How likely is it that all the legends, myths, scary tales, and so on actually have a very real basis?

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4 Answers

  1. Legends, myths and scary tales. Here they mentioned Baba Yaga. First of all, everything you've heard about it is an artistic reworking of the 19th century. Well, let's also discuss whether Moidodyr was actually a revived washbasin.

    If we turn to a variety of folklore sources and highlight the common ones, then:

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    “According to the leading expert in the field of theory and history of folklore V. Ya. Propp, there are three types of Baba Yaga: the giver (she gives the hero a fairy-tale horse or a magic object); the kidnapper of children; Baba Yaga-a warrior, fighting with whom” not for life, but for death”, the hero of the fairy tale passes to a different level of maturity. At the same time, Baba Yaga's viciousness and aggressiveness are not her dominant features, but only manifestations of her irrational, nondeterministic nature.

    The dual nature of Baba Yaga in folklore is associated, first, with the image of the mistress of the forest, who must be appeased, and secondly, with the image of an evil creature who puts children on a shovel to fry. This image of Baba Yaga is associated with the function of a priestess who guides teenagers through the rite of initiation. So, in many fairy tales, Baba Yaga wants to eat the hero, but either, after feeding and drinking, lets him go, giving him a ball or some secret knowledge, or the hero runs away himself.”

    “Thanks to the texts of fairy tales, it is also possible to reconstruct the ritual, sacred meaning of the actions of the hero who gets to Baba Yaga. In particular, V. Y. Propp, who studied the image of Baba Yaga on the basis of a mass of ethnographic and mythological material, draws attention to a very important detail, in his opinion. After recognizing the hero by smell (Yaga is blind) and finding out his needs, she necessarily drowns the bath and evaporates the hero, thus performing a ritual ablution. Then he feeds the newcomer, which is also a ritual, “mortuary” treat, which is not allowed for the living, so that they do not accidentally enter the world of the dead. A, “by demanding food, the hero thereby shows that he is not afraid of this food, that he has the right to it, that he is “real”. That is, the alien, through the test of food, proves to Yaga the sincerity of his motives and shows that he is the real hero, as opposed to the false hero, the impostor antagonist.”

    This food “opens the mouth of the deceased,” says Propp, who is convinced that a fairy tale is always preceded by a myth. And, although the hero does not seem to have died, he will have to temporarily “die for the living” in order to get to the ” third kingdom “(another world). There, in the “third kingdom” (afterlife), where the hero is heading, he is always waiting for a lot of dangers that he has to anticipate and overcome. “Food, treats are always mentioned not only when meeting Yaga,but also with many equivalent characters. …Even the hut itself is adapted by the storyteller for this function: it is “propped up with a pie”, “covered with a pancake”, which in children's fairy tales of the West corresponds to a “gingerbread house”. This house sometimes passes itself off as a food house by its very appearance” ” wikipedia.org

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    What is there to doubt? The fact that people perceived the world in this way? So have you tried to understand its meaning, its place in it? Your relationship with meanings?

    Myths (and this is still the pre-written era) this is not a retelling of life stories, not a technology guide, not sketches of “how I spent the summer”, this is a search for meaning, self-awareness – where are we in the middle of this taiga, why, what do we have to do with this forest, this river, these wolves?

    Compare what is said in myths not with a physics textbook that describes the laws of nature, but with your conversation with your mother and father, with your children about the meaning of life.

    It is clear that such conversations do not interest everyone at all, and some even annoy, but this does not devalue the myths. Different people have different needs, some are interested, some are not.

    What is a myth today? Not a myth in the sense of “there is a dead end or not”, but a myth – the meaning of history, the meaning of existence. Fairy tales are about this in a special form, but now distorted for entertainment and so that children do not get scared.

    Try to answer the question-what is our country, how do we differ from our neighbors, why, why (whether it is necessary to differ). This is the myth. And the answers will also be controversial and funny to someone like Baba Yaga.

    The worst thing is that children sent their parents to tartarus, and not so rarely this happened.

  2. Legends, myths and fairy tales are different things and there are a variety of fairy tales, for example, the magic one that V. Ya. Propp wrote about, and others. Propp and others have successfully shown that fairy tales (specifically magic) – and this is a decayed myth – reflect the ideas in primitive tribal society, about initiation (the rite of initiation into the community of a young person), etc. Baba Yaga eating children is a symbolic death during initiation (for example, a young man by a shaman). And all other horrors reflect exactly these moments. And there are many author's fairy tales, for example, Charles Perrault, here we are talking about completely different tasks that the authors set themselves, and so on. So the formal answer is: the probability is different for different things, maybe very high.

  3. I doubt that Baba Yaga once flew through the sky in a stupa, and on the Mediterranean coast swayed guys wrapped in sheets sent their cruel parents to Tartrat. However, the myths may have had a psychological basis. I refer you to Jung and Freud for more details.

  4. Apparently, extremely low, tending to zero. This can be seen at the household level, counting the number of miracles that occur around.

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