Axiological Aspect of Slavic Lower Mythology

This article was written for the jubilee of Irina Aleksandrovna Sedakova, DrSc of Philology. It touches upon one of the jubilee's favourite topics – axiology, i.e. the science of evaluations and values. The material for the study is the lower mythology of the Slavs. The study briefly outlines those areas in folk demonology, with which one can judge about the values and principles of evaluation of the surrounding world and people (through the prism of mythological characters and motifs of mythological prose) in the Slavs. The question of axiological differences between paganism and Christianity is inevitably touched upon. While the latter is characterised by binary oppositions of good and evil, folk mythology is characterised by ambivalence and even multivalence. The values in both worldview systems are also different. For folk demonology these are mainly personal and social values: survival, harvest, wealth, power, strength, skills, nature, etc. The examples of mythological stories given in the article demonstrate, on the one hand, the ambivalence of evaluations, and on the other hand, the presence of different from modern ones evaluations (e.g. the danger of alien ethnicity), or outdated values (e.g. survivability).