| dc.description.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. | en_EN |
