The Ritual Aspects of Ukrainian Beekeeping

Abstract

The article deals to research of Ukrainian ritual context of apiculture. The complex research of symbolic and semantic aspects of Ukrainian apiculture is based on separation of three fundamental ritual “units”: folk Ukrainian vision of a bee along with an insect’s status in a worldview tradition, historical process of developing the institute of patronage and defining the role of patron saints in Ukrainian apiculture; its place in a system of traditional national ritualism and, in particular, outlining the general portrait of an apiarist against the background of the past, as well as ambivalence of his character, narrative and conceptual accentuation and integral conceptualization of apiarian motives of the folk calendar (ritual activities of spring-summer and autumn-winter cycles); role of apicultural products in the Ukrainians’ ritual life (worldview visions, calendar and occasional ritualism, rituals of human life cycle, magic ritual practice). The comparative ethnological analysis of apiarian ritualism of the Ukrainians has found both local feature of separate visions and beliefs and all-Ukrainian worldview matrix of apiarian spiritual phenomenon. While comparing the data, of field and literary sources, on the ritual aspects of traditional apiculture of the residents of Ukraine and some Slavonic (and, in the broader sense – European) countries, we detect a considerable range of common features.