The article is based on the assumption that an exclamation, a certain hand gesture, and prostration are the minimal form of greeting and propitiation of a deity in Egypt. These are already mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, and stay in use further on: since the New Kingdom we are aware of the mysterious language of baboons, welcoming the birth of the solar god with their screams and dances. Brief quotations of texts (again in the Pyramid Texts) supposedly spoken before the deity merely proclaim the beauty and goodness of the god, essentially putting the addressee in the necessary frame of mind for sacred communication to take place. The “contemplation of the beauty of God” by the common people becomes possible with the spread of religious processions, which provide the context for the manifestation of personal piety in texts that testify to the whole world about the beneficial intervention of God in the private life of a mere mortal. The phenomenon of personal piety is regarded by J. Assmann as a natural result of the development of both the hymn tradition, which explored the diversity of manifestations of the divine will in the world, and the religious upheavals of the Amarna era. However, the grain of such texts, reflecting the connection between a person’s attitudes in everyday life and the deity, the necessity to appease the deity with one’s behavior, can be found already in the tomb autobiographies of the Old Kingdom. This study compares evidences for Egyptians approaching deities expressed in varying degrees of eloquence in order to separate synchronic (variation in volume, typical for the textualization of mythological motifs) and diachronic (development of theological thought, formation of new text-generating models) mechanics of unfolding texts of sacred communication.

   It is believed that the Proto-Japanese ethnos was formed on the Islands during the Yayoi period (2^nd century B.C. to 4^th century A.D.) This was the time of numerous migrations from the Korean peninsula, and various groups of migrants relocated to the Japanese Islands and brought with them the techniques of rice cultivating, bronze and iron production, silk weaving, the main ritual symbols of power – the mirror and the sword, and many other innovations. Powerful migrations from the neighboring peninsula for various military and political reasons continued in the next period named Kofun, which is alternatively called the Yamato period. The 5^th – 6^th   centuries bring to Yamato Chinese system of writing, different currents of Chinese philosophy and Buddhism. It is also a period of the formation of the ancient Japanese state. Accordingly, when the time comes for compiling the state codes of myths and records (8th century), these texts are based primarily and predominantly on legends belonging to the ruling family and its closest clans, often of continental origin, apparently brought to the Islands in the form of written records. Many mythological themes and motifs came to the Islands among other cultural phenomena and inventions; some of them remained in little changed form, others blended with local archaic motifs, which probably date back to even more ancient migrations from the continent. The paper strives to reconstruct typological connections between the mythological narratives about the shamanistic ruler Jingū, her son, Emperor Ōjin, and some motifs of the East Asian folklore related to concepts of miraculous birth. It is also intended to touch on the theme of miraculous turtle in the Japanese and the continental folklore.

   In ancient and medieval sources written in the classical Chinese language, there are references to the “Land of the Gui” (Gui Guo), which lies at a considerable distance from known inhabited places, and not in the sky, underground or underwater, but on a horizontal plane. The word “gui” usually refers to the spirits of the deceased, but is also used to describe various creatures of the demonic realm. Some medieval accounts of journeys to Gui Guo differ markedly from other contemporary accounts of visits to the afterlife. At the same time, there are several descriptions of the inhabitants of the “Land of the Gui” with distinctly demonic behaviour. One of these texts, a tale called “The Merchant of Qingzhou” from “Jishen Lu”, a 10th-century collection, is based on the assumption that the visit of a living person to a Gui Guo is harmful to the inhabitants. The actions of the inhabitants of the Gui Guo, who ask a magician to expel the invisible hero from their midst, resemble the measures traditionally taken to expel the wandering soul of the deceased. The narrative of “The Merchant of Qingzhou” is built around a motif identified in Yu. E. Berezkin’s catalogue as “Spirits do not see the living” (I56). The article argues that the plot of this story may have developed under the influence of Tungus-Manchu or Turkic folk traditions. It was adapted to the specific mythological worldview by reinterpreting the dead as demons and using terminology from natural philosophy. In addition, the narrative was enriched with a description of the ritual of exorcising disease-causing demons by feeding them.