This article examines a detailed case involving an accusation of witchcraft against peasant Ivan Dulepov, which was heard before the Court of Equity in Nizhny Novgorod in 1812. In comparison with the materials from other Courts of Equity of the first half of the 19th century the one involving Dulepov provides a window onto how the court dealt with cases of using magical, primarily healer’s, practices. Comparative analysis shows that the adjudication in cases of witchcraft was related to the process of translation of peasant’s magical practices into the legal language by a judge and their correlation with the term “witchcraft” in the texts of the documents. The judicial term “witchcraft” included the use of spells that presuppose the accused’s belief in their efficacy and any harmful magical practices, but it excluded practices of healing with prayers and without using any texts (herbal medicine) and magic “for a joke”. The appearance in the course of the investigation of a case-specific bundle of meanings (for example, “witchcraft” and “sin”, “witchcraft” and “swindle”) concretised the nature of punishment (penance, corporal punishment or others). The article shows that the variability of this system of meanings is associated with the vagueness of the laws of the 18th – first half of the 1^9th centuries and the fluidity of the concept of “witchcraft” in traditional culture. The variability of court sentences in similar cases is also associated with the dialogic nature of testimony. Dialogical structure of the evidences is analyzed on the example of two interrogation points in the testimony of Ivan Dulepov (about the invocation of evil spirits and the belief in the “healing power” of spells) and it is shown how different ways of reading similar concepts by the accused and the judge affect the understanding of magical practices by different parts of the investigation.

The paper is an attempt to identify the main symbolic meanings of the girl’s braid in the texts of wedding lamentations. In the modern researches (works of E.L. Madlevskaya, S.M. Tolstaya, A.V. Gura) the braid was considered only as one subject substitute for the volya/krásota an abstract concept that combined the idea of youth, beauty, virginity of a girl and her reaching childbearing age. In our work, we tried to show that a girl’s hair/braid has a number of eigenvalues. The braid can be interpreted as a symbol of girlish freedom, and this freedom can be of different: it is freedom of choice, freedom of participation in ritual and behavioral practices, relative freedom of appearance. The braid also can have mythological meaning: it can be thought of as a means of testing the groom. Also, the braid is an integral part of the appearance of the bride, which is constantly transforming depending on the stage of the ceremony. In the lamentations related to different stages of the wedding, we note a different configuration of hair: when a girl leaves her family her hair is uncombed and loose. When the groom and his family come the bride appears in all the best. In this way, through a change in hairstyle, changes in the social status of the girl can be reflected.

The article is devoted to Pomor’s magical practices, omens, prohibitions and regulations related to fishing and hunting. They are considered in diachrony, records of ethnographers and folklorists of the 1930s are compared with the field materials of the expeditions of the Pushkin House in 2007–2019.

The supplement contains a large publication of materials from the archive of R.S. Lipets. She was one of the first to study the fishing and hunting folklore of the Pomors. In Soviet folklore studies, omens were studied as a text, isolated from the rite, which was considered outside of religion. Publishing them in the way they were deposited in the archive, combining the appeal to the saints in a dangerous situation and the use of magical practices, allows us to better represent the tradition as a whole, without considering separately Christian and non-Christian ideas. Among the trends that can be traced in modern records, compared with the records of the 1930s and 40s, which we can talk about on the basis of interviews, is a fine line between faith, compliance with certain prescriptions and evaluating them as fun.