In Irish Saga and Folklore Tradition there exist two types of tales telling us of magic islands housing the Other World (OW in the two meanings – OW as a world parallel to that existing on Earth and OW as a world after death). “Far-away islands” described in the focus of Christianized narrative are shown as a “promised land” which can be reached as a matter of chance or else through the supernatural help. The hero as a rule gets there while still alive and sometimes gets an opportunity to return. Islands of this type have no proper toponymical designations, instead they possess conventionally motivated names like The Land of Youth, The Land of Women, The Island of Apple-trees et al. Small islands (really existing off the Irish shores) are shown differently and presented as locoes of life after death. The article gives motivated reconstruction of the ways in which such tales come into being.
1. The correlation with Druids’ cult islands tradition (testified by archeology and classical data) as well as with neo-heathen practices of later periods.
2. The correlation with the tradition of leaving those accused of crimes on a small island as a kind of an execution.
3. The correlation with tales of vanishing islands (the projection of the region’s volcanic activity). Special attention is given to folklore tales of the so-called Donn’s House (Tech Duinn), an as it were existing island at the South-West of Ireland which is (1) described in the Middle Irish tradition as the burial site of Donn, one of Goidelic tribe’s ancestors killed in a battle for the island; (2) depicted in the folklore tradition as a kind of a “station” where the dead one’s soul, guided by his patron saint, has to expect the final direction for its last route. Separate attention is given to the tradition of contamination of Donn’s House and the magic hill which is at the same time the abode of Death as well as the home of Goddess Danu’s Tribe, and later of the fairies.

On the material of the novels by Chretien de Troyes (“Cliges”, “Perceval”), the anonymous “Floir and Blanchetflore” and “The Beautiful Stranger” by René de Beaujeu the article examines the basic parameters of marking, the specific features and the semantic load of the otherworldliness in the French chivalric romance at the early stages of its development. The undertaken analysis reveals both mythological and fairy tale markers (crossing the water border, defeating the guard of the reservoir, signs of death, barren land, playing chess) and new ones (imaginary death of the hero or heroine). The article shows how the opposition of two different other worlds in one novel serves to depict the formation and selfidentification of the knight in his two roles – a warrior and a lover, as well as to depict the complex relationship between these roles, the limits of duty and freedom of the hero, the problems of combining courtly love and love sensual, as well as love for and pursuit of wanderings and adventures. It is noted that the portrayal of the other world in the novels is subjected to the author’s creative revision.

The fairy tale “The Water-Babies” by the British novelist Charles Kingsley depicts the other world as water kingdom. The boy chimney sweeper Tom gets there having drowned in the river. The paper analyses how the other world is organized to provide the Victorian up-bringing and support the ideas of Darwinian evolution. Tom’s life in water is interpreted as the period of moral transformation and the study of nature. The topography of the other world is structured around the magic Isle of St. Brendan. The boundary between this world and the other world is crossed through mirrors, water surfaces and by looking in the eyes of fairies.
“The Water-Babies” are interpreted as part of a specific literary tradition. The article compares different versions of the archetypal plot about a chimney sweeper in English literature. The analysis is focused around the poems about the chimney sweeper by William Blake in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”, narrating the tale of children getting into the other world and the following Redemption. “The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire” by Walter de la Mare is the final text in this tradition.
In conclusion we examine beliefs about chimney sweeper in folklore sources and in particular the connection between chimney sweeper and good luck.

The paper investigates spiritualistic perception of Mars by Russian spiritualists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It determines historical and cultural specificity of spiritualist attitude to Mars and its Russian background enrooted in the orthodox tradition. The paper overviews popular scientific concepts, which made probable the existence of a highly developed civilization on Mars; it indicates the authoritative spiritual works, which influenced the interest of Russian spiritualists to cosmological problems; it reveals spiritualistic interpretation of spirit messages about the existence of a highly developed civilization on Mars; it considers the cosmological Martian theme in the works of Russian spiritualist I.A. Karyshev. The author argues that the interest in Mars should be explained by the similar nature of epistemological problems encountered by both spiritualists and astronomers. Elusiveness of natural phenomena in positivistic age was the reason that secured Mars a certain place in popular scientific, artistic and spiritualist literature. Although the fideistic view was common among spiritualists, the author claims, that some of them argued for the need to demythologize the spirit messages. I.A. Karyshev’s cosmological system is of interest to the historian of religion as an example of spiritualist construction of Russian planetary utopia and can rightfully take its place in the history of Russian utopian literature.

Greek perception of the Others was syncretic: real facts were mixed with fantastic ideas; in their view the Others lived on the outskirts of the oikumene, that is on the border with the other worlds – in the broad sense – real and fantastic, the world of alive and dead – this connected them with the phenomena of borders, transition, burial, etc. Due to this, the Others in Greek art were often represented in mythological subjects and as mythological characters. Also, some subjects where the Others were represented were connected with the phenomena of transition and burial – war, preparations for war, hunt, etc. Also, some details of such images were connected with these phenomena.
The semantics of the Greek vase painting was controversial and multilayered therefore interpretation of many of such images is disputable. Besides, the phenomena studied might be examined in a more narrow or more broad sense. Moreover, the connection of many characters represented with the other world, other gods and myths is much more complicated and outgoes far beyond the borders of the thematic connected with the Otherness.

The article, based on the author’s field materials and the analysis of ethnographic literature, describes the features of several Mari folklore characters, who are associated with plots about death and the “wires” of the deceased. This character category includes the “angel of death” Azyren (Azreni), the deity of the “afterlife” Kiyamat and the spirits of deceased people. These characters have the function of “guides” to the “afterlife” and harbingers of death. One of the hypostases of Kiyamata – the god Kiyamat-tyura, appears in folklore as the patron saint of the deads. Another hypostasis is Kiyamat-savush. He performs the role of seeing off to “the next world”. Some of these mythological characters are presented in narratives abstractly, the others are visualized more detailed. Azyren and the “deads”, as a rule, are heroes of non-fabulous prose (legends, epics and fairy tales), they are not considered to be the objects of worship. The image of Kiyamat, on the contrary, is sacred, and some traditions of the memorial ritual are associated with him. Kiyamat (kiyamats) is revered during the ceremonies devoted to a deceased person. The image of Azyren has demonic essence. He is believed to be the “evil spirits” and he scares alive people. Despite the semantic association between the spirits of death and the chthonic world, they do not perform the function of intimidation as other demons do. Their role in the folklore is to take away the soul of the deceased without violating the natural boundaries between the worlds. The article includes historiographical descriptions of these characters, etymological and comparative data, fragments of interviews.

The custom of raising the left hand has been preserved until recently in the thanatological practices of one of the Circassian diaspora communities in Turkey (Uzunyayla – Kayseri). According to the stereotypical narrative descriptions of the ritual, one of the groups arriving at the funeral slowly steps forward, taking three steps from the left foot, and slowly raises the left wrist to the level of the chin, temple, or crown. By raising his hand, the condolent publicly expresses the recognition of the social status of the deceased. According to informants, in the late 1980s, the custom was eradicated under the pressure from the Islamic clergy. Those who opposed its cessation understood this custom as a sacred one ‘brought from the ancestral homeland’ and bequeathed by Zhabagi Kazanoko (the folkloric and historical hero, philosopher, humanist and reformer of the 18th century).
The idea of “reviving” the ritual was initiated during the pandemic, when mass gatherings and physical contacts (handshakes and embraces, which are common in ordinary funeral practices) were prohibited. In particular, in relation to the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Caucasian War (celebrated by the Circassian community annually on May 21), it was proposed to hold an online campaign for posting photos with a raised left hand.
The explicit and hidden strategies of actualizing the ritual of raising the left hand as “our own”, “the primordial” and ‘undeservedly forgotten one’ are analyzed in this work on the material of the texts of classical folklore (heroic legends) and memoranda recorded by the author during fieldwork, as well as posts on the social media. The main aim of the research is to show how the bearers of the tradition reproduce (verbally and visually) the stable and changeable structures of a narrative / a ritual under the influence of certain ideological dominants.

The article deals with the images of the war – one of the key concepts of the Don Cossacks’ world picture – in the historical song folklore. Military themes permeate most of the Cossacks historical songs. Along with the direct depiction of military actions and related phenomena and concepts, the songs contain allegorical, metaphorical descriptions of war – stable images associated with armed clashes. The author’s attention is focused on the last, as they show the deep interconnections of war with other basic concepts of the Cossack, and Russian in general, worldview.
The representations of war, reflected in the songs, are closely related to the understanding of life and death, one’s own and others’ and the main occupations of the Cossacks. War is described allegorically through images of natural disasters, social relations, and labor activities, and appears as a phenomenon beyond human control, characterized as an alien, otherworldly space, and thereby partially intersects with the people’s understanding of death. Many of the described metaphors (army – cloud; battle – harvest, feast; enemies – guests) were characteristic of all-Russian folk art from the earliest period, which shows the continuity of the Cossack folklore tradition with the Russian one.

The most important attribute of paradise in most of its medieval descriptions is light, which is usually characterized in superlatives: paradise is filled with such a bright radiance that any differentiation of colors is apparently impossible here. However, some texts suggest a certain, albeit modest, color diversity of paradise: they mention the colors of plants present in paradise, the colors of rivers flowing in it, etc. It seems to us that such a “splitting” of undifferentiated light that dominates paradise space does two functions. First, it symbolically expresses the difference in virtues in terms of their quality and meaning (medieval paradise, like the earthly world, is strictly differentiated, although not in a social but in a moral sense). Differentiation of colors from objects can be transferred to human bodies. Secondly, the coloring of paradise, albeit not rich, corresponds to the multicolor criterion characteristic of medieval artistic thinking: paradise is interpreted as a “decorated” place (in this respect it correlates with “decorated” speech in rhetorical theory), and decoration requires the presence of “colores” (As in rhetoric, embellishment is achieved by using verbal “colores”, i.e. tropes and figures).

After the report “Split Light: Coloring of Medieval Descriptions of Paradise” questions were asked to its author A.E. Makhov. Here are some extracts from this discussion – they compensate, at least in a small part, the lack of a complete text by Makhov, the preparation of which was prevented by the death of Alexander Evgenievich, and will show possible ways to transform the report into an article (A.E. himself has always been very attentive to the questions of listeners and saw in them an inventory grain for developing his own ideas).