Trajtimi mitologjik

Abstract

In the Northern Dibra and in Lume one can hear about such an old legend:

"Once upon a time the godmother went to see godfather. Finding oneself alone in the house with her, godfather was lured by the flash's temptation losing the reason and he set on her in lust. On her part, sensing the horror of this incest, she escaped from the house pursued by the godfather. She crossed coppices and coulees, but, in the end, the godfather caught her on the top of a hill where he dehumanized her. While the sin was taking place, the wind took her untied sash away by transforming it into a rainbow, as an eternal sign of this incest". Even nowadays, when the rainbow appears, the people in these regions say: the belt (sash) of godmother.

The belt (in some areas of Dibra and Luma it is called sash), represents in itself an inseparable element of the national dress of most people. Leaving aside the aesthetical and ethnographical aspect, we will pay attention only to the mythological approaching of its essential usage in some of the regions in the Northern Albania.

A bountiful and authentic material is provided by the folklore- not only in the forms of rites and superstitions, but also in those of eposes and fairy tales that have come to date. To illustrate this, it is worth to mention the anthological research of Vladimir Popp, "The fairy tale's morphology", in which he approaches different variants of the fairy tale's subject. For example, to take the princess as a wife, the hero is obliged to defeat the Snake Gorinicin, Koshcejen or any other monster.

In the collections of old apocryphal manuscripts, it is said: "The Rainbow was created by God after the cataclysm" (The Apocryphal Collection of 1531)... "after the cataclysm, God put an arch in heaven as a distinctive sign for the next cataclysm that will happen"...

The question arises: Why among Albanians, differently from the majority of people, including the ones in the Balkans, incest remains one of the main taboos"

Knowing the texts of ancient Albanian ballads, we reach to the conclusion that from the view of the fatal force incest is equaled to the natural catastrophes, such as the big cataclysm. In such a vast range of texts, there can be found elements of vicissitudes, for example, the nature's forces taking part in the relationships of characters and try in all ways to hinder the unconscious incest (when the sister and the brother, being unaware of their blood relations, decide to enter into a sinful relationship, then a flight of fatidic birds is born, or a bloody rain falls from heaven, etc.).

So, it is worth to emphasize that the rainbow was often taken as some kind of message from heaven, as a divine sign. In such circumstances, the legend of rainbow is worth to be viewed as a subject charged with latter religious didactics, where the female opposing the sexual sin, even though forcedly giving in, is considered already as a martyr and the divine sign sent from heaven appears in the sky in sign of purity and holiness of her pains.