Andrzej Huszno (1892–1939) was one of the most interesting – although marginal – clergyman in the Second Polish Republic. He tried to create an esoteric version of the Catholicism based on the allegoric interpretation of religious symbols, the cyclical idea of time and “temporalization” of eschatology. The perennialist idea of the common root of all religions determined Huszno’s interests in Slavic pagan beliefs.

The paper is devoted to the holy day of the Yezidis, Wednesday, and the Spring festival of Çarşemiya Sor. I propose an interpretation of the meaning of this day, pointing to the supposed relationship between the meaning of Wednesday and the description of ‘fourth day’ in the Old Testament tradition. I also show that the annual feast of Çarşemiya Sor, just like every Wednesday of the week, for the Yezidis commemorate the creation of the material world and subjecting it to the power of angels (especially to the Peacock Angel) and heavenly bodies. I rely mainly on the Yezidi sources and materials gathered during my own field research in Iraq and the South Caucasus.

The aim of the article is to present the most characteristic elements of the contemporary Russian discourse on spells. The empirical material used here was based on magical handbooks and spell collections by Natalia Ivanova Stiepanova, who calls herself (coming from a well-known house of folk healers) the Healer from Siberia. The paper explains the genesis of Russian people’s sensibility to all signs of esotericism and shows huge popularity of magical practices in contemporary Russia. The paper also highlights mutual relations between magic, science and religion taking place in these areas (nowadays and in the past). The analysis of the material has shown that Russians today are firmly convinced of the existence of charms (bad spells cast with glances or words) which may cause various misfortunes. It is equally popular among them to believe that with the help of appropriate – as suggested by Stiepanova – magical rituals, a bad spell can be undone (got rid of). 

The article presents the main directions of the ‘strategies’ of Orthodox and Protestant social communication in the Ruthenian Territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. Relations between Protestants and the Orthodox Church followed a natural and traditional course of actions aimed at protecting the confessional freedom of non-Catholics. This cooperation was taken up too late. It took place at the time of predominance of the counter-reformation camp in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The article rises a question of the attitude towards carnality in the religious doctrine and practice of medieval dualists (Bogomils and Cathars). Its main aim is to answer the questions: why did the adherents of these heresies consider sexual intercourse as the worst of all the sins? What was the doctrinal justification of such position and how did it determine their attitude towards women, marriage and procreation? The article also shows how this severe condemnation of sexuality influenced the ways of life of the cathar perfects, and what the simple believers (credentes) thought about it.

This article is an attempt to apply a modern social psychology thesis to reproduce a linguistic image of non-Christian Jews in chosen narratives taken from the Greek canonical Gospels of the New Testament. In the first century AD, non-Christian Jews and primitive Christians found themselves in a state of growing ideological conflict resulting in marked changes in their social relations and mutual perceptions. While remaining in close connection with the usage of language and discourse creation, these changes led to the adoption of new linguistic strategies among primitive Christians, thanks to which the image of non-Christian Jews took on over the course of the following years characteristics of negative stereotypes. A structural model has been used to analyse Christian texts, allowing for consistent and uniform comparisons of available sources. The aim of this paper therefore is an attempt to recreate linguistic characteristics of Jews in primitive Christian documents. There is also an alternative proposal for the analysis of stereotypes against that which has been used for many years in the study of anti-Judaism in historical documents. I will present the theoretical context (a short historical outline) and accepted psychological theories.