Morana’s Frozen Howl — A Deity for Angry Non-Binary Witches
By: Valerie Moran-Clark
Tags: Trauma, LGBTQ, Witch, Mental Health, Spirituality

digital visual by v. moran-clark

In this dark and bitter winter season, like stinging crimson hot blood dripping down to melt frozen snow, near to my heart remains a deity I feel is perhaps even my birthright. Morana is one name of a goddess who is found throughout Slavic lands from Poland in the North and West, and stretching south and East through Ukraine and into Russia. Depending on the area she also goes by the names Marzanna, Mara, Morena, Marmora, and Mora. Also, she is known as Morana in what is now modern day Czechia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia. Going East, She is known as Moré in Lithuanian, Morena in Slovak and Russian, and Mara, in Belarusian and Ukrainian. Even with all of these variations, It is believed that her name stems from the Proto-Indo-European root *mar-, *mor-, which alludes to an association with death, darkness, “the void,” and has connections to the Russian root word, mor, or pestilence. The term Mora, in Russian, is a name given to night roaming spirits that affect people through nightmares and sleep paralysis. In dialects between Poland and Russia, the word mara which is related to mora, means phantom, vision or hallucination. Amongst simplified and binary neo-paganism Morana is reductively personified as the Slavic goddess of winter and death, and in Crone or “Hag” aspect only. Reconstructivists on a slightly more animist view see her as the embodiment of the darkness of winter, the cold that brings death and famine. Among some researchers, Morana is seen as linked to the Greek Hekate for correspondences to witchcraft, and although there are many differences between these two pantheons, there is historical evidence of some mingling between these pantheons in respect sharing attributes between deities. This can also be seen in the similarities between the myths of Slavic Morana and of Greek Persephone, especially comparing the themes of domestic abuse, sacrifice, shadow, descent/death, transformation/rebirth, cycles, madness and duality; each occurring independently and collectively.

There is so much to explore with every deity, and it is a personal process that I do not want to color too much of for a person. I will only share the tiny bit of what I feel called to share publicly about Morana here, and for curious folks I think I can say with confidence Morana will hear all serious inquiries and scream back what you need answered. Getting back to the point, of the of the many facets of Morana’s mythology, what resonates with me the the most is the tale of her relationship with the Sun God Dazbog and how this relationship is the explanation of seasonal change, from summer to winter and back again, the cyclical nature of the light half and dark half of the wheel of the year. This is the theme that also corresponds the Persephone/Demeter, although it gets a little clunky trying to work Zhiva as Persephone into this story seamlessly so it is not a direct example, but interesting to see how these common archetypes play out similarly and differently from one culture to another. One story explains that Morana and Dazbog were lovers, but eventually Dazbog left Morana for another lover. In retaliation, Morana poisoned Dazbog who, in turn, retaliated for the poisoning by banishing Morana to Nav, the Slavic Underworld. Another version, is that as winter draws near, the Sun God, as a huntsman roaming, he is enchanted by Morana and falls in love. Morana then traps his soul, and therefore his light and vibrancy, in a magick mirror, symbolism that represents the Underworld, where he must spend the Winter lost. This gives explanation to the vibrancy of solar energy being most alive during the summer or light half of the year, and solar energy weakened in wither with the colder days and longer nights and aspects of death taking the spotlight in the dark half of the year. In the winter, the Sun descends to the underworld and Morana rises to reign over the world, with death, famine, stillness and darkness. When spring approaches at the Vernal Equinox, ritual practices center around a symbolic killing of Morana and arrival of her sister Zhiva/Vesna/Devanna in a large holiday celebration called Maslenitsa.

As a non-binary person, the above stories resonate with me internally as I struggle to navigate both a binary world and my own femme and masculine expressions. Unfortunately, what I should be a gift and a blessing of masculine and feminine within, is a binary war of one part over the other at times. Tales such as these, as salty as they are, give validation to my internal struggle, and I feel that perhaps they aren’t to be taken so literally as heteronormative lovers’ quarrels tinged with sexist patriarchal oppression and abuse, but perhaps also as internal quarrels and cycles of identity expression that were originally normalized in pre-Christian times before the patriarchy took over. It has been said that in Slavic lands before Christianity, one needed only to hop over the other side of the Rainbow to live as the other gender than they were expressing, so while there was this idea of a binary, it seemed that it was accepted that it was arbitrary and changeable and acceptable to hop the rainbow once and a while. Some day, I hope to see that rainbow to hop in the sky. For now, I navigate what to show to who and when. I take comfort that even our deities had to do the same at time, but Morana is eternal and the screams and terror of mora are the sensory stains of the trauma carried by generations given to us by the Patriarchy who have tried to silence us for too long.