‘On the Mythical Sense of Certain Beliefs and Rites’ is a work by linguist and philologist Alexander Afanasievich Potebnya (1835-1891), publ. in 1865, in the Readings of the Society of Russian History and Antiquities at the Moscow University In his paper, the author expressed the position of the mythological school (the main representative of which was A. N. Afanasyev), as well as the ideas by W. von Humboldt.

The work consists of three chapters, published in three issues of the ‘Readings...’ in 1865. The author tried to give a mythological interpretation of modern and ancient rites and beliefs. The first chapter, ‘The Christmas Rites, contains a description and interpretation of rites dedicated to the celebration of the Christmas and wedding, and demonstrated parallels from cultures of various peoples: Serbs, Germans, Scandinavians, Indians, etc. For example, the author interpreted the Christmas candles as a kind of heavenly fire. In addition to the role of fire in the Christmas rite, the author noted the importance of bread, referring, in its turn, to the Sun. Along with the ritual elements, the author cited numerous poetic and song testimonies: carols, wedding songs, lamentations. He also tried to restore the roots of words, to prove the antiquity and universality of certain concepts. At the end of the chapter P. pointed at the parallelism of the Christmas and wedding ceremonies. However, the interpretation of the Christmas, as a marriage of heavenly deities, on the model of which earthly weddings were held, was only an assumption of the author. In the second chapter, ‘Baba Yaga’, the author shown a connection of the female deity implied in the Christmas rites with the German Golda, the Czech Moran, or the Russian Baba Yaga: all of them, according to P., were personification of death. Fairy tales, children's songs and games were used as additional evidences; the author made references to Manngard, the Grimm brothers, Buslaev, Afanasyev, Kuhn. In the third chapter, ‘The Serpent. The Wolf. The Witch’, he developed his juxtaposition of mythological plots and explained them through their connection with natural phenomena.

In 1866, the same publishing house issued a work by Slavic Peter Alekseevich Lavrovsky ‘A Review of the Research ‘On the Mythical Sense of Certain Beliefs and Rites’’, where he criticized the philological method of P., and pointed at arbitrariness of the majority of linguistic parallels, subjectivity of the author’s conclusions and guesses. One of the main complaints by Lavrovsky was the author’s disregard for the particular historical conditions and his desire to bring peoples closer together on the basis of random resemblance. At the end of his review Lavrovsky noted the benefit of such a rapprochement, and approved the selection of facts of Slavic materials, made by the author.