Introduction Ideas about the zoo-and ornithomorphic appearance of the soul are universal: they are characteristic of many peoples, including Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Birds that "carry away" the soul are associated with views about the other world. The soul is said to "fly away". Many peoples of the world had the idea that the soul of the deceased, taking the form of a bird, could visit relatives, remind them of themselves, declare their will, and provide protection [Afanasyev, 1868, pp. 137-139; Zelenin, 1994, pp. 245-246; Eremina, 1991, pp. 102-116; Nikitina, 2002, p. 125]. According to traditional views, Ukrainian and South Slavic navi - souls of unbaptized infants-had an ornithomorphic appearance (Rybakov, 1981, pp. 35-36, 277; Nikitina, 2002, pp. 138-162). The bird was considered both a guide of the soul to the next world [Propp, 1996, p. 167-170] and a symbol of the incarnation of the spirit of the dead [Veletskaya, 2003, p.31]. According to some researchers, the image of the soul bird arose from the idea that when burning corpses, the soul went up in smoke. This transition of the soul approaches its transformation into fast-moving animals, especially birds and other flying creatures, and the primary source of such a metamorphosis was fire [Wundt, 2002, p. 382; Propp, 1996, p. 176-177, 208-209]. In the folklore of a number of peoples, including the Komi, there are traces of ideas about the connection of birds with the element of fire. In the Komi riddles, fire is compared to a bird running on a perch and dropping red eggs. There are well-known bylicks about birds that took revenge on people with a fire for destroying their nests [Mythology of Komi..., 1999, p. 88, 184]. A story recorded in Polesie tells of a gallows man "rising from the ground in flames and taking the bird-soul out of people's throats at midnight" (Sedakova, 2004, p.40). Luzhniki residents saw the soul of a suicide bomber as a burning bird [Gura, 1997, p. 41]. Ideas about the correlation of the ... Read more