This article «From Ladder and Thread to Heaven: The Symbolic Meaning of the Path in a Fragment of the Linguistic World Image» explores the problem of the analysis of folk customs. These customs could be verbalized both in folk texts and in dialects. The specifics of this study lie in the linguistic analysis of the symbols which are usually interpreted as folk customs and folk objects. However, the symbolism of the objects in national customs causes the development of a symbolic meaning of the respective word that defines these objects. In this way, many symbols in folk customs become verbal, and the context of the custom creates a foundation for the development of the symbolic meaning. The verbal symbols analyzed are a «thread», a «ball of twine», a «ladder», a «bridge» and a «cross». In the national Ukrainian linguistic space, these words have the general semantics of the ‘connection between worlds’. It is stressed that the symbolic meaning of the (celestial) ladder has been discovered in the biblical context. This is also relevant for the clarification of the subject of continuity in the development of the symbolic meanings, which are also documented in the Ukrainian context. A concrete situation in linguistics and custom creates conditions under which arise symbolic co-meanings that develop in the framework of the same main symbolic archetypical meaning. All analyzed symbols belong to the archetypical ones. That is why they have been also discovered with the same semantics in other languages. This is the reason why the analysis of such symbols requires not only facts documented in the dictionaries and texts in Ukrainian, but also information about the respective symbol in other linguistic cultures. It is also pointed out that the thread is analyzed as an apotropaic symbol. This word has also been documented linguistically as a symbol of the demarcation line between one’s own world and the world of «others».
Korzybski and General Semantics
