PSEUDO-OMENS: BELIEVE THEM OR NOT?

Abstract

Omens are considered to be one of the ancient ways of coding everyday behavior, unquestioning observance of which guaranteed the archetypal person stability and well being in everyday life. Household omens fix the codification of everyday life, making them in the form of stable, well-structured models that have survived almost unchanged.

The aim of the work is to investigate the so–called “pseudo-omens”, which are the basis of the television series “Blind” (638 series), the specifics of their functioning in the time continuum. The presented paradigm of new omens explicates new properties and features of the ancient genre on the basis of system and non-system connections arising at the intersection of the main semantic coordinates. The author builds a special model type of omens, indicating an attempt to mythologize the consciousness of a modern man, because television as an effective means of suggestion blurs the line between reality and the fictional world. The results of more than 30 years study show that while meteorological and agricultural omens gradually turn into a passive reserve of the Russian language, household omens are actively used in different groups of the population. Among the arguments in favor of this conclusion, we can note the emergence of a significant number of scientific studies focused on the description of superstitions and the search for an answer to the following questions: why superstitions were created, why they are still used, why we believe in them. The material of the article allowed to formulate an explanation of the grounds for predicting the most likely causes of such a wide spread of household omens.