THE OGRE’S SOUL. AGE AND SEQUENCE OF THE SPREAD OF FOLKLORE MOTIFS THAT EXPLAIN THE INVULNERABILITY OF A PERSON
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2020-1-79-89
The “external soul” (person dies when some object or creature is destroyed) and the “Achilles heel” (The only vulnerable spot is near the surface of person’s body and not in his inner organs) are folklore motifs used to explain why a particular person cannot be killed or how he can be killed. As other 2700 motifs which global distribution is demonstrated in our database, the “external soul” and the “Achilles heel” are a product not of the universal “primitive mind” but of particular historical processes and circumstances and we try to reveal the age and region of their initial spread. In Central and South Africa, Australia and Melanesia both motifs are rare or totally absent. This makes improbable their origin in the Out-of-Africa time. The “Achilles heel” is often found in North and South America but its Eurasian area is sporadic. On the contrary, the “external soul” is very popular across most of Eurasia but in the New World it, is found only in North but not in South America. It looks plausible that in the Old World the motif of “Achilles heel” was mostly ousted by the “external soul” being preserved in the New World thanks to its isolation from Eurasia. The lack or rarity of these motifs in the Northeast Asia and in Alaska and American Arctic excludes, possibility of their late diffusion across Bering Strait. Because both motifs were brought to America by the early migrants, their age in Eurasia must exceed 15,000 years, the “Achilles heel” being probably older. At the time of the peopling of America, both motifs had to be well known to the oral traditions of the Northeast Asia. Their rarity or absence there in historic time is in conformity with significant differences between genetic samples of Early and Late Holocene populations of Siberia. The complicated version of the “external soul” according to which a life essence is hidden in a series of objects and beings, one inside the other, is absent in America. Such a variant probably spread across the Old World after the end of antiquity being used in fairytales.
Keywords: peopling of America, early migrations, comparative folklore studies, the “external soul”, the “Achilles heel”
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Issue: 1, 2020
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Rubric: ANTHROPOLOGY
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