Modern pagans celebrate the Wheel of the Year, or the four holidays associated with solar events - Spring and Autumn Equinox, Summer and Winter Solstice - along with the four holidays that fall in between these markers, known as “cross-quarter days.” But recently, more and more pagans are rejecting the schema of an eight-spoked wheel that gives equal importance to every holiday. This has partly to do with the fact that celebrating a major fête every six and a half weeks quickly becomes exhausting, and much more to do with the fact that the wheel of seasonal holidays has no historical precedent. It’s true that large-scale festivities accompanied the Winter Solstice, or Beltane, or Spring Equinox, etc. in regions all over the world, but it’s not true that any single culture celebrated all eight of these days with the same vigor. Modern covens deal with the problem of “too many holidays” by electing one to have special significance, often the one that aligns best with that group’s particular flavor of paganism and its cultural roots. For example, heathens who honor the Norse pantheon maintain the special reverence that ancient Germanic peoples had for Yule (Winter Solstice), while Summer Solstice (also called St. John’s Eve) has been a holiday of special import in the British Isles for at least the last several centuries, with neolithic monuments like Stonehenge drawing thousands of modern druids to summer festivals each year.
In Slavic cultures, Spring Equinox and its associated holidays signal the most iconic period of the seasonal year. Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles are among the nationalities reviving the ancient pagan traditions of the Slavs today, but Slavs also make up the largest ethnic group in Europe and are dispersed far across the eastern and southeastern part of the continent. Christianity came late to the Slavs - the ninth and tenth centuries - and though this tardiness allowed for more cultural traditions to survive without interruption, it also left us with fewer written records of ancient Slavic belief systems. Modern Slavs celebrate the many holy days of the Easter cycle, but the pagan roots of their local customs are easily discerned. For example, the “Easter whip,” in which young men whip young women with pussy willow branches in exchange for decorated eggs, has strong sexual overtones and suggests the Spring Equinox themes of fertility and rebirth. The whip is said to wake up the vitality of the young women, just as the white buds burst from the barren pussy willow branches at the onset of spring. Pussy willows are the regional variant of “palms” for Palm Sunday in Slavic countries, but the profusion of long flowering branches in Slavic churches on this day resembles a community fertility rite moreso than it does a somber procession.
Ancient pagan customs honoring the sacredness of water in Slavic cultures also surface at Spring Equinox. The LA-based Ukrainian diaspora witch, Madame Pamita, explained in a workshop recently that melted snow is seen as a particularly powerful blessing for the home. Snow-water can be incorporated into the all-important spring cleaning ritual, used in rites of personal renewal, or given to household animals. The refreshing rains of spring may be captured and utilized in the seasonal dying of eggs to increase their magical potency. Modern celebrations of Śmigus-dyngus across Slavic countries on Easter Monday may not retain the consciousness that rivers, springs, and swamps were liminal spaces for the ancient Slavs, places where humans could make contact with the spirit world. Today, “Dyngus Day,” as it is called in Polish American communities, simply involves young people giving each other a good soaking. But in the not-too-distant past, young men splashing young women with buckets filled at thawing rivers was a way to welcome the return of fertility to the land with the renewing power of “living water.”
Eggs are conventional symbols of Easter today, but it’s obvious that their pagan associations were revered by the Ukrainian people who developed such an intricate and beautiful practice of decorating them. Known as pysanky, Ukrainian dyed eggs are talismanic and adorned with ancient symbols in beeswax, which is then melted off with a candle-flame at the end of the process. The many colors that pysanky are dyed each possess a symbolic meaning, and are chosen according to their intended use. Pysanky may be given as gifts, placed in coffins or on gravestones, or put outdoors to protect the household, but their most common use is indoors as a ward against evil in the home. The ancient Slavs were Sun-worshippers, and the bright yellow yolks of eggs are potent symbols of the Sun’s return at springtime. Birds were also considered to have an intimate relationship with the Sun because they could approach the Sun’s height in flight, and many species of birds return from their winter homes during springtime in the Slavic lands. Thus, birds’ eggs are ancient symbols of the Sun’s return at springtime, and their use as talismans predates the Christianization of the Slavs. If, like me, you despair of keeping a steady enough hand to decorate your own pysanky with a wax stylus, you may also simply dye your eggs red, which is traditional at the Spring Equinox. Madame Pamita provides a recipe for dying hard-boiled krashanky with onion skins in Baba Yaga’s Book of Witchcraft: Slavic Magic from the Witch of the Woods (2022). These red krashanky are consumed on the first day of Spring, an act which represents taking the power of the Sun into one’s own body.
The fertility whip, spring cleaning and blessing with “living water,” and symbolic egg-dying are all to some extent light-hearted customs, but there is one Spring Equinox ritual in Slavic lands that alludes to the very real threat of decline, despair, and death in winter’s darkness. In a rite known as “drowning Mara,” an effigy of the Slavic goddess of death is constructed by the village children out of straw or twigs, dressed in a white cloth, and adorned with ribbons and eggshells. In some instances, Mara or her regional variant will be dressed in clothing worn by the last person who died in the village, a very literal way of banishing death by transferring it to the effigy. “Mara” is the name of the winter goddess in Ukraine, but she is known as Morana in Czech, Marzanna in Polish, Marena in Russian, and by other related names across Slavic lands. Mara is then carried in a procession through the village to a waterway. She may be set on fire before she is drowned, but her drowning is consistent with the special magic afforded to rivers and streams in Slavic tradition. A victory over the powers of death is declared after Mara is drowned, and no one must touch her sacrificed body or look back at the river after the rite is complete. Christianized Slavs typically carried out the drowning of Mara before Easter to the distress of the Catholic clergy, who made many unsuccessful attempts to put a stop to the practice. This irrepressibly pagan rite is now celebrated on the Spring Equinox across many countries.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Czech writer Božena Němcová penned perhaps the most well-known Czech novel of all time, Babička, or The Grandmother in English. A highly nostalgic account of the folk customs of the seasonal year, Babička appeared at the height of the Czech national revival in literature and became an instant classic. In the novel, the grandchildren celebrate the long awaited “Death Sunday” (two weeks before Easter) by crafting an effigy of Morana out of straw, dressing a switch with streamers and egg shells, marching gaily to the river with their poppet held high, and drowning her with songs of triumph. This ritual is carried out essentially unchanged by Czech schoolchildren today, and it is a testament to the enduring spirit of Slavic paganism through a thousand years of Christianization. The old crone Mara may be sacrificed, but she is reborn as the lovely Vesna, the springtime goddess whose stages of life follow the agricultural cycles, from bloom to harvest, and from the barren field to the planting of seeds. This Spring Equinox, why not take inspiration from the Slavic rituals for fertility, purification, and rebirth, as you honor the turning of the old year into the new.