Tulpe I. A. Mifologiya [Mythology]. Art. Religion, St. Petersburg: Nauka Publ., 2012, 320 p. (in Russian)

This book deserves a leisurely reading, understanding the logic of the presentation and the meaning of the conclusions. The author is Irina A. Tulpe, Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University, and is familiar to many interested in religious studies from her interesting research papers in the thematic range defined by the title of this monograph. But this work is the first book in her scientific biography. And the author tried to put into the text the quintessence of her own research (theoretical and empirical) and reflections.

A special feature of the individual "scientific handwriting" of I. Tulpe can be considered the way she addresses the material-active questioning of the object under study. The author's observations are concentrated in analytical reasoning, built as a constant dialogue with existing interpretations, with possible readers, with opponents or with like-minded people, with themselves, in the end. Sometimes this manner makes it difficult to read - you periodically have to be distracted by the author's associative turns of thought, and then return to the main line of the text again, annoyed at the discontinuity of the presentation. But the main thing is that the main line is present in the book, and the further you continue reading, the more noticeable it becomes.

The main question that the author asks about mythology, art, and religion is: "why do people need them as a collective?"-

new subject"? The already vast volume of statements about this by thinkers of "all times and peoples" indicates that there is no single and universally shared answer to this question. In many research interpretations, the author is not satisfied, first of all, with a certain "a priori", i.e. the presence of an implied "correct" answer to the main question even before the question itself was posed. Tulpe tends to take a different perspective - to search for the meaning of phenomena directly in these phenomena themselves, taken in a specific context (material or intellectual) of their discovery. Of course, this move complicates the task of a scientific prospector - in such (software) knowledge there is always not much room for "self-evident" and "long-understood by everyone". But the optimism of scientific research lies in the fact that, it would seem, along and across what has been studied opens up new facets to new researchers.

The book has three chapters. Each of them has an intricate structure. Some paragraphs are completely complete, while others appear in a differentiated form, branching out into three, four or five subsections. This is partly a consequence of the initial preparations for the book, which served as various previous publications by I. Tulpe. But in general, the structure is determined by the general idea of the monograph - to present to readers the author's concept of unity and difference, interdependence and interaction of three fundamental strategies of human existence: myth-spiritual, artistic, and religious. Tulpe suggests tracing the complex (non-linear) disclosure, so to speak, of the human in a person (in the author's literature - "humanity"), which is found in the analysis of the three named strategies of human development of the world and self-realization in this world.

The first chapter " Origins. The myth-spiritual culture of the archaic" is an experience of the "archeology of consciousness", which sets guidelines for the author's vision of the nature of myth. I note that the themes of both religion and art are still present here, as they say, ghostly. And this is due to the author's fundamental consideration, based on a reference to a well-known scientific tradition (represented in our country, for example, by A. F. Losev, E. M. Meletinsky, O. M. Freudenberg): the mythological picture of the world and the myth-spiritual strategy of being do not imply an explication of either the artistic or the religious, as something that has essential definiteness beyond myth.

First of all, Tulpa is interested in how "bookish" you are.-

derived largely from philological studies, the characteristics of the myth manifest themselves in a completely tangible material. Here, her qualification as a philosopher of religion is complemented by almost a quarter-century of experience in participating in the field archaeological work of expeditions of the State Museum of the History of Religion to the necropolises of Ilurat and Kitey (small towns of the Bosporan Kingdom in the Northern Black Sea region).

The period of existence of these settlements - from the VI century BC to the IV century AD-is not only a constant movement of the ancient "political geography", but also a significant period of the so-called "axial epoch", when the integrity of the world of people and their mythological gods is gradually rebuilt. Everything that goes beyond what is natural and accessible to human comprehension is carried out by consciousness outside of sensory reality. In the end, there is an orientation of beliefs and cults that distinguishes the areas of the profane (natural and human) and the sacred, translating the latter into the sphere of the transcendent. The idea of a special, mystical connection between the earthly and the unearthly, i.e. religion, is affirmed.

Precisely because religion is a different strategy of consciousness and behavior from the myth-spiritual one, meeting with some evidence of beliefs should not immediately lead to their unambiguous identification exclusively as religious. The researcher is always faced with the "recognition task". Monuments of material culture related to the period under study are no less important sources of reconstruction of the spiritual world of antiquity than the texts that have come down to us. Such materiality as necropolises (the borderline and connecting link between the terrestrial and subterranean zones of the universe), perhaps, preserves in the most "pure" form evidence of authentic ideas about the sacred and profane, about Chaos and Space, about the meanings of burials, sacrifices and other rituals themselves.

I. A. Tulpe, in his own argumentative way, "frees" the archaeological material of the ancient necropolises under study from attributing to it a religious character, if we understand by the essence of religious consciousness the doubling of the world into natural and supernatural. As the content of the excavations shows, even the appearance of religious (in this sense) motivation for funeral rites in later times did not completely replace their myth-spiritual "charge". The author, in particular, casts reasonable doubt on the usual thesis

about the" equipment "of the deceased with various items as a concern for his posthumous existence (they say- "it will be needed there"). The repertoire of burials turns out to be either wider or differently composed than was customary in life.

According to the author's conclusion, " the main purpose of the rite was to restore and maintain the integrity and order of the Cosmos as a whole and each (terrestrial and "other") world separately. A necessary condition for achieving this goal was a properly implemented, full-fledged transition of the deceased. Archaic society did not care about the afterlife well-being of the deceased, but about self-preservation in a crisis situation created by the death of a kinsman" (p.37). In the light of this conclusion, the "art" of archaism is also considered. The word " art " is not accidentally quoted in this chapter, since, according to the author, any pictorial art had no intrinsic value (so to speak, aesthetic significance in itself), but conveyed the general properties of objects and phenomena that filled the mythological picture of the world, i.e. it was an integral part of mythological practice.

I do not think that these interpretations are indisputable (although they contain a wide range of references to the "intellectual classics" from Plato to Jung).

Experts will obviously have their own objections to the interpretation of archaic sacrifices or the principles of constructing a myth-ritual model of the world. But it is impossible not to notice the author's desire for a non-trivial reversal of the subjects under consideration.

Thus, completing the analytical discussion of children's burials in the ancient necropolis, I. Tulpe comes to the conclusion that " in the myth-ritual culture, the child is not a self, but a function, a ritually obtained renewal."...> A child growing up and ritually integrated into the world is a gradual functional design of a part of the current model of the world. As long as the child is not "re-formed", he could not be adequately manifested in the world. < ... > That is, "educational efforts" were aimed not at identifying and cultivating the uniqueness of a person, but at creating a form that was functionally suitable and necessary for society. Having become a functionally suitable "thing", a properly formed part and a functioning model of the world order, it was in this capacity that a person acquired a genuine existence " (pp. 65-66).

The second chapter "Religion and Art: The problem of relationships" is based on a comparison of myth-making

and the religious picture of the world (to clarify-in monotheistic systems, which the author believes are actually religions). According to the author, having provided the complexity of being, the myth simultaneously exhausted its universality, leading people to the question of the ineffable mythological source of being itself. Here comes the turn of religion, as an "innovative type of consciousness" (in each community and culture chronologically this happens differently and not everywhere definitively). With the idea of the supernatural, religion "devalues the basis of the existence of the world to which archaic man was isomorphic, and thereby opens the way to the actualization of human subjectivity." Developing this thesis, the author states: "In religion, there is a process of transformation from a thing (a function in the universe) to a self-aware person who sets goals for his being. By revealing a person's limitations, religion provides hope and ways to go beyond limitations... "(pp. 116-117).

Like religion, art also gains its own value, finding itself outside the practice of myth-spiritual depiction, acting as a way to compensate for the incompleteness and finiteness of human existence. The functional similarity of religion and art creates the problem of their mutual claims to priority. According to the author, one of the sides of this problem was the initial lack of demand for the artistic doubling of the world by religion. Contrary to many popular opinions about the so-called religious art as an obligatory component of confessional influence on believers, it is artistic activity that has always been the subject of "headaches"for all monotheistic systems.

Explaining the origin of art, Tulpe writes: "The exodus from the myth-spiritual space-the destruction of the connection of everything with everything-was expressed in the individualization of the thing, event, character, author. Art begins with creative copying of the world, with the experience of delight in the possibilities of a person to make the way back to the creation of the world, that is, from existing existence to its idea, to the disclosure of the plan of being. Gradually, art breaks away from the real world, formalizes, creates another, parallel world. In the conscious distinction between the real and the unreal, the self of art manifests itself" (pp. 142-143).

According to the author, art and religion have a different understanding of the relationship of a person with a "different reality":

for religion, this reality is the world of the supernatural; for art ,the "other reality" is what man himself creates. This thesis suggests a conclusion: in the first case (religion), a person aspiring to the Creator tries to comprehend the ideal self; in the second case (art), a person learns (or imagines it) the real self. The author's position is expressed as follows: "Art is ... an activity that is conditioned by the need to fulfill a person in his fullness, when the experienced partiality of existence is realized as limiting. < ... > In religion, the individual also leaves this world, ascending to another: here the goal is important - getting into the "other" being as the final stop." And another quote that conveys the author's approach: "The emergence of art after religion does not mean the emergence from religion. It is not out of faith in the supernatural, nor out of God, that art arises, but out of the man who is formed as a result of self-awareness in relation to the supernatural... Religion does not create a need for art with necessity, but contributes to the formation of the possibility of the emergence of such a need, which can only be realized in art " (p. 158). Indeed, both are different strategies that, if necessary, can complement each other, but do not have mutual obligations and can fully independently perform their own functions.

In the third chapter, "The Culture of Monotheism and Art", I. Tulpe seems to project the previous theoretical calculations on concrete historical material. The range of subjects can be seen from the titles of the sections: "Monotheism and image", "Judaism and Art", "Christian in Early Christian Art", "Metaphysics of Orthodoxy in its icon" (with the subsection "Painting as icon painting")., "Russian Christian Sectarianism: Transfiguration and Image". Perhaps it is in this chapter that some fragmentary presentation is revealed - after all, the material is diverse, and the author does not know everything equally completely. But still, it contains a lot of thoughtful and well-founded judgments and they do not get out of the general concept implemented in the book.

There are also some shortcomings in this book, not only in the content, but also in the technical plan - somewhere letters are missing in words, somewhere sentences are mistakenly separated, and so on. It is clear that such flaws are practically independent of the author. Let's hope that with vre-

then there will be a reissue that addresses the shortcomings.

And we can only congratulate our readers, whether they are specialists or simply interested in religious studies: a really interesting and useful book has been published that makes you think, argue, and search for the truth. Thanks to the author for this.

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