Russian Obscene Language and New Religious Ontologies

What the paper says

The paper focuses on the resemantisation and the new mythologies of Russian obscene language in present day Orthodox culture and larger cultural contexts. The social history of Russian obscene language (known as mat or maternaia bran’) still appears to be quite obscure and intriguing. Unlike profanities in many other European languages that employed a lot of symbols and topoi from Christian culture, Russian swearing concentrated predominantly on sexual symbolism. Certain researchers still follow the hypothesis by Boris A. Uspensky who argued that Russian mat was historically related to pre‑Christian mythology and rituals including the allegedly existing pagan cult of the “Mother Earth”. Yet this point of view does not seem to be well‑grounded; religious connotations of Russian mat Uspensky proceeded from were probably ascribed to particular formulae only in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, the hypothesis of “pre‑Christian origin” influenced the reception of Russian obscenities in present day Orthodox and secular discourses where mat can be considered as a survival or even a driving force of paganism and Satanism. On the other hand, both Orthodox and other religious / spiritual ontologies in contemporary Russia usually involve “holistic” understanding of obscenities, the latter believed to transmit particularly harmful “energies” which are understood and discussed in terms of physics and biology. Proceeding from these beliefs, ideas, and practices, the article deals with how post‑secular religious ontologies elaborate their own ideas and senses of language that paradoxically intertwine linguistic and semiotic ideologies, moral reasoning, political expectations, and the image of human body. This new mythology of language is obviously linked (but not limited) to the New Age or holistic worldview, where conventional boundaries between material and spiritual, individual and collective, human body and its environment are erased or blurred, and deserves special investigation as an important part of post‑secular and postmodern ontology in general.