Mythopoetic Imagery of Categories and Cosmology of Hymnography in Ancient Russian Culture

Abstract

Historically, a myth arises as an attempt to build a holistic picture of the world structure on an intuitive-figurative level, capable of summarizing empirical experience and supplementing (with the help of psychological speculations) its limitations. Thus, a myth is something that appears in preliterate societies: stories about ancestors, gods, spirits, and heroes. The mythological complex, which acquires syncretic visual-verbal forms in rites, acts as a specific way of systematizing knowledge about the surrounding world. A whole complex of concepts is interpreted under mythopoetics («mythologeme», «archetype», «poetic cosmos» or system of myths), as well as a special type of thinking (mythological thinking) and ritual. Mythopoetics studies methods of artistic assimilation and transformation of myth, mythological images and motifs, considers various principles of introducing archaic-mythological elements into the text, their functioning in culture. In this case, the mythopoetic picture of ancient Russian culture, the integrity of the ethnocultural space was modeled by worldview categories. With the help of these concepts, the orientation of the ancient Russian man in culture was carried out, since the universal categories of culture are the defining categories of human consciousness. As for hymnography (praise song), this is the general name of poetic works related to Christian worship. The history of Slavic hymnography begins with the translations made by Cyril and Methodius in the second half of the 9th century. Works of hymnography were included in various collections: triodes, minae, prayer books, Chasoslov, Trebnyk. The «cosmological» ideas of Christian songwriters also found their expression in hymnographic texts. The paradigmatic structure of the texts reflected a holistic symbolic concept of the universe and the place of man in it.