“GRAB IL’INSKY MEAT”. FROM RITUAL REALITY TO THE LEGEND MOTIF

The article considers a special ritual behavior – grabbing meat, which was an integral part of the animal sacrifice rite on Elijah’s Day of the village Noshul of Priluzsky district of the Komi Republic until the 1930s, and also determines the role of the “grabbing meat” motif in the modern oral local tradition. Based on an analysis of ethnographic materials, it was revealed that grabbing meat was a kind of ritual element of summer vow holidays with the sacrifice of animals not only in the village Noshul, but also in certain areas of Karelians and Northern Russians. Considering it in a number of other unusual ways of distributing sacrificial meat, such as throwing it from the roof of a building and issuing it through a church fence, makes it possible to compare ritual behavior with fights and fist battles of rural patronal holidays. Grabbing meat adds to the ritual of sacrificing an animal “strangeness”, “casus”, so that information about the sacrifice is preserved in oral tradition. The analysis of the content and form of oral stories recorded during the folklore and ethnographic expedition in 2006 allows the author to conclude that the collective memory retains not the story of the sacrifice on Elijah’s Day, but a fixed expression – “grab Elijah’s Day meat”, which becomes the plot-forming motif of narratives about Elijah’s Day. The language form of expression provides a relationship with Elijah’s Day and leads to annual updating, which creates the conditions for the motif preservation and translation in the local oral tradition.