Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The demons of the world's traditions are creatures of the dark almost by definition—midnight things, shadow things, powers of the witching hours. The Slavic lands kept one great exception, and she is among the most original spirits in European belief: a demon of high noon . The Południca —Polish for "the noon woman"; Polednice to the Czechs, Poludnitsa to the Russians, the Mittagsfrau of the Germanized Wendish lands—walks the grain fields in the blazing middle of the summer day, when the light is flattest and the heat is worst. She appears as a tall woman in white , moving through or above the standing rye, sometimes in a swirl of dust—the whirlwinds that cross the July fields were her passage—carrying a sickle or a pair of shears ; and her law, uniform from the Elbe to the Volga, concerns the hour: whoever is found working, lingering, or—above all— idling in the fields at noon is hers to examine. She stops the harvester and asks questions —about flax-working in the ...

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...

The Russian village stood always between two sovereigns it had not elected. Behind it, the forest, with its bark-clad lord whose whistles bent the paths. Before it, the river or the millpond—and in the millpond lived the other one: the Vodyanoy , the Water One, old man of the deep pools. Bilibin drew him as the tradition described him: a bloated ancient with a beard of green weed and slime, fish-belly pale, sometimes scaled, sometimes finned, crowned with water-plants, riding an outsized catfish as a lord rides a stallion—for the catfish, the whiskered giant of the Russian rivers, was the Vodyanoy's own steed and messenger, and prudent fishermen threw the first of the catch back to him as a courtesy. He dwelt in the deepest hole of the river, under the mill-wheel by preference, in a drowned palace lit by a light that was not the sun; herds of drowned cattle grazed his underwater meadows; and in his crystal halls, said the strangest and most persistent of the traditions, he kept ro...

The Domovoi, Grandfather of the Russian house, had a counterpart the tradition spoke of far more warily. She lived in the same dark geography—behind the stove, under the floorboards, in the corner where the roof-beams settle—but where the Grandfather was the house's honored ancestor, she was its uninvited resident : the Kikimora , the little crooked woman of the night hours, wild-haired, thin as a spindle, hen-footed in some provinces, so slight she could slip through the keyhole—and, in the tellings that raised the hair of every listening child, glimpsed only as a whirring in the dark: for the Kikimora's signature, her office and her obsession, was spinning . On nights when the house slept badly, she came out to the abandoned distaff and spun—backwards, tangling what was straight, knotting what was smooth, wetting and twisting the thread—and the whir of her wheel in the blackness was a sentence pronounced on the household: someone would sicken; something would break; the luck...

Every Russian house of the old world had one inhabitant more than the census recorded. He lived behind the great stove, or under the threshold, or in the corner where the brooms stood; he was small, old, and covered in soft hair—palms included, and the hairier the palm, the richer the house would be; and he was, in the most literal sense the language allows, the master of the house : the peasants called him khozyain , master, or more warily and warmly, Dedushka —Grandfather. He is the Domovoi , from dom , the house itself: the house-spirit of the Slavic world, one of the great family of domestic guardians that watched the hearths of all old Europe—but nowhere else did the species survive so long, so vividly, or with so complete a code of law as behind the stoves of Russia, where he was fed, consulted, apologized to, and moved house with the family well into the twentieth century, and, by the quiet testimony of many a modern apartment-dweller, somewhat beyond it. Grandfather Behind t...

The Russian peasant, stepping from his field into the treeline, crossed a border more real to him than any the mapmakers drew. Behind him lay the world of the baptized: hut, church bell, plough-land, the little house-spirit grumbling behind the stove. Before him rose the les —the forest, which in the north is not scenery but an ocean with trees for waves—and the forest had a master. They called him the Leshy : the Forest One, from les itself, though a prudent man in the woods did not say the name, preferring He , or the Old Man , or, with the wary courtesy the Russian language reserves for powers within earshot, Grandfather . Every forest had one; great forests held several, each lord to his own tract with wolves and bears for cattle. And the whole art of the woodland life—hunting, herding, berrying, the child sent for mushrooms, the girl walking to the next village—rested on a body of law that was never written down because everyone breathing knew it: the law of the Leshy, the etiqu...

In the orchard of a certain tsar there grew a tree that bore golden apples , and every night an apple went missing. The watchmen saw nothing; the elder sons, standing guard, slept the strange sleep that always takes elder sons in these tales. Only the youngest, Ivan, kept his eyes open past midnight—and saw the thief arrive like a sunrise out of season: a bird with plumage of burning gold, eyes like eastern crystal, lighting the whole garden as it settled into the branches. He seized it; it tore free; and what remained in his fist was a single tail-feather —a feather that lit a dark room like a hundred candles, a feather men could not stop looking at. Ivan brought it to his father. And the tsar, who now possessed the most marvelous object in his kingdom, did what possessors of fragments always do: he conceived an unbearable need for the whole, and sent his sons out into the world after the Firebird itself. With that commission begins the most famous of all Russian quests—and one of t...

In 1871 Ivan Kramskoi painted a Ukrainian night: a ruined cottage, a moonlit slope running down to still water, and upon it a company of girls in pale shifts—sitting, drifting, combing, waiting. He called it The Mermaids , and Muscovites whispered that the canvas was unlucky, that it fell from walls and troubled the sleep of those who hung it. The whisper was, in its way, sound scholarship. For the beings Kramskoi painted are rusalki , and the rusalka is not a mermaid—no fish-tail, no coral throne, no saltwater whimsy. She is something far nearer and colder: a dead girl who did not finish , the drowned bride, the maiden lost before her wedding, the unbaptized daughter, returned to the rivers and birches of her own parish, beautiful as she would have been, and dangerous in exact proportion to what she was denied. The Slavic lands, which kept the oldest peasant Europe longest, preserved in her the deepest of all doctrines about the dead: that the perilous ones are not the wicked, but th...

There is a figure who gallops through the Russian wonder tales like a rumor of winter: gaunt as famine, old as grievance, mounted on a steed that outruns the wind, forever carrying off the bride of some luckless prince. Swords do not bite him. Fire does not hold him. Bury him and he climbs out; drown him and he walks ashore. The tales name him with a shudder of respect: Koschei Bessmertny , Koschei the Deathless. And yet the whole engine of his legend runs on a paradox the peasant storytellers polished for centuries—the Deathless One can die, and he knows precisely how, because he has hidden his death away himself. His death lies at the point of a needle ; the needle is in an egg ; the egg is in a duck ; the duck is in a hare ; the hare is in an iron chest ; the chest is buried under a green oak ; and the oak stands on the island of Buyan , in the middle of the ocean-sea. Whoever recites that address has already begun the spell that kills him. The Prisoner in the Iron Chamber The m...

In 1896 Viktor Vasnetsov painted two great birds perched in the branches of a single tree, and gave Russia back one of its oldest dreams. Both birds wear the faces of women. One, plumed in black, her cheeks flushed with rapture, sings with parted lips and eyes wide open upon some unbearable gladness; the other, radiant white, crowned, sings with her eyes shut, and tears stand on her lashes. He called the canvas Sirin and Alkonost: Birds of Joy and Sorrow —and then, as if to warn us that the dream resists our tidy labels, the tradition itself cannot finally agree which bird is which. For these are the twin bird-maidens of the Russian paradise : creatures blown out of Byzantine Greece into the Slavic imagination, nested for centuries in illuminated bestiaries, spiritual songs, and the cheap woodblock prints called lubki that peasants pinned to their walls—and their doubled song divides, with terrible precision, the two things a human being may feel when heaven brushes too close: joy th...