SEMANTICS OF ANIMAL IMAGES IN MANTIC RITUALS: RUSSIAN FOLK SONGS

Abstract

The article explores the symbolic images of animals in Russian folk songs, ritual texts performed during Yuletide divination, where hopes, fears and social ideals of the peasantry are revealed through agrarian and magical traditions. Folk songs integrating pre-Christian, Orthodox, and secular calendar rituals served as a tool for predicting the future. The author identifies three types of animal symbolism: carrier animals that bring benefits or disasters; animal symbols with stable semantics; paired images that reflect gender roles and portend marriage. The ambivalence of the symbols underscores the duality of peasant life: a horse can mean both prosperity (“golden mane”) and death (“carrying a log on horseback”). The novelty of the research lies in the application of a structural and mythological approach, which allows to consider animals as a cultural palimpsest, where totemic representations, predictive magic and social symbols are intertwined. For the first time, the author systematically reveals the dual function of animals in divination rituals and offers an interpretation of the plots of folk songs through structural models of totemic myth. Thus, the work demonstrates that folk songs are not just fortune-telling texts, but a mirror of peasant mentality, where each image of an animal becomes a metaphor for human experience and reflects the deep mythological structures of the Slavic tradition.