The article covers the unpublished work of Professor E.G. Kagarov “Wedding Rites of the Ancient Greeks” (1937) in the context of the history of his research into wedding rituals in general. Particular attention is paid to the scholar’s comparative-typological approach to the analysis of the semantics of wedding rituals based on a comparative interpretation of ethnographic and folklore data. The stage-by-stage analysis of the development of individual elements of the wedding ceremony used by Kagarov is considered within the framework of contemporary anthropological concepts, in particular, the evolutionary approach to the study of religious ideas, as well as the theory of remnants, according to which certain elements of wedding rituals seemed to the scholar “fragments of the passed stages of human social development”. The reconstruction of the wedding ritual in Ancient Greece and the interpretation of the symbolic meanings of its individual elements proposed by E.G. Kagarov have not lost their scientific significance to this day.
\Key words: ritual, wedding ceremonies, ritual semantics, comparative-historical method in ethnography, theory of remnants, E.G. Kagarov
DOI: 10.22250/20728662-2026-1-190-198
About the author
 |
Marianna M. Shakhnovich – DSc (Philosophy), Full Professor, Chair of the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies, St. Petersburg State University; |