Polska ludowa terminologia mitologiczna - demony domowe

Abstract

The study describes demons present in homes or connected with them, called home demons. Four groups of beliefs constitute the cult of demons, namely the cult of deceased ancestors - family guardians, which goes back to the early Slavs; the cult of home snakes - the guardians of the cottage and the yard; beliefs in a flying home demon who brings wealth and mythical images of more recent origin taken over from German mythology: dwarfs, kobolds, genies. Specific demonic figures are frequently mixtures of those belief motives. The names of home demons recorded in Polish dialects belong to several lexico-semantic fields. They are informative of the place of residence of those demonic creatures, about their appearance and forms taken by demons, about the actions of demons towards people - their hosts, about the behaviour of demons as observed by humans. With reference to their origin, demons’ names are categorised in the following way: names. which are related back to proto-Slav or old Slavonic word structures, original Polish names (word-formation derivatives, syntactic derivatives — adjectives, semantic derivatives — neo-semanticisms, compounds), word borrowings from other languages.