RITUALS OF NATURAL AND SOCIAL DISASTERS IN TRADITIONAL MENTAL ECOLOGY AND ETNOMEDICINE OF THE RUSSIAN NORTH

Abstract

The paper represents new results of structural-semiotic analysis on syntactics, semantics and pragmatics of ritual-mythological «texts», which are included in subject-problem field of traditional mental ecology and sacred ethnomedicine of peoples living in the European North of Russia. The main purposes of the paper are investigation of ritual process of sacred space' creation (hierotopy) of temples built for one day in the North of Russia, revelation of «healing» («saving») mythopoetic semantics of the phenomenon of «one-day» temples building within folklore-ethnographical discourse, church archaeology and Russian religious-philosophical knowledge. Data base of the investigation is composed with «rituals of disasters», related with menace of epidemics, epizooties, social and natural cataclysms. Subject field of them may be determined as «ritual medicine of catastrophes». The main attention is paid to investigation of ritual technologies of sacred space' creation (hierotopies) within the process of one-day building of votive wonder-working temples on the Russian North. The motivation analysis of ritual one-day technologies reveals their relation to crisis, marginal situations, «troublous times», when all foundations of the universe is being destructed and chthonic forces of unhuman world, bearing diseases and death, bad harvest and famine, fires and natural disasters are rushing into human world. Special occasional rites (as sort of «ritual medicine of catastrophes») were performed to restrain the forces of chaos. Building of one-day temples was considered to be the most important technology of renovation of the universe.