Ritual and Mythological Substrates in Wira Wowk’s “Meandry” and “Mandala” Collections

The article explicates ritual intentions of Wira Wowk’s poetic text on the material of her two collections “Meandry” (1979) and “Mandala” (1980). The prominent feature of Wira Wowk’s poetry is organic combination of heterogeneous symbols and motifs with Ukrainian imagery, as well as special organization of textual and visual (paratextual) components. Both poetry collections reflect all of these characteristics. The first book “Meandry” is illustrated by an artist Zoya Lisowska, whereas the second one includes Wira Wowk’s own paper cuts (vytynanky), structured like Buddhist mandalas. Semantic importance of illustrations prompts us to define them as non-verbal channel that coordinates the verbal channel of the collections. The connection between image, gesture and word is ritualistic, while ritual and mythological substrates of “Meandry” and “Mandala” are the main focus of our analysis. Based on mythological archetypes of Chaos and Order, these two collections form a diptych that constitutes a textual recreation of the Universe and God. Moreover, they correlate with the unity of myth and ritual, which is also manifested in the interaction between verbal and non-verbal components. In the article, we identify main motifs of this diptych, i.e. being lost in the world and finding yourself in it; exploring the outside space in order to go deeper inside individual psyche; an attempt to restore the universal unity. The latter intention is also represented by inclusion of translations in several languages that accompany each poem in both books. Thus, lingual polymorphism, textual synaesthesia and organic combination of heterogeneous symbolic systems with Ukrainan one are analyzed in the context of ritual teleology of “Meandry” and “Mandala” collections.