Did the Székelys Have Their Own Marriage Ritual? A Double-Faced Ancient Marriage Ritual from Székelyland
Did the Székelys Have Their Own Marriage Ritual? A Double-Faced Ancient Marriage Ritual from Székelyland

Summary/Abstract: In Sândominic the initiation into a woman, that is, the ritual of accepting the young wife among the women takes place within the framework of the wedding, after midnight. The ritual of elopement and bunning make the turning-point in one’s life temporarily acceptable, tolerable by the community, and make the turning-point irreversible. The author highlights the legal and moral significance of bunning applied as a life-belt ritual, its historical and validity supremacy. He regards it as the promotion of a pagan ritual to the rank of customary law. Bunning is a marriage ritual deriving from the age of the Hungarian Conquest, which was later replaced by the religious, then by the official marriage ritual. It became part of the customary order of the wedding: it became a ritual of initiation into a woman, it survived as a separate initiation ritual, and in the cases presented it is performed as an independent, what is more, autonomous legal ritual. In the absence of data deriving from elsewhere, and based on a record from the seventeenth century, the author presupposes that in Székelyland (or Székelyföld as it is known in Hungarian) bunning, as a specific strategy of the rites of passage, constituted an independent marriage custom/ritual of folk-right. Its out of turn applicability in exceptional cases is still recognized, the deviant situation is made acceptable by public opinion by resorting to a former profane ritual which has fallen out of the authority of religious and official law.

• Details
• Contents