HE ASKED "WHETHER THEY SAW HIM" AND WISHED “THAT THEY DIDN’T SEE HIM THE FOLLOWING YEAR"

The paper contains a possible analysis of data concerning the custom of someone hiding behind bread, grain or something else, asking others whether they see him. Most frequently the person wished not to bee seen the following year. By its basic interpretation it would be a magical procedure for ensuring abundant crops. The correspondence of that custom with that performed by Slavic priests in front of the temple of Svantevit on the island of Rügen (based on a description from the 12,h c.) was attested a long time ago. Available data from Slavic countries (and single data from Latvia, Romania and Greece) are being presented. They are not numerous and appear sporadically, though in recent decades there are more and more such data (at least from some regions). They could be sorted out into five groups: 1) descriptions of the contemporaneous custom (frequently without information about the circumstances of its recording); 2) descriptions of the custom which was performed in the past; 3) oral tradition with the motif of hiding, frequently with at least a part of the usual dialog; 4) anecdotes and jokes with the same motif (at the expense of peasants from other villages, members of other ethnic groups, persons with special status of profession); 5) customs which are being performed for fun’s sake. Records from the third and fourth group, perhaps also from the fifth and to some extent those from the second, bear testimony to a possibility that we are dealing here with a part of oral tradition rather than with a custom. In some records there is a more or less pronounced hint at the ambiguity of the wish of the person who does not want to be seen. The magic which should provoque abundance and fertility can cause death. This was said in the record from the 12th c.: the priest who wished not to be seen the following year "did not ask for his or the people’s death, but for abundance following harvest”