Abstract

The article deals with the laugh culture myth-poetical sources. Collective laughter, based on the mythpoetical consciousness, was the most important component of the ancient continuum. It found expression in the relevant cults, rituals, literary genres. Greek and Roman laugh cultures are based on the ancient mythological sacred laughter tradition. The mythology laughter characterized by the fact that the order of an object or phenomenon is given in the form of confusion, chaos, which a person must overcome. Laughter and myth both deify man, reduce the distance between the ideal and the real life, inserting it into the communication sphere. The symbolism of the divine laughter is based on the symbolism of freedom: the Olympic gods are free from fear and limitation. Laughing man is like a God, going into the same spiritual space of freedom, raising over social taboos. The essence connection between myth-poetical and laugh sources of the culture reveals in Dionysianism as a particular kind of «choral» state, in which the individual soul outgrows itself, breaking out of a unit in the Entity. Dionysian comic source is based upon metonymy which is a form of the trope, genetically ascending to myth and mostly defining – in the arsenal of the literary devices – the refraction of the principle “everything in the all” basic for mythology in the models of the world created by the antiquity literature. Thus the ancient Greek comedy is the ontological system in which the conception of the relationship between man and the external reality manifests itself. In the antiquity consciousness the comedy laugh possesses the sacred essence due to the attitude of the special “enrapture” state of the mystery participants to God’s beneficial energy. In the whole mythological laughter did not act against the official seriousness; moreover – it indirectly – through the weakening of norms and restrictions of the society – supported the official culture, maintaining social stability. In the traditional culture mythology, ancient holidays, related with it, and early medieval carnival become important tools of the spiritual-practical activity directed to the recreation of three-dimensional view of the world, overcoming outlook and connecting the centre and the marginalia of the individual self-identification.