Abstract
For many sciences, such as history, archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and for philosophy, cosmogonic beliefs of ancient peoples became a subject of detailed study. This work uses field research results with reliance on the scientific tradition. The authors used both special, or general scientific, and philosophical methods. The problem of semantic analysis of the elements in the folklore of the world nations in the contemporary context is highly relevant. One of the tasks of this article is to identify the importance of the elements in the ancient beliefs. For this purpose, the article describes the results of a comparative study of myths mentioning different types of the elements. The article reveals the characteristics of the elements’ embodiment in the cosmogonic myths of the world nations and determines the reasons for worshipping the sky, earth, fire, and water in cosmogonic folklore. The authors analyse the common and the special in figurative symbolism of the elements in classical and contemporary folklore. The analysis of semantic load of archetypal images describing the elements showed that each of the elements in the world mythology is sacred. The elements act at all levels of the universe and occupy the entire cosmos in the cosmogonic myths of the world nations.Contribution: The results of the article can be used in scientific research in the field of folklore and ethnology.
Highlights
The concept of the Elements penetrates through and through mythology as one of the most important structural and system-forming elements of the worldview
The cosmogonic myths of the world nations describe the origin of the cosmos as well as its individual parts, which are united in a single system
It is the cosmogonic myth that describe about the disintegration of the primary Chaos into four elements, namely water, fire, air, and earth, of the separation of heaven from earth, and of the emergence of the earth from the world ocean as a stronghold
Summary
The concept of the Elements penetrates through and through mythology as one of the most important structural and system-forming elements of the worldview. With the formation of religion, the idea of the Elements is significantly transformed within the framework of theology and finds an ambiguous interpretation in the picture of the world, built on the basis of Scripture. Anthropology practically does not record clearly distinguished traces of the concept of the system of elements in the ideas of peoples at the pre-state stage of social development. Some of the most important elements, on the coexistence with which the life of the tribe directly depends, are reflected in cosmogonic representations in abundance, such as the sea in the proto-religion of the Japanese, the inhabitants of Oceania, and some tribes of American aborigines who lived on the coast (Rudenko & Sobolievskyi 2020). There is no logical reason to discuss the existence of these peoples’ ideas about the system of elements interacting with each other
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