Traditional Adyghe ornaments in the light of sacred and religious representations
The article aims to study the traditional national ornaments of the Adyghe people at different stages of their ethnic evolution. Such long-standing roots of the national ornament suggest the loss of the sacred semantics of the symbols that have come down to us and translate them into signs of intra-ethnic commutation. The stylised image of the snake-legged goddess is viewed as one of the ancient ornaments of the Adyghe people, with a high degree of probability related to archaic autochthonous ones. The article makes an attempt to describe the star-shaped sign as an integral part and concise embodiment of the concept of the path, which is closely related to the concepts of “hike” and “lone rider”. It points out that the literal meanings of certain patterns of Adyghe forms of arts and crafts were apparently lost long ago due to significant layers of heterogeneous influences of the Turkic peoples, who came into close contact with the Adyghe people quite early. The selected ornamental motifs retained their original meaning longer than others for various reasons, but they were eventually completely desemantised, their true meaning was preserved only in the totality of their functional meanings, stable localisations, and interaction with other stable ornamental motifs.