Translations into Slavonic from the Latin, and especially from the Western European vernaculars, were exceedingly rare cultural occurrences in the life of medieval Slavia Orthodoxa. This article addresses one such exceptional case: the...
moreTranslations into Slavonic from the Latin, and especially from the Western European vernaculars, were exceedingly rare cultural occurrences in the life of medieval Slavia Orthodoxa. This article addresses one such exceptional case: the process of appropriating an amulet known as The 72 Names of the Lord for Slavic use.
The Slavonic 72 Names of the Lord is a list of divine titles and epithets that are delegated explicitly to prophylactic magic. Extant in over 26 manuscript copies, ranging from the late 13th through the early 19th century, and in several early printed editions, it presents the best-documented case of Slavonic name magic. Contrary to Iatsimirskii’s (1913) assumption that the text’s source is Greek, the article demonstrates through solid textological evidence its Jewish pedigree and reveals that the immediate sources of its Slavonic tradition are of Provençal origin. No less significantly, the Slavonic sources of this Christian amulet predate the earliest extant Provençal copies and are thus invaluable documents of a productive Kabbalo-Christian exchange in late medieval Europe (12th- 13th century) whose significance extends far beyond the Slavic world.
The article further traces two possible routes for this particular hybridization. Along the first route, the Hebrew lists of God’s 72 names had already infiltrated Christian practice in Provence as Christian amulets (in Latin with Provencal provisos) by the 13th century. The amulets then migrated to the Balkans, producing there a strong tradition in Slavonic that spread, before the 16th century, as far as Russia and Ukraine. Along the second route, the Kabbalistic tradition generated an alternative Hebrew list of divine names, known as The 70 Names of Metatron, which spread northward to Germany and Poland and, along channels unknown, affected the Christian practice of the Eastern Slavs by contributing to their magic nomenclature.
