Carpathian Ukrainian Folk Demonology. Part 2. Beliefs About the Devil, Sorcerers and Witches

Abstract

The article is a short version of one of chapter of the collective monograph on folk demonology of all Slavic peoples, which is currently being worked on by the staff of the Department of Ethnolinguistics and Folklore of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The aim of the project is a systematic description according to a unified scheme of the entire rang 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 mythology. In the first part of this article (published in the journal «Slavic Studies», 2022, no. ...), three major blocks of Carpathian demonology were considered: the category of spirits of the domestic and natural sphere; characters belonging to the group of «walking» dead, and personified images (death, diseases, days of the week). The second part is devoted to the analysis of the regional features of the Carpathian beliefs about devils, ghosts, «fears» and people with supernatural properties. In conclusion, the original features of the Carpatho-Ukrainian lower mythology that distinguish it from the East Slavic tradition are listed.