#folk custom

“You are the lady of life, the mother of the whole world,

You are the pregnant lady, the mother of the sun,

Wherever you set foot, rye is born,

You make the hearts of men and animals beat.”

—Lelek, Marzanna (translated from Polish)

The drowning of Morana (or Marzanna, or Marena, or Mara, or Smrtka . . . ) is an old Slavic tradition and the beginning of my devotional year.  Traditionally in the Czech Republic, on the fourth or fifth Sunday of Lent, depending on the region, an effigy of the goddess is thrown into the river to drown; sometimes she is also burned.  We know that people have been drowning effigies of the goddess since at least 1420, when it was forbidden by the Catholic church, but probably for much longer.  It is a misconception by many that Morana is only a goddess of winter and death.

“However, many historical sources and traces of her cult (particularly in the West Slavic beliefs) show clearly that the cold winter is only one of the faces of this goddess. After getting rid of the winter effigy, another similar one was being brought up in a procession around the villages and fields - it was a symbol of spring, the same goddess being reborn after the winter phase and waking up nature’s vital strength for the upcoming growing season. Many of such informations survived in countless folk songs and rituals.” @lamus-dworski

In my personal practice I drown her on St. Matthew’s Day (Feb. 24th a much earlier day than is traditional in my ancestral lands but more suited to the Southern region where I live) and then set about restructuring the altar into a bower for her to be reborn.

Spring embroideries were hung backwards, and the new Morana veiled until Spring arrived. I had decided that this year I was not going to be constrained by the calendar, but rather do things that felt seasonally appropriate for the southern region in which I live—a region where spring comes earlier than the northern lands of my ancestors.

On my St. Gregory’s Day (old March 12 date) mini-pilgrimage around our land, I came upon the first new leaves of the year and decided this was the sign that I was waiting for.

Spring Morana

May Morana

Midsummer/Kupala Morana

Harvest/Dozinky Morana

Straô  |  Every spring, eight weeks prior to Easter, a procession of flower-draped draft horses rides to the beach to wash their legs in Zeeland’s sea water. The straô, an age-old tradition on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland, concerns six villages. The evil spirits, which according to old tales would have gathered in the horses’ legs, are rinsed out.

"One of the more fascinating, and somewhat eerie, pieces of folklore in Appalachia is that of the feather “death crown.” The death crown phenomenon occurs when a clump of the feathers inside a pillow take the form of a crown after someone passes away.

Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people's festive laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people's festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world's comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people's ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.