One of the most famous Russian nursery rhymes that adults have used to amuse children since time immemorial is about the magpie. The text of this nursery rhyme is undoubtedly old and long-established. "Soroka-beloboka" or "soroka-raven" - she "cooked porridge", then "jumped on the threshold, waited for guests","called". The chirping of a magpie, indeed, according to popular belief, is for the appearance of guests. However, the guests in the nursery rhyme are children, it is the magpie who treats the children, giving them, one by one, his porridge. Everyone got it, except for the youngest, who was lazy and careless. And then-either: "Shoo-oo, flew, sat on the head!". Either the ending is different:

Go, boy, on the water
On the cold krinitsa.
Here's a tree stump, here's a deck,
Here is moss, here is a swamp,
It's cold water here.

Or else:

Here the keys are boiling-boiling!

With this ending, the adult's fingers make their way up the child's arm from the palm of the hand and up to tickle the armpit with the final words.

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So, the magpie is related to children. Just because a nursery rhyme song about her is fun for the little ones. But also because in the text of the nursery rhyme we are also talking about guests-children. Interestingly, the chirping of a magpie could portend not only the arrival of guests, but also the imminent birth of a child - a "newborn guest" (Nikiforovsky N. Ya. Common signs and beliefs, superstitious rites and customs, legendary tales about faces and places. Vitebsk, 1897. P. 192). The newborn was often called a "guest". In general, a guest was considered to come from afar, from a strange and alien, "other" world. The guest is potentially dangerous, and he needs to be treated to appease and win over himself. Then he can give gifts-signs of his benevolence. So called and the bride, and the merchant, and the stranger, the enemy and the deceased. So euphemistically called illness and death.

The newborn is also a guest, because he comes to our world from the "other world", he is not yet rooted in our being, he is not even fully human yet. An infant and a woman in labor are in a borderline, transitional situation. To save them from the dangerous influence of otherness, to protect them from witchcraft, to humanize the newborn guest - all these were complex but necessary ritual and magical tasks that were performed by the midwife in the folk tradition. A midwife is not just a village midwife. She was also a healer, that is, she knew the rites. Her art of sorcery overlapped with witchcraft and sorcery, except that it was usually aimed at good and not evil. She inspired the villagers with a wary respect, it was necessary to do without her, but they were also a little afraid of her...

"Babushka puporezna "(that is, the midwife) is mentioned in a curious Russian nursery rhyme:

Grandma puporezna went to the auction
, bought an awl and soap, washed all the guys.
She gave five of them food to eat:
I gave Tom a spoon, Tom a ladle,
Tom - pot, Tom-maslennichek.
And you're small, you're short,
You didn't go to melenka,
You didn't drown baenki, you didn't carry vodushki.
Hot water - boiling water, boiling water...

(Russian children's folklore of Karelia. Petrozavodsk, 1991. N 130).

The usual place of birth was the bathhouse. The soap mentioned in this nursery rhyme is an indispensable attribute of the midwife.

It is quite obvious that this text is close to the text of the nursery rhyme "Magpie". The main difference is that the Karelian nursery rhyme is not about a magpie, but about a midwife grandmother. The folklore and mythological image of the magpie in popular perception was associated with young children. But on-

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how stable is this peculiar interchangeability of the magpie and midwife?

In some versions of the nursery rhyme " Magpie "(for example, where "boiling water" is mentioned), the theme of the bath appears:"...Guests arrived to rasparit the bones";"...Water carries, bath drowns" (Folk wisdom. Human life in Russian folklore. Issue I: Infancy. Detstvo, Moscow, 1991, pp. 122,127); " The Magpie-crow heated the bathhouse, waited for the guests: will the guests come, will they go to the bathhouse? "(Children's Poetic Folklore: Anthology, St. Petersburg, 1997, N 683). Of course, you can take ordinary visiting guests to the bathhouse, if they are from a long road... But if Sorokin's guests are small children, then this bathhouse may turn out to be completely different. Here is a bathhouse mentioned in one of the versions of the nursery rhyme:"...Carries firewood, drowns the bathhouse; the child soars" (Folk wisdom. Issue I. P. 124). This seems to be a postpartum bath run by a midwife.

In one of the published versions of the famous skomoroshina "Birds" it is said about the magpie, and immediately after - about the raven: "The crow is on the Mori grandmother... "(Historical songs. Ballads/Comp., podgot. texts, introduction. article and notes by S. N. Azbelev, Moscow, 1986, p. 275). It can be assumed that in the old days it was common to compare magpies (magpies-crows?) with the midwife. Two folklore texts, versions of the skomoroshina "Birds", recorded in 1937 in Vozhgalsky and Sovetsky districts of the Kirov region (they are stored in Kirov, in the personal archive of T. K. Nikolaeva), speak of a cuckoo who"collected children, called larks". Another text is even more interesting:

Not on the sea cuckoo cuckoo, not over the sea goryushko grieves -
The old midwife did not collect the children for food,
Larks called out.

Vyatka records allow us to reconstruct a remarkable set of images and motifs, which, obviously, was once inherent in the skomoroshina "Birds". "Calling the larks" is a performance of short long ritual songs-calls. This was done in the spring, usually on March 9 (according to the old style), on the day of the forty martyrs of Sebaste, this day was popularly called "Magpies". They baked ritual cookies in the form of birds - "larks " or"waders". Baked "birds" were played with, and live, real birds were invited, asking them to come as soon as possible and bring spring with them-red, warmth, health and harvest.

Because of the consonance of the words forty and forty, the signs and beliefs of this day were associated with the magpie. It was said that on this day the magpie curls the nest and puts forty sticks in it. Migratory birds, as people believed, appeared from the "overseas". It is characteristic that in these texts

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the midwife is indistinguishable from a bird (midwives in bird form). There are also small children that she collects. In the Vyatka records, the words about some kind of "food" are clearly distorted, reinterpreted to the point of meaninglessness, but it seems that initially there was mentioned a treat for children. The theme of midwifery is obvious in the context of the women's, children's and bird festival in early spring. And the ceremonial celebration of the arrival of birds was once celebrated by women, girls and children. And it was connected with the Magpie day-March 9.

Magpie in the popular view was constantly compared with a woman. Magpie is a grandmother-a witch, a witch, a thing (from the verb to know - to have sacred knowledge). This bird is not just prophetic, but sinister. It could invite disaster and death. Gizmos are werewolf witches who usually flew together through the chimney to the house of a pregnant woman. They stole the fruit, replacing it in the womb with a burnt brand, a crumb of bread or a broom-golik, fried it and devoured it, sitting on a stove pole. This eerie image of folk demonology reveals the features of an ancient mythological character, a bird and at the same time a female, who is in charge of birth and fate. M. N. Vlasova writes about this as follows: "A thing, a cannibal bird - embodied fate and death at the same time (ideas about death as about abduction, eating-one of the oldest). At the same time, according to the beliefs of many peoples, deities who can kidnap, eat, destroy a woman in labor and a child, although dangerous, are necessary. Apparently, an image like vishchitsa, according to the "mythological logic", combines both the deity who gives life and the deity who takes it away" (Vlasova M. N. Russkie superstitii: Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar ' SPb., 1998, p. 85). Having penetrated into the hut, the little magpie sometimes took the form of a midwife. Therefore, the midwife's magical knowledge was treated somewhat cautiously. So the midwife's magpie form is attested by bullheads.

The magpie, like a real village midwife, had to do with procreation. With her chirping, she predicted the birth of a child. It was popularly believed that a magpie could bring babies to families. The fortieth prayer was called the purifying prayer of a woman six weeks after giving birth - a remarkably significant consonance with the word forty for popular perception.

In the Kuedinsky district of the Perm region, a story is recorded about two old women whose actions are very similar to the manipulation of magpies-gizmos: "One man's wife was in a position. Once her husband came to her after drinking, and they all went to bed. Suddenly two old ladies come in, one says to the other: "Let's get the baby out, put a crumb of bread." Another: "We'll stick your head in." The guy woke up, jumped off, let's wake everyone up. One woman he recognized - she went to receive children" (Bylichki and byvalschiny: Old Testament stories recorded in the Prika-

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mie. Perm, 1991. N 266). This is a relatively late, noticeably demythologized version of the belief about things that take the child out of the mother's womb. Nevertheless, even in this story, the archaic idea remains that a malicious demonic character-a thing-can turn into a midwife. It is interesting that in the same Kuedinsky district there was also such a belief: vekshitsy (as they are called there), taking the fetus from the womb, put soap in its place-an object that was an indispensable accessory and even a kind of symbol of midwives.

So, it turns out that in some cases the magpie in the popular perception of the world was associated with the midwife. This in itself should not surprise us: after all, in fairy tales, the role of the midwife is also attributed to the sly fox. If so, then the connection of the magpie with small children in the nursery rhyme is not at all accidental. The texts of nursery rhymes, as I have already seen more than once, are generally strikingly interesting and archaic. They clearly captured traces of ancient rites.

Kirov

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, grant code GOO-1.6-471.

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