Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Lithuania was the last country in Europe to accept Christianity, and its folklore keeps, better than any of its neighbors', the temperature of the elder world. Its greatest tale—told in hundreds of recorded variants, taught to every Lithuanian child, raised in bronze at Palanga by the sea—is Eglė žalčių karalienė : Eglė, Queen of Serpents; and it is not, despite its nursery ubiquity, a children's story. It is a tragedy of marriage between the shore and the deep, built with the cold symmetry of the old Baltic mind, and it ends with a mother turning her own children and herself into trees —an ending the tradition regards not as horror but as the only dignity left, which tells the reader at once what kind of country the tale comes from. At its center are four instruments: a grass-snake in a sleeve, a secret name, a betrayal extracted from a child by whipping, and the ancient identity—nowhere else so explicit—of persons and trees . The Snake in the Sleeve Three sisters bathe in ...