Echoes of Slavic Antiquities in the Mythonym of Yuda in the Voronezh Conspiracy Tradition

The authors of the article address the issue of the distribution of the mythonym yuda in the dialects of settlers from the southwestern territories of the East Slavic area, living (for more than 300 years) in the territory of the modern Voronezh region. This nomination was recorded during a dialectological expedition as an element of a spell text. The authors of the article proceed from the fact that the demonological image of yuda has a wider areal distribution than is noted in the works of researchers. The existence of the demonym is limited by some scientists to the Bulgarian and Ukrainian Hutsul tradition; the nomination is characteristic, in particular, of Belarusian spells. The fragment presented in the article explicates in the context the hierarchical relations of two mythological characters, yuda and pydjuda. The male image of yuda in the recorded spell obviously has archaic foundations, correlating with other demonological characters of the same root content in the Slavic dialect space. At the same time, the connection of the studied demonym with the image of Judas is unconditional. A direct correlation with the southwestern folk tradition is traced, within which yuda acts as a representative of evil spirits, a kind of an evil spirit. Unfortunately, the extremely transformed context and contamination of spell formulas and motives do not allow a full analysis of the functioning of the lexeme under the study.