The rock sanctuary of the Great Goddess – the Great Mother. The birth of the male solar deity
The phenomenon of the Bubnyshche sanctuary is in the sacral structure, the topography of the temple, its mytho-ritual symbolic and figurative meaning code inherent in the tribes that inhabited Ukraine in the VI-IV millennia BC. The model of the temple indicates a cosmic level of thinking, where the sanctuary acts as a sacred likeness of the universe. Giant rock images of totemic animals, ancestors, combined into theogonic and cosmogonic compositions, symbolic models, zoomorphic classifiers of the upper and lower worlds, solar, lunar and astral deities, personified the world-creating creative forces of nature. The orderly column-shaped picture of the world is reproduced in the zodiac of constellations-symbols, zoomorphs (triangles, animals) and the supreme deity in the image of the Great Goddess. The identified sacrificial loci testify to the rich mytho-ritual traditions of “transition” on the days of the solstices and equinoxes. Calendar and ritual actions were aimed at sacralizing the world, protecting it from the forces of evil and chaos.
The symbolic-figurative series of rock petroglyphs in Bubnyshche, like other Carpathian sanctuaries, reproduced in the system of ancient religious and mythological representations, constitute a hitherto unknown original type of pictorial sources that reveal theogonic and cosmogonic concepts and myth-ritual pictures of the world, and this is their important scientific significance.
