Shirts, Cloaks and Nudity: Data on the Symbolic Aspects of Clothing<br>Srajce, ogrinjala in golota: simbolični vidiki oblačil</br>

Abstract

This study discusses the beliefs and rites related to spinning, textiles, robes, and nudity that markedly outline some coherent symbolic systems within European belief systems. Their deep structure consists in the symbolic series of oppositions of nature-culture, raw-cooked, and life-death. In this binary universe, nature is characterized by the absence of cultural processes and products: ploughing, sowing, domesticating wild animals, the furnace, smithery, the iron, spinning and weaving, clothes, and Christian sacraments. The paper will discuss how the “raw” world of nature was tamed; how human beings, born as natural beings, were transformed into social beings, in the course of which the main role among the basic working processes of human culture is attributed to spinning and weaving.