Received: 2026-02-23
Accepted: 2026-05-20
Published: 2026-09-11

Mourning invocations – relicts of ritual practices at the borderline of religion and folklore in the narratives of leaders of extra liturgical prefuneral devotions

Adam Okun Logo ORCID

Abstract

The article attempts to present extra liturgical prefuneral ritual practices from a religious, folkloristic and cultural perspective. The author outlines the profiles and repertoires of female animators of traditional vigils for the deceased, whose accounts were recorded in 2015 in the Rybnik region. At the centre of the author’s analysis are performance situations connected with prayers for the dead, situated within the sphere of religious folklore and folk thanatology, as well as the cultural context arising from this form of the faithful’s piety. Within the analysed repertoire, the author distinguishes two groups of prayer invocations typical of the research area, taking into account the ritual-religious context in which these texts fulfilled specific functions and their performance practice characterized by local variations. In conclusion, the author emphasises that chaplet chants associated with vigils for the deceased constitute both a religious testimony of tradition and Christian culture in Upper Silesia and are a valuable folkloristic documents.

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Okun, A. (2026). Mourning invocations – relicts of ritual practices at the borderline of religion and folklore in the narratives of leaders of extra liturgical prefuneral devotions. Silesian Historical and Theological Studies, 59(1), 74–92. https://doi.org/10.31261/SSHT.2026.59.1.04

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Vol. 59 No. 1 (2026)
Published: 2026-09-11


ISSN: 0137-3447
eISSN: 2956-6185

Publisher
Instytut Gość Media/Księgarnia św. Jacka

Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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