I conducted my own ethnographic field research in 1998, 2004 and 2007. Further field research, from 2010 to 2012, under the title ‘Folk Piety and the Transmission of Ethnoheritage in Upper Meñimurje’, was part of Tomo Vinšćak’s academic project Sacral Interpretation of Landscape, organized by the Matapur Association and the Ethnological and Anthropological Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The analysis and comparison of the collected materials has contributed to research into the fascinating and still vibrant – though under-researched – survival strategies of pre-Christian and Christian worldviews in the western and north-western parts of the northernmost districts of Croatia.
Trying to interpret oneself and the other in the world, the traditional Man has established a real world and an otherworld. Specific herbal and animal attributes were ascribed to particular people who allegedly had the power to communicate between worldliness and transcendence. Also some human characteristics were linked with herbal and animal mediators. These attributes were folklorized as miraculous powers. Such supernatural beings from South Slavic traditional conceptionsof the world have been largely associated with the pre-Christian deities and their degradations, based on the observed real attributes of the vegetal and animal species. The interdisciplinary comparative way of treating South Slavic folklore real-unreal motifs through time and space in this article is its ethnological, animalistic and anthropological contribution.
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