Veselin Čajkanović’s Magical Laughter in Ancient Greek Rituals

Abstract

Ritual laughter represents phenomenon that is not enough researched. Especially interesting type of the ritual laughter is the one that appears in the context of death. Veselin Čajkanović have termed it magic laughter and devoted special attention to it. With the intention of interpreting and explaining this ritual act, Čajkanović focused on its traces as well as available folklore material, above all material from Greek antiquity and Serbian folklore, supplementing it with works and notes of Serbian ethnologists. His theory about magic laughter as a ritual act, with specific function and meaning in the context of death, is the starting position for my research of this phenomenon in the wider context of ancient Greek ritual and culture, in which the encounter of laughter and death is possible to come across. I focused especially on funeral rituals, fertility rituals and theatre. For the interpretation and understanding of ritual laughter I used theoretical conceptualization of serious and parodic by Olga Freidenberg, establishing the dialog with Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque.