“God’s Roads” of the Russian North: Sacred Hydrography and Hydrosophy of the Northern Pyatirechye

Abstract

The paper displays results of the initial stage of research on the creation of a thesaurus of key geocultural concepts, images and symbols of the Russian North and the Russian Arctic as a cultural code and symbolic resource of spatial development of the Northern macroregion. The research methodology is based on semiotic analysis and hermeneutics of texts of the traditional culture of the region’ peoples, as well as works included in the Northern supertext of Russian literature. The “Island-archipelago” prasymbol and associated image-symbolical ensemble of the sacred hydrosphere (“world river”) are identified as a basic geocultural constant reflecting the structure of physical and metaphysical space (cosmos) of the North and the Arctic. The river network of the North, reproducing the tree-like topology of the “world tree”, acted as a system of spatial, social, and sacred orientations underlying the identity of ethnic and local communities of the region. Sacred hydrography determined the ways and directions of the Slavic-Russian (Novgorod) colonization of the Chud’ north (“Finnish Rus”), colonization models, types and forms of colonists' settlements. In addition to the “island” and “river” symbols, the study provides a semantic analysis of related concepts and images, relevant for building a thesaurus of geocultural symbols of the Russian North and the Russian Arctic (“holiness”, “zemstvo-world”, “Northeast”, “network”, “House of St. Sophia”).