Родючість в українських обрядах родинного циклу

Abstract

The aim of the article is to study the role of fertility in rites, which is carried out after the construction of structures of wedding, funeral and maternity cycles, as well as after their comparative analysis. The use of the method of structural and functional analysis opens wide prospects for scientific studies of national rituals.                 The scientific novelty of the research results is the combination of family rites, as the most stable component of the Ukrainian tradition, with the expediency of introducing an ethnological approach and coordination with the structural and functional method. The problem is to verify the conformity of the structures of the cycles of wedding, funeral and maternity rites constructed by the researcher to the well-known and popular concept of the presence in ritual actions of processes of making, using and destroying ceremonial attributes.                 It was established in the result of study that the ritual attributes in the wedding cycle can be considered virginity and social status of the bride, in the funeral – the dead body and the coffin with the dead, and in the maternity – baby, festive table, whip-round. Thanks to the verification of rites, it was possible to establish the true nature of the action of some episodes in each of the three cycles, due to which the structures underwent a certain transformation. Because for each of the three actions – making, using and destroying – there must be a separate episode in the structure of a rite.                 The researcher comes to conclusion that with the use of ritual attributes and the growth of the sacralization of the surrounding reality, the ritual action is saturated with elements of fertility and there is a close connection between fertility and sacralization. The driving force of ritual action is the conflict between death and fertility, because only fertility can resist death. In this case, both forces – death and fertility in primitive mythological notions are the energy of the afterlife. Energy that is able to penetrate reality only during ceremonial actions, opening access to the afterlife and sanctifying, sacralizing the surrounding reality.