Marzanna, the goddess of winter, is probably an ancient holdover. She is the Slavic version of an old goddess-as-old-woman figure found in Indo-European mythologies and known as Marratu to Chaldeans, Marah to a Jew, & Mariham to the Persians. As a Slavic princess, she is mainly seen as a scary figure who brings death and represents winter. A goddess of spring is said to lure Perun, the god of lightning, ending winter. Shiva is a summer goddess who is in charge of crops. There was no autumn goddess. In the stories, she was indeed the daughter of a moon Chors who’d been cursed when she was born and went missing. By Chernobog, Triglav, the god of war, was Marzanna’s only child.
Maslenitsa is a celebration that takes place when spring is almost here. People dress up a straw maiden with rags, carry her thru the town and into the fields, and then burn her or put her in a body of water or pond. The puppet stands for Marzanna, which means that winter is gone from the land when it is burned or destroyed. When she drowns, she goes into the underworld. At the solstice, this same Kupalo ceremony mixes wedding and funeral ideas. It is a set of happy and sad rites that celebrates the Dionysian blend of water and fire and the Sun’s descent into winter.
As winter approaches, the story of the “enchanted huntsman” is linked to Marzanna. The Roma tells a story about a hunter in love with Marzanna. The hunter, occasionally the god of the Sun, has his soul trapped in a magic mirror, where he must splurge the long winter. In some stories, Marzanna is a fate goddess named Mara or Mora. She rides the evening winds & drinks men’s blood. She is the mare inside the word nightmare. She is characterized as a “monstrous harridan squatting on the breast, mute, immobile, and evil, an instalment of the evil demon whose intolerable mass crushes the exhalation out of the body”. In this way, she is like the Hindu goddess Kali, who is known as the Destroyer and whose death implies “passive mass and darkness.”
In this form, Marzanna is a cruel person who sometimes looks like a horse or a tuft of hair. One story is about a man who was so upset beside her that he left his house, got on his white horse, and rode away. But wherever he went, the Mora went with him. At last, he spent the night in an inn, where the owner heard him grunting in a nightmare and discovered him being strangled by a long tuft of white hair. The host used scissors to cut the hair in half, and the white horse was found murdered in the morning. The hair, this same nightmare, and the white horse were all Marzanna.
As the kitchen devil Marui and Marukhi, Marzanna conceals behind the stove and rotates at night, making weird, thumping, strange sounds when danger is coming. She changes into a butterfly & hangs over the mouths of people sleeping to give them bad dreams. If a woman rotates something without first offering a prayer, Mora would then come at night and ruin all her work. In this way, Marzanna is sometimes called Kikimori, a name for the ghosts of girls who died without being christened or whose parents cursed them.
In modern times, the rituals affiliated with Marzanna are no longer holy. Instead, they are a fun way to celebrate the start of spring and have some fun. Most of the time, the tradition is held around the spring equinox. Most of the time, local folklore groups, schoolchildren, and other residents participate in the celebrations. Handmade Marzanna is taken to the closest river, lake, or pond by a group of men, women, and children. People sing folk tunes and throw Marzanna-shaped figures into the water. Sometimes the effigy is set on fire first, or its clothes are ripped off. On the way back to the village, the focus is on the trees with ribbons and eggshells. The procession goes back to the town while still singing. In some places, a feast is held to mark spring’s start.
