Mātes latviešu mītiskajā pasaulē

Abstract

Female spirits mates (Mothers, plural form; singu lar - mate) are significant in Latvian folklore. There are more than a hundred names of different mates, even until the present preserved in various folklore texts (folksongs, magic formulae, fairy tales, leg ends, folk medicine practices etc.). The most com mon are Vėją mate (Mother of Wind), Meža mate (Mother of Forest), Veju mate (Mother of Shades), Žemes mate (Earth Mother), Velna mate (Devil's Moth er). Although not as frequently, yet in semantically and formally curious contexts some Mothers - Lazdų (Hazel), Ogu (Berries), Senu (Mushrooms), Kapa (Grave), Smilšu (Sand), Pieną (Milk), Uguns (Fire), Ūdens (Water) mate - are mentioned; the same goes for mates, the meaning of whose names is difficult to translate into any other language: those are Ceru (Tuft?), Rišu, Rūšu, Sekšu, Jodu (Black Devils), Mėšlu (Dung) mates, being related to death and rebirth, as well as to the increasing of fertility and fruitfulness. Mates - patronesses of various essential and im portant spheres of the ancient man's life - have been so characteristic in folkloric worldview of many peoples during certain periods of their develop ment when matricentric tendences prevailed. Mates - female spirits have survived longer in the mythic consciousness, where the patricentric ideology as a base for state formations was meagre, and those patricentrically organized civilizations emerged comparatively much later or did not es tablish themselves at all (in Latvian, Estonian, Livo nian, Keltic traditions). On the other hand, Ger mans, Slavs and Baltic Lithuanians experienced the formation of such patricentrically organized civili zations much earlier, and the female spirits and deities were forgotten party in folkloric tradition, and expelled from mythic consciousness, or their functions were transferred to male deities.