The study is devoted to the meaning and the main types of divinatory practices in the Japanese antiquity. The main objects of the study are the texts written in 8^th c., such as two mythological and historic annals, “Records of Ancient Matters” (“Kojiki”) and “The Chronicles of Japan” (“Nihon shoki”), an anthology of the ancient Japanese poetry “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” (“Man’yōshū”) and “Records of Customs and Lands” (“Fudoki”), the last one representing some kind of ancient gazetteers.

Remarkably, the rites of divination in these annals are mentioned beginning from the earliest stage of the Japanese cosmological history. First of all, the rite is performed when the pair of ancestors is going to give birth to the world between Heaven and Earth; the next two episodes are also highly important in the cultural history of Japan, one being the story concerning Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, who concealed herself for a time in the Rocky Celestial Cave, and the second is connected with the descent of her grandchild from Heaven to Earth in order to rule Japan.

We are also going to introduce and analyze the (“Newly compiled record of turtle omens” (“Shinsen kisōki”). This text, compiled presumably in 9^th c., contains some myths of Urabe, the guild of official diviners. From it, for example, we learn the mythical explanation of the fact that divination with a deer blade (scapulimancy) was officially rejected at the state level in favor of divination with the turtle shell (plastromancy).

The main object of the paper is also to present some suggestions about the peculiarities of the Japanese type of communication with the gods during the rite of divination.

In 1940 the philologist Xiangda put forward a hypothesis that in medieval China sutra preaching could be separated from its religious environment and continue to spread separately in the form of self-sufficient texts. He also drew attention to the fact that in the early Middle Ages (3^d – 6^th centuries) changdao preachers could be playing a crucial role in this process. In our article, drawing upon the material of biographies collection “Gao Seng Zhuan” (“Biographies of Eminent Monks”, beginning of the 6^th c.) we attempt to reconstruct certain criteria the chronicler identified this group of monks with. We have determined its boundaries by comparing changdao preachers with other categories of religious figures from the “Gao Seng Zhuan”: with the sutra masters jinshi, on the one hand, and with the declamators songjing, on the other. The article proves that the concepts of changdao and jingshi was to signify special groups of religious specialists which were typical of the Chinese Buddhist community in the 4^th – beginning 6th centuries. At the same time the term songjing did not mean professionalism, but personal merits and bliss a monk had obtained.

There are no pre-Christian descriptions of the afterlife and wanderings to the “other world” in the Old Russian tradition. Of particular importance for the understanding of these ideas are the traditions of the Initial Chronicle (Tale of Bygone Years) – “Stories about the first Russian princes” (“Varangian sagas” in the terminology of A. Stender-Petersen). The most lengthy text of the ““Death penalties” is a description of the massacre of the Drevlyans the murderers of her husband Igor, by Princess Olga. The massacre includes three episodes: the burying of the Drevlyan ambassadors in the boat, the burning in the “bath”, the extermination with weapons of the remaining Drevlyans, who drank on the Igor’s trizna. Olga’s “death penalties” are transmitted by the chronicle in accordance with traditional cult paradigms: “rites of passage” – wedding and funerary. All three motifs (burial, cremation, death from weapons) correlate with the mythoepic traditions of Northern Europe (Old Irish and Scandinavian – Old Icelandic), but rather reflect not the three functions of Dumezil, connected with mythological cosmology, but the legend of the establishment of the nontribal state order in the Russian land after the tribal uprising of the Drevlyans.

Danzanravjaa (1803–1856), the 5^th Noyon Khutuktu was a well-known khalkha monk, poet, and the founder of the Mongolian theatre. He wrote more than 300 works in Mongolian and Tibetan. His museum contains those poems, songs, and plays including a philosophical volume. He dedicated the eulogy “Тэр мину” to his “patron deity and friend Jamsran”. This article introduces for the first time the poem “Тэр мину” of Danzanravjaa, examines the connection of this deity to the Noyon Khutuktu lineage and pays a special attention to the Choinling and Galba Monastery relationship of Danzanravjaa. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with monks from Khamar monastery conducted in 2019, outlining the current state of research including recent Mongolian literature.

In the early twentieth-century Europe, international indexing systems and typologies were developed for folklore archives and research. Later, these indexes formed international standards. As an illustrative example of such international systems, mention may be made of such as the Thompson motif index of folk literature, and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type index. The problem presented in my article is to ponder, how to combine the traditional indexes of narrative folklore with the methodology of computer-based research. The problem with using the traditional motif indexes is that only very rare cases e.g. of Thompson’s index represent Caucasian, Siberian, Central Asian or East Asian traditions, and in general only a few non-European traditions are well represented. Luckily there exists the index developed recently by Yu.E. Berezkin and E.N. Duvakin, entitled “Thematic classification and distribution of folklore and mythological motives by area. Analytical catalog". This index encompasses massive corpuses of myths and other materials of folklore from all parts of the world.

An important direction of future research will involve advances from traditional typologies to cross-cultural digital typologies. In the era of digital humanities’, it is possible to enrich the motif indexes to include more traditions, so far not well represented in the previous indexes. Large datasets of “Big Data” offer great potential for developing new computational models. One way to combine modern computing network technology with traditional methods is to use web-ontologies as linked data. The advantage of the digital motif index is its universality: the digital code is language-independent. Digital, annotated corpuses combined with Internet-based type indexes can create a completely new tool for research of oral traditions.

The article presents an index of the types, motives and basic elements of the legends recorded among the Kestenga Karelians on the territory of the modern Loukhsky district in the Republic of Karelia, and also partially in the Kandalaksha district in the Murmansk region. The identification of the legends’ motives was carried out based on the Scientific Archive of the Karelian Scientific Center RAS and the Phonogram Archive of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of the Karelian Scientific Center RAS archival materials, as well as published notes and articles of travelers who visited the studied region in the 19^th – 20^th centuries. In total, 120 texts of legends were involved in the work, among which one can single out cycles about the settlement and development of the region; the aboriginal regions; treasures; the fight against external enemies; robbers. The index is compiled on the basis of the corresponding index developed by N.A. Krinichnaya in the field of Russian historical prose. The index contains 18 types of motives, within which the main versions and elements are highlighted. With respect to the original index, some versions of the motifs have been corrected, some versions have been added. The compilation of an index of motives based on the material of Karelian prose was undertaken for the first time, which determines the novelty and relevance of this work.

The article examines the sources and specifics of the first attempt at a systematic description of Chinese folklore for comparative purposes. The index of Chinese folk tales in the 12th chapter of NB Dennis’s monograph “The Folklore of China” (1876) was based on a scheme by S. Baring- Gould, attached to the collection of English folklore by W. Henderson (1866). In turn, Baring-Gould improved the model created by J.-G. von Hahn that was published in the first volume of the Greek and Albanian tales’ collection (1864). The 1876 index is shorter than its predecessors: it has 15 “roots” (approximately corresponding to the tale types), 9 of which Dennis identified himself; von Hahn had 40 such types, and Baring-Gould had 51. If von Hahn and Dennis in their constructions considered the position of migrationists, Baring-Gould proceeded only from the early ideas of the mythological school about a single ancient source of Indo-European folklore. Dennis had a broader perspective that allowed him in his book to take into account the parallels between the mythological traditions of all inhabited continents; however, in the index, he compares Chinese tales mainly with Indo-European, which reflects the influence of the “Sino-Aryan” movement, popular among Sinologists in the 1870s.