SLFK 214, January 27, 2004
Last class &endash; survey of place spirits
Older, more traditional stories
But contemporary ones will do just fine too
Parallels to American urban legends
Stories about place spirits are like legends
Fabulate and memorate division
They offer rewards for good behavior, but mostly punish misbehavior
Please note that place spirits, though part of the unclean force,
Though one story of their coming into being is that they are bad, fallen angels
Though the collective term for them is often demonology
Keep good church order
Punish for failure to go to church on Sunday
Can get men for not keeping the icon lamp lit
So &endash; both cultures have LEGENDS &endash; a type of oral or verbal folklore &endash; that tell stories about good things that happen to you if you are good
But mostly bad things that happen to you if you are bad
And thus reinforce proper behavior &endash; with some ambiguity &endash; but more on the ambiguity later
All cultures have legends
Peculiarly East Slavic &endash; show map
Belief in the place spirit
There is a certain AGENT that makes you behave, a kind of personification of a unit of space
But not quite personification
Anthropomorphization &endash; not quite, not human form, though humanoid
Idea of animism = I/Thou relationship to nature, rather than I/it
I/it is more American
Nature is a thing
You study it
You manipulate &endash; with fertilizers and pesticides, if crops is what you are after
Seed clouds, if it is weather that you want to influence
In house &endash; you paint, insulate, decorate
You don't go around talking to a spirit and leaving it little food and alcohol presents
Animistic thinking is primitive thinking
Characteristic of peasants, but not educated Russians
And certainly not American college students
Well … what happens when you have problems with the computer
With the car
Soda machine or other vending machine
Talk to, threaten, cajole, kick, etc.
Perhaps if you want to look at one difference
Slavs &endash; what is alive is the land, or units of space on it
Émigrés taking soil from motherland, place in coffin
Importance of soil in creation legends
It is what both God and Satanail want
It is the medium of creation
Americans &endash; what is alive is a machine
Please note movies about machine comes to life
Car that comes to life &endash; Christine
Tron and the computer
All of the Terminator films
In legends
Microwave and new version of tanning bed
Computer, internet
Girlfriend's revenge &endash; telephone
Last kiss
One pattern place units are living things and you interact with them
Not persons, but alive
With their own sort of life
Another pattern &endash; inside/outside and protect the border which they already saw
The closer to human abode, the nicer the spirit
The farther away, the "wilder" the nastier
And bathhouse spirit has special position being on the border and a kind of intermediary between household/farmstead spirits and those outside, the spirits of water, forest, field
Lets look at gender &endash; I left out the rusalka
Talked about male spirits only
Again, may have wives, but essentially this is a male pantheon
Males are tied to place, rooted in place
Females are not
Male born into a house &endash; quite literally
Dies in that house
And never leaves the house, not to dwell elsewhere, except at death
Male has two homes &endash; if you will &endash; the house and the coffin and coffin is called by a name derived from the word for house
Dom = house
Domovina = coffin
Description of coffin in laments as a house without windows and doors where the breezes never blow and the sun never shines
Connect this to ancestor cult &endash; word for ancestors as a category is dedy/didy = grandfathers
Basically, men and the houses that they inhabit are intimately connected
Breaking the horse's head on the main beam when an adult male has trouble dying
Since men and houses are connected, then they are connected to the spirit of the house, the domovoi
Story of male household head having to die for a domovoi to come into being when a family builds a new house
But new houses are not often built
And location in relationship to previous house &endash; this is NOT our idea of moving
So, there are alternative stories about the way domovoi comes into being
Just materializes along with house &endash; tested by tossing in dog or cat
But family and house and domovoi all connected, esp. MALE members of the family, the dedy/didy
Female does move
She has two homes too, but her movement is not at death, but at marriage
She is born into a house, like the man
But she moves at marriage
And then her funeral is like a man's &endash; well, not quite
For women &endash; wedding/funeral parallels
Clothing
Exit from house
Laments
The phenomenon of the death wedding
For women, it is exactly marriage where the big break comes
It is at this point where she can start seeing spirits
Recall fortune-telling
At which point in life and on what topics
She can deal with birth and death &endash; though usually she has to be past menopause to be midwife or to prepare body for funeral
Lets look at rusalki
How they come into being
What they do to men &endash; basic tickling
Man who tries to dance with the rusalki
Baby rusalki &endash; the children born of the women who commit suicide by drowning
Baby rusalki can also be unbaptized children
Stillborn children &endash; no time to baptize &endash; though various ways to get around this
Children born out of wedlock and abandoned/killed at birth
The various ballads
Stories about baby rusalki wandering around in groups begging to be baptized, but none about baby ones growing up to be adults
Rather, most stories about adult (and gorgeous) females
Though there is a difference south>north in terms of appearance
Making a rusalka a wife &endash; its marriage that is lacking and that makes her a spirit
To what extent does she uphold order?
Again, things pivot around marriage
The matriarchy thesis &endash; very popular in Russia
Actually advocated by Engels in the Origin of the Family
Not well-accepted in the West
Marxist thesis is that it applied universally, to all peoples and all cultures
As in every society must go through a stage of matriarchy at some point
But perhaps only certain groups were matriarchal in the past and the Slavs were such a group
Evidence &endash; besides rusalka beliefs
Archeology &endash; preponderance of female figurines that are presumed to be evidence of goddess worship
Why female figurines necessarily mean goddess worship &endash; well…
Would preponderance of female dolls tell a future culture that we were goddess worshippers?
But it's not that simple
Location of the figurines in the home &endash; votive corner, sort of like icon corner
And the continuation of various beliefs
Terracotta figurines are associated with fertility
Human
Crop
Animal
This is connected to rusalki &endash; they make crops grow, make household prosper
To beliefs about the Virgin Mary and Paraskeva Piatnitsa (Friday)
Paraskeva is a "dirty" saint and she is a patroness of women, esp. in childbirth and a saint of cloth, spinning, and weaving, which are prohibited on her day or nasty effect on babies
Later will do pagan substratum of current belief &endash; in connection with articles in Balzer
Ivanits &endash; lower and higher mythology
Lower, I think, was always there and persists &endash; the place spirits
Animistic feelings toward the land
Higher is religion &endash; now Christianity
Before that, the pantheon they will see in Balzer
And before that, Neolithic period or earlier &endash; goddess worship