Carpathian Ukrainian Folk Demonology. Part 1. Natural and Domestic Spirits; Souls of Deceased People; Images-Personifications

Abstract

The article is a short version of one of the sections of the future collective monograph on folk demonology of all Slavic peoples, which is currently being worked on by the staff of the Department of Etnolinguistics and Folklore of the Institute of Slavic Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences. The aim of the project is a systematic description according to a unified scheme of the entire circle of the most famous demonological images and the establishment of their regional specificity in order to obtain comparable data for further research on comparative Slavic demonology. This work is devoted to the Carpathian Ukrainian ethno-cultural tradition and is published in two parts. The first part considers the regional features of beliefs about the spirits of natural and domestics space, about characters genetically related to the souls of deceases people, about the personification of death, diseases, days of the week, good and bad human fate. In the second part, folk beliefs about the devil and about people with supernatural properties are analyzed.  The main objective of the article is to determine the regional particularity of the Carpathian data against the background of the Ukrainian mythology