Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Lyubomir Mikov: Rituális emberábrázolás - Jel: jelkép: művészi hasonmás

male, because each image is simultaneously both female and male. As a latent coding this combining of the two sexes exists in some of the children's forms of the images as well. The essential interpénétration of the life-giving principles, or the mutual complementation of the female reproductive ability with the male fertilizing power, is a manifestation of the mutually required duality and of the unity of consubstantial opposites in the interpretation of the images. On the one hand, the duality of the images expresses their semantic consubstantiality, while on the other - their differentiation as types. In this way, however, anthropomorphic ritual plastic art stands out as a typical example of a ritually or - more precisely - of a symbolically interpreted androgynism. There are opinions that its origin is archaic, resulting most probably from the combination of two types of sacratity - female and male, whereby the female sacrality is believed to bear the characteristics of a primeval superiority.

5 The view about the primeval superiority of the female type of sacrality could also be supported by the fact that the variety of female images exceeds by far that of male images. Also noteworthy in this respect is the isomorphism between the female anthropomorphic image and the image of the tree, because "the female figure coincides almost fully with the idea of fertility, invested in the tree of life as well.

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" It would not be superfluous to explain that most of the female anthropomorphic images are life-size, being predominantly with a cross as the skeleton, this being a well-known alloform of the "world tree". A similar connection exists between the tree image and the other types of anthropomorphic attributes. For example, the male attributes symbolize fertility by placing the emphasis on the reproductive organ and on the male fertilizing principle in general, and they were incorporated in ritual situations with tripartite-vertical spatial dimensions: sky (= celestial moisture = rain) - earth - subterranean water. The destruction or the sacrificing of anthropomorphic plastic images is also a symbolic act of creative communion. And while for the female images it is equivalent in most cases to the woman's ritual death during the marital copulation, for the male images the orientation is predominantly towards ritual fertilization of the earth. The "marriage-death" theme is among the most widespread in ritual art. Particularly indicative are its visible incarnations in ritual practice containing anthropomorphic attributes.

7 It may be said that in this case the theme is treated predominantly at attributive level. This is in fact its specific mode of manifestation, which distinguishes it from its other forms of manifestation in ritual practice. Thus, for example, from a technological point of view, the images are invested with that markedly "marital" appearance, together with the animation and vitality inherent to it, which are necessary for their sacrificing, for their ritual destruction or for their "death". At a functional level they are established as mythical and ritual generalizations, as plastic and metaphoric models of female reproductive capacity or of male fertilizing power. Howver, these images also gain prominence as a sacrificial offering needed for marking the social transition and for guaranteeing agrarian fertility as well. All rituals comprising anthropomorphic attributes follow in one way or another the game models of the wedding and of the funeral. This means in practice a successive enactment of the love-marriage theme and of the act of sacrifice. In this sense the reproduced patterns of the wedding and of the funeral illustrate the need of simultaneous maintaining of the social and natural equilibrium

. The role of the anthropomorphic attributes for the realization of this type of rituals is the most essential. Here they are included and treated as extremely generalized personifications, doubling semantically both the ritual persons and characters, and the ritual-festive patronages - "high" (deities and saints) and "low" (predominantly anthropomorphic daemonic creatures). In other words, the anthropomorphic ritual images are formed and function as man's symbolic equivalents, in accordance with his social and cosmogonie dimensions. Hence their