Indo-Iranian Parallels of the Slavic Water Rites of the Oath and Guilt Confirmation Attested in Medieval Latin Accounts and Slavic Law Codices<br>Indo-iranskie paralleli slavjanskih vodnyh ritualov kljatvoprinošenija i priznanija viny, opisannyh v srednevekovyh latinskih istočnikah i predstavlennyh v slavjanskih juridičeskih kodeksah</br>

Abstract

In this article are presented Slavic rituals of the contract, and confirmation of oaths through water, mentioned in the historic accounts and law codices. Connections between the deities given in the historic accounts and descriptions of the rituals are proposed. Parallels between the Slavic and Indo-Iranian water oath rites, as well as their semantics and related deities, are offered. An attempt to justify the validity of the reconstruction of the missing elements of one mytho-religious space with the use of another, a better-known space, is presented, given that the elements of the interest satisfy the homomorphic mapping between the spaces. It is suggested that the mapping of the water oath rites and their associated deities in the Slavic and Indo-Iranian mytho-religious spaces satisfy the homomorphic mapping criteria.

Keywords

• slavic mythology
• oath-taking rituals
• indo-iranian parallels
• mytho-religious spaces
• homomorphic mapping
• “slavic varuna”
• “slavic mitra”