Russian Mythology. House Spirits and Traditional Peasant Life

The book is dedicated to the analysis of images from folk mythological prose - "house spirits", which were once the highest deities in ancient mythology and transformed in late folklore into lower spiritual beings that assist in everyday and household matters: the bathhouse spirit, the house spirit, the woodaw, the water spirit, and associated creatures. The appearance, chronotope, and functions of these characters are examined. The syncretism and polysemy of the images are identified, the archetype of which was formed in the myth of the totemic ancestor. Field materials, including those collected by the author, are used for analysis. This book conducts for the first time a comparative analysis of a very large volume of scientific data in the fields of ethnography, folklore studies, history, linguistics, art studies, literary studies, folk medicine, and botany.

For folklorists, ethnographers, art historians, religious scholars, psychologists, as well as for readers interested in folk culture.