E-mail: plimeroff@mail.ru
Tel: +7 904 2710389;
Kommunisticheskaya st. 26, 167982 Syktyvkar, Russian Federation;
PhD (Philology), leading researcher of Folklore Department of Institute of the Language, Literature and History of Komi Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The paper is prepared within the project of the fundamental research, conducted according to the fundamental research programs of the Uralic Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2015—2017) No 15-13-6-30 “Oral Folk Tales among the Komi and Modern Narrators”
This research paper analyses the motif of the Original Sin as a kernel theme of the anthropogony plots. Anthopogony legend is incorporated to the cosmogony texts, but in its essential features it is constructed according to the Holy Bible story about Adam and Eve, their Lapse from Virtue and their Expulsion from the Paradise. The Bible narrative about the first people in its oral folk interpretation acquires additional etiological motifs, that change semantics of the Bible story essentially. Major change happens to the concept of the Original Sin. According to the churchly tradition, the Lapse from the Virtue consists of the violation of the God’s Commandment prohibiting to eat fruits from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This violation by Adam and Eve, the humankind’s ancestors distorts the primordial human nature. According to the Komi oral narratives, the concept of the Original Sin is related with the motif of the First Woman’s Adultery with the Devil, and the entire motif of the Original Treason is determined with the mythic status of the female as created by the Heaven’s god’s antagonist. The Sin of the ancestors diseases the next generations of humans still harder, the further they are distanced from the first human generation, until full devolution of the last generation of humans before the Eschaton.
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