The Animals Conceived Subjectively in the Early Medieval Rituals. An Attempt to Reinterpret the Animals’ Status in the Culture of the Pre-Christian Slavs

Abstract

The role of animals in the early medieval Slavic culture is formulated in the scientific literature from the perspective of the modern, anthropocentric worldview, which draws neatly the boundary between human and non-human beings. However, in the light of the concepts related to eco-philosophy and the social-regulatory theory of culture, our kind of worldview is reasonably different from the thinking of the man of the pre-modern era. The latter concepts allow for the interpretation of early medieval rituals from the perspective of the equal status of the human and nonhuman beings. This status was reflected, inter alia, in magical identification of a man with an animal.