Abstrakt
The paper analyses four narratives attested in chronicles, religious treatises and folk legends that it considers to be possible remnants of Slavic anthropogony myth that has partially survived after the Christianization of Slavs. These fragments of myths about the origins of humanity, the creation of man or the origin of his soul are build on the pervasive principle of synecdoche and metonymy.
A man is created by means of a merging of Earth or dirt either with a particle of God (synecdoche principle), or with some object that has been in contact with God (metonymy principle). Earth thus works as a symbolic mediator between body material coming from God and between the human body coming from the Earth itself.
In the talk I would like to re-evaluate the meaning of these semiotic principles with a special focus laid on the role of human body and corporeality and its connection to the material of Earth and the body of deities. Also, the semantic background of archaic Slavic culture, of the Biblical apocrypha horizon and of medieval Orthodox popular culture will be considered, as well as many common traits with the other Indo-European anthropogony traditions that can be positively identified in the myth fragments analysed.