Chesnov, Ya. V. Existentials: Sources of the Evil

Abstract: The purpose of the article is to analyze the sources of the evil. It is confined only to magic practice. The author studies rich philosophical and anthropological materials and provides his own ethnographic data collected at the Caucasus, Middle Asia, central regions of Russia and abroad. Special attention is paid at the concepts of evil magic introduced by such scientists from Edward Tailor to Paul Ricceur. The purpose of the study is to conduct a hermeneutic analysis of the evil as a human existential. Hierarchy of philosophical and anthropological reconstruction allowed a shift from higher levels of structuring of a society to the basic levels of domestication of time where the sources of the fear, evil and magic aggression were revealed. As a result, the evil loses its stable ontological grounds and is viewed as a social and cultural reduction which arises when the resources are limited.

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