Митарствата на душата в иконографията на страшния съд
The Aerial Tollboths in the Last Judgement Iconography

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the teaching of tollbooths/toll-houses/toll-stations/ ordeals, their origin, sources, spread in Christian theological thought and subsequently, in iconographic eschatology: the composition of Christ’s Second Coming. In the fifteenth century in russia and ukraine, the classical Byzantine iconography of The Last Judgement underwent changes with one of the most impor- tant new features being a snake with twenty or twenty-one coils. Twenty coils of a snake symbolize the ordeals in the Life of St. Basil the New (tenth century), the main source of the teaching of ordeals, interpreted in a different manner in Orthodox literature and more often than not defined as apocryphal. This paper studies why ordeals were incorporated in The Last Judgement, as a result of what changes in Christian literature and what their significance was. The proper theological and historical hermeneutics of the development of the new russian-ukrainian iconography of The Second Coming helps clarify the Orthodox or Gnostic nature of the teaching of ordeals.

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