Mythology of Water and Reservoirs. Tales, anecdotes, beliefs, cosmological and etiological stories from the Russian North.
Mythology of Water and Reservoirs. Tales, anecdotes, beliefs, cosmological and etiological stories from the Russian North.
19.99 €
This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the element of water as it appears in Northern Russian folk mythology. Deities of this element can include lakes, rivers, and streams themselves, mythological figures more or less emanating from water, the master spirit of a river or lake, and even figures associated with water but negatively reinterpreted. Perceived by mythological consciousness as a primordial, living element, water plays a dominant role in cosmogenesis. It also provides the impetus for the re-creation of the world, the transformation of landscape and society. Water deities predetermine and foretell human destiny. Their will determines the rhythms of the life cycle inherent in each individual. These same deities participate in the daily life of peasants. The research is accompanied by a corpus of texts—252 mythological stories, mostly introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time. The texts are supplemented with commentaries, indexes, and a glossary of dialectal and obsolete words. This is the most extensive collection of tales, anecdotes, superstitions, cosmogonic and etiological stories devoted to aquatic themes. These texts serve as material for the research undertaken in this book, and are revealed through this research.
For folklorists, ethnographers, art historians, historians, religious scholars, psychologists, and all lovers of folk culture.
For folklorists, ethnographers, art historians, historians, religious scholars, psychologists, and all lovers of folk culture.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Technologies of Culture