slavic oral texts), the article provides a hermeneutic translation of its content. The contexts of the occurrence of the lexemes szerzyć się (‘spread’) and szeroki (‘wide, spread out’) are analysed in a comparative manner, with reference to the folk traditions of Eastern and Southern Slavs: the goal is arrive at their understanding proper to folk mythopoetics. This leads to a description of this enigmatic Polish formula in terms of Slavic folk cosmology, which functions as a translation of a significant part of its mythological and ritual meaning.