Revenantství v české lidové tradici jako obraz cizího, nepřátelského světa<br>Revenantism in the Czech Folk Culture as Reflection of an Alien World</br>

Abstract

The article deals with dead persons believed to have come back as ghosts in the territory of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. On the basis of literary sources that originated not only in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also in older times, it treats the revenantism as reflected in the imaginations, customs and folklore. It shows the bases from which this phenomenon was growing and the ways in which it expressed various features of the folk life, its mentality, view of the world, morality and ethics. The souls of the so called impure departed persons whose death was instant or violent, or who outran the laws of proper life in some way, came back to earth in the form of eerie ghosts and demons. This faith became a significant part of the folk demonology embedded in the fatefully conceived conflictful relation between the living and the dead persons.