One of the grand authorities of Bogomil religion is a priest called
Jeremiah (Jeremija), for which many historians presumed that he could have been
the famed Bogomil preiest, founder of Bogomilsm. But, what is certain is that
Jeremiah was indeed a Bogomil, and this was confirmed to us by Atanasij, a
Jerusalem monk. Without a doubt, we are talking about a very interesting
historical person, an extraordinary mind and the biggest religious authority in
this part of Europe and we could easily call him the Balkan Zarathustra.
Jeremiah is credited with authorship over a number of popular, but forbidden
works, but today it is obvious that many of those books had other Bogomil
authors. In Russia all those books were called by a collective name "Bulgarian basma (spell)" and
they were extremely popular among the folk, which can also be discerned from
the inscriptions of the Belarus translation by Iohannes
Damascenus from the 16th century, in which the translator
complains: "We haven't even translated the tenth honourable book of our
teachers, because of the laziness and neglect of our nobility; and additionally
the so called teachers of our century are entertained by Bulgarian basma, Bulgarian
magical formulas, or better to say, old wives foolery, they read these things
and laud them".
That the Bogomil religion left a deep trace in Bosnian tradition is
evident from numerous examples, and some can be found through this analysis. By
investigating available data about Jeremiah and his books I discovered another
Bogomil belief in Bosnia about the demons of disease. Namely, the Bulgarian
folk believed in a type of dangerous witches, or better to say, female demons
which attack humans in various ways. They were called Tresavice.
According to the writing of Jeremiah they were daughters of Irud and they were
seven in number. Among the Russians, which latter took this belief, those
demons were 12 in total.
In the Russian version of Jeremiah's exorcist formula (basma)
this text is mentioned: "There is a stone pillar in the red sea (in the
original basma: Mount Sinai), apostle Sisinij sits on the pillar and
observes how the sea has been agitated and how it rises up to the sky and
twelve long haired women are coming out of it (in the original: seven). Those
women said: We are Tresavice,
daughters of the king Irod". Holly Sisinij asked them: "cursed
devils, why did you come here?" They replied: "We came to torture the
human kind; whomever interests us we will follow and torture him: who
oversleeps the morning prayer, doesn't pray to God, doesn't respect holidays
and eats and drinks early in the morning, he is our favourite! Holly Sisinij
prayed to god: God, God! Save the human race from these damned devils. Christ
sent him two angels, Sihail and Anos and four evangelists. They
started beating the Tresavice with four iron rods, causing them three
thousand wounds a day." In the rest of the basma the tortured
demons revealed their names and ways in which they torture people: Treseja, Ognjeja, Ledeja, Gnjeteja, Ginuša,
Gluheja, Lomeja, Puhnjeja, Žuteja, Krkuša, Gledeja and Neveja.
