Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On a morning in late March, in villages across Poland—and, under other names, across the whole western Slavic world—the children still do a thing their ancestors were doing when the bishops first complained about it six centuries ago. They build a woman of straw : life-sized or larger, dressed in white linen or in cast-off finery, beribboned, sometimes necklaced, raised on a pole. She is Marzanna —Morana to the Czechs, Morena to the Slovaks, Śmiertka, "little Death," in some counties—the lady of winter, of sickness, and of death; and the village carries her out in procession, with singing, to the nearest river or pond. There she is stripped of her ornaments, set alight if the parish is thorough—and drowned : pitched from the bank or the bridge into the spring flood, while the singers tell her, in verses worn smooth as river stones, that she has ruled long enough. Death rots in the water, runs one of the oldest recorded songs of the rite; winter, away—summer, into the villag...