Keyword: «desacralization»

The article examines the internal form of phraseology to throw words to the wind 'to say something in vain', taking into account the ritual of causing a deadly hurricane described in A. Volkov's fairy tale «The Wizard of the Emerald City». The magical actions contained in this description are compared with numerous information about the beliefs of the Russian and Belarusian peoples related to harmful magic. Attention is drawn to the parallelism of magical actions, which consists in throwing certain objects into the wind by a witch or sorcerer while simultaneously pronouncing a spell text.