Functions and actions of the spirit of the forest vöris’ (on the data of Komi-Permyak mythological narratives)
Abstract
Most common nominations, functions and actions of the Komi-Permyak mythological beings, the spirit of the forest, were observed after analysis of oral narratives. After analysis of the texts we concluded, that the main functions of the spirit were related to aspects of malignancy, protection, foretelling, and punishment. We saw, that the spirit of the forest is mostly commonly found to be malignant towards its interactions with humans, and cattle who could not coexist in agreement with the spirit. Protective function is shown to be actualised through special actions that are said to grant the person magic abilities and knowledge.
In this analysis, we present the notion of verb phrase thematic groups establishing close relations to multiple different function series through evaluation of process lexis of mythological narratives about the said spirit. We showed, that the data on the spirit voris', as the master of the natural locus, provides evidence of contact of the spirit with a person, but, unlike the texts on the spirit of the house susedko, the motive of physical contact of the spirit of the forest voris' with a person is significantly insufficient. On the other hand, other motifs have a wide spectrum of actualisation in the region under question: voris' leads people astray in the forest, “steals” the road from people, takes away children, and cattle. These motifs are reflected in the lexical and semantic domains of the verb phrase unit vocabulary. We showed, that in the presented set of functions and actions of Komi-Permyak spirit of the forest, the said spirit's functions and actions cannot be said to be sufficient in its quantity.
We are still gathering more data as well as we are analysing older notes and other data that was not published; our actions are to help us to elaborate on the system and actualisation of the said spiritthrough a wider number of texts gathered and evaluated in near future, as such it is to help us to establish different loci of verbs describing the said spirit's called voris' actions of each of the functions' type.
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