The Image-Symbolic Fund of Sacred Oceanography of the Sea Peoples (Part 2)

Abstract

In order to reconstruct the sacred morphology of the northern traditional maritime culture, we need to consider it through the prism of comparative analysis. This procedure allows us to identify all the missing elements and fll up the vacant cells of the ritual-mythological system as a generic core of the sacred oceanology of northern seafarers. Comparing it with classical maritime cultures appears to be most effective. The results of the systematic study of these cultures can be transformed into a research paradigm (discipline matrix) considering the traditional maritime culture as a semiotic system. Among such symbolic paradigm constructions we can name the model of traditional maritime culture of indigenous peoples of Oceania, Polynesians (the “Vikings of the East”) in the frst place. Polynesians’ maritime culture is rooted in their ritual-mythological tradition, in the symbolic ensemble of the primal New Year celebration. The most important result of the research is the development of the basic model of sacred morphology of the sea peoples’ traditional culture. It includes the following topical sections of sacred oceanography: mythological conception of the frst ship; sacred status of the ship carpenter; image of the patron god of shipbuilding; ritual cycle of building a ship (material selection, building sacrifce rite, rituals of ship assembly; the rites of consecration and naming of a new ship); cosmogonic
and eschatological aspects of sea and ship mythology; poetic creativity and deifed memory within the structure of sacred sea studies (omniscience). Such is the invariant structure of sacred maritime knowledge as the generic core of the sea peoples’ traditional culture. Hierophants-shipbuilders and poets-navigators were the keepers and exegetes of sacred oceanography. They charted and laid the “divine course” in the ocean with their shipbuilding craft and world-ordering poetry.