Maciej Czeremski
SYMBOLIC FORMS OF EXPRESSION OF MONODOMAIN WORLDVIEW
IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES
The paper discusses specificity of mental processes and their symbolic expressions in traditional societies. Based on the cognitive theory of metaphor and metonymy a hypothesis is made that it is a monodomain way of organizing mental structures and ideas that is responsible for this specificity. How a trope is used in a particular situation depends on the way a given culture combines the domains of ideas, and as we know from ethnographic accounts, one of the characteristic of traditional societies is lack of autonomy of the individual domain. Consequently, from among two ways of organizing ideas that are universal for the human mind, the traditional societies in principle tend to use solely metonymy. As a result the symbolic expression of traditional worldview will differ from its modern counterpart.
The authors’ theory is based on the assumption that the way traditional societies form their monodomains is linked to their religions, and these lack a dichotomous division on sacred and profane realms. The ubiquitous presence of the sacred that permeates each aspect of traditional culture and nature is used as a link enabling possibility of metonymic contact between any element of domains that are not mutually connected. This argument leads as to a question about the relationship between metonymy and religious thinking, this however, is not explored in this paper, as the theory proposed is limited to the realm of traditional cultures only
Andrzej Szyjewski
WHY DID THE TJILPA SUB-CLAN PERISH?
RECONSIDERATION OF THE ARRERNTE ANCESTORS’ WANDERINGS MYTH
IN THE CONTEXT OF ELIADE-SMITH-GILL DISCOURSE
The aim of the paper is to reconsider the Tjilpa myth in the light of a disagreement among the greatest authorities on the history of religion. Although Sam Gill’s detailed and extremely thorough criticism proved that both Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith were wrong in their interpretations, he made no attempt to explain the myth within Aboriginal cultural framework. The paper tests the hypothesis that the myth of kauaua ritual pole may be compared to the wanderings of Djanggawul siblings in Arnhem Land. In the light of this comparison, the wonderings of the Tjilpa ancestors are the part of the process of „making country”, i.e., soaking land with the creative power that enables communication between its inhabitants and ancestral beings. From this perspective the breaking of the kauaua pole is not the cause of extinction of the subclan (as is assumed by all the opponents in the discourse). Rather, the extinction is a result of the loss of power, caused by the Tjilpa ancestors’ incestuous intercourse.
Andrzej Migda
READING ON REBELLION BETWEEN THE LINES –
A STRUCTURALIST ANALYSIS OF THE CULTURAL MODEL OF MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE BIBLE
Myth is a rudimentary tale; it is a representation of action and also an event; it is a narration and a way by which these representations take place. All sacred texts contain a religious message that is different form the literally meaning of the story. The embedded meaning of the text is encoded, but it can be deciphered. The greatest mysteries of Christianity were unveiled by contemplation of the message that endured the process of text transformation. The author of this paper uses structuralist analysis, which attempts to bring to light these encoded patterns that were obvious to the early Church Fathers, but that are no longer discernable to many contemporary Bible readers. The author analyzes the Biblical myth of angelic rebellion associated with the sexual intercourse with women. Following the structuralists assumption that a myth is only a representation of the original meaning, the hope is to answer the question of what is encoded in a recurrent Bible myth on angelic rebellion.
Mateusz Dąsal
MULTIFACTORIAL APPROACH TO RITUAL.
(RITUAL STUDIES INSPIRED BY BENSON SALER’S WORKS)
This article discusses a new approach to the conceptualization the category of ritual in the field of cultural anthropology. Contemporary scholars are eager to deconstruct the category of ritual for many reasons. Some anthropologists demonstrate its dubious essential character whereas others point to Euro-American roots of the term. On the other hand, when speaking of contemporary secular rituals scholars often raise objections attributing the category of ritual to traditional ‘ethnographic’ societies and they argue that we have only specific analogies of rituals in modernity (e.g. political or civil ‘rituals’). The classical process of a monothetic, single-factorial essentialist way of defining ritual can, in fact, be misleading and can lead to controversies without any consensus reached. Benson Saler proposed an alternative multifactorial method in the field of religion. This method connects Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, polythetic grouping from taxonomy and prototype theory from cognitive sciences into one analytic tool. His theory assumes a matrix of resemblances where no single feature is necessary or sufficient to classify a unit into a category. However, Saler himself did not propose any matrix for religion, not to mention ritual. To adapt his theoretical structure for ritual category we will use, among others, a vast variety of previous methodological approaches, including theories of A. van Gennep (structure), V. Turner (liminality, communitas), C. Geertz (worldview), R. Schechner (effectiveness), M. Eliade (special time). This article is an attempt to create a relevant and useful methodological tool for analyzing modern rituals, especially from the comparative perspective.
Jakub Bohuszewicz
BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURAL MEANING
OF THE COLLECTIVE FEAST
The main purpose of this paper is an attempt to explain a universal presence of the ritual of the collective feast. The essence of such a ritual is collective killing of the sacrificial animal, and then the joint consumption of it. The main constituent of the feast is meat that is recognized as sacred by those who consume it. In the view of participants, the goal of the ritual is to unify all participants into one organism. The explanation of universality of this rite is based on an assumption pertaining to the asemantic pattern which is both independent of local cultural modifications and derived from the human biological condition. The crucial argument for this statement is represented by a fivefold structure. This structure itself does not carry much meaning, but it contains some semantic potential that would make cultural meaning possible. This is demonstrated in three examples taken from the Aztec, Far East Asian, and Christian religions, to which the fivefold structure is still applicable, despite different cultural meanings attributed to the feast.
Małgorzata Sacha
CONSTRUCTING THE RITUAL BODY IN VEDIC AND TANTRIC TRADITION
The key concepts organizing both vedic and tantric speculations on ritual are discussed, namely: the universal connections (bandhu) and the prototype-counterpart nexus (pramā-pratimā). The vedic ritualist was mainly concern with constructing many ritual doublets of the prototypic sacred reality, and possibly the most perfect ones. By his artful acts he believed that he would reproduce the realm of integrity within the chaotic human cosmos. Operating from within this protected ritual realm he was able to transact with the sacred source of creation, and yet, the same time, did not risk being absorbed into the chaotic, disintegrated realm of creation. The ritual body, one such doublet, was conceived as a ritual vehicle that enabled the ritual subject to make a safe journey to the other worlds. For the tantric ritualist the main concern is to transmute whatever is profane and disintegrated into the sacred and integrated. He does not create any doublet but rather operates immediately on the mundane substance which he transmutes by means of his ritual mastery in the series of the sophisticated transmutative acts. The ritual tantric body is then, at the same time, the very human body whose substance is being constantly „perfected” and sublimated by the ritual operations until it gains the prototypic sacred qualities. It is on the ground of the above premises that some possible similarities and dissimilarities between vedic and tantric construction of the ritual body are elucidated.
Artur Kowalik
STUDIES ON „VLADIMIR’S PANTHEON”: THE HORSE
The article attempts to analyze a passage from twelfth-century epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Its anonymous author used an excerpt from the legendary eleventh-century bard Bojan about Prince Vseslav of Polotsk. The tale goes that Prince Vseslav took an image of a werewolf and made a night passage from Kiev to Tmutorokan on the Taman Peninsula. During his fictional journey Vseslav crossed the path of the Horse i.e. the Sun or Moon deity. Analyzing two epics, namely The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and Zadonshchina, the author of this paper argues that the werewolf image which was used by the authors of these epics is a metaphoric representation, and as such it had been popular among the people at that time. They also argue that the Horse does not have any solar or lunar connotations, as some authors thought, but rather they are in accord with the nineteenth-century hypothesis which held that the Horse deity may be traced to the time of Khazars.
Further, the paper attempts to verify a hypothesis that traces the cult of the Horse deity from the Iranian-speaking nomads. The author of the paper considers it possible to identify the Horse deity within the so called the Thracian Rider, whose cult on the Balkans was replaced by that of Saint George as Christianity encroached on the region. Traces of the Horse cult can be found in Russian and Lithuanian heraldry in the image of Pahonia, as well as in the cult of the Jarilo deity. Studies of the Iranian-speaking nomads indicate that the Horse deity was a patron of military initiation, and this made his cult popular among aristocracy. This would also explain its persistence among these peoples, even after their formal acceptance of monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
Edited and translated by Stanisław A. Wargacki
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