Lietuvos istorijos institutas

By applying the internal reconstruction and comparative methods, in this article I detail the ethnological discourse in the 1262 insert in the 6th-century Chronicle of John Malalas. I dispute earlier authors’ hypothetical claims about how the meaning markers 9 boar spleens, 9 gates of hell, etc. relate to the referents abundance and the inherent vitality of the defeated enemy or the sun’s annual movement across the heavens and the 9 gates of the city of Rethra, and others. These ethno-mythological symbols are interpreted harnessing factography from the Old and New Testaments, the Christian dogmatism of the deadly sins (9 [→ 8 → 7]), also detailing Evagrius Ponticus’ and Slavic apotropes, such as the spleen (↔ food of the dead) and their ritual tradition of placing food in gates/gateways for the spirits of the deceased.

Based on ethnological analysis, the author of this article presents a new hypothesis concerning the currently obscure origin of the tradition of decorating roadside crosses with aprons and ribbons in the area of the Southern Highlands in Lithuania. Due to an identical and prevalent tradition among the Belarusians, the phenomenon is ascribed to cultural innovations of non- Baltic origin. This enables the identification of the genesis of the custom, for up to the present time the most archaic reminiscenses of proto-Semitic religious-mythological models were interpreted as authentic factographic relics of the Baltic proto-culture: the transformation of mythological images, reflection of necroculture, fertility rites, etc.

Yatvigian Book (hereinafter YB) is a conventional, probably the most exhaustive and the most important description of the ethno-cultural tradition of the tribe that spoke Yatvigian, one of the two languages of Western Balts, recorded during the Reformation period. It is based on the source of information disseminated in several variants of manuscripts, and later in small printed books (reprints). Unfortunately, the original of YB has not been found yet, and the scholars who discussed this source or analysed it to some detail after the appearance of Wilhelm Mannhardt’s book Letto-Preussische Götterlehre (1936), which contains copy A(p), resorted not to the analysis of the copies, but to the materials provided in the book, and did not doubt the authenticity of the given information. Due to these reasons, historical facts of the manuscripts were not investigated as the information in Mannhardt’s monograph was taken for granted. Unfortunately, in many cases it does not correspond to reality and is essentially erroneous or elliptical. Textological analysis of ten surviving manuscripts of YB shows that the method of information structuring in the copies A(p), α, B, X of the old edition presupposes a reflection of the mandatory tradition of the preparation of diplomatic documents, i.e., those that are related to the legal field: the presentation of factual material follows strict rules established for preparation of such works – a prologue, a narrative, and an epilogue. Although this circumstance has not been highlighted by any of the researchers of the source analysed, it is extremely important, because it can be related with the intent of the work and the aim