Book: Edward Burnett Tylor Myth and Rite in Primitive Culture. Magic, myth, ritual, poetics and pictures of the world of primitive culture

Lecture 2 Primitive art and mythology

1. Characteristics of the primitive era. Features of the art of primitive society.

2.Mythology and religion. Primitive beliefs and their influence on art.

LITERATURE

Alekseev V.P., Pershits A.I. History of primitive society. M., 1999.

Vasiliev L.S. History of Religions of the East. M., 1983.

Zubov A. B. History of religions. M., 1997.

Levi-Strauss K. Primitive thinking. M., 1994.

Fundamentals of Religious Studies // Ed. N. I. Yablokova. M., 1994.

Semenov Yu.I. The emergence of culture and its early forms //

History of Russian culture. M., 1993.

Mirimanov V.B. Primitive and traditional art. M., 1973.

Myths of the peoples of the world. Encyclopedia: In 2 volumes / Ed. S.A. Tokarev. M 2000.

Stolyar A.D. Origin of fine arts. M., 1985.

Tylor E.B. Myth and ritual in primitive culture. Smolensk, 2000.

Tylor E.B. Primitive culture. M., 1989.

Toynbee A. J. Comprehension of history. M., 1991.

Tokarev S.A. Early forms of religion and their development. M., 1964.

Jung KG Problems of the soul of our time. SPb., 2002.

The history of the appearance of man on Earth, the formation of human society, the formation of its culture has more than one million years. The temporal scale of the primitive era in itself determines its special place and significance in the history of mankind. This is first.

Secondly, the culture of the primitive era is the foundation of all subsequent culture of mankind. Here are its origins. Many phenomena of the life of modern society originate in the deep antiquity of the primitive era: language, writing, art, religion, mythology, science, morality, etiquette, marriage and family, housing, clothing and much more.

Thirdly, many problems are entirely or partially solved on the basis of materials from the study of primitive culture: the history of the emergence of man, the origin of races, peoples, the emergence of mythology, religion, art, etc.

Fourthly, the primitive era has not completely gone into the past. It still continues to exist in certain corners of the globe: in the jungles of the Amazon, in the central regions of Africa, on the islands of Oceania, in the deep regions of Australia.

And finally, fifthly, some elements of primitive culture are preserved in the life of modern society. These are superstitions and prejudices, magic and witchcraft, elements of paganism in existing religions and in everyday life, remnants of animism, fetishism, totemism, etc.

General characteristics of the primitive era

The primeval era is the largest period in the history of mankind. It lasted from the moment of the appearance of man and until the emergence of social heterogeneity, social inequality. According to modern scientific data, man as a species has existed for about 2.5 million years, although it is not easy to determine the lower limit of the primitive communal system more or less exactly. Its upper limit in different regions fluctuates within 5 thousand years. In some parts of the world, primitive relations are still preserved. Thus, most of human history falls on the period of the primitive era.

According to archaeological periodization, based on differences in the material and technique of making tools, three centuries are distinguished in the history of primitive society: stone, bronze (copper) and iron.

The Stone Age is divided into the ancient stone - the Paleolithic (from about 2.6 million years BC to the XII millennium BC), the middle stone - the Mesolithic (from about the XII to the VII millennium BC), the new stone - Neolithic (approximately from the 7th to the 4th millennium BC), copper-stone - Eneolithic (approximately from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BC). Bronze Age - approximately II - the beginning of the I millennium BC. e. Iron Age - from about the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e. The Old Stone Age is divided into the epochs of the early (lower), middle and late (upper) Paleolithic.

The human race has existed for about 2.5 million years. Homo sapiens (reasonable man) - only about 40 thousand years. Man has been using tools for more than 2 million years. Their use opened up wider opportunities for primitive man to use natural resources, adapt to the environment, collective hunting, and protection in the fight against predators. At the same time, constant joint labor activity united primitive society. The complication of social life has led to the need to exchange experience and transfer it from person to person, from generation to generation. Articulate speech, language, art, mythology, religion arose - culture arose.

Looking into the distant past, scientists call two factors thanks to which a herd of humanoid creatures could turn into people –

1.creation of symbols, language and 2. creation and use of tools.

Our distant ancestors could survive only by acting together, by joining forces. To do this, they had to somehow identify, communicate their intentions and explain their actions. There was a need for some sounds, signs, designations that would express these intentions and be understandable to others. Thus, the symbols appeared - symbols. No living being, except man, has the ability to create and use symbols. The most important form of symbolic expression is articulate speech. Thanks to her, people were able to communicate, inform others about their intentions, transfer the acquired knowledge, and later - thoughts, ideas. This ensured the accumulation, preservation of the best that people have developed, the emergence of tradition and, ultimately, the progressive development of human society.

The second and no less important factor of humanization was creation of tools. The animal takes the means for its existence from nature in finished form. A person creates them himself, using various devices created by him for this. From the first steps on the path of formation to this day, a person strives to lighten his work and at the same time get more products of labor, for this he improves, improves tools, which becomes the most important engine for the development of man and society, the engine of progress. So, symbolic and labor activity, language and labor were the most important factors of anthropogenesis. The use of symbols and labor activity led to the emergence and development of culture.

mythology.

Religion

Along with the development and complication of religious views on nature and man himself in it, the sociocultural process in primitive society contributed to the emergence and accumulation of knowledge. Thus, the development of agriculture in the late period of the primitive era required the ordering of the calendar, and consequently, astronomical observations. Irrigation work led to the formation of the technique of geometric calculations, the development of exchange - to the improvement of counting systems. Ultimately, all this led to the accumulation of mathematical knowledge. Diseases, epidemics, wars forced the use and improvement of primitive medicine. Land and sea movements served as an incentive for the development of geography and cartography. And with the advent of the smelting of ore metals, the beginnings of chemistry were born.

The further development of primitive culture belongs to the Neolithic. Tools of labor, stone processing techniques (sawing, drilling, grinding) are being improved. Bows, arrows, ceramic dishes appear. Man moves to more complex forms of production. Along with hunting, fishing, gathering, agriculture and cattle breeding are spreading. These two greatest achievements of the primitive economy, which many researchers call the "Neolithic revolution", played a huge role in the further development of primitive culture and man himself. With the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, a transition took place from the appropriation of finished products of nature to their production with the help of human activity. The Neolithic was the highest and last stage of the millennia-old Stone Age.

primitive art

With the advent of modern man on Earth, the process of development of productive forces and social relations accelerated significantly. A qualitative leap took place in the development of culture. Primitive art has become an essentially new phenomenon.

The question of the causes of the emergence of primitive art is one of the most controversial in science. There are hypotheses pointing to various factors that served as the starting point of human artistic creativity: his aesthetic needs, sexual instinct, mythological thinking, religious practice, cognitive activity, the need to consolidate and transfer accumulated experience, the need for entertainment, etc. There are disputes about how and when art appeared, what it was for primitive man, what results of his creative activity should be attributed to art. The most reasonable is the view on the origin of art as the result of the cognitive activity of primitive man and the associated need to reflect, consolidate and transmit social experience in a specific mediated form.

Primitive art did not constitute an autonomous area in the sphere of human activity. Artistic creativity was inextricably linked with all existing forms of culture, and above all with mythology and religion. This unity formed the so-called primitive syncretism. All types of spiritual activity were associated with art and expressed themselves through art.

Primitive art, due to the syncretic nature of the culture of the era under consideration, had a functional diversity. As its main functions, the following can be distinguished: worldview, educational, cognitive, informational, communicative, magic-religious, aesthetic. All these functions are inextricably linked and follow one from the other.

The emergence of art as a special sphere of human activity became possible with the division of labor. The social division of labor is contradictory. On the one hand, it made it possible for the development of various forms of human activity, on the other hand, it inevitably led to the one-sided development of a person who was forced to do one thing. From the moment of its inception, art has overcome this shortcoming: one of the functions of art has been the re-creation of a holistic human personality.

In the art of the primitive era, the first ideas of man about the world around him and about himself were developed. It contributed to the consolidation and transfer of knowledge, skills and abilities of people, served as a means of communication between them. Primitive art regulated and directed social and mental processes in society. It acted as a means of forming the spiritual world of a person, streamlined mental processes in him.

In the primitive era, all types of fine arts were born: graphics (drawings, silhouettes), painting (images in color, made with mineral paints), sculpture (figures carved from stone or molded from clay), decorative arts (carving on wood, stone, bone , horns, reliefs, ornaments). The origins of other types of artistic creativity also go back to ancient times: music, singing, dance, theatrical performances.

The first works of primitive art that have come down to us belong to the Upper Paleolithic, their age is about 40 thousand years. These are sculptural, graphic, pictorial images, geometric signs, as well as images created in the likeness of natural objects. Among them, a special place is occupied by the so-called "Venuses" - images, apparently associated with the cult of the mother ancestress. Generalized images of animals were found: a mammoth, a horse, a deer, a bear, a bison, scenes of hunting for them.

Cave painting was discovered at the end of the 19th century. (Altamir cave in Spain). Later, researchers discovered dozens of similar caves in Spain, France, and also in Russia (Kapova Cave - Southern Urals). One of the most outstanding discoveries in the field of cave art was made in France in 1940. The Lascaux Cave, accidentally discovered by four boys, became a real sensation in the world of rock art, examples of which are among the most perfect creations of the Paleolithic era. Their approximate age is 15 - 20 thousand years. The highly artistic works found by the children are well preserved, which has made it possible to turn this many-roomed cave into a first-class museum of primitive art, called the “prehistoric Sistine Chapel”.This cave hardly served as a place of residence for ancient people, most likely it was a sanctuary. In its first hall, a long procession of various animals is presented on the walls. They are obviously heading somewhere, a very strange creature is at the head of the procession. The human head has two straight horns, the butt has a wild bull with a deer tail and elephant legs, a bison hump, horse front legs.

According to the general opinion of researchers, a female creature with signs of pregnancy is depicted. Of particular note is the three-meter dimensions of the creation. There are many versions about the strange drawing, but none of them has given an answer to his riddle.

In the development of cave art, several periods can be traced, covering more than 25 millennia (XXX - IV millennium BC).

The initial period, which lasted about fifteen millennia, includes monuments with primitive drawings, obscure signs, wavy lines ("pasta"), traced by fingers on wet clay, and handprints. By the end of the first period, uncertain contour drawings of animals appear, which gradually improve, begin to fill with paint (the caves of Lascaux, Font de Gome, Peche Merle, La Moute - in France, Altamira, etc. - in Spain).

The second period - XVIII - XV millennium BC. - characterized by a transition from a planar, planar image to the transfer of the volume of an object and to its greater detail (Lascaux caves, Peche Merle, La Pasiega, etc.).

The third period - XIV - XII millennium BC. Cave art reaches its highest heights. Animalistic ensembles amaze with their scale (up to 5 thousand images) and realism, the perfection of the transfer of volumes, proportions of figures, perspective, movement, and the use of polychromy. Similar ensembles have been created in the caves of Rufignac, Troyes, Frere, Montespan, Nyo, Lascaux, La Madeleine and many others. By the end of this period, painting gradually degenerates into technical virtuosity, loses volume, becomes flat.

Fourth period - XII - XI millennium BC. - characterized by a transition to stylization, generalization; images are becoming more and more symbolic (the caves of Labastide, Font de Gomes, Marsula, etc.).

Fifth period - X - IV millennium BC. - completes the development of cave art in Europe. It is characterized by a kind of return to its origins - the absence of realistic images, the appearance of purely symbolic images: random weaves of lines, geometric patterns, rows of dots, mysterious signs, etc., the meaning of which we do not know.

The meaning and meaning of the depicted is very difficult to understand. We can only make assumptions about what ancient people wanted to convey. One of the most common types of images of the Upper Paleolithic are images of animals. There are drawings showing scenes of their sacrifice. They bleed. Other animals were depicted against the background of some structures, the meaning of which is not entirely clear to scientists. Another theme of the Upper Paleolithic caves were models or images of tents or dugouts. There is an assumption that they were a symbol of the dwelling of the dead.

Monuments that speak of the existence of a mammoth cult belong to the same period. Along with it, the ancient cult of the bear is also preserved. It is likely that both cults coexisted for some time. Some of the drawings of the bear are not quite ordinary: it is often depicted with the head of a wolf, the tail of a bison, sometimes there is a person under the skin of a bear.

Another important topic of the Upper Paleolithic is images of women (reliefs, figures, drawings). Women are neither beautiful nor graceful. Rather, on the contrary, ancient artists and sculptors emphasize the main social role of a woman - to be a mother, continuer of the family, keeper of the hearth. Most likely, these venuses were images of Mother Earth, pregnant with the dead, who still have to be born again to eternal life. Perhaps the essence depicted in this way was the genus itself in its course from ancestors to descendants, the Great Mother, always giving birth to life ... For the guardian of the genus, individual personal characteristics are not important. She is a womb eternally pregnant with life, a mother eternally feeding with her milk.

The development of cave art of the primitive era testifies to its natural evolution from the simplest pictorial forms through clear naturalistic images to simplification, stylization and, finally, to an easily reproduced and readable symbol.

Man's turning to artistic creativity was the greatest event in terms of the possibilities that are inherent in it. This is most clearly evidenced by the emergence of writing. Modern letter-sound systems of writing were preceded by various forms of writing, but the original type was pictographic writing, consisting of individual specific images. This original type of writing was closely associated with primitive fine arts, from which pictographic writing began to separate at the beginning of the Mesolithic, so that after thousands of years, already on the threshold of early class civilizations, it would turn into an ordered writing.

With the advent of the Mesolithic era, there are noticeable changes in art. The image begins to dominate the person. The materiality of objects - color and volume - gives way to action, movement.

Rock art, Mesolithic multi-figured images represent a compositional unity that vividly reproduces hunting scenes, honey gathering, ritual actions, dances, battles, etc. Thus, in Alpera (Eastern Spain), a rock frieze depicting hunting scenes includes several hundred human figures and dozens of animals : shooting archers, rushing antelopes, deer, stone goats and rams, running bulls.

The Mesolithic artists had different tasks than those of the Paleolithic artists. Now they sought to show not the objects themselves, but to convey the action - the meaning of the events taking place. And although the images of humans and animals of the Mesolithic era are less detailed, more schematic than in the previous period, they are much more dynamic, mobile, and expressive. The appearance of dynamic multi-figure compositions speaks of a new, more complex reflection of reality in the human mind, of an increased cognitive level of artistic creativity.

In the Neolithic era, art, like primitive culture in general, undergoes profound qualitative changes. The most important of these is that culture ceases to be unified, it acquires distinct features in different territories, an original character: the Neolithic of Egypt differs from the Neolithic of Mesopotamia, the Neolithic of Europe - from the Neolithic of Siberia, etc.

The transition from an appropriating to a productive economy contributed to a deeper knowledge of the world, of man himself, which led to the emergence of new content and new pictorial forms in art. With the further development of abstract thinking, language, mythology, religion, the accumulation of rational knowledge, a person came to the need to generalize existing concepts. He had a need to embody more complex images in art: the sun, earth, sky, fire, water, etc. This led to the appearance of conditionally symbolic pictorial forms.

An ornament consisting of stylized abstract motifs is gaining popularity: a cross, a circle, a spiral, a triangle, a square, etc. Images of real objects - humans, animals, birds, fish - also gradually stylized, turned into symbolic signs that expressed religious and mythological representations of people. At the same time, the desire to decorate all the objects that a person used satisfied his aesthetic needs. Ornament or individual signs-symbols covered ancient ceramics - the most common type of decorative art, wooden utensils, tools for labor and hunting, weapons, stone, bone, horn, etc. A person also decorated himself with body painting, necklaces, beads, bracelets, patterned clothes.

The main materials used by primitive people for the manufacture of tools, weapons, household utensils were wood, bones and stone. Household utensils were made from branches, birch bark, bamboo, and shells. Products were processed on fire, but it became possible to really boil them only after clay vessels were invented. Before that, hot stones were thrown at the food to warm the food. The clothing of primitive people depended on where they lived. At first, a belt, an apron, a skirt appeared. Clothing allowed the ancients to show their creativity, it was decorated.

One of the first forms of human activity was gathering. At first it was random, unsystematic. Primitive beings noticed which fruits were edible and collected them. Over time, they began to notice places where you can collect edible fruits.

Then came the understanding of the ripening time of the crop, which was not the same for different types of plants. Collectors (mostly women) could not only collect fruits for everyday food, but also create stocks, which required a good memory, quick wits, and the ability to connect disparate facts into a single picture.

For hunting traps, traps, nets were used. Digging a huge earthen trap for a large animal to provide food for the tribe for a long period was simply impossible alone. It was also impossible to defeat a large predator by one or even two people. Therefore, hunting at the first stages of its existence was carried out collectively, only then it becomes individual. Fishing in some areas was of paramount importance and also sometimes required common efforts.

At the end of the Neolithic, more and more new subjects appear in art, while the pictorial language becomes more and more general, symbolic. The trend in the development of primitive art from the depiction of living forms to abstract forms, to a general scheme and, ultimately, to a sign-symbol is a natural and universal phenomenon for the entire primitive culture.

Among the most common monuments of Neolithic art are petroglyphs- images carved on rocks and boulders in the open air. Most of them are animalistic plots - images of animals that served as an object of human hunting. As a rule, this is a relief image. Painting on them has not been preserved due to atmospheric action. Such "art galleries" exist in many places on the planet. Petroglyphs of the Neolithic, Bronze and early Iron Ages are found on the rocks of Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. They are also found in Africa, Australia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Crimea and other parts of the world. In Russia, numerous petroglyphs have been found on the shores of the White Sea, Lake Onega, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.

Among the most mysterious phenomena of primitive art is a group of monuments - megaliths. This menhirs- dug into the ground, vertically placed stone pillars with a height of 4 - 5 m or more, standing separately or in groups; dolmens- huge, weighing up to several tens of tons, stone blocks, placed vertically and covered with a stone slab, which served as burial structures of the Neolithic, Bronze and Early Iron Ages; cromlechs- religious buildings, which are a circular fence of stone blocks that support stone slabs covering them.

The most famous and largest structure of this type - Stonehenge (England) - has a diameter of 90 m and 125 boulders weighing up to 25 tons each.

Scientists of the 20th century determined that already in the Neolithic era (VIII millennium BC), dolmens not only had a certain geometric shape, but were also located in places that allowed them to be resonators of cosmic energy that affected people in a certain way. The very location of the dolmens indicates the presence of a compositional center that connects them into a single whole, which indicates a conscious attitude to space.

Dolmens are made of quartz - a material that has the ability to absorb the energy of space. Consequently, a man of primitive society already possessed a lot of knowledge and used them in his activities.

Megalithic structures are known in Western Europe (England, Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, France), in North Africa (Algeria), in Palestine, in India, in the Crimea, in the Caucasus. Only in France there are about four thousand of them. The same type of character of such structures, the same time of their appearance - III-II millennium BC. - and an unusually wide distribution suggest that there were homogeneous beliefs, one cultural tradition among many peoples who inhabited vast areas of the globe.

Megalithic structures were the prototype of monumental architecture. Already on the threshold of the emergence of the first civilizations, cyclopean or adobe fortifications, temples, tombs appeared, which, in turn, was associated with the stratification of society into classes, the separation of the nobility, the complication of religious ideas and religious practice.

The accumulated archaeological data make it possible to trace the emergence and development of other types of primitive artistic creativity: music, dance, theatrical performance, applied art.

Music.Found tubular bones with drilled holes on the sides, drilled horns, animal skulls with traces of numerous blows are examples of the first wind and percussion musical instruments. Ethnological research leads to conclusions about a wide variety of such instruments. The prototype of stringed instruments, in all likelihood, was a bowstring, reed instruments - wood chips or bird feathers, wind instruments - a reed or other natural tube, percussion instruments - animal bones, wooden mallets, stones, etc. Along with the instrumental form in music, of course, her vocal component was present.

An important place in the system of primitive art was also occupied by dance. Rock carvings, as well as ethnological material, testify to its presence. Dance performed the same diverse functions as all primitive art as a whole. Dances were ritual, military, hunting, male and female, domestic, etc.

Closely intertwined with dance theatrical performance. In primitive scenes, reflecting the whole way of life of primitive man, his worldview and emotional and mental essence, one of the most complex synthetic genres of art, theater, was born.

With a greater degree of confidence, one can guess about the existence of the most accessible type of creativity - oral folk- songs, stories, fairy tales, myths, epics.

Primitive art became the beginning of a figurative reflection of the surrounding world, a means of its knowledge, as well as the formation of the inner world of the person himself. The study of the monuments of primitive art allows us to trace the evolution of styles, forms, means and methods of artistic creativity, to understand the patterns of formation and development of the entire world artistic culture.

Thus, the culture of the primitive era is a multifaceted, comprehensive and complex phenomenon. It served as the basis for the development of the first civilizations that arose in the Nile Valley and in Mesopotamia (end of the 4th millennium BC), in the Indus basin (mid-3rd millennium BC), in the Aegean Sea basin, in Asia Minor, Phoenicia, South Arabia, in the Huang He basin (2nd millennium BC), in Central and South America (1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD), and ultimately the entire modern civilization.

2. Mythology and religion. Primitive beliefs and their influence on art

In the Neolithic era, a person gradually begins to comprehend himself, the world around him. The first form of attitude, worldview of a person was mythology. The perception of the world by primitive man took such a peculiar form, expressed in a system of fantastic ideas about the natural and social reality surrounding him. In primitive society, mythology was the main way to explain the world; it acted as the earliest form of world perception, understanding of the world and man's place in it, as the original form of the spiritual culture of mankind.

Main background mythological thinking lie, firstly, in the fact that in ancient times man did not yet distinguish himself from the environment - natural and social, and, secondly, in the indivisibility of primitive thinking, which had not yet clearly separated from the emotional sphere. As a result, man transferred his own properties, feelings to natural objects, endowed them with souls and spirits. The depiction of natural forces in the form of human-animated images gave rise to bizarre mythological fantasy.

An important role in primitive thinking is played by unconscious. The contents of the collective unconscious are the result of the mental functioning of a number of ancestors, that is, in their totality, this is a natural image of the world, merged and concentrated from the experience of millions of years. These are symbolic, mythological images in which the harmony of the cognizing subject with the cognized object finds expression.

From this matrix of experience, Jung believes, all mythology, all revelation, has come. From there, new ideas about the world and man will come out. And yet the unconscious is not a revelation. It requires comprehension and translation into the language of a particular historical era.

In myths, the image of the moon is often found. According to Jung, it represents the changing experience of the night. In primitive man, the moon can cause various experiences. First of all, the experience is sexual.

In many myths, the Moon is the wife of the Sun. The author believes that a woman for a primitive man was an event of the night, since it was this time of the day that was usually set aside for sexual intercourse. However, the Moon can be associated with other images. Night sleep is often disturbed by evil thoughts about power and revenge, a different mythological interpretation of the Moon is born as a deprived brother of the Sun, who planned revenge. In addition, the Moon is able to appear before a person as a repository of the souls of the dead, for the dead often visit us in a dream, or thoughts about them disturb us during insomnia, and this also happens at night when the Moon reigns in the sky.

For a primitive man, sexuality can appear in various images: it is both a fertility god and a demon woman, whom Jung characterizes as an animal voluptuous. Even a devil with goat legs, even a snake that makes us fear, can be put in this row, according to the author. The primitive man at every step was in danger, which was personified by various monsters.

According to Jung, primitive people lived almost unconsciously. The first myths were totemic. People dressed up in the skins of totem animals. Totem dances are an attempt to tell fellow tribesmen about the life of their ancestors. Over time, the rituals began to take on a more detailed character. There was a strict order in the dance scenes, rhythms that were passed down from generation to generation. Now they have turned into a coherent coherent account of the life of totemic ancestors.

were of great importance myths about culture heroes. At first, these ideas were also closely connected with ideas about totemic ancestors. In the future, they acquire individual features and their own names. Divinatory magic (mantic) arises. Later, people began to believe that supernatural power could be transmitted from person to person, from object to object. This form of religion is called emanism.

The transformation of the human species, which occurred in the middle of the Paleolithic period, was perhaps the most epoch-making event in human history and remains so up to the present, because at that moment the Pre-Man managed to turn into Man, but Man has not managed to reach the superhuman level since then, no matter how much he aspires to it.

The concept of myth

In the ordinary sense myth- these are, first of all, ancient, biblical and other ancient "tales" about the creation of the world and man, stories about the deeds of ancient gods and heroes.

The very word "myth" is of ancient Greek origin and means precisely "tradition", "word", "tale". The secret of the origin of the myth should be sought in the fact that mythological consciousness was the oldest form of understanding and understanding of the world, understanding of nature, society and man. The myth arose from the need of ancient people to realize the natural and social elements surrounding it, the essence of man.

Myth is the assimilation and generalization of cultural space by fantasy-figurative means.

Functions of myths

1) They explained the world, nature, society, man in their own way;

2) They established a connection between the past, present and future of mankind in a peculiar, very concrete form;

3) They were the channel through which one generation passed on to another

accumulated experience, knowledge, values, cultural goods, knowledge.

Myth-making is a long-standing cultural tradition. So old that there are still a lot of hypotheses about the origin, historical context and meaning of the myth.

In research on mythology, several approaches can be conventionally distinguished:

a) Myths as a way of explaining the world, rationalization of reality (R. Taylor).

b) Myths as a product of artistic fantasy.

c) The symbolic theory of myths (E. Cassirer).

d) The study of myths as features of primitive mythological thinking (K. Levi-Strauss).

Let's take a closer look at the symbolic theory of myth. The symbolism of myth, as well as the symbolism of art, lies in the fact that ideas and feelings are expressed by conventional signs or objects. Along with language and art, mythology, as a symbolic system, models the surrounding reality in its own way. Thus, the pagan pantheon of the ancient Greeks, Slavs, Indians, and other peoples is the personification of natural and social forces. Each of the deities is assigned certain functions, and this makes people's lives predictable and understandable. For example, in ancient Russian mythology, the god Stribog commands the winds, Dazhdbog - the sun, Perun - thunder and lightning, Veles - cattle. Deities of lower status are associated with economic cycles or social and ethical norms that had developed by the time the mythological consciousness was formed, represented by such personified deities expressive in language as Rod, Chur, Share, Woe-Misfortune, Truth, Krivda, etc.

The mythology of the Proto-Slavs was largely lost during the period of Christianization of paganism. The reconstruction of the main elements of Slavic mythology became possible only on the basis of secondary sources. Such sources were: chronicles and annals in German and Latin; teachings against paganism and the annals; writings of Byzantine writers; archaeological data (rituals, sanctuaries). For example, the famous four-faced Zbruch idol from Poland is well known. This monument is a four-sided stone pillar ending with four faces of an idol crowned with one headdress. All four sides of the pillar are covered with images of human and equestrian figures.

Features of mythological consciousness are inherent in the Slavic system of mythology to the same extent as in the cultural phenomena of other ethnic communities. Also, as in other systems, there is a hierarchy of deities, cult myths of cyclic time, a symbolic image of the world tree, a dualistic principle of life: Belobog - Chernobog, Nikolai Sukhoi - Nikolai Wet, Perun - the god responsible for fire and rain, even - odd etc.

Myths are closely related to magic and ritual and bring order and
control in the life of the community. This is what determines the logical originality of myths. Natural forces appear in myths in an anthropomorphic form, in other words, nature is humanized. Myth-making is one of the universal, ancient ways of explaining natural phenomena and social life. Explaining reality, the myth in its own way fills the gaps in knowledge. Thus, myths interpret the change of seasons, illness, the use of fire, the change of day and night. In the ancient Greek mythological tradition, these phenomena are explained, respectively, by the change of mood of the goddess of fertility Demeter, the curiosity of Pandora, the courage and selflessness of Prometheus, and the movement of the divine chariot of the god Helios across the sky. The Bushman myth explains the inequality among people and the difference in their way of life by the fact that the tribe of people living in the desert descended from the most capricious and disobedient monkeys who refused to obey the Great Spirit.

Thus, mythology is a collection of works of human fantasy containing peculiar explanations of the facts of the real world.

Myths are an integral part of any culture. A naive explanation of the causes of natural and social phenomena creates the impression of a deep archaism of the mythological way of seeing the world.

As a cultural phenomenon, myth has a number of features:

Syncretism.Myth is synthetic. It combines the principles of rituals, religions, philosophical systems, and art. The most diverse aspects of human life have grown out of the mythological worldview and are produced by it.

Symbolism -substitution in primitive thinking of subject and object. By replacing some symbols in myth with others, mythological thought makes the objects it describes more accessible for understanding and comprehension at a given level of knowledge. Specific objects - shield, owl, snake, feather, ring, tooth, etc. - become symbols of other objects and phenomena.

Metaphorism.Comparison of cultural and natural objects. For example, in ancient Greek mythology, time is the god Chronos, night is the goddess Nyukta.

geneticism. To explain the structure of the world means to tell about its origin. With this approach, time is sharply divided into sacred (pra-time) and profane (empirical) time. Pre-time is the time of laying the foundations of human existence. This is linear time. In the great time, the first ancestors, demiurges (creators) and cultural heroes create the world and patterns of social behavior. The first objects appear in it: the first fire, a spear, musical instruments, as well as labor skills. A characteristic feature of mythology is the appeal to the past. The myth lives in its own, special time - the time of the "original beginning", "original creation", to which human ideas about the flow of time are inapplicable

In contrast to the right time, cyclical (profane) time reproduces in the form of rituals that which has a beginning in the right time. This position can be confirmed by calendar agricultural rituals, which reproduce the features of the agricultural cycle in a playful way.

In myth, man and society do not distinguish themselves from the surrounding natural elements: nature, society and man are merged into a single whole, inseparable, united.

There are no abstract concepts in the myth, everything in it is very concrete, personified, animated.

Mythological consciousness thinks in symbols: each image, hero, character denotes the phenomenon or concept behind it.

Myth thinks in images, lives with emotions, arguments of reason are alien to it, it explains the world, proceeding not from knowledge, but from faith.

Thus, the inability to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, the weak development of abstract concepts, the sensuously concrete character, emotionality - these and other features of primitive thinking turned mythology into a kind of symbolic system in terms of which the whole world and man himself were perceived and described.

Typology of myths

Among the peoples who have risen to a higher level of cultural development and created complex mythological systems, they were based on myths about the origin of the world, the universe - cosmogonic. They tell about the origin and structure of the cosmos, about the appearance of people and gods. Such myths contain one of two ideas: the idea of ​​creation or the idea of ​​development. The idea of ​​creation is creational: the world was created by a supernatural being - a creator god, a great sorcerer, etc. The idea of ​​development is evolutionary: the world arose gradually from some initial formless state - chaos, darkness, water, eggs, etc.

Acquaintance with the myths of the peoples of the world revealed that they are all trying to find an explanation, to give answers to the same questions: what is the world around us, how and from what did it arise, did it have a beginning and will it end; what is a person, natural phenomena, etc.? On this basis, a typology of myths is formed. For example, according to Chinese myth, the world originated from the first egg; mountains, rivers, trees arose from parts of the body of the first man. In some myths, on the contrary, a person consists of the primary elements of nature.

A special type is theogonic myths - myths about the origin of the gods. Myths about a miraculous birth, about fate, about death and immortality, about the afterlife are widespread.

The most ancient myths are myths about the origin of people - anthropogonic, because one of the first questions that primitive man tried to resolve was the question - who is he in this world? Where did he come from?

Ancient man did not distinguish himself from the natural world and led his family from animals, plants, and, conversely, animals descended from people. So arose zooanthropomorphic myths.

myths astral, lunar and solar devoted to the stars, the moon and the sun. In them, either the creation of the luminaries is attributed to a supernatural being, or these luminaries are represented by people who previously lived on earth and ascended to heaven. These myths date back to ancient times, and it is interesting that the meaning of the moon and sun has changed over time. In many myths, the sun as an object of worship comes to the fore (Egyptian Ra, Slavic Yarila).

At a higher stage of development, many peoples have eschatological Myths are prophecies about the end of the world. These are myths about the flood, about the global fire, about the death of a generation of giants - in a word, about the end of the existence of the world. Myths of this type are characterized by a story about the dying and resurrection of nature, about the clash of the forces of Chaos and Cosmos, about the powers beyond the grave. The most consistent ideas about the cosmic cycles of death and renewal are found in Hindu myths. So, the Universe perishes when the god Brahma falls asleep, and with the onset of the day, he again creates the Universe.

A special place is occupied cult myths. They underlie almost all rituals that have come to us from time immemorial. The rites of sacrifice to gods and demons, the rites of initiation (the initiation of boys into men, the feast of Saturnalia in ancient Rome, when servants and masters changed places, symbolic sacrifices in African tribes, as well as in the Christian tradition), are well known.

Myths about ancestors can be considered as a variant of myths about the creation of the world. Ancestors are characters of sacred (mythical) time. Totemic, zoo- and anthropomorphic ancestors are distinguished. Sometimes they turn into demons or spirits. Many myths are characterized by the figure of the main ancestor. Gradually, the first ancestors merge with the image of the god-father or goddess-mother. In empirical (profane) time, ancestors become the object of reverence, a special cult.

A special place is occupied myths about culture heroes. The acquisition of various cultural goods is associated with their activities: the production of fire, the invention of crafts, agriculture, the emergence of arts, the establishment of customs, rituals, rules of conduct, and social institutions.

The myths about the ancestors are close in cultural significance twin myths in which two antipode heroes appear: one personifies good, the other evil, one does good, the other does harm.

These are myths about wonderful creatures, about two twins. They often act as the ancestors of the tribe or cultural heroes. Among the Indians of North and South America, the myth of the ancestor brothers is associated with everything good or bad. The Egyptians are well known for the myth of the divine brother and sister - the spouses Osiris and Isis. The cult of twins can also be observed in African rituals: during the ritual, people symbolically paint the left and right sides of the body in different colors. Along with veneration, there is also a rite of killing twins, since it is believed that they embody dark forces and belong to the animal world.

Among the developed agrarian peoples, a significant place in their mythological systems is occupied by calendar myths(the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Aphrodite and Adonis, etc.), associated with a series of natural cycles. They reflected both the work of the farmer and the work of the cattle breeder, various methods of their professional activity, depending on the change of seasons, natural and climatic conditions, etc.

Often a myth accumulates stable, established ideas about the past, future, and even the present. The myth of the golden age, when people lived in complete harmony with nature, with each other and with themselves, has been popular for many centuries. Thinkers saw in him the embodiment of justice and the condition for the manifestation of the best human qualities.

Studies have shown that in the early stages of development, myths were primitive, short, elementary in plot and content. Later, mythology turned into an extended system of myths connected with each other, forming more complex branched cycles. This is how mythological systems developed, for example, ancient, ancient Slavic, Scandinavian and many others.

In the process of evolution of primitive society, forms of beliefs arose and developed, adequate to the new conditions of life. Religion has its roots in the depths of the primitive era.

Religionbegan to dominate the culture after the myth. The main thing in almost any religion is faith in God or faith in the supernatural, in a miracle, which is incomprehensible by reason, in a rational way. In this vein, all the values ​​of religion are formed. Religion establishes a gradation of values, gives them holiness and absoluteness.

Religion, as well as mythology and art, without solving spiritual and practical problems in a scientific way, removed them, creating an illusory world, thereby satisfying the needs of man. This was her illusory-compensatory function.

At the same time, it created a special worldview, a religious picture of the world in the mind of a person, thereby fulfilling worldview function.

And finally, religion corrected human behavior, streamlined the life of primitive society in terms of its norms and prescriptions. This manifested her regulatory function.

The cult of ancestors - veneration of the spirits of dead relatives - was one of the most common forms of primitive beliefs. It was believed that these spirits, evil and good, can influence people's lives. There were many ways in which they tried to propitiate the spirits of their ancestors and neutralize their evil will.

M. Eliade believes that the discovery of agriculture causes serious changes in cult symbolism. The mystical relationship with the animal world is replaced by a relationship with the plant world. Cereal products are used in various important religious events. Religious creativity was motivated not by the empirical phenomenon of agriculture, but by the mystery of birth, death and rebirth, revealed in the rhythm of plant life. That is why objects related to the processing and storage of grain are found earlier than the time of plant domestication and are found precisely in the sacred sphere.

Like his ancestors, the monkeys, ancient man depended on the forces of nature. However, his main difference from animals was that he was able to establish connections between various phenomena, which were more emotional, fantastic, and not logical.

Analyzing the problems of primitive culture, L. Levy-Bruhl notes several important circumstances:

1. For the consciousness of primitive man there is no purely physical fact - in the sense that we attach to this word, his thinking is fundamentally mystical.

2. In the perception of primitive man, the object is a single whole, not divided into, say, body and soul.

3. In the perception of primitive people, collective ideas, on which a mystical imprint is superimposed, are of great importance.

4. In the thinking of primitive man, mystical properties and relationships that are not given in experience come to the fore.

To characterize primitive thinking, Levy-Bruhl introduces the term " pralogical". One of the most important features of pralogical thinking is that it is not afraid of contradictions and treats them with indifference. In primitive thinking there is no absolutely clear distinction between subject and object. What happens inside primitive man and outside him is an inseparable integrity. Members of the community were aware of their unity with each other, which was expressed in totemism. Primitive people believed that they were associated with a certain animal or plant species.

This belief is the basis for the emergence of totemism. A group of blood relatives, which can be called totemic, formed a clan. totemism was the main form of religion of a similar tribal group (genus). As a rule, she was called by the name of her totem (animal or plant).

totemism- belief in a mysterious blood connection between certain groups of people and animals, plants or natural phenomena. Functionally, totemism was a way for a group of people to realize their unity, which was projected onto an external object of nature. With the advent of totemism, a boundary was drawn between "us" and "them". Thus, a key element of social self-identification was formed, which largely determined the paths for the further development of human culture.

Totemism played an important role in the development of primitive society. Its origin is closely connected with the economic activity of primitive man - gathering and hunting. Animals and plants, which gave people the opportunity to exist, became the object of worship. At the first stages of the development of totemism, such worship did not exclude, but even assumed the use of totem animals and plants for food. Over time, there was a demarcation between various totem groups. Formed tribalism: norms, traditions and customs apply only to villagers, but not to strangers.

Played an equally important role taboo closely related to the belief in totems. First of all, the ban was imposed on marriages between close relatives. In addition, there were other taboos. In essence, they were a set of rules according to which primitive people lived. Taboos extended to food, housing, norms of behavior, etc.

Animistic ideas (belief in spirits) appear, apparently, even before the advent of totemism. The term " animism" comes from the Latin anima - soul.

The founder of the theory of animism was the English researcher E.B. Tylor. His theory is as follows. Reflecting on such phenomena as, for example, dreams, primitive man came to the conclusion that there is a soul that can be separated from the body. Various objects and natural phenomena, in the environment of which a person lived, were also endowed with spirits that could both help people and harm them. Another prerequisite for the emergence of animism, according to Tylor, is that primitive man saw in the objects and phenomena of the world around him something similar to himself. The savage believed that since he himself has a soul, it means that everything else that surrounds him must also have it.

Animism- a form of primitive religion associated with belief in the soul and spirits, which all living beings, as well as objects and natural phenomena, allegedly possess. If all objects have a soul, then you can influence it and achieve the desired result for yourself. For this, magic tricks were used. In primitive culture, animism was a universal form of religious belief. It began the process of development of religious ideas, rites, rituals. Many cults are based on animistic beliefs. Animism as a belief in governing deities, in spirits and souls subordinate to them, in life after death, is the initial stage of a religious worldview, not structurally different from subsequent polytheism and monotheism.

There were significant differences between animism and totemism. Each tribe had its own totem. However, the Sun, the Moon, the forces and phenomena of nature existed for everyone. Primitive man believed that everything has a soul - from lightning and thunder to a river or a large tree.

Simultaneously with totemism and animism, magic(from rp. Mageia - witchcraft)- actions based on a person's belief in his ability to use symbolic actions (rituals, ceremonies, spells) to influence the natural course of events. Various types of magic have become widespread: industrial, commercial, protective, healing, harmful, etc.

Primitive man created amulets and talismans, idols. Often, only a sorcerer could deal with these magical items. Primitive people often dealt with a fetish without much ceremony. If, despite persistent reminder, the fetish did not bring the desired results, he was severely punished, as if it were a question of a delinquent living person. In cases where the fetish did not fulfill requests over and over again, it was simply thrown away and replaced with a new one.

Fetishism -a form of primitive religion associated with the veneration of inanimate objects, which were also endowed with supernatural powers and properties. Any object (a stone, a tree, a spring, a grove, a lake, a mountain, etc.) that aroused surprise or possessed an attractive power, was distinguished by beauty or ugliness, symbolic similarity, could become a fetish. But the form itself did not yet make the object a fetish. The main thing is how he was perceived, how they treated him, what they wanted from him.

In primitive thinking, ideas about a cause-and-effect relationship are already being formed. The first of these is that the cause of a certain misfortune is attributed to the fact that a taboo has been broken. In the second case, the misfortunes that fell on the head of the tribe are associated with the wrath of the ancestors or the machinations of some evil sorcerer. Fortune-telling and ordeal, poison tests help determine the cause of misfortunes.

Another important feature inherent in primitive thinking, according to Levy-Bruhl, is that for him nothing random exists, and cannot exist. The ideas of Lévy-Bruhl were rethought by the French explorer Claude Lévi-Strauss. He believed that primitive thinking is focused on mediating contradictions, and not on their removal.

Burials are among the ancient monuments of spiritual culture. Neanderthals buried their dead relatives. There are several versions about this:

1. Many scientists believe that Neanderthals believed that they have a soul and that it continues to exist after death (A. Bunsoni, G. Obermayer).

2. Others are somewhat skeptical about such assumptions. In their opinion, Neanderthals did not believe in the soul, but in the supernatural properties of the dead body itself, and therefore tried to get rid of it (M. Ebert).

3. Neanderthals did not understand what death is, and continued to take care of their dead brothers as if they were alive (I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov).

4. The most practical point of view: animals usually stay away from the rotting bodies of their relatives (except when eating carrion). Hence the desire of Neanderthals to bury dead bodies.

The funeral rite of Sinanthropus (Pithecanthropus pekinensis) was a complex and lengthy process. Scientists suggest that relatives after a certain time after death brought the body (or only the skull) to the cave. The brain was removed, after it was burned at the stake. Some researchers believe that the fire, as it were, returned the deceased to the Sun. The skull was either kept or buried under the hearth. According to existing hypotheses, in this way the deceased allegedly continued to live a heavenly and earthly life.

The Neanderthal burial of the Mousterian type (according to D. Lambert) can be interpreted as follows. The body of the deceased is located in a sleeping position: ancient people could consider death as a sound sleep, after which awakening is possible. The deceased lay along a strictly defined east-west axis. The face is turned to the south, under the head is a stone pillow. On the long journey, the tribesmen put pieces of fried meat, stone tools, horsetail bedding, flowers of medicinal plants.

Upper Paleolithic hunters took burial very seriously. The Aurignacian burial is considered a classic. The bottom of the grave is sprinkled with ocher. There are traces of a rich headdress. A figurine of a man, stone rings, stone disks were also found there. After laying the deceased down and placing various objects in the grave, the tribesmen sprinkled ocher on the body. According to researchers, ancient people attached great importance to ocher in the performance of rituals. It can be assumed that not all the dead were honored with the right of ritual burial. There are burials in which there are no gifts, some bodies are laid face down, littered with heavy stones. There are also dismembered bodies. It is likely that the tribesmen were afraid that the dead after death could harm them.

Many different monuments relating to that period have been preserved. The funerary cult became more complex and richer. Leaders, princes and kings took valuables and jewelry with them to the grave, they were accompanied by dead horses (sometimes people) to serve in the world of the dead. High mounds were piled over the burial place, monuments were erected.

Ordinary members of the tribe were buried much more modestly. At that time, the dead were often burned rather than buried. Apparently, it was believed that together with the fire, the dead person ascends to heaven faster. In the Bronze Age, people revered the Sun.

Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected]|| http://yanko.lib.ru || 1- Scanning and formatting: Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || [email protected]|| http://yanko.lib.ru || Icq# 75088656 || Library: http://yanko.lib.ru/gum.html || update 05/09/06 POPULAR HISTORICAL LIBRARY Edward Burnett Tylor MYTH AND RITE IN PRIMARY CULTURE Tylor EB = Myth and rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -1 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected]|| http://yanko.lib.ru || 2- POPULAR HISTORICAL LIBRARY Edward Burnett Tylor MYTH AND RITE IN PRIMARY CULTURE Tylor EB = Myth and rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -2624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected]|| http://yanko.lib.ru || 3- SMOLENSK "RUSICH" 2000 UDC 397 LBC 86.31 T14 The series was founded in 2000 Translated from English by D. A. Koropchevsky T 14 Tylor E. B. Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - 624 p. ill. - (Popular Historical Library). ISBN 5-8138-0161-8 The publication is a selection of pages from the famous work of one of the most prominent ethnographers and historians of the 19th century. E. B. Tylor "Primitive Culture" (1871). The book contains a huge amount of factual material on the primitive beliefs of the peoples of the world and acquaints the reader with the origins of religion, with the most ancient ideas and rituals of mankind, the remnants of which (“living evidence”, “monuments of the past”, as the author aptly defined) can be found in modern culture. For a wide range of readers. UDC 397 LBC 86.31 ISBN 5-8138-0161-8 © Compilation, word processing, notes and indexes. "Rusich", 2000 © Development and design of the series. "Rusich", 2000 Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -3624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 4- Electronic Table of Contents Electronic Table of Contents .................................................................. ................................................. .................................4 CONTENTS ............................... ................................................. ................................................. ...........................................5 Chapter I. SURVIVES IN CULTURE..................................5 ................................................. ...............................7 Sphinx........... ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. .....15 Athenian king Aegeus questioning the oracle .............................................. ................................................. ...............................17 Human sacrifice.................................................. ................................................. ....................................23 Chapter II MYTHOLOGY...... ................................................. ................................................. ....................25 Atlas with the globe on the shoulders....................... ................................................. ................................................. 27 Prometheus molds the first man out of clay .............................................. ................................................. ............28 African sorcerer .................................. ................................................. ................................................. ........40 Werewolf ........................................ ................................................. ................................................. .......................43 Hermes kills the hundred-eyed Argus....................... ................................................. .................................................46 Tezcatlipoca - one of the main deities of the Indians of Central America ..........49 The Egyptian goddess of the sky Nut absorbs and gives birth to the sun .............................. ................................................. .50 Hindu sun god Surya....................................... ................................................. .................................58 Chapter III. ANIMISM................................................. ................................................. ...................... ....64 Siberian shaman....................................... ................................................. ................................................. .....74 Penelope in a dream is her sister....................................... ................................................. ................................................75 The crossing of the soul of the deceased to the world of the dead (fragment of the painting of the ancient Greek lekythos, 5th century BC BC) ....... 105 Domovina - a tomb frame in which the Slavs put funeral food. Russia, 19th century ..............................108 While visiting family graves, the Chinese decorate them with flowers and eat cold snacks ..............109 Odysseus, who descended into the afterlife, talks with the shadow of the soothsayer Tiresias .......................................... 113 Judgment of Osiris in the afterlife ................................................. ................................................. .........................119 Spirit hunts emus in the afterlife. Australia................................................. .................................................128 Punishment of sinners in hell. Antique book illustration, China .............................................. ..............131 Chinese paper money for the souls of ancestors .............................. ....................136 Possession ............................... ................................................. ................................................. ..............................147 Old Russian amulets-pendants............. ................................................. ................................................. .....155 Salamander - the spirit of fire .......................................... ................................................. ...............................................172 Spirits of water ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. .........174 Gnomes - spirits of the earth's bowels .................................. ................................................. ...............................................179 Sacred Oak in the Prussian sanctuary Romov ....................................................... ................................................. ..180 Apis - the sacred bull of the ancient Egyptians.................................................. ................................................. ................183 Cat - a sacred animal Bast of the ancient Egyptians..... ................................................. ................................................184 Hanuman, the monkey king, builds a bridge between Ceylon and India...... ................................................. ..............185 The symbol of eternity is a snake biting its tail .............................. ................................................. ..................................186 Asclepius - the ancient Greek god of healing with a snake .............................. ................................................. ..........187 Trimurti - the trinity of the supreme gods of Hinduism: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva ............................ ......................190 Hindu god Indra - the lord of lightning ................ ................................................. ................................................196 Wotan - god of thunder of the ancient Germans.......... ................................................. .......................................198 Agni - the Hindu god of fire..... ................................................. ................................................. .................................. 203 Mithras trampling the bull .......................... ................................................. ................................................. .........208 Selena - goddess of the moon of the ancient Greeks.................................. ................................................. ......................210 Chapter IV. RITES AND CEREMONIES ............................................................... ................................................. ...213 Human sacrifices among the Maya .............................................. ................................................. ................220 Conclusion .................................. ................................................. ................................................. ..............243 NOTES............................... ................................................. ................................................. ....248 Chapter 1....................................... ................................................. ................................................. ....................................248 Chapter 2..... ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ...............................248 Chapter 3............. ................................................. ................................................ ................................................. ...............................251 Chapter 4............... ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ..................................256 INDEX OF ETHNONYMS .............................................. ................................................. ....................................258 NAME INDEX .............................. ................................................. ................................................. ..................266 CONTENTS............................... ................................................. ................................................. .......274 Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -4624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 5- CONTENTS Chapter I. Survivals in culture Survival and superstition.- Children's games.- Gambling.- Old sayings.- Children's songs.- Proverbs.- Riddles. prejudice against the resurrection of drowned people......3 Chapter II. Mythology Mythological fiction, like all other manifestations of human thought, is based on experience. - The transformation of myth into allegory and history. - The study of myth in its actual existence and development among modern savage and barbarian peoples. nature.- Personification of the sun, moon and stars; waterspout; sand column; rainbow; waterfall; pestilence. - Analogy turned into myth and metaphor. - Myths about rain, thunder, etc. - The influence of language on the formation of a myth. Material and verbal personification.- Grammatical gender in relation to myth.- Proper names of objects in relation to myth.- Degree of mental development conducive to mythical fictions.- Teaching about werewolves.- Fantasy and fiction.- Natural myths, their origin, rules their interpretations.--Natural myths of higher savage societies, compared with kindred forms among barbarous and civilized peoples.--Heaven and earth as universal parents.--Sun and moon: eclipse and sunset in the form of a hero or a maiden swallowed up by a monster; the sun rising from the sea and descending into the underworld; the jaws of night and death; Symplegades; the eye of heaven, the eye of Odin and Gray.- The sun and the moon as mythical civilizers.- The moon, its impermanence, its periodic death and resurrection.- The stars, their generation.- Constellations, their place in mythology and astronomy.- Wind and storm.- Thunder.- Earthquake .............................................. .43 Chapter III. Animism Religious concepts exist in general among primitive human societies. - The 620 denial of religious concepts is often confused and misunderstood. - The definition of the minimum of religion. - The doctrine of spiritual beings, here called animism. - Animism, divided into two sections: the doctrine of the soul and the doctrine of other spirits. - The doctrine of souls, its distribution and definition among primitive societies. - The definition of ghosts, or ghosts. - The doctrine of souls as a theoretical representation of primitive philosophy, designed to explain phenomena now included in the field of biology, especially life and death, health and disease, sleep and dreams, ecstasy and visions. - Relationship of the soul by name and nature to shadow, blood and breath. the absence of souls in sleepers and ghost-seers.- The theory of visits by other souls.- Ghosts of the dead, which are alive.- Doubles and ghosts. - The soul retains the shape of the body and is mutilated along with it. - The voice of the spirits. - The concept of the soul as something material. - Sending souls to serve others in a future life through funeral sacrifices of wives, servants, etc. - Souls of animals , their departure to another life during funeral sacrifices. - The souls of plants. - The souls of objects, sending them to the next world during funeral sacrifices. - The relationship of the primitive doctrine of the souls of objects to the Epicurean theory of ideas. - The historical development of the doctrine of souls, starting from the ethereal soul primitive biology to the immaterial soul of modern theology. - The doctrine of the existence of the soul after death. - Its main divisions: the transmigration of souls and the future life. - Transmigration of souls: rebirth in the form of a person or animals, transitions into plants and inanimate objects. - The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is expressed weakly in the religion of savages. - Future life: a common, though not universal, belief among primitive societies. - Future life is rather continuation of existence, not immortality. - Secondary death of the soul. - The ghost of the deceased remains on earth, especially with an unburied body. - Attachment to the mortal remains of the body. - Festivities in honor of the dead. - Wandering of the soul to the land of the dead. the land of the dead appears to lie in the west. - Realization of religious concepts that are current in primitive and civilized theology in stories about 621 visits to the country of spirits, - Localization of the future life. - Its remote areas on earth: earthly paradise, islands of the blessed. stars. - Sky. - The historical course of beliefs in such localization. - The nature of the future life. - The theory of the continuation of existence, which is apparently original, belongs mainly to primitive societies. - Transitional theories. - The theory of retribution, obviously a derivative, belongs mainly to civilized peoples. - The doctrine of moral retribution, developed in a higher culture. - Their practical influence on the feelings and mode of action of the human race. - Animism, developing from the doctrine of souls into a broader doctrine of spirits, becomes the philosophy of natural religion. - The concept of spirits is similar to the idea of ​​souls and, obviously, derived from it. - Transitional state: categories of souls passing into good and evil demons.- Honoring the shadows of the dead.- Teaching about the infusion of spirits into the bodies of people, animals, plants and inanimate objects. Fetishism.- The incorporation of disease-producing spirits.- Spirits that hold on to the mortal remains of the body.- A fetish formed by a spirit that is embodied in, associated with, or acts through an object.- Analogues Taylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -5624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 6- fetishism in modern science.- Veneration of stones and pieces of wood.- Idolatry.- Remains of animistic phraseology in modern language.- Decline of the animistic doctrine of nature. good or evil geniuses.- Spirits that appear in dreams and visions: nightmares, brownies and kikimoras (incubi and succubus).- Vampires. Spirits for which materiality is recognized. - Guardian spirits and household spirits. - Spirits of nature; development of the doctrine about them. - Spirits of volcanoes, whirlpools, rocks. - Worship of waters: spirits of wells, streams, lakes, etc. - Worship of trees: spirits embodied or living in trees, spirits of groves and forests. - Worship of animals: animals , serving as objects of worship either directly or as the embodiment of deities. - Totemism. - The cult of snakes. - Species deities; their relation to the ideas of prototypes - arche622 types. - The highest deities of polytheism. - Human properties applied to a deity. - The highest persons of the spiritual hierarchy. - Polytheism: the course of its development at the highest and lowest stages of the development of culture. the concept of their meaning and functions.- God of the sky.- God of rain.- God of thunder.- God of the wind.- God of the earth.- God of water.- God of the sea.- God of fire.- God of the sun.- God of the moon.... .................................... 129 Chapter IV. Rites and ceremonies Religious rites: their practical and symbolic meaning. - Prayers: the continuous development of this rite from the lowest to the highest levels of culture. - Sacrifices: the original theory of gifts evolves into the theories of honoring and renunciation, - The manner in which sacrifices are accepted by the deity. - Material transfer of sacrifices to the elements, fetish animals and priests. - Consumption of the substance of sacrifices by a deity or idol. - Blood offering, - The transfer of sacrifices through fire, - Smoking. - Spiritual transfer: the consumption or transfer of the soul of the sacrifices. - Motives for sacrifices. - Transition from the theory of gifts to the theory of honoring: insignificant and formal offerings; sacrificial feasts. - Theory of renunciation. - Sacrifice of children. - Substitution in sacrifices: the offering of a part instead of the whole, the life of a lower being instead of the life of a higher one; offering likenesses.-Modern remnants of sacrifices in folk beliefs and religion.-Fasting as a means of inducing ecstatic visions. - Forms of fasting in the history of the development of society. - Medicinal substances for inducing ecstasy. - Fainting and seizures caused for religious purposes. - Turning to the east and west. funerals, prayer, and the building of temples.- Purification by fire and water.- Transition from material to symbolic purification.- Associating it with various occasions of life.- Purification in primitive societies. - Religious purification practiced at the highest levels of culture .............................................................. 475 Conclusion ................................................. ...............................547 Note.................... ................................................. ................567 Index of ethnonyms .................................. .........................................587 Index of names...... ................................................. ................604 Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -6 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 7- Chapter I. RELIEFS IN CULTURE □ Survival and superstition. □ Children's games. □ Gambling. □ Old sayings. □ Children's songs. □ Proverbs. □ Riddles. □ Meaning and survivals of customs: wishes when sneezing, sacrifices when laying buildings, prejudices against reviving drowned people. When a custom, habit, or opinion is sufficiently widespread, it is like a stream which, once having carved a channel for itself, continues its course for ages. We are dealing here with the persistence of culture. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that the changes and upheavals in human history allow so many small streams to continue flowing for so long. In the Tatar steppes 600 years ago it was considered a crime to step on the threshold and touch the ropes at the entrance to the tent. This view seems to have survived to this day. 18 centuries before our time, Ovid mentions the popular prejudice of the Romans against marriages in May, which he explains, not without reason, by the fact that the funeral rites of Lemuralia fell on this month: 3 Virgins and widows alike avoid marriage unions This time. In May, marriage threatens with early death, This is what the people express with a saying known to you: Only take an evil wife in May for yourself. The belief that marriages entered into in May are unhappy lives in England to this day. Here we have a striking example of how a well-known idea, the meaning of which has disappeared many centuries ago, continues to exist only because it once existed. One can find thousands of examples of this kind. The stability of survivals allows us to assert that the civilization of the people in which such survivals are found is the product of some more ancient state, in which one should look for explanations of customs and beliefs that have become incomprehensible. Thus, collections of such facts should serve as the subject of development as mines of historical knowledge. When dealing with such material, one must be guided primarily by observation of what is happening now. History, on the other hand, must explain to us why old customs are preserved in the environment of a new culture, which, of course, could not give birth to them, but should, on the contrary, strive to supplant them. What direct observation gives us is shown by at least the following example. The Dayaks in Borneo did not have the custom of cutting wood, as we do, with a notch in the form of a U. When the whites, among other innovations, brought this method with them, the Dayaks expressed their dislike for the innovation by imposing a fine on any of their who began to cut wood according to the European model. The native lumberjacks, however, were so well aware of the superiority of the new method that they would use it secretly if they were sure that others would keep silent about it. That was 20 years ago, and it is very likely that the foreign way of logging could cease to be an insult to Dayak conservatism. However, a strict prohibition prevented him from establishing himself. We have here a striking example of a survival, which is maintained by virtue of 4 great-grandfather's authority, in direct defiance of common sense. Such a course of action might, as usual, and with good reason, be called superstition. This name generally fits a considerable number of survivals, such as those that can be collected by the hundreds from books on folk traditions and on so-called occultism. However, the word "superstition" at present has the meaning of reproach. For the purposes of the ethnographer, it would be desirable to introduce such a term as "survival". This term should serve as a simple designation of a historical fact, which the word "superstition" can no longer be. To this category of facts must be placed, as private survivals, many cases where much of the old custom has been preserved to make it possible to recognize its origin, although the custom itself, having taken a new form, has been so applied to new circumstances that it continues to take its place. by virtue of its own importance. With this view of things, it would only in a few cases be fair to call the games of children in modern Europe superstitions, although many of them are survivals, and sometimes wonderful. When we consider the games of children and adults from the point of view of the ethnological conclusions that can be drawn from them, what strikes us first of all in these games is the fact that many of them are a playful imitation of the serious business of life. Just as today's children play at dinner, horseback riding and going to church, so the main childish pastime of the savages Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -7624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 8- there is an imitation of things that children will seriously engage in a few years later. Thus, their games serve as real lessons for them. The games of the Eskimo children consist in shooting at targets with small bows and in building little huts out of snow, which they light with the remnants of the lamps begged from their mothers. Small Australian children use miniature boomerangs and spears as toys. Their fathers retained an extremely primitive way of obtaining wives by forcibly taking them away from their native tribe, and so the game of “bride stealing” was noticed among the most common games among native boys and girls. Play, however, usually survives the serious occupation it serves as an imitation of. A clear example of such an experience is provided by the bow and arrow. We find this ancient and widespread weapon at the stage of savagery in both barbarian and ancient culture. We can trace it back to the Middle Ages. But at the present time, when we look at a gathering of shooters, or when we drive through the villages at that time of the year when children have the most toy bows and arrows, we see that the ancient weapon, which among the few savage tribes still plays a deadly role in hunting and in battle, has become a mere relic, a toy. The crossbow, a comparatively later and local improvement of the ordinary bow, has survived in practical use even less than the bow, but as a toy it exists throughout Europe and, apparently, will remain in use. According to antiquity and extensive distribution in various eras - from savagery to antiquity and the Middle Ages - along with a bow and arrows there is a sling. But in the Middle Ages it fell out of use as a practical weapon, and the poets of the 15th century. in vain point to the art of wielding a sling as one of the exercises of a good soldier: Practice throwing stones with a sling or hand: This can often come in handy when there is nothing else to shoot with. Men clad in steel cannot stand when stones are thrown in multitude and force; And the stones are indeed everywhere, And it is not difficult to carry slings with you. An example of the economic use of throwing tools, which are akin to a sling, within the civilized world, can perhaps be found only among the shepherds of Spanish America. They are said to throw their lasso or bola so skillfully that they can seize the animal by any of the horns and turn it as they please. But the use of the sling, that crude ancient weapon, has survived chiefly in the games of the boys, who here again are, as it were, representatives of the ancient culture. Just as the games of our children preserve the memory of primitive military techniques, they sometimes reproduce ancient stages of cultural history dating back to the childhood period in the history of mankind. English children, who amuse themselves by imitating the cry of animals, and New Zealanders, who play their favorite game, imitating in a chorus the screech of a saw or a plane, and the shots of a gun and other tools, making the noise inherent in various instruments, equally resort to the element of imitation, which was so important in language education. When we study the ancient history of the number system and see how one tribe after another learned to count, going through the primitive numbering on the fingers, this is of known ethnographic interest for us, as it gives an idea of ​​the origin of the most ancient numbering. The New Zealand game of "tee" consists, they say, in counting on the fingers, and one of the players must name a known number and at the same time immediately touch the corresponding finger. In the Samoan game, one of the players sticks out several fingers, and his opponent must immediately repeat the same, otherwise he loses. It may be native Polynesian games or games borrowed from our children. In the English children's game, the child learns to say how many fingers the nanny shows him, and a certain formula of the game is repeated: "Buk, beech, how many horns have I raised?" The game in which one raises his fingers and the others must raise exactly the same is mentioned by Strutt. We can see little schoolchildren on the streets playing the guessing game, where one of them stands behind and holds up a certain number of fingers, and the other has to guess how many. It is interesting to note the wide distribution and antiquity of these empty amusements, about which we read in Petronius the Arbiter, a writer of the time of Nero, the following: “Trimalchio, in order not to seem upset by the loss, 7 kissed the boy and ordered him to sit on his back. The boy immediately jumped on top of him and hit him on the shoulder with his hand, laughing and shouting: "Buka, buka, how many are there?" Simple counting games on fingers should not be confused with the game of addition, where each of the players plays Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. -8 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 9- puts his hand. It is necessary to name the sum of the exposed fingers; whoever says it correctly wins. In fact, everyone is in a hurry to name the number of fingers before they see the hand of their opponent, so the art of the game consists mainly in guessing quickly. This game is a constant pastime in China, where it is called "guess how much", and in Southern Europe, where it is known in Italy, for example, under the name "morra", and in France - under the name "murre". Such an original game could hardly have been invented twice, in Europe and Asia, and since the Chinese name does not indicate its antiquity, we may consider it probable that Portuguese merchants introduced it to China as well as to Japan. The Egyptians, judging by the names, also had some kind of finger game in use, and the Romans had their own game, mikare digitis, which was played by butchers with their usual customers for pieces of meat. It is difficult to say whether it was "morra" or some other games. When Scottish guys take each other by the crest and say: "Do you want to be mine?" - they are unaware of the old symbolic custom of taking into feudal allegiance, which continues with them as a survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction, which, as is known, was used in the domestic life of many primitive or ancient tribes, and which is already preserved among the modern Hindus as a time-honored method of lighting a pure sacrificial fire, exists in Switzerland in the form of a toy. With his help, children light a fire as a joke, as the Eskimos would do it seriously. In Gotland, people still remember how the ancient sacrifice of a wild boar has in modern times turned into a game in which young boys dressed up in fancy dress, inked and painted their faces. The victim was represented by a boy wrapped in fur and placed on a bench, with a bunch of straw in his mouth, which was supposed to represent the bristles of a boar. One of the innocent children's games of our time has a strange connection with an ugly fairy tale that is more than a thousand years old. In France, they play it like this: children stand in a circle, one of them lights a folded piece of paper and passes it to his neighbor, saying “Alive, alive, smoking room”, and he passes it on, and so on around the circle. Everyone pronounces these words and passes the burning piece of paper as soon as possible, because whoever has it goes out must give the phantom, after which it is announced that "the smoking room has died." Grimm mentions a similar game in Germany, where they play with a lighted splinter, and Gallivel gives children's poems that are said at this game in England: Jack is alive and in good health, Beware that he does not die in your hands. Those familiar with ecclesiastical history are well aware that the favorite polemical device of the adherents of the mainstream faith was the accusation of heretical sects that they performed the sacraments of their religion in the form of disgusting orgies. The pagans told these stories about the Jews, the Jews about the Christians, and the Christians themselves achieved a sad excellence in the art of attacking their religious opponents, whose moral life actually often seemed to be extremely pure. The Manicheans in particular were the subject of such attacks, which were later directed at the sect whose followers were considered the successors of the Manicheans. We are talking about the Paulicians, whose name reappears in the Middle Ages in connection with the name of the Cathars. These latter were called boni homines ("good people"), and this name later became the common name of the Albigensians. Obviously, the ancient Paulicians aroused the hatred of orthodox Christians by rebelling against icons and calling their worshipers idolaters. Around 700, John of Osun, the patriarch of Armenia, wrote a denunciation against this sect, which contains an accusation of a real anti-Manichean type, but with a certain peculiarity that puts his story in a strange connection with the game we have just been talking about. Reporting that they blasphemously call the Orthodox "idolaters" and that they themselves worship the sun, he claims that they, moreover, mix wheat flour with the blood of children and partake of it. “When they kill the boy, the first-born of their mother, with the most painful death, they throw him to each other in turn, and in whose hands the child dies, they pay respect to him, as a person who has reached the highest dignity in the sect.” How to explain the coincidence of these terrible details? It is unlikely that this game was inspired by the legend of the Paulicians. The most probable assumption is that this game was as well known to the children of the 8th century as it is today, and that the Armenian patriarch simply used it. He accused the Paulicians of seriously doing the same thing to living children that the guys did to the symbolic smoking room. We are in a position to trace another interesting group of games that have survived as a remnant of an area of ​​savage worldview that once held an important place, but now deservedly came into Tylor E. B. = Myth and Rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. --9 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 10 - decline. Gambling is closely related to the art of divination, already known to savages, and perfectly shows how what was once taken seriously can degenerate into a comic relic. For a modern educated person, to cast lots or a coin means to rely on chance, that is, on the unknown. The solution of the question is left to a mechanical process, which in itself has nothing supernatural or even extraordinary, but which is so difficult to follow that no one can accurately predict its outcome. However, we know that this was not at all the idea of ​​chance that was characteristic of antiquity. It had little in common with the mathematical theory of probability, and very much in common with sacred divination,10 and was akin, to take an example from later times, to the custom of the Moravian brethren to choose wives for their young men by casting lots with prayer. The Maori did not have in mind a blind chance when casting lots to find a thief among suspected people, as did the Guinean negroes when they went to a fetish priest who shook a bunch of small strips of skin and made a sacred prediction. In Homer, the crowd prays to the gods with their hands raised to the sky, when the heroes draw lots from the hat of Atrid Agamemnon to find out who should go to battle with Hector, to help the well-armed Greeks. Praying to the gods and looking at them, the German priest or father of the family, according to the stories of Tacitus, took out three lots from the branches of a fruit tree scattered on clean white clothes, and interpreted the answer of the gods by their signs. Just as in ancient Italy the oracles gave answers by means of carved wooden lots, so the Hindus settled their disputes by casting lots in front of the temple and calling on the gods with cries: “Do us justice! Point out the innocent!" An uncivilized person thinks that the lot or the dice, when they fall, is not accidentally arranged according to the significance that he attaches to their position. He invariably tends to suggest that some spiritual beings are hovering over the fortuneteller or player, shuffling lots or turning dice to make them give answers. This view was firmly held in the Middle Ages, and even in recent history there is an opinion that gambling is not complete without supernatural intervention. About what change took place in the views on this issue at the end of the Middle Ages, some idea is given by a work published in 1619, which, apparently, itself contributed to this change in no small way. I am referring to the treatise On the Properties and Uses of Lots, where the author, Thomas Goethaker, a Puritan priest, among other objections to gambling refutes the following, very common in his time: the location of the lot proceeds directly from God... The lot, as they say, is a matter of God's special and immediate discretion; it is a sacred oracle, Divine judgment or sentence; therefore, to use it lightly is to abuse the name of God and thus violate the third commandment.” Getaker dismisses such views as mere superstition. It was, however, quite a long time before this opinion gained currency in the educated world. 40 years later, Jeremiah Taylor still expressed the old understanding of things, speaking in favor of gambling, if they go not for money, but for goodies. “I have heard,” he says, “from those who are skilled in these things, that there are very strange cases here: movements of the hand by inspiration, some divination tricks, constant gains on the one hand and inexplicable losses on the other. These strange accidents entail such terrible actions that it is not unbelievable that God allowed the devil to interfere in gambling, who makes everything bad out of them that he can. If the game is not played for money, he is not able to do anything. How tenacious this notion of supernatural interference with gambling, which still persists as a relic in Europe, is clearly shown by the flourishing and still thriving divination of players. The popular belief of our time continues to teach that for good luck in the game, you should bring with you an egg consecrated in the temple on Good Friday and that turning a chair entails turning happiness. The Tyrolean knows a conspiracy by which one can acquire from the devil the gift of a happy game of cards and dice. On the European continent, books are still in circulation that promise to teach how to find out the lucky number for the lottery from dreams, and the Serbian peasant even hides his lottery tickets under cover in the altar so that they can receive a blessing from the Holy Gifts and thus have a better chance. for a win. 12 Divination and gambling are so similar to each other that in both cases the same tools are used. This is evident from the very instructive accounts of the Polynesian manner of divination by Tylor E. B. = Myth and rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -10 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 11- spinning coconut. In the islands of Tonga, during the time of the Mariner, this fortune-telling was solemnly performed in order to find out if the sick person could recover. Previously, a prayer was loudly read to the patron god of the family that he directed the movement of the nut. The latter was then allowed in, and its position at the stop showed the will of God. In other cases, when a coconut was thrown just for fun, the prayer was not recited and no significance was attached to the results. This is where the serious and playful uses of this primordial spinning top come together. On the islands of Samoa, according to Turner, though later, the same actions pursued a different goal. The participants sit in a circle, a coconut is launched in the middle, and the oracle's answer is considered to refer to which way the underside of the nut is facing when it stops. It is not known whether the Samoans in the past used this divination to find a thief or for some other reason, but now they keep it simply as a lot and as a game of forfeits. In favor of the opinion that this custom was originally a serious divination, is evidenced by the fact that the New Zealanders, although they do not have coconuts, still have traces of the time when their ancestors in the tropical islands had these nuts and divined from them. The well-known Polynesian word "niu", i.e. coconut, is still used by the Maori to refer to other methods of divination, especially stick divination. R. Taylor, from whom this vivid example of ethnological evidence is taken, gives one more case. The method of divination here was to bring the hands together while the corresponding incantation was repeated. If the fingers passed freely, the prediction was considered favorable, if they were hooked, it was bad. When the question was whether it was possible to pass through the country during the war, the interpretation was very simple. If the fingers passed freely, then this foreshadowed a happy transition, if several fingers were delayed, then a meeting should have been expected, if all the fingers were delayed, then this meant the impossibility of passage. A similar connection between divination and gambling can be seen in simpler subjects. Take, for example, grandmas. They were used in ancient Rome for divination, and then they turned into rough dice. Even when the Roman player used the dice to play, he had to call on the gods before throwing the dice. Items of this kind are often found now in games. However, their use for divination was by no means limited to the ancient world. Babki are mentioned as early as the 17th century. among the objects by which young girls guessed about marriage, and Negro sorcerers still use bones as a means to detect thieves. The lot serves both these purposes equally well. The Chinese play dice for both money and dainties, but at the same time they are seriously looking for omens, solemnly drawing lots stored for this purpose in temples. They have professional fortunetellers always sitting in the markets to open the future to their customers. Cards are still used in Europe for divination. The ancient cards, known as the tarot, are said to be preferred by fortune-tellers to ordinary cards, because a deck of tarot cards, in which the figures are more numerous and more complex, gives more scope for a variety of predictions. History cannot tell us whether the original use of the cards was for divination or for playing. In this regard, the history of the Greek kottabos is instructive. This divination consisted in pouring wine from a glass into a metal bowl placed at some distance so as not to spill a single drop. The one who splashed out the wine, at the same time pronounced aloud or in his mind the name of his beloved, and by the transparency or cloudy color of the splashes from the wine falling on the metal, he found out what fate awaits him in love. Over time, this custom lost its magical character and became just a game in which dexterity is rewarded with a prize. If this case were typical, and if it could be proved that divination preceded the game, then gambling could be considered a relic of the corresponding methods of divination. Comic fortune-telling could turn into a serious game of chance. Looking for other examples of the durability of some of the customs that have become established among mankind, let's look at a group of traditional expressions, venerable in their antiquity - old sayings of particular interest as survivals. Even when the real meaning of these expressions has disappeared from the memory of people and they have lost all meaning or obscured by some later superficial meaning - even then the old sayings continue to be of great interest to us. We have heard the expression "buy a pig in a poke", i.e. "buy a thing without seeing it", from people who are not so familiar with the English language to understand the meaning of the word "bag". The real meaning of the phrase "to sow wild oats" seems to have been lost in its recent usage. No doubt this once meant that bad herbs would subsequently grow and that it would be difficult to eradicate them. As the parable speaks of an evil spirit, so the Scandinavian Loki2, the culprit of troubles, the Jutland proverb says that he sows oats, and the name "Loki's oats" corresponds among the Danes to the concept of "wild oats". Proverbs, the source of which was Taylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -11 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 12 A forgotten custom or legend is, of course, especially likely to be subjected to such misuse. The expression “unlicked cub,” about one who still has to take on a finished form, has become purely English. Meanwhile, only a few remember the explanation of these words in the story of Pliny. Its meaning is that bears are born blind, naked, clumsy "pieces of meat" and must be "licked into shape." In these proverbs, which are sometimes the relics of ancient magic and religion, one can sometimes find a deeper meaning than that which is put into them now, or find a real meaning in what now seems absurd. How a folk proverb can be the embodiment of an ethnographic memory, we see clearly from a Tamil proverb still known in South India. If one beats the other, and the third screams, then the Tamils ​​say about the screamer: “He is like a coravan who eats assafetida for his sick wife!” Coravans are a tribe in India and assafetida is a medicine. At present, the Koravans belong to the lower strata of the population in Madras. They say about the koravan that he is “a gypsy, a tramp, a donkey driver, a thief, that he eats rats, lives in matting huts, is engaged in divination and is generally a suspicious person.” The proverb is explained by the fact that native women generally use assafetida as a tonic after childbirth, while among Koravans, in this case, it is not the wife who eats it, but the husband. In fact, this is an example of a very common custom of "kuvada" when, after the birth of a woman, her husband undergoes treatment. Often he is even forced to go to bed for several days. The Koravans seem to be among those tribes who had this strange custom, and their more civilized Tamil neighbors, struck by its absurdity and not knowing its now forgotten meaning, turned it into a proverb. Let us try to apply the same kind of ethnographic key to the obscure expressions of our newest language. The English expression “the hair of the dog that bit you” was not at first either a metaphor or a joke, but a real recipe for a dog bite, one of the many examples of the ancient homeopathic teaching: what hurt you, so heal .. This is mentioned in the Scandinavian Edda: “ Dog hair cures dog bites. The expression "to catch up with the wind" is now used by the English in a humorous sense, but once it quite seriously meant one of the most frightening witches' actions, once attributed especially to 16 Finnish sorcerers. English sailors still have not forgotten their fear of their power to command the storm. The ancient rite of ordeals, which consisted of walking through a fire or jumping over a burning fire, was so firmly established in the British Isles that Jamison derived from this rite the English proverb "to drag over the fire," meaning trial, trial. This explanation does not seem to be a stretch at all. Not so long ago, an Irish woman in New York was tried for killing her child: she put it on burning coals to find out if it was really her child or a changeling. An English nurse who says to a capricious child: “You got out of bed today on your left foot,” usually does not know the meaning of this saying. She is quite satisfied with the popular belief that getting out of bed with your left foot means having a bad day. This is one of many examples of a simple association of ideas, connecting the concept of right and left with the concept of good and evil. Finally, the expression "draw the line" seems to go back to a number of well-known legends, where a person makes a pact with the devil, but at the last minute gets rid of him either thanks to the intercession of a saint, or through some kind of ridiculous trick, like humming the words of the Gospel, who gave the word not to read, or refuses to fulfill the contract after the fall of the leaves under the pretext that the stucco leaves in the church are still on the branches. One of the forms of a medieval pact with a demon was that for teaching students his black art, instead of a teacher's salary, the devil had the right to take one of the students for himself, letting them all run to save their lives and grabbing the last one - a story that obviously had a connection with another folk proverb: "Damn the one who is behind everyone." But even in this game, one can draw a quick-witted line, as popular belief in Spain and Scotland says, in the legends of the Marquis de Villano and the Count of Soutesca, who studied at the magic schools of the devil in Salamanca and Padua. The dexterous apprentice leaves his shadow to his mentor as the last of the fugitives, and the devil must be content with this immaterial payment, while the new magician remains free and only loses his shadow forever. It seems possible to admit that popular belief is closest to its source where a more important and more sublime significance is attributed to it. Thus, if any old verse or Tylor EB = Myth and rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -12 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 13 - the proverb in one place has an exalted meaning and refers to philosophy or religion, and in other places it is at the level of a children's saying, then there is some reason to consider the serious meaning more primitive, and the comic meaning a mere relic of antiquity. If this argument is not always true, then it should not be completely neglected. In the Jewish religion, for example, two poems are preserved, usually placed at the end of the Passover service in Hebrew and English. One of them, known as “Khad gad” I, begins with the words: “A goat, a goat, which my father bought for two coins.” Then follows a story about how a cat came and ate a goat, a dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the end. “Then the only saint appeared - blessed be he! - and killed the angel of death, and the angel of death killed the butcher, the butcher killed the bull, the bull drank the water, the water flooded the fire, the fire burned the stick, the stick killed the dog , the dog bit the cat, the cat ate the goat that my father bought for two coins. This work is taken by some Jews as a parable relating to the past and future of the Holy Land.According to one of the explanations, Palestine (the goat) was devoured by Babylon (the cat), Babylon was ravaged by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome, until finally the Turks took possession of the country. The Edomites (that is, the European peoples) will drive out the Turks, the angel of death will destroy the enemies of Israel, and the kingdom of his sons will be restored under the rule of the messiah. still retaining some of its original form, and that it appeared to express some mystical idea.If so, then the well-known children's tale in England about the old woman who could not reach her goat (or pig) from behind the fence and did not want to return until the very midnight, must be considered a distorted adaptation of this old Hebrew poem.Another work is a verse numbering and begins like this: Who knows one? - I (said Israel) know one. There is one God in heaven and on earth. Who knows two? - I (said Israel) know two: Two tablets of commandments; but one is our God in heaven and on earth. And so on, increasing all the way to the last, next verse: Who knows thirteen? - I (said Israel) know thirteen: thirteen divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments, nine months before the birth of a child, eight days before circumcision, seven days of the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the Law, four foremothers, three patriarch, two tables of commandments, but one is our God in heaven and on earth. This is one of a whole series of poetic numberings, which, apparently, were very much appreciated by medieval Christians, since they are still not completely forgotten in the villages. One old Latin edition says: “There is one God”, etc. And one of the English versions that still exists now begins with the words: “One is completely alone and will forever remain alone” - and continues to count to twelve: “twelve - twelve apostles ". Here both the English and Hebrew forms are or were of a serious nature, and although it is possible that the Jews imitated the Christians, the more serious nature of the Hebrew poem here again makes one think that it appeared earlier. The old proverbs, inherited by our modern language, are far from meaningless in themselves,19 because their wit is often as fresh and their wisdom as stable as of old. But, having these practical qualities, proverbs are also instructive in their significance in ethnography. But their scope in civilization is limited. Apparently, they are almost non-existent among the most primitive tribes. They first appear in a definite form only in some of the fairly high-ranking savages. The inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, who until a few years ago were in what archaeologists might call the Late Stone Age, have some very characteristic proverbs. They laugh at the lack of consideration, saying, "The Nakondo (tribe) cut down the mast first" (that is, before they build the boat). When some poor man looks enviously at a thing that he cannot buy, they say: "He sits in the calm and looks out for fish." One of the New Zealand proverbs describes the lazy glutton as follows: "Deep throat, but shallow strength." Another says that the lazy one often uses the work of the industrious: “Large chips from a strong tree go to the couch potato,” and the third expresses the truth that “you can see the curvature of the stem, but you cannot see the curvature of the heart.” Among the Basotho of South Africa, the proverb "Water does not get tired of flowing" is given as a reproach to talkers, the proverb "Lions roar when they eat" means that there are people who are never satisfied with anything. "The month of sowing is the month of headache" - it is said about those who shirk from work. "The thief eats thunderbolts" - means that the thief himself incurs the punishment of heaven. Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -13 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 14- The peoples of West Africa are so strong in terms of proverbs that Captain Burton, during the rainy season, amused himself in Fernando Po by compiling a whole volume of native proverbs, hundreds of which are on the same high level as European proverbs. The proverb “He left the sword and got caught in the sheath” is just as good as our sayings “From the frying pan to the fire” or “From the fire to the frying pan”. The Negro proverb, "He whose only eyebrow serves as a bow, can never kill an animal," if not so elegant, is certainly more picturesque than the English one, "A rude word does not break bones." The old Buddhist aphorism "A man who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes from the leeward side: the ashes fly back and cover him from head to toe" is expressed less prosaically and with more wit in the Negro proverb "The ashes fly back in the face of the one who throws him." When someone tries to settle a case in the absence of those to whom it directly relates, the Negroes will say: "You cannot shave a man's head when he is not here." To explain that the master cannot be blamed for the stupidity of his servants, they say: "The rider is not yet stupid because the horse is stupid." A hint of ingratitude is expressed in the proverb "The sword does not know the head of the blacksmith" (who made it) and even stronger in the proverb "When the gourd saved them (during the famine), they said: cut it off to make a cup out of it." The usual contempt for the poor man's mind is vividly shown in the saying "When a poor man makes a proverb, it does not go far." At the same time, the very mention of composing proverbs as a completely possible thing shows that the art of composing proverbs is still alive among them. Africans transported to the West Indies retained this art, as can be seen from the proverbs “If the dog goes behind, she is a dog, and if in front, she is a mistress-dog”, “Every hut has its mosquitoes”. Over the course of history, the proverb has not changed its character, retaining its precisely defined type from beginning to end. Proverbs and sayings recorded among the advanced peoples of the world number in the tens of thousands and have their own well-known extensive literature. But although the area of ​​existence of proverbs and sayings extends to the highest levels of civilization, this can hardly be said about their development. At the level of European medieval culture, of course, they played a very important role in the education of the people, but the period when they were created, apparently, has already come to an end. Cervantes raised the art of proverb to a height beyond which it had never gone, but it must not be forgotten that the sayings of the incomparable Sancho were for the most part inherited. 21 Even at that time, proverbs were already a relic of the former society. In this form, they continue to exist in our time, and we use almost the same remnants of great-grandfather's wisdom that made up the inexhaustible supply of the famous squire. Nowadays, it is not easy to remake old sayings or make up new ones. We may collect old proverbs and use them, but composing new ones would be a feeble, lifeless imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new children's songs. Riddles appear in the history of civilization along with proverbs and go along with them for a long time, but then diverge along different paths. By a riddle, we mean those problems built in the old fashion, to which a completely serious answer must be given, and not at all a modern, usually reduced to an empty joke, wordplay in the traditional form of a question and answer. A typical example is the riddle of the Sphinx. The original riddles that can be called meaningful originated with the higher savages, and their heyday is in the lower and middle stages of civilization. Although the development of such Ancient Greek king Oedipus was the first to solve the famous riddle proposed by a mysterious creature with the body of a winged lion and the head of a woman, guarding the path to Thebes. According to the myth, the Sphinx asked every passerby the question: “What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” Those who did not answer her question were killed by the Sphinx. Oedipus answered her that this is the man himself, who crawls on all fours as a child, stands on his feet as an adult, and leans on a stick in old age. Hearing the correct answer, the Sphinx jumped off the cliff and crashed. 22 Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -14 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 15- The Sphinx of riddles stops at this level, but many ancient examples of them are still kept in our children's fairy tales and in rural life. It is quite understandable why riddles refer only to the highest levels of primitive culture. To compose them, it is necessary to have a good command of the ability of abstract comparison. In addition, a significant stock of knowledge is needed for this process to become publicly available and move from a serious game to a game. Finally, at a higher level of culture, the riddle begins to be considered an empty business, its development stops, and it is saved only for children's play. A few examples, taken from the riddles of various societies, from the most savage to the most cultured, will more accurately indicate the place that riddles occupy in the history of the human mind. The following specimens are taken from a collection of Zulu riddles written down together with ingenuous native interpretations concerning the philosophy of the subject. Question: "Guess who are those people who are many and who are standing in a row: they are dancing a wedding dance and dressed in white elegant dresses?" Answer: These are teeth. We call them people standing in a row, because the teeth stand like people who have prepared for a wedding dance in order to better perform it. When we say that they are dressed in white elegant dresses, we say this so that it would not be possible to immediately think that these are teeth, we distract from the thought of teeth by indicating that these are people dressed in white elegant dresses. Question: “Guess who doesn’t go to bed at night, but goes to bed in the morning and sleeps until sunset, then wakes up and works all night, guess who doesn’t work during the day and who no one sees when he works?” Answer: Barnyard fence. Question: “Guess who is the person whom people do not like for his laughter, because they know that his laughter is a great evil and that after it there are always tears and joys end. People are crying, trees are crying, grass is crying - everyone is crying in the tribe where he laughs. Of whom do they say that a man who usually does not laugh laughed? Answer: Fire. He is called "man" so that it would be impossible to immediately guess what is being said, since this is hidden behind the word "man". People name many things, vying with each other looking for the meaning and forgetting the omen; A riddle is good when it cannot be guessed right away. Among the Basotho, riddles are a necessary part of education and are offered as an exercise to a whole company of children puzzling over them. Question: "Do you know what is thrown from the top of a mountain and does not break?" Answer: Waterfall. Question: "Who walks agile, without legs and without wings, and whom neither mountain, nor river, nor wall can stop?" Answer: Voice. Question: "What are ten trees called with ten flat pebbles at the top?" Answer: fingers. Question: “Who is that little, motionless, mute boy who is warmly dressed during the day and naked at night?” Answer: A nail for hanging a night dress. From East Africa, let's take as an example the riddle of the Swahili tribe. Question: “My chicken is lying in the thorn bush, who is it?” Answer: Pineapple. From West Africa, the riddle of the Yoruba tribe. Question: "Who is this long, thin merchant who never goes to the market?" Answer: "Boat" (it stops at the pier). In Polynesia, the Samoan islanders are very fond of riddles. Question: "Who are the four brothers who always carry their father on them?" Answer: "A Samoan pillow, which consists of bamboo sticks three inches long, resting on four legs." Question: “What is it - a gray-haired man stands over the fence and reaches the very sky?” Answer: "Smoke from the chimney." Question: "What is it - a person stands between two gluttonous fish?" Answer: language. (The Zulus have a riddle similar to this one, in which the tongue is likened to a man living among fighting enemies.) Here are the old Mexican riddles. Question: “What are those ten Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -15 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 16 stones that everyone has? Answer: Nails. Question: "What is it - where we enter with three doors, and exit with one?" Answer: shirt. Question: "Who goes through the valley and drags his entrails with him?" Answer: Needle. These riddles, found among primitive tribes, do not in the least differ in their character from those that have found their way, sometimes in a somewhat renewed form, into the children's fairy tales of Europe. So, Spanish children still ask: “What dish of nuts is removed for the day, and scattered at night?” (Stars). The English proverb about tongs ("Long legs, crooked hips, small head and no eyes") is so primitive that a Pacific Islander could have composed it. Here is a riddle on the same subject as one of the Zulu riddles: “A flock of white sheep is grazing on a red hill; they walk here, they walk there; are they still worth it now? Another is very similar to the Aztec riddle: “Grandma Twitchette had only one eye and a long tail that fluttered, and every time she passed over the pit, she left a piece of her tail in a trap. What is this?" The composition of riddles is connected to such a degree with the mythological period in history that any poetic comparison, if it is not very obscure and remote, with a certain slight rearrangement, can become a riddle. The Hindus call the sun Santashva, i.e., "riding on seven horses," and the same idea lies in the old Germanic riddle, which asks: "What wagon are drawn by seven white and seven black horses?" (A year that is carried by seven days and seven nights of the week.) This is the same Greek riddle about two sisters, Day and Night: "Two sisters, of which one gives birth to the other and, in turn, will be born from her." Such is the mystery of Cleobulus, which reflected the features of primitive mythology: A father of one has twelve sons, who gave birth to Every thirty virgins, having a double appearance. White one at a glance, the other is black. They are all immortal, although their death awaits. Such questions can now be guessed just as easily as in the old days, and must be distinguished from that rarer class of riddles, for the solution of which some dissimilar events must be guessed. A typical example of such riddles is the riddle of Samson and one Scandinavian riddle similar to it. The point is that Hestr found a duck sitting on its nest in the horned skull of a bull, and then proposed a riddle describing, using a purely Norman metaphor, a bull whose horns were supposedly already turned into wine cups. Here is the text of the riddle: “The long-nosed goose has grown strongly, rejoicing at its chicks. He collected wood to build a dwelling. The chicks were protected by herbal incisors (jaws with teeth), and a sonorous drinking vessel (horn) hovered above. Many of the answers of the ancient oracles present difficulties of exactly the same kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle, who ordered Temen to find a man with three eyes to lead the army, and Temen fulfilled this command by meeting a crooked man on horseback. Curiously, this idea is found again in Scandinavia, where Odin proposes a riddle to King Heidrek: "Who are the two who look like a creature with three eyes, ten legs and one tail?" And the king replied that it was the one-eyed god Odin himself riding his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. The close connection between the doctrine of survivals and the study of manners and customs is constantly revealed in ethnographic research. And it seems hardly too bold to say once and for all that customs now meaningless are survivals, and that where these customs first arose they had a practical or at least ritual significance, although at the present time, having been transferred to a new environment in which their original meaning is lost, they have become absurd. Of course, new customs introduced at a certain time may be funny or stupid. Taylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -16 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 17- The Athenian king Aegeus, questioning the oracle 26 us, but still they have their own motives that can be recognized. It is this method, which consists in referring to some forgotten meaning, that seems to generally best explain the dark customs, which some seemed to be the manifestation of stupidity. A certain Zimmermann, who published in the last century the ponderous Geographical History of Mankind, remarks on the predominance of such senseless and stupid customs in various distant lands as follows: probably, taking into account the much greater number of fools and stupid heads, that some similar stupidity could be introduced in two countries far from one another. Therefore, if in two peoples the ingenious fools were important and influential people, as is indeed very often the case, then both peoples accept similar stupidities, and then, after a few centuries, some historian will extract his proofs from this; that one of these peoples is descended from the other. Strict views about the unreasonableness of mankind seem to have been in full swing during the French Revolution. Lord Chesterfield was no doubt a very different person from the German philosopher mentioned, but both agree on the absurdity of customs. Giving advice to his son on court etiquette, he writes the following: “For example, it is considered respectful to bow to the king of England and irreverent to bow to the king of France. With regard to the emperor, this is a rule of courtesy. Eastern monarchs demand that the whole body prostrate before them. These are established ceremonies and they must be performed, but I doubt very much that common sense and reason will be able to explain to us why they were established. The same is found in all classes, where certain customs are adopted, which must be obeyed, although by no means can they be recognized as the result of common sense. 27 Take, for example, the most absurd and widespread custom of drinking to health. Could anything in the world matter less to another person's health than drinking a glass of wine? Common sense, of course, will never explain this, but common sense commands me to conform to this custom. Although it would be rather difficult to make sense of the minute details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield very unfortunately presents the latter as an example of the folly of mankind. In fact, if someone were asked to define in short terms the attitude of the people to their rulers in various states, he could do this by answering that people bow down to the ground Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -17 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 18 - to the King of Siam, that they kneel or take off their hats before the European monarch and shake hands firmly with the President of the United States, as if the handle of some kind of pump. All these are ceremonies, understandable and at the same time meaningful. Lord Chesterfield chose his second example better, because the custom of drinking to health is indeed of obscure origin. However, it is closely connected with an ancient rite, practically, of course, absurd, but established with a conscious and serious intention that does not allow it to be classified as nonsense. It is the custom to make libations and drink at solemn feasts in honor of the gods and the dead. Such is the ancient Norman custom of drinking in honor of the ancient Germanic gods Thor, Odin and the goddess Freya, as well as in honor of kings at their burial. This custom did not disappear with the conversion to Christianity of the Scandinavian and German peoples. They continued to drink in honor of Christ, the Mother of God and saints instead of pagan gods and heroes, and the custom of drinking for the living and the dead at the same feast with the same exclamations: “Gods minni! (to the glory of God)" - sufficiently proves the common origin of both rites. The word "minne" meant at the same time love, remembrance and the thought of the absent. It has long been preserved as a relic in the name of the days on which the memory of the dead was honored with worship or feasts. Such evidence 28 fully justifies those writers, old and new, who have regarded these ceremonial wine-drinking practices as essentially sacrificial practices. As for the custom of drinking for the health of the living, information about it comes to us from various areas in which the Aryan peoples lived, from ancient times. The Greeks drank to each other's health at feasts, and the Romans adopted this custom. The Goths shouted “heils” when answering toasts to each other, as can be seen from the curious opening line in the poem “Decohviis barbaris” in the Latin anthology, which mentions gothic salutatory exclamations around the 5th century, in words that still retain some of their meaning to the English ear . As for ourselves, although the old salutary greeting “Be healthy” (“Wacs hael”) has ceased to be an ordinary English greeting, its formula remains, having passed into a noun. In general, it can be assumed, although not with complete certainty, that the custom of drinking for the health of the living is historically connected with the religious rite of drinking in honor of the gods and the dead. Let us now subject the theory of survivals to a rather rigorous test. We will try to explain with its help why, within the framework of modern civilized society, there exist in practice or as a tradition three remarkable groups of customs, which cannot be explained at all by civilized concepts. Although we shall not be able to clearly and completely explain their motives, it will, in any case, be a success if we are able to trace their origin to savage or barbarous antiquity. If you look at these customs from a modern practical point of view, then one of them is ridiculous, the rest are cruel, and all in general are meaningless. The first is a greeting when sneezing, the second is a ritual that requires a human sacrifice when laying the building, the third is a prejudice against saving a drowning man. In explaining the customs relating to sneezing, it is necessary to keep in mind the view prevailing among primitive societies. Just as they thought of the soul of a person, 29 that it enters and leaves his body, so it was also believed about other spirits, especially those who supposedly enter the sick, take possession of them and torment them with diseases. The connection of this idea with sneezing is best seen among the Zulus, who are firmly convinced that the good or evil spirits of the dead hover over people, do good or evil to them, appear to them in dreams, enter them and cause them illness. Here is a summary of the native evidence collected by Dr. Callaway. When a Zulu sneezes, he says, “I have been blessed. Idkhlozi (ancestral spirit) is now with me. He came to me. I need to quickly praise him, because he makes me sneeze! Thus, he glorifies the souls of his dead relatives, asking them for cattle, wives and blessings. Sneezing is a sign that the patient will recover. He thanks for the sneezing greeting, saying: “I have gained the well-being that I lacked. Keep being kind to me!" The sneeze reminds the person that he should immediately name the Itongo (ancestral spirit) of his people. It is Itongo who makes a person sneeze, so that by sneezing he can see that Itongo is with him. If a person is sick and does not sneeze, those who come to him ask if he sneezed, and if he did not sneeze, then they begin to feel sorry for him, saying: “The disease is severe!” If a child sneezes, they say to him: "Grow up!" This is a sign of health. According to some natives, the sneezing of blacks reminds a person that Itongo has entered him and is with him. Zulu soothsayers and sorcerers tend to sneeze more often and believe that this indicates the presence of spirits; they glorify them by calling them: "Makozi" Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -18 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 19- (i.e. gentlemen). An instructive example of the transition of such customs from one religion to another are the Negroes of the Amakoz tribe, who usually called upon their divine ancestor Utixo when they sneeze, and after their conversion to Christianity began to say: “Savior, look at me!” or: "Creator of heaven and earth!" Similar concepts are found, according to descriptions, in other parts of Africa. Sir Thomas Brown relates the well-known story, 30 that when King Monomotapa sneezed, exclamations of blessing, passed from mouth to mouth, went around the whole city. He should, however, have mentioned that, according to Godinho, from whom the original story is taken, the same was done when the king drank, coughed, or sneezed. A later story, on the other side of the continent, is closer to our subject. In Guinea in the last century, when the chief sneezed, everyone present knelt down, kissed the ground, clapped their hands and wished him happiness and prosperity. Guided by a different thought, the Negroes of Old Calabar sometimes exclaim when a child sneezes: "Get away from you!" At the same time, they make a gesture, as if throwing away something bad. In Polynesia, sneezing greetings are also very common. In New Zealand, when a child sneezes, a spell was said to prevent evil. Among the Samoans, when sneezing, those present said: “Be alive!” On the islands of Tonga, sneezing while preparing for the journey was considered the worst omen. A curious example from American life relates to the famous expedition to Florida by Hernando de Soto, when Guachoya, a native chief, came to pay him a visit. “While all this was going on, Katzik Guachoya sneezed heavily. The people who had come with him and were sitting along the walls of the hall between the Spaniards all suddenly bowed their heads, spread their arms, folded them again and, making various other gestures, signifying great reverence and reverence, greeted Guachoya, saying: "May the sun keep you, protect you." you, give you happiness, save you" and other similar phrases that came to mind. The rumble of these greetings did not subside for a long time, and on this occasion the astonished governor said to the gentlemen and captains accompanying him: "Isn't it true that the whole world is the same?" The Spaniards remarked that such a barbarian people should have the same ceremonies, or even more, than peoples who consider themselves more civilized. Therefore, this way of greeting can be recognized as natural for all peoples, and not at all the result of a pestilence, as is usually said. 31 In Asia and Europe, superstitious ideas about sneezing are common in a wide range of tribes, centuries and countries. Among the related references from the classical times of Greece and Rome, the following are most characteristic: the happy sneeze of Telemachus in the Odyssey; the sneezing of a warrior and the cry of glorification of the gods that passed through all the ranks of the troops, which Xenophon called a happy omen. Aristotle's remark that the people consider sneezing divine: a Greek epigram for a man with a long nose who, when sneezing, could not say "Save me, Zeus" because the noise of sneezing was too far away for him to hear; the mention of Petronius the Arbiter about the custom to say “Salva” (“Be healthy” to a sneezing person); Pliny's question: "Why do we welcome sneezing?", about which he remarks that even Tiberius, the most gloomy of men, demanded the observance of this custom. Similar customs when sneezing were often observed in East Asia. Among Hindus, when someone sneezes, those present say: “Live!”, And he answers: “With you!” This is a bad omen, and, by the way, the Tugs4 paid great attention to it when they went to catch people for their bloody sacrifices. It even forced them to release captured travelers. The Hebrew formula for sneezing is: "Tobim Chaim!" - "Good life!" A Muslim, sneezing, says: “Praise be to Allah!”, And friends greet him with the appropriate words. This custom passes from generation to generation wherever Islam is spread. Through medieval Europe, he moved to modern. Here, for example, was how they looked at sneezing in medieval Germany: “The pagans do not dare to sneeze, because it says: “God help!” We say when sneezing: "God help you." For England, the following verses (1100) can serve as an example, from which it is clear that the English formula "Be healthy!" It was also used to prevent a disease that could occur from sneezing: "Once sneezing, people believe that they will feel bad if you do not immediately say:" To health "". In The Rules of Courtesy (1685), translated from the French, we read: "If his Lordship happens to sneeze, you must not shout at the top of your voice: 'God bless you, sir', but taking off your hat, courteously bow to him and say this appeal to yourself. The Anabaptists5 and Quakers6 are known to have dropped both these and other salutations, but they remained in the code of English good manners among the upper and lower classes for at least 50 years or so. And even now they are not yet forgotten: many find the most witty in the story of Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -19 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 20 to the violinist and his wife when his sneezing and her hearty "Be healthy" interrupt his violin lessons. There is nothing strange that the existence of these absurd customs for many centuries was a mystery to inquisitive researchers. In particular, the scribblers of legends were wiser about this custom, and their attempts to find historical explanations left their mark on the philosophical myths of the Greeks, Jews and Christians. In Greek legend, Prometheus7 prays for the preservation of his artificial man when he gave the first sign of life with a sneeze; in the Hebrew Jacob - about the fact that the soul does not leave the body of a person when this person sneezes, as happened before; in the Catholic Pope Gregory - about the aversion of pestilence in those days when the air was so deadly that he who sneezed died from it. According to the legends, the formulas pronounced when sneezing originated from these imaginary events. It is even more important for our purpose to note the existence of a corresponding set of beliefs and customs associated with yawning. The Zulus considered frequent yawning and sneezing to be signs of impending possession by an evil spirit. When yawning, a Hindu must squeeze his thumb and some other finger and say the name of one of the gods, for example Rama, several times: neglecting this rite is as big a sin as killing a Brahmin. The Persians attribute yawning and sneezing to being possessed by an evil spirit. Among Muslims, when a person yawns, he covers his mouth with his left hand and says: “Allah, protect me from damned Satan!” Actually, according to the Muslim view, yawning should be avoided, because the devil has a habit of jumping into the mouth of a yawner. This is probably the meaning of the Jewish proverb: "Do not open your mouth to Satan." The story of Josephus Flavius, who saw how one Jew, named Eleazar, cured demoniacs in the time of Vespasian, belongs to the same category of views, pulling demons out of them through their nostrils. He did this with the help of a ring containing a root, which had mystical power and which Solomon mentions. Tales of a sect of Messalians spitting and blowing their noses to exorcise demons that might enter their noses when breathing, testimonies of medieval exorcists exorcising devils through the nostrils of the sick, a custom, still observed in Tyrol, of crossing oneself when yawning in order to do something unkind did not enter through the mouth - all this reflects similar views. When comparing the views of the latest Kaffirs with the views of the peoples of other parts of the world, we come across a clear idea that sneezing comes from the presence of spirits. Apparently, this is the real key to solving the issue. This is well explained by Haliberton with regard to the popular Celtic beliefs expressed in stories, from which it follows that a sneezing person can be dragged away by fairies, unless their power is met with opposition in some exclamation like "God bless you." A related notion of yawning can be found in an Icelandic folk legend, where a troll (small mountain spirit), transformed into a beautiful queen, says: “When I yawn with a small yawn, I am a beautiful tiny girl; troll, when I yawn a full yawn, I become a troll all over. Although the superstitious idea of ​​sneezing is by no means universal, yet its considerable prevalence is highly remarkable. It would be extremely interesting to determine to what extent this spread occurred due to original development in different countries, to what extent it is a consequence of the transition from one tribe to another, and to what extent it is a great-grandfather heritage. Here we only want to confirm that originally it was not some accidental custom devoid of any meaning, but the expression of a known principle. The completely unequivocal evidence of the present day Zulu is in keeping with what can be drawn from the superstitions and popular beliefs of other tribes. This allows us to connect the views and customs regarding sneezing with the idea of ​​the ancients and savages about the spirits that penetrate and take possession of a person, which were considered good or evil and were treated accordingly. The remnants of ancient formulas that have survived in modern Europe seem like an unconscious echo of the time when the explanation of sneezing was not yet within the competence of physiologists, but was at the “theological level”. It is widely believed in Scotland that the Picts, to whom local legend ascribes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, irrigated the laying of their buildings with human blood. The legend says that even St. Columba found it necessary to bury St. Oran alive under the foundations of her monastery in order to appease the spirits of the earth, who destroyed at night what was being built during the day. Already in 1843 in Germany, when a new bridge was being built in Halle, there was a rumor among the people that a child should be laid in the foundation of the building. The view that a church, wall, or bridge needs human blood or an immured sacrifice to secure its foundations is not only widespread in European folk beliefs, but also practiced, as confirmed by local chronicles and traditions such as Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -20 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 21 is a historical fact in many countries. So, for example, when it was necessary to restore a collapsed dam on the Nogata River8 in 1463, the peasants, following the advice to throw a living person there, made the beggar drunk, as they say, and buried him there. The Thuringian legend says that in order to make Liebenstein Castle strong and impregnable, a child was bought from the mother for a lot of money and laid in the 35th wall. While it was being walled up, the child was eating a pie. When the masons set to work, the story continues, he shouted to his mother: “Mom, I can still see you,” then a little later: “Mom, I can still see you a little,” and when the masons laid the last stone, he shouted: “Mom, Now I can't see you anymore." The walls of Copenhagen, according to legend, collapsed several times as they were built. Finally, they took a little innocent girl, seated her at a table with delicacies and toys, and while she played and ate, twelve masons laid a vault over her. Then, with the thunder of music, the wall was erected, and since then it has always stood strong. An Italian legend tells of the bridge over the Arta that it was constantly collapsing until the builder's wife was put into it. She, dying, cast a spell so that from now on the bridge would tremble, as a flower stalk trembles. The Slavic princes, laying the citadel, according to the old pagan custom, sent people to seize the first boy they met, and laid him in the wall of the building9. A Serbian legend tells how three brothers conspired to build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari), but year after year the vila, or mermaid, ruined at night what 300 masons had erected during the day. This enemy had to be propitiated by a human sacrifice. She was to serve as the first of the three wives, who would bring food to the workers. All three brothers swore to keep a terrible secret from their wives, but the two older brothers changed their oath and warned their wives. The wife of the younger brother, not suspecting anything, came to the construction site, and they laid her in the wall. But she begged to leave a hole there so that she could breastfeed her child, "and they brought him to her for twelve months. Serbian women still go to the grave of a good mother, to a source of water flowing along the fortress wall and similar to admixtures of lime to milk.Finally, there is an English legend about Vortigern, who could not finish his tower until the foundation stones were moistened with the blood of a child born to a mother without a father. 36 As is usually the case in the history of sacrifices, here again we are confronted with a substitution of victims. Known, for example, are empty coffins embedded in walls in Germany; a lamb buried under an altar in Denmark to keep the church strong; a human cemetery where a live horse was buried first. In modern Greece, an obvious survival of this view is the belief that the first person to pass a new building after the first stone has been laid will die within the same year. Therefore, as a substitute, masons kill a lamb or a black rooster on this first stone. The German legend, based on the same idea, tells of an evil spirit that interfered with the construction of the bridge. They promised him a soul, but they deceived him by letting a rooster go over the bridge first. One German folk belief says that before entering a new house, it is good to let a cat or dog in. All this forces us to admit that we have before us not only a frequently repeated and changing mythological theme, but a recollection of a bloody barbarian rite, preserved in oral and written tradition, which not only really existed in ancient times, but also persisted for a long time in European history. If we now look at less cultured countries, we will find that this rite survives to this day and quite obviously has as its goal either the propitiation of the victim of the spirits of the earth, or the transformation of the soul of the victim into a patronizing demon. In Africa, in Galama, in front of the main gate of a new fortified settlement, a boy and a girl were usually buried alive to make the fortification impregnable. This custom was once widely practiced by a Bambara despot. In Great Bassam10 and Yoruba11 such sacrifices were offered at the foundation of a house or village. Ellis heard of a custom in Polynesia, illustrated by the fact that the central pillar of one of the temples of Mawa was erected over the body of a human victim. On the island of Borneo, among the Milanauan Dayaks, a traveler witnessed how, during the construction of a large house, a deep hole was dug for the first post, which was hung over it on ropes. The slave girl was lowered into the pit and, at this signal, the ropes were cut. A huge beam fell into the pit and crushed the girl to death. It was a sacrifice to the spirits. Saint John saw a milder form of the ceremony, when the head of the Kuop Dayaks placed a high pole near his house, and a chicken was thrown into the pit prepared for him, which was supposed to crush this pole. The more cultured peoples of South Asia preserved until modern times the rite of sacrifice at the foundation of a house. A Japanese story from the 17th century mentions the belief that a wall erected over the body of a voluntary human sacrifice, Tylor EB = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -21 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected]|| http://yanko.lib.ru || 22- is protected by this from various misfortunes. Therefore, when they began to build a large wall, some unfortunate slave offered to become a foundation and lay down in a prepared pit, where heavy stones piled on him killed him. When the gates of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, were being built twenty years ago, Mason heard from eyewitnesses that in each of the pits prepared for the pillars a criminal was thrown as a sacrifice to the patron demon. Thus, such stories about human sacrifices buried for the patron spirits under the gates of the city of Mandalay13, about a queen drowned in the Burma ditch to make it strong, about a hero whose body parts were buried under the fortress of Tatuig to make it impregnable - all these stories are memories, in historical or mythological form, telling about the really existing customs of the country. Even in the English dominions there was such a case. When the Raja of Sala-Bin was building the fortification of Sial Kot in the Punjab, the base of the southeastern bastion was destroyed several times. Therefore, the Raja turned to a fortuneteller. The latter convinced him that the bastion would not hold until the blood of the only son was shed, as a result of which the only son of a widow was sacrificed. All this clearly shows that the vile rites, about which Tylor E. B. in Ev38 = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -22 624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 23- Human sacrifices to the pope have survived only a vague memory, still retain their ancient significance in Africa, Polynesia and Asia in those societies that are, if not chronologically, then according to the degree of their development, representatives of the oldest stages of civilization. Walter Scott tells in his "Pirate" about the peddler Brace, who refused to help Mordaunt save a sailor who was drowning after a shipwreck. Expressing an old Scots belief, Brace points out the rashness of such an act. “Are you out of your mind? - says the peddler. - You, who have lived in the Scottish Isles for so long, want to save a drowning man? Don't you know that if you restore his life, he will probably do you some terrible harm? If this inhuman belief were noticed only in Scotland alone, then one might think that it was of some local origin, which now defies explanation. But when such superstitions are found among the inhabitants of the islands of St. Kilda, and among the Danube boatmen, and among French and English sailors, and even outside Europe, among less civilized peoples, then it is no longer possible to explain this state of affairs by any local fictions. We have to look for some very common belief related to archaic culture. Hindus will not save a man who is drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago share this cruel attitude towards a drowning man. Among primitive Kamchadals this prohibition has the most remarkable form. They consider it a big mistake, says Krasheninnikov, to save a drowned man: the one who saves him will drown after himself. Steller's story is even more extraordinary and probably applies only to cases where the victim actually drowned. He says that if a person somehow accidentally fell into the water, then it was considered a great sin for him to get out of it: if he was destined to drown, he commits a sin, saving himself from death. No one would let him into their home, talk to him, give him food or a wife, considering him dead. If 40 people fell into the water even in the presence of others, they would not help him get out of the water, but, on the contrary, would drown him. These savages avoided the fire-breathing mountains, since spirits supposedly live there and cook their own food. For the same reason, they consider it a sin to bathe in hot springs and fearfully believe in the existence of a sea spirit that looks like a fish, which they call Mitgk. This Kamchadal spiritualistic belief is, without a doubt, the key to their ideas about the salvation of the drowning. Even in modern Europe, remnants of this belief can be found. In Bohemia, as a not very old report (1864) says, fishermen do not dare to pull Tylor out of the water EB = Myth and rite in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -23,624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 24 - a drowning person. They are afraid that the merman will take away their luck in fishing and drown them at the first opportunity. Such an explanation of the prejudice against the salvation of the victims of water spirits can be confirmed by a mass of facts taken from various countries of the world. Thus, when examining the customs of sacrifice, it turns out that the usual way of offering a sacrifice to a well, river, lake or sea consists simply in throwing a thing, animal or people into the water, which should itself or through the spirit living in it take possession of them. That an accidentally drowned person was considered just such a prey of water is proved by many beliefs of wild and civilized peoples. Among the Sioux Indians, Unktah, a water monster, drowns his victims in streams or rapids. In New Zealand, the natives believe that great supernatural reptile monsters called Tanivga live in meanders of the rivers, and those who drown are said to have been dragged away by these monsters. The Siamese are afraid of Pnuk, or the water spirit, which seizes bathers and carries them away to its dwelling. In the Slavic lands, this is always done by Topilec, who drowns people. In Germany, when someone drowns, the people remember the religion of their ancestors and say: "The river spirit demanded its annual sacrifice", or more simply - "Nyx took him." It is quite obvious that from this point of view, the rescue of a drowning man, i.e., tearing the victim out of the very claws of the 41 water spirit, is a reckless challenge thrown to the deity, which can hardly remain unavenged. In the civilized world, the crude old religious idea of ​​drowning has long since been replaced by a physical explanation, and the prejudice against rescuing drowning people has almost or completely disappeared. But the archaic ideas, which have passed into folk beliefs and poetry, still point to an obvious connection between the primitive view and the custom that has survived from antiquity. As the social development of the world advances, the most important views and actions may, little by little, become mere vestiges. Their original meaning is gradually eroded, each generation remembers it less and less, until finally it completely disappears from the memory of the people. Subsequently, ethnography tries, more or less successfully, to restore this meaning by bringing together bits of scattered or forgotten facts. Children's games, folk sayings, absurd customs may be practically unimportant, but from a philosophical point of view they are not without significance, since they belong to one of the most instructive phases of ancient culture. The ugly and cruel superstitions of this or that person may turn out to be remnants of primitive barbarism, and at the same time, education for such a person is the same as it was for Shakespeare's fox, "which, no matter how you tame it, no matter how you cherish it and protect it, will preserve wild cunning of their ancestors. Tylor E. B. = Myth and ritual in primitive culture. / Per. from English. D. A. Koropchevsky. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000. - -24,624 p. ill. Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || http://yanko.lib.ru || 25- Chapter II MYTHOLOGY □ Mythological fiction, like all other manifestations of human thought, is based on experience. □ The transformation of myth into allegory and history. □ The study of myth in its actual existence and development among contemporary savage and barbarian peoples. □ The original sources of the myth. □ The oldest teaching about the animation of nature. □ Personification of the sun, moon and stars; waterspout; sand column; rainbow; waterfall; pestilence. □ An analogy turned into myth and metaphor. □ Myths about rain, thunder, etc. □ The influence of language on the formation of a myth. Material and verbal representation. □ Grammatical gender in relation to myth. □ Proper names of objects in relation to the myth. □ The degree of mental development, conducive to mythical fiction. □ Teaching about werewolves. □ Fantasy and fiction. □ Natural myths, their origin, rules for their interpretation. □ Natural myths of higher savage societies in comparison with related forms among barbarian and civilized peoples. □ Heaven and earth as universal parents. □ Sun and moon: eclipse and sunset in the form of a hero or a maiden devoured by a monster; the sun rising from the sea and descending into the underworld; the mouth of the night 43 and death; Symplegades; the eye of heaven, the eye of Odin and Gray. □ Sun and moon as mythical civilizers. □ The moon, its impermanence, its periodic death and resurrection. □ Stars, their offspring. □ Constellations, their place in mythology and astronomy. □ Wind and storm. □ Thunder. □ Earthquake Among those beliefs that are generated by a small stock of information and which must disappear with the development of education, is the belief in the almost limitless creative power of the human imagination. Perhaps nothing can so well study the laws of the imagination as certain events of mythical history, as they pass through all known periods of civilization, bypassing all the physically different tribes of the human race. Here Maui, the New Zealand sun god, who caught the island with his magic rod and pulled it from the seabed, will take his place near the Indian Vishnu, who dived into the very depths of the ocean in the incarnation of a boar in order to raise the flooded earth on his huge fangs. There, the creator Bayam, whose voice is heard by the rude inhabitants of Australia in the thunder, will sit on the throne next to the Olympian Zeus himself. Starting with the bold and crude natural myths in which the savage clothed the knowledge he had learned from his childhood contemplation of the world, the ethnographer can trace these crude works of fantasy right back to the epoch when they were framed and embodied in a complex of myths.

The problem of the beginning of culture. Various versions of cultural genesis. Tool-labor, game, symbolic concepts of the origin of culture. The most important features of primitive culture. Ritual and its place in culture. The concept of myth. Specificity of mythological consciousness, functions of myth. Typology of myths. The problem of religious consciousness in the era of primitiveness. The original forms of religious beliefs. Primitive art: periods of development, characteristic features.

Culture distinguishes man from animal. Therefore, the problem of the beginning of culture is inextricably linked with the problem of the origin of man. In this regard, we can distinguish a number of theories explaining the origin of man and culture, which, in essence, can be reduced to three main positions: religious, philosophical, scientific.
The religious concept is the most ancient; According to the religious vision of the world, man is the creation of God. Culture in this context is understood as a manifestation of a divine gift in a person, as a sending down to believers of the highest spiritual values. The basis of the religious concept is faith.
The scientific point of view is based on the results of scientific research (archaeological, paleontological, etc.). The first known cultural phenomena are stone tools, which date back to about 2-2.5 million years ago. The remains of the creatures that created these tools have received the name "Homo habilis" ("handy man") in science. But a significant part of scientists do not consider “habilis” to be people, since in terms of brain structure and other biological features they did not differ significantly from the previous Australopithecus, which were animals (the name “Australopithecines” and other terms found later in the text are used in science to refer to various stages of evolution from animal to human).
Specific features of a person, according to research, arise in the descendants of "habilis" - archanthropes, pithecanthropes or "Homo erectus" ("upright man") 1.5-1.6 million years ago. The key points that determined the transformation of the monkey into a creature of a higher order were: the transition to upright walking, the use of tools, joint activities, the development of language, speech, communication based on the use of signals, signs and communications. The biological evolution of man ended 35-40 thousand years ago, when "Homo sapiens" ("reasonable man") appeared.
Reconstruction in the theory of the process of the emergence of man and culture can be considered reliable, close to the truth, only with a certain degree of conventionality. The results of scientific research make it possible to more or less adequately judge the development of the material culture of primitive man (tools, methods of their processing and use, etc.). But these data do not make it possible to fully recreate the process of a person's spiritual development. This problem has attracted and will continue to attract the attention of philosophers, culturologists, and historians. There are various cultural and philosophical concepts of the problem of the emergence of culture.
One of the most developed is the tool-labor concept, associated with an active approach to culture and represented primarily by the Marxist tradition. According to this concept, "labor created man" (F. Engels). Labor is understood here as a purposeful activity that begins with the manufacture of tools from stone, bone, and wood. In the course of labor activity, speech and communication arise, and the thinking of primitive man develops. All this creates the prerequisites for the formation of culture as a way of human life. The tool-labor concept seems to be quite convincing, it is confirmed by the data of archaeological excavations, which testify to the process of improving the tools of labor. Most anthropologists adhere to the position of the decisive role of labor in the process of the emergence of man. However, a number of modern researchers of culture question the thesis about the central place of labor in the development of man and culture; point to contradictions within the framework of the tool-labor concept. For example: how could a person discover, invent, depict, discover something, not being able to invent, invent, discover?
In the 20th century, the playful concept of culture became widespread. According to the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), human culture emerges and unfolds in play. The game is inherent in highly developed animals. The game precedes culture, is one of the beginnings that form it. It contains the qualities of pre-cultural activity: it is a free occupation, there is no “practical” interest in it; playing according to certain rules is understood as "untrue". The most important primary activities of human society are intertwined with the game, for example: hunting, myth, cult. But one should not understand Huizinga's reasoning in the sense that culture grows out of the game in the process of evolution. Culture arises in the form of a game; it is initially played out. As culture develops, the game moment in it recedes into the background. However, it can manifest itself in full force at all times, including in the forms of a highly developed culture.
At the same time, it should be pointed out that despite the deep development of the concept of game cultural genesis (different versions of it are also found in other thinkers of the 20th century), such an important question remains unclear: where does the desire, “craving for the game” come from?
Consider another version of cultural genesis - the symbolic one. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1864-1945) presented the process of the emergence of culture as a symbolic, playful adaptation to the natural world. A person is distinguished from an animal by a symbolic way of communicating with the world. Animals have only sign signaling systems. The signals are part of the physical world, and the symbol is part of the human world of meanings. Animals are limited by the world of their sensory perceptions, which reduces their actions to direct reactions to external stimuli. And man no longer lives simply in the physical, but also in the symbolic universe. This is a symbolic world of mythology, language, magic, art, with the help of which a person organizes the chaos around him, spiritually cognizes the world. Cassirer considers man as an animal, a biological organism that breaks out of the animal kingdom, replacing natural instincts with an orientation towards culturally significant objects. Thus, the essence of cultural genesis, according to Cassirer, is the formation of a person as a “symbolic animal”.
Undoubtedly, none of the versions of cultural genesis can claim to be the ultimate truth. But each of them contributes to understanding the problem of the origin of culture.
The initial stage of cultural development (primitive culture) is characterized by a number of important features: 1) homogeneity - the uniformity of culture forms wherever it exists: murals and drawings in caves, ancient ceramics, tools show the same degree of conventionality, similarity in details and manufacturing techniques ; 2) syncretism - indivisibility, non-isolation, fusion of all forms of culture.
Ritual was the basis of such syncretism. Ritual (Latin rutis - religious rite, solemn ceremony) is one of the forms of symbolic action, expressing the connection of the subject with the system of social relations and values. The structure of the ritual is a strictly regulated sequence of actions associated with special objects, images, texts in conditions of appropriate mobilization of the moods and feelings of the actors and groups. The symbolic meaning of the ritual, its isolation from everyday practical life is emphasized by the atmosphere of solemnity.
Ritual plays a very important role in the culture of primitive society. Through its prism, nature and social existence are considered, an assessment is made of the actions and actions of people, as well as various phenomena of the surrounding world. The ritual actualizes the deep meanings of human existence; it maintains the stability of a social system, such as a tribe. The ritual carries information about the laws of nature, obtained during the observation of biocosmic rhythms. Thanks to the ritual, a person felt himself inextricably linked with the cosmos and cosmic rhythms.
Ritual activity was based on the principle of imitation of natural phenomena, they were reproduced through the corresponding ritual symbolic actions. The central link of the ancient ritual - sacrifice - corresponded to the idea of ​​the birth of the world from chaos. As chaos at the birth of the world is divided into parts, from which the primary elements arise: fire, air, water, earth, etc., so the victim is divided into parts and then these parts are identified with parts of the cosmos. Regular, rhythmic reproductions of the basis of the event elements of the past connected the world of the past and the present.
Prayer, chanting, and dance were closely intertwined in the ritual. In the dance, a person imitated various natural phenomena in order to cause rain, plant growth, and connect with the deity. The constant mental tension caused by the uncertainty of fate, the relationship to the enemy or the deity found a way out in the dance. The dancing participants in the ritual were inspired by the consciousness of their tasks and goals, for example, a military dance was supposed to enhance the sense of strength and solidarity of the tribe members. It is also significant that all members of the collective participated in the ritual. In the primitive era, ritual is the main form of human social existence and the main embodiment of the human ability to act. Production-economic, spiritual-religious and social activities subsequently developed from it.
The ritual acted in close relationship with the myth. Myth is the earliest form of expression by a person of his attitude to the world. Myth acts as a single, undifferentiated (syncretic) form of consciousness. Thought in myth is expressed in specific emotional, poetic images, metaphors. Human features are transferred to the surrounding world, the cosmos and other natural phenomena are personified.
There are no clear distinctions between the world and man, thought and emotions, knowledge and artistic images, subject and object, thing and word in the myth. This is a holistic worldview, in which various ideas are linked into a single figurative picture of the world, combining reality and fantasy, natural and supernatural, knowledge and faith, thought and emotions. Myth is characterized by a sharp distinction between the mythological, early (sacred) time and the current, subsequent (profane) time. The mythological event is separated from the present time by a significant period of time and embodies not just the past, but a special form of first creation, first objects and first actions that precedes empirical time. Everything that happens in mythological time takes on the significance of a precedent, that is, a role model. Therefore, the myth usually combines two aspects: diachronic (a story about the past) and synchronic (an explanation of the present or future).
A myth (especially the simplest one) is close to a fairy tale: both in terms of the presence of fantastic motives and in content - the personification of natural phenomena and human properties. Both in a fairy tale and in a myth, natural phenomena, animals, objects are depicted as people and behave like people. But there is a significant difference between a myth and a fairy tale. Fairy tales were created for entertainment or moral edification, but they did not explain anything. And the main function of the myth was the etiological (explanatory) function.
The content of the myth seemed real to the primitive consciousness, as it embodied the collective, “reliable” experience of understanding reality by many generations. The myth performed a communicative function. The myth rallied people in the face of dangers and common enemies; and also was the spokesman and translator of the spiritual values ​​of the team. A system of values ​​and norms of behavior was passed on to the younger generation through myth. Myth provided spiritual connection for many generations.
A comparative historical study of a wide range of myths made it possible to establish that in the myths of various peoples of the world - with their extreme diversity - a number of basic motives and themes are repeated. Among the oldest and most primitive myths are the myths about animals. The most elementary of them are only a naive explanation of individual features of animals. Deeply archaic are the myths about the origin of animals from people (there are a lot of such myths, for example, among the Australians) or mythological ideas that people were once animals. Myths about the transformation of people into animals and plants are present in almost all peoples of the globe. The ancient Greek myths about hyacinth, narcissus, cypress, bay leaf (the girl-nymph Daphne), about the spider Arachne, etc. are widely known.
Very ancient are the myths about the origin of the sun, the month (moon), stars - solar, lunar, astral myths. In some myths, they are often depicted by people who once lived on earth and for some reason ascended to heaven, in others, the creation of the sun (not personified) is attributed to some supernatural being.
The central group of myths, at least among peoples with developed mythological systems, are myths about the origin of the world, the universe - cosmogonic myths - and man - anthropogonic myths. Culturally backward peoples have few cosmogonic myths. So, in Australian myths, the idea that the earth's surface once had a different look is only occasionally found, but questions about how the earth, sky, and so on appeared are not raised. The origin of people is mentioned in many Australian myths. But the motive of creation, creation is not here: it tells about the transformation of animals into people, or the motive of “finishing” appears.
Among peoples who are comparatively cultured, developed cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths appear. Very typical myths about the origin of the world and people are known among the Polynesians, North American Indians, among the peoples of the Ancient East and the Mediterranean. In these myths, two ideas stand out: the idea of ​​creation and the idea of ​​development. According to some mythological ideas (creational, based on the idea of ​​creation), the world was created by some supernatural being - a creator god, a demiurge, a great sorcerer, etc., according to others (evolutionary) - the world gradually developed from some primitive, formless state - chaos, darkness or water, eggs, etc.
Usually, theogonic plots are also woven into cosmogonic myths - myths about the origin of gods and anthropogonic myths - about the origin of people. Among the widespread mythological motifs are myths about a miraculous birth, about the origin of death; relatively late, mythological ideas about the afterlife, about fate, arose. Cosmogonic myths are also adjoined by eschatological myths that are found only at a relatively high stage of development - stories-prophecies about the "end of the world" (developed eschatological myths are known among the ancient Mayans and Aztecs, in Iranian mythology, Christianity, German-Scandinavian mythology, Talmudic Judaism, Islam ).
A special and very important place is occupied by myths about the origin and introduction of certain cultural goods: making fire, the invention of crafts, agriculture, as well as the establishment among people of certain social institutions, marriage rules, customs and rituals. Their introduction is usually attributed to cultural heroes.
The myths about cultured heroes are adjoined (almost making up their variety) twin myths, where the image of a cultured hero is, as it were, bifurcated: these are two twin brothers endowed with opposite features: one is good, the other is evil, one does everything well, teaches people useful, the other only spoils and mischief.
In the mythology of the developed agrarian peoples, a significant place is occupied by calendar myths, symbolically reproducing natural cycles. The agrarian myth about a dying and resurrecting god is very well known in the mythology of the Ancient East, although the earliest form of this myth originated on the soil of a primitive hunting economy (the myth of a dying and resurrecting beast). This is how the myths about Osiris (Ancient Egypt), Adonis (Phoenicia), Attis (Asia Minor), Dionysus (Thrace, Greece) and others were born.
In the early stages of development, myths are for the most part primitive, short, elementary in content, devoid of a coherent plot. Gradually, more complex myths are created, different in origin, mythological images and motifs intertwine, myths turn into detailed narratives, connect with each other, forming cycles. A comparative study of the myths of different peoples shows that, firstly, very similar myths often exist among different peoples, in various parts of the world, and, secondly, that the very set of topics, plots covered by myths is questions of the origin of the world, man , cultural goods, the structure of the social sphere, the secrets of birth and death, etc. - affects the widest, literally "global", range of fundamental issues of the universe. Mythology no longer appears as a sum or even a system of "naive" stories of the ancients.
Researchers explain the similarity of myths of different peoples by the common historical conditions in which the processes of myth-making take place. Myths are formed at a certain - primitive, archaic stage of development of society. Natural human curiosity seeks answers to questions important to every member of the human race. But in the early stages of social development, cognition of the world cannot occur otherwise than through the correlation of the external world with one's own, the animation, humanization of the environment. The similarity of myths can also be explained by possible cases of their migration, borrowing. An example of this is the myth of the great flood, born in ancient Mesopotamia and later included in Christian mythology.
As already noted, in primitive culture all its forms (myth, religion, art) were merged, not dissected. However, for the purposes of scientific analysis, scientists conditionally single out these forms as independent cultural phenomena, while paying attention to their deep interconnection.
In primitive society, religion as a complete phenomenon did not yet exist, and only early forms of religious beliefs developed. Traditionally, five main forms of early beliefs are distinguished, which became the basis of subsequent religious cults.
Totemism is a belief in the kinship of groups of people with any kind of animals, fish, plants, which is considered the "totem" of this group, and the name of which it bears. Totemism arose at the hunting-gathering stage of economic development, when a person did not distinguish himself from the outside world. The appearance of totemism is attributed to the time of the emergence of the tribal system. The occupation of the people of this period was hunting, so childbirth most often bore the names of animals. The choice of a totem animal was based on such a reason as the abundance of this or that animal in the area.
Totem representations played a big role in the development of primitive culture. Together with totemism, the custom of tabooing arose, which, under the conditions of a primitive tribal community, became the most important mechanism for regulating social and family relations. Taboo (Polynesian) - a system of prohibitions, the most important of which related to the prohibition of eating a totem, with the exception of ritual ceremonies. Taboos regulated the economic, social and cultural life of the tribal community. Gender and age taboo regulated ties in the team; food taboo determined the nature of the food intended for the leader, warriors, women, children, etc. A number of other taboos were intended to guarantee the inviolability of the home or hearth, to regulate the rules of conduct, to fix the rights and obligations of certain categories of community members. Taboo was the form in which duty was clothed.
Animism (from Latin anima, animus - spirit, soul) is a term denoting the animation of the phenomena of the objective world. This term was introduced into scientific circulation by E.B. Tylor, who believed that the presence of ideas about spirits, the soul is the "minimum" of any religion. In modern science, animism is understood as the belief in the existence of spirits, the spiritualization of the forces of nature, animals, plants and inanimate objects, attributing to them reason, supernatural power.
In contrast to totemism associated with this tribal community, animistic ideas had a broader and more general character, were understandable and accessible to everyone. Primitive people inspired not only the formidable forces of nature (heaven and earth, sun and moon, rain and wind, thunder and lightning), on which their existence depended, but also individual noticeable details of the relief (mountains and rivers, hills and forests). All these natural phenomena had to make sacrifices, to perform prayer rites.
Animatism is a belief in the souls of people, especially the dead, who continue to exist in an incorporeal form. Animatism served as a connecting link between group totemic and universal animistic beliefs and rituals. Paying tribute to the souls of the deceased ancestors, primitive people thereby endowed themselves with the protection and patronage of the dead in the gigantic world of otherworldly forces.
Magic (from the Greek mageia - sorcery, sorcery) is a complex of ritual rites aimed at influencing supernatural forces to obtain material results. Originating in ancient times, magic has survived and continued to develop over the millennia. Magical actions were used for various purposes. Fishing magic was especially widely used, as evidenced by the drawings of animals pierced by spears. Often magic was used for protection (protective), treatment (healing); military and malicious types of magic developed.
Fetishism (from the French fetiche - idol, talisman) is the attribution of magical powers to individual objects that can influence the course of events and obtain the desired result. Fetishism was manifested in the creation of idols - objects made of wood, clay and other materials and various kinds of amulets, talismans. In idols and amulets, they saw objectified carriers of a particle of that supernatural power that was attributed to the world of spirits, ancestors, totems.
In its pure form, all these four forms of religious beliefs did not exist, they were intertwined with each other, syncretically merged into one. In the future, the system of religious beliefs of primitive man becomes more complicated; religious cults such as funeral agricultural (fertility and reproduction), fishing, cults of dead ancestors, the cult of leaders, etc.
Characterization of the features of the development of primitive art requires identifying, first of all, the stages of its development. In general, the following periodization of primitive society is accepted in science: the Stone Age is the longest period in the history of mankind, which is divided into the Old Stone Age - the Paleolithic (40-12th millennium BC); Middle Stone Age - Mesolithic (12-8th millennium BC); New Stone Age - Neolithic (10-4th millennium BC); from the end of the 4th century the Stone Age is replaced by the Bronze Age, followed by the Iron Age.
The appearance of the first monuments of fine art dates back to the end of the Middle Paleolithic - the Mousterian era - and to the late Paleolithic - the Orikyan, Sollutre and Madeleine eras (all eras are named after the places of the first finds). At this time, engraved drawings on stone, horn, cave paintings, relief and round plastic art appeared. Almost all stories are devoted to animals, less often to humans.
In the Orinyak era, female figures (5-10 cm high) appeared, typologically uniform, with barely outlined limbs, a head without a face, and hypertrophied sexual characteristics. An ancient woman is a vessel of fertility, and the sculpture emphasizes her most important function - procreation. The strong and solid plasticity of the body, the expressiveness of forms, monumentality speak of the skill of primitive artists, but at the same time about the primitiveness of thinking - the absence of spiritual problems, which was expressed in complete inattention to portraiture.
In the era of Sollutre, the drawing of animals becomes more confident, which are depicted in complex poses, turns, in other words, figurative knowledge of the surrounding world deepens. The highest flowering of Paleolithic culture is the Madeleine era. The masterpieces of the Lascaux caves - in France, Altamira - in Spain and others vividly and convincingly convey animals almost life-size. But all these images are isolated both compositionally and by action; are not connected in meaning.
Only in the period of the Mesolithic in the murals will dominate plot compositions: hunting scenes, cattle pens, wars. At this time, animals and people are depicted as a silhouette filled with one paint, the figures seem rather primitive. Now the artist seeks to convey the meaning of ongoing events, the expression of movements, the nature of actions, so the plausibility has given way to solving more complex problems.
In the Neolithic, people learned to burn clay, and painted pottery appeared. Numerous jewels are found in the graves, which indicates a funeral cult. The development of culture during this period in different regions begins to go in different ways: the Neolithic of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and others differs in painting and ornamentation of products, forms of ceramics. But there are also similar features: small plastic art made of clay and stone is ubiquitous, and the desire to decorate objects of everyday life is common to all.
The first architectural structures of primitive society - megaliths (from the Greek megos - large, litos - stone), appeared in the Bronze Age, when the social system became more complex due to the accumulation of wealth, property and social stratification of society. There are three types of megaliths - buildings made of huge roughly processed stones: a) dolmens - quadrangular structures made of large stone slabs, set on edge and covered with a slab, serving as tombs, less often - dwellings; b) menhirs - vertical pillars, sometimes up to 20 meters high (France, Brittany, Karnak), covered with relief (Mongolia), designed in the form of a human figure ("stone women" of southern Russia, Siberia), an animal (Armenia); c) cromlechs - the most complex structures of antiquity. Usually these are menhirs set on a large platform in concentric circles around the sacrificial stone, sometimes covered in pairs by a slab (England, Stonehenge). These are the first religious buildings known to us, during the creation of which not only utilitarian goals were pursued, but also the artistic impact on the viewer was taken into account.
During the Bronze and Iron Ages, metal weapons and arts and crafts became widespread. This is proved by finds from the Scythian mounds, burials of the Kuban, the North Caucasus.
Primitive man is still far from making the cognitive orientation of consciousness an independent form of his spiritual activity; the mental mechanisms of abstract-logical thinking have not yet been developed. The artistic and figurative thinking characteristic of him is metaphorical, sensual and is the only means of spiritual exploration of the world. Comparison of cultural monuments of various centers of primitive art allows us to draw a conclusion about the general patterns of development of artistic consciousness, which evolves very slowly. Established tribal ideas and rules consecrated by legends, collectively created by many generations of artistic images, each of which embodied the diversity of mythological, religious, social and other ideas, were passed from generation to generation. All together: music, dance, theatrical performance of ritual and ceremony, products, drawings and murals - expressed complex concepts and ideas and were called upon to pass on cultural acquisitions to the next generations.

Literature:

Golan A. Myth and Symbol. M., 1994.
Gurevich P.S. Philosophy of culture. M., 1995.
Levi-Strauss K. Primitive thinking. M., 1994.
Mirimanov V.B. Primitive and traditional art. M., 1992.
Myths of the peoples of the world: In 2 vols. M., 1990.
Tylor E.B. Primitive culture. M., 1989.
Tokarev S. A. Early forms of religion. M., 1989.
Fraser D.D. Golden branch. M., 1984.

TASKS FOR COMPREHENSION OF THE TOPIC MATERIAL.

A) Training tasks:

Tasks

1. Highlight features
primitive culture.

2. Specify the functions of the myth
in primitive culture.

3. Name the main types
myths.

4. Give a brief description of the early forms of religious beliefs.

5. State the essence of the symbolic concept of cultural genesis.

B) Problematic issues:

1. Is it possible to explain the origin of culture on the basis of naturalistic premises? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

2. What explains the similarity of themes and plots of the myths of different peoples?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

3. What is the specificity of the primitive attitude to nature? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

4. How does mythological consciousness differ from religious consciousness? _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

5. Why is modern man able to appreciate and understand primitive art? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Myth is the first form of human exploration of the world, the first historical form of worldview. The world for primitive man was a living being. A person encounters the existence of the surrounding world and experiences this interaction holistically: emotions and creative imagination are involved in it to the same extent as intellectual abilities. Each event acquires individuality, requires its own description and thus explanation. Such unity is possible only in the form of a kind of story, which should figuratively reproduce the experienced event and reveal its causal conditionality. It is this kind of "story" that is meant when the word "myth" is used. In other words, when telling myths, ancient people used methods of description and interpretation that were fundamentally different from those familiar to us. The role of abstract analysis was played by metaphorical identification.

Imagery in myth is inseparable from thought, since it is the form in which the impression and, accordingly, the event are naturally realized. Myth becomes a way of understanding the world in primitive culture, the way in which it forms its understanding of the true essence of being, i.e. myth acts as a kind of philosophy or metaphysics of ancient man.

Totemism and magic. Mythology was like a philosophy of the history of primitive society. But in the spiritual, conceptual and cognitive spheres of the life of this society, two other layers of its culture played an equally important role: totemism and magic.

At the first stages of their development, people much better (than we now) felt their unity with nature, and therefore willingly identified themselves with its specific manifestations. In culture, this identification took the form of totemism, i.e. belief that each group of people is closely connected with any animal or plant (totem), is related to them. The premise of totemism was a myth that affirmed the possibility of "conversion", i.e. the transformation of a person into an animal, a myth based on one of the oldest beliefs that there is no fundamental difference between a person and an animal. Totemism has retained its position in modern culture (heraldry, household symbols, prohibitions on eating the meat of certain animals - cows in India, dogs and horses - among the Aryan peoples.

The idea of ​​totemic kinship appeared earlier than the awareness of the usual physiological kinship, and it seemed to people of ancient times much more significant. Totemism includes the belief in totemistic ancestors, from which specific groups of people descend. The life and adventures of these ancestors are the content of numerous myths, complex rituals and ceremonies are associated with belief in them. A special origin allowed a particular group to realize its difference from other groups, i.e. realize your individuality. With the advent of totemism, a boundary was drawn between "us" and "them". Thus, a key element of social self-identification was formed, which largely determined the development of human culture, and indeed the entire history of society.

Primitive culture is often defined as magical as based on magical actions and magical thinking. To a certain extent this is true. Of course, in our time, the number of fans of "white" (healing) and harmful ("black") magic is incalculable. Astrological forecasts, divination, rain-making rites, sorcery, and the like have become lucrative activities for many. But in modern culture, the elements of magic, with all their influence, are under the powerful pressure of the rational world, which determines the worldview of our civilization. It is not for nothing that many modern types of magic try to imitate scientific activity.

In primitive culture, such censors as logic, causation, almost did not interfere with magical-fantastic ways of self-expression. Hence the amazing brightness and diversity of this culture. Reality and fantasy are equally real for primitive man, and a priest's spell sometimes killed him more surely than primitive weapons. Magical forms of thought, fortune-telling, signs, complex rituals were not only a cultural component, they predetermined the very way of life of that time.

Both in the purely spiritual and in the practical realm, one can point to many examples of how expedient, reasonable (in our understanding) is intertwined with what we tend to consider magical or witchcraft acts. The techniques of healing magic are closely connected with folk medicine, magic forms its methodological and theoretical basis. Harmful magic, inflicting damage, love magic were effective means of fashionable and now methods of manipulating consciousness by influencing the psychosomatic structures of a person. Such is the nature of the action of military, hunting and other types of magic.

The special role of magical ideas in archaic culture is associated with one of its qualitative features - boundless syncretism, i.e. absolute non-differentiation, fusion, organic unity of elements, both realistic and fantastic. Syncretism makes it almost impossible to distinguish between the subjective and the objective, the observable and the imaginary, conjectured in primitive culture, since all this is not reflected in it, but, on the contrary, is unambiguously experienced and perceived.

It is impossible to distinguish between the spheres of "supernatural" and "natural" in archaic culture, to separate "magical" ideas from practical ones on purely cognitive grounds. Such a division would affect not the cognitive, but the emotional sphere of the psyche of primitive man, since it implies a functional division of "mind" and "heart", i.e. intellect and emotions, easily accessible to us, but completely impossible for primitive man. The supernatural for a primitive society is not something that violates the natural laws of nature, because this last concept does not yet exist in archaic culture. "Supernatural" is something that disrupts the routine of everyday life, interferes with the usual sequence of events, it is something unexpected, unusual, sometimes extremely attractive and seductive, but, most importantly, always dangerous, capable of threatening life, depriving people of well-being and peace of mind. In such circumstances, a powerful arsenal of magical actions was launched: spells, witchcraft, turning to the spirits of ancestors and gods for help, making sacrifices, even human ones.

In magical thinking, synthesis does not require prior analysis. The existing information blocks that make up magical knowledge are indecomposable and insensitive to contradictions, and are hardly permeable to negative experience.

Magical activity involved the use not only of magical techniques, but also of certain things, which, like the external circumstances of magical procedures, also acquire a magical meaning. Therefore, the awareness of the need for certain external conditions for the success of the spell took the form of faith in "omens", which very often reliably reflected real patterns. Later, along with belief in omens, the belief arose that objects with a magical meaning can not only influence the outcome of individual actions of a person, but also determine his fate.