Last lecture Todays lecture

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Last lecture Todays lecture

• Goddess worship as one aspect of ditheism
• Reflected at all levels of culture tales and
  Baba Iaga
• Horses and sacrifice
• Bear cult
• Start Cows Son

• 2 approaches to tales
• Reconstructing ancient beliefs from tales
• Seeing tales as part of a current belief system
• Cows Son and Koshchei
• Animal tales

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Two basic approaches to tales

• Stories of the cultural past Haney
• Tales lt old myths
• Tales lt accounts of old rituals, old practices
• Tales reflect old systems of belief (pagan ½ of
  ditheism)

• Stories of the individual past Bettelheim
• Tales parallel the development of the child
• Tales offer the child images, structure
  experiences through narrative

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Reconstructing systems of belief

• Is reconstructing prehistoric belief possible?
• Baba Iaga lt Goddess beliefs example
• Quantity of evidence
• Variety of evidence
• Consistency of evidence

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Shamanic beliefs What is shamanism?

• Belief in 3 levels of being three worlds
• Shamans travel between worlds soul journey
• By entering ECSTATIC states through dancing,
  wounding, stress, chemical aids
• Communication with gods about crops
• Finding the loss souls of the sick so that they
  can recover
• Animal familiars, animal transformations
• One-time spirit journey at initiation

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Contemporary belief systems rather than
reconstruction

• The Cows Son
• The pike as a shamanic fish
• The cow as a second mother other second
  mothers
• Milk relations/blood relations

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Cows Son continued

• Weaning and the evil eye
• Witches and milk
• Forest baby
• Attack from the back
• Analog to vampires and blood
• Exchange of bride for cattle

Please note difference witches/Baba Iaga
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Milk related to blood

• Body liquids that nourish and sustain
• Sickness drying up
• Blood bans and the church
• Milk is a liquid that is eaten
• Eating and becoming part of the world in which
  you eat

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Koshchei the deathless remnant of red death
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Koshchei the Deathless and the cycle of life and
death

• Analogs to unquiet death beliefs and old practice
  of killing elders
• Two types of dead in red death times
• Two types of dead now one is INVERTED from good
  to bad
• Journeys to the other world and crop issues again

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More Koshchei

• Koshchei and his transposable soul shamanic
  analogs
• Fear of soul going into objects, esp. mirror, now
• Koshchei as serpent
• Serpents live underground
• Serpents eat the dead issues of eating again
• Serpents visit women at night
• Koshchei is seducer of YOUNG women

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Introduction to animal tales

• Fox and wolf at the fishing hole
• Peasant, bear and fox
• Fox marries the cat
• Fox as midwife
• The Trickster and Paul Radins theories