Over the centuries, in traditional folk culture, in addition to the products of material culture, a rich world of divine and demonic beings was formed, which provided the basis for the development of numerous myths, legends, folk tales and stories.
Initially, the images of demonic beings were the personification of mysterious natural phenomena, which were incomprehensible to contemporary man: lightning, hailstorms, air whirlpools.
Various demonic figures occurring in the Polish folk culture belong to the family of Slavic demonic ideas. After the Christianization of Poland, the Church fought against old practices and religious beliefs, but for a long time in various regions there was a phenomenon of "double faith". Old beliefs, practices and rituals connected with them permeated the local folk cultures permanently, contributing to the integration of individual rural communities. Many pagan customs were still cultivated in the 19th century, such as the rite of Forefathers' Eve. They were also interested in folk beliefs. At that time, actions were taken to reconstruct old Slavic beliefs. With time, researching folk beliefs began to notice such important elements as the dynamics of cultural development and the ongoing processes of social and cultural transformations: religious syncretism, assimilation of foreign religious threads, or revaluation of beliefs.
Characteristics of Polish demonic beliefs:
- they do not form a uniform belief system, they are a peculiar conglomerate of various threads shaped at particular stages of development and transformations of the spiritual culture of the Polish people.
- beliefs functioned in folk culture as a transformed reflection of the phenomena of nature and the socio-productive relation between man and this world.
Legends are stories based on folk and apocryphal motifs - pagan and Christian elements are mixed in them. Most of the legends had an etiological character, i.e. explaining the origin of a given town, holy spring, tradition. The legends and legends are filled with elements of fantasy and folk beliefs, but they tell about the historical past of the region, important events and places.
All folk tales were passed from mouth to mouth. Researchers became interested in these contents in the 19th century and this interest continues to this day. An example can be the "Legends of the Lemko Beskid" collected and compiled by Andrzej Potocki. Below is the legend
"About two people who celebrated their weddings":
Władek Kasza, a former inhabitant of the Polan Surowiczne, told me that two couples, neighbours over a fence, somehow forced by the conscience, made vows that they would no longer drink horilles in their lives. Previously, yes, they drank a little penny and a little field, driving their families almost into poverty. Since pop founded the Brotherhood of Sobriety, every now and then some cougar summoned before the iconostasis vowed to attend mass. Rarely did he join the fraternity of his own free will, most often he was forced to do so by the collusion of his wedding baby or even the damn candlesticks with a lightning candleholder. To be a peasant in such times is better to put a rope on your neck right away. Well, you can't seem to have the pleasure of living, how to drink booze, smoke a twist with a madziarskim bakon and probably feel a young girl. A sober man is usually sad, because he is troubled by a lot of grief. When he drinks, he forgets about his grief and any other joy.
After taking their vows, the couples survived one day soberly, the second and third, but at the end of the week they were wearing them like hell. In the house from corner to corner, in the village from end to end. It was not possible to withdraw from the weddings, because the mass they swore on was a sacred thing and perjury could have ended for them. And who would voluntarily want to go to hell....
Finally, one of them came up with a peculiar concept of how to circumvent these unfortunate vows without committing sin. He went to the inn to Srul, bought a bottle of gray, because it was the cheapest horilka, poured it on her plate, put bread into it, took out a spoon from behind the ladle and... I think the devil himself had to tell him this.
After all, they vowed not to drink, not to drink, not to drink, but to eat. And there was no question of that when they swore in an Orthodox church. And so the oath was kept and the peasants were containers. One thing their grandmothers probably didn't see at all, that they so easily emerged from the promises given to the conscience and by the way to God.
