Paweł Kawiński

This book (written in Polish) seeks to present how the concept of holiness was understood in the social consciousness of ancient Prussian tribes. The Prussians were an ethnic group of autochthonous Baltic tribes that inhabited medieval Prussia, the land stretching on the south-eastern coast of the Baltic Sea between the Vistula and Neman river mouths, in today’s Masuria. They spoke a language now known as Old Prussian and had their own pagan mythology. The book consists of an introduction, five chapters and conclusions. Its construction reflects the author’s research on concrete manifestations of holiness in social representations of medieval Prussians. To start with, it was necessary to present their spiritual culture. This was done in chapters 1 and 2, which discuss the social structure and world outlook fixed in their language by tracing the etymology of selected lexical material, mainly proper nouns and so-called verba faciendi. In this way a glossary was compiled of the most important Old Prussian value-loaded notions. In chapter 1, “Ethno-linguistic model of Old Prussian culture”, an analysis is made of Prussian words connected with the categories of life and death. Discussed next are notions concerning the world outlook as well as those of human beings, broadly understood social relations, human emotions, and intellectual functions. Finally, ways of conceptualizing the notions of space and time are presented. Chapter 2, “Attempt at a linguistic identification of sacrum-related phenomena”, starts with presenting the oldest Indo-European sacrum-related terminology and its possible continuation in the Baltic languages. It then proceeds to a discussion of selected Old Prussian vocabulary embracing the basic axiological and religious terms. Chapter 3, “From representations of sacred power to categories of deities and their cult”, deals with Prussians’ representations of sacred power, its personifications and the associated worship as described in historical sources. Starting with the information from the chronicle of Peter of Dusburg, examples are discussed of the primitive structure of the sacred as expressed in the Old Prussian accessories of worship: idols, sacrificial cauldrons, the sanctified beverage (mare’s milk), temples, and various taboos concerning horses of specified coat colours. An analysis is also made of ritual ablutions, hospitality and blood vengeance characteristic of medieval Prussians, followed by the discussion of the significance ascribed to deities and relations holding among them. A subchapter is devoted to the group of cult functionaries („holy men”), divided in the dissertation by the charisma they represented into sorcerers and priests. Chapter 4, entitled “Manifestations of the sacred in space evaluation”, is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the internal structure and functions of the Prussian centres of pagan worship (holy groves, fields, rivers and lakes), and the other with the organization of the sacred space seen against the settlement pattern from before the conquest of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, with tribal Pomesania, Pogesania and Warmia as examples. The last chapter, “Old Prussian thanatology”, concerns representations of magical metamorphosis, ways of evaluating death, and their possible significance in the axiology of Old Prussians. The book ends with conclusions summing up the results of the research.

The aim of the article is to shed light on the elements of historical reality conveyed in the legend about the beginnings of the Piast dynasty, i.e. the legend about the hospitable ploughman Piast and the evil duke Popiel – contained in the 12th century chronicle by Gallus Anonymus. A method of analysis of folk epic texts developed by the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp was used for this purpose. As it has been shown, the story of Piast and Popiel, preserved in the chronicle of Gallus Anonymus, was originally a tribal tradition, later adopted as a dynastic legend of the Polish ruling house. The story’s origins go back to pagan times and it was not connected with specific political events of the past, but with a cycle of rituals (harvest feast, ceremonial hair-cutting, potlatch and the ritual death of the leader), constituting the social life of an agricultural tribal community, possibly the alleged Proto-Slavic tribe of Polans.

Comparative ethnological research suggests that there is a certain uniformity to the patterns organising relationship terminology at a global level, which has made it possible to identify the general regularities that govern them. This paper deals with an attempt to reconstruct the semantic evolution of the Old Lithuanian appellative mótė “wife; woman mother” through the prism of the changes taking place in the Baltic kinship system. It is suggested that the initial kinship system of the Balts coincided with the Omaha-type kinship-terminology system, formed in the Proto-Baltic period in connection with the popularization of cyclical form of generalized exchange between patrilineal descent groups, which act as a segments of larger exogamous groups. This exchange was based on a prescriptive unilateral marriage of a man with a matrilateral cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter) or its more distantly related collateral counterpart, called “mother” in the Proto-Baltic kinship terminology (i.e. relative from the mother’s descent group). The high level of compliance with this defined norm regulating martial selection was maintained amongst Lithuanians probably until the mid-12th century, when, against the background of  deepening socio-economic differences, there was a crisis of this form of matrimonial exchange. Despite this, the terminology of the Omaha type survived fragmentarily in the Lithuanian language until the 16th and 17th centuries, thus making it possible to try to highlight the structural features resulting from it. (The author assumes no responsibility for the English summary from the attatched paper).