Month: May 2014

hedendom:

Maran

Maran (singular mara, roughly translated as “nightmare”) are terrifying female beings that haunt people at night. They crawl upon the victim’s chest while they sleep, suffocating them and sucking out their life force. If you wake up, you will be breathless and feel as if you have been smothered.

Maran can enter a victim’s home through the smallest of opening, so to prevent this one can sing hymns, blessing as much cow hair as possible and place it in the window. If a mara attempts to enter, she must first count all the individual hairs before entering, leaving her little time to attack before the victim wakes. Alternatively, flax seed can spread around the bed before sleeping and if a mara comes she will compulsively have to count all the seed.

Maran are also known to attack horses which will be found in their stall in the morning appearing to have been ridden very hard. Symptoms will include exhaustion, foaming at the mouth and a matted mane. Hanging a dead bird of prey or painting a hexagonal marker on the stall of the horse will scare the mara away.

Maran are said to be the souls of unmarried women who have died and returned to take the warmth and essence away from the living. It is also possible for any woman to become a mara at night if she is cursed. The curse comes about if a mother attempts to prevent the pains of childbirth using sorcery. A daughter will be cursed as a mara and a son will be cursed to live as a werewolf.

The transformation into a mara starts with a thick smoke that appears to come from the woman’s body, takes it’s terrifying shape and then flies off into the night. The curse can be broken if someone tells her she is a mara the moment she returns to her body in the morning but the timing must be perfect because the woman may lose a finger or toe if the curse is lifted too soon and the body has not fully transformed back to normal.

Artwork by Johan Egerkrans

dianaandpansson:

Palaeolithic Female Figurines

Photos from the American Museum of Natural History

“To a student of prehistoric religion, the earliest significant works are a group of about thirty-five female figurines found on twelve sites scattered from the Pyrenees to Siberia. In view of this vast geographical range, their similarity is striking. All are relatively small, about the length of a human hand, and all are footless and faceless with swollen breasts, buttocks and/or abdomens. Within this style there are some variations. They are fashioned in clay, ivory or stone. Some are fat, some apparently pregnant, and some have the breasts and buttocks alone emphasized. Those from western and central Europe tend to be found singly and without any context, while the Russian examples are found ore often in groups and on settlement sites. At Kostienki on the river Don, three were found in a niche in a hut wall. The situation could suggest that they were deities in a family shrine, but as they had been thrown there after being broken it looks more likely that they were being discarded or hidden. At Yeliseevici, on t he river Desna, one was found among three mammoths’ skulls arranged in a circle. At Laussel in the Dordogne, France, three reliefs of women holding objects were found carved upon boulders in a rock shelter. All are similar in style to the figurines and the best preserved holds what experts upon the fauna of the Palaeolithic have always identified as an upward-curving bison horn, marked with thirteen lines. The woman’s left hand rests upon her abdomen, and she has been painted red, which, as suggested above, seems to have been the colour most often connected with sacred or arcane matters in the Palaeolithic.

No collection of male images is associated with all these females, the only masculine forms being a torso with a spear carved at Laussel and a crude and mutilated statuette from Czechoslovakia. There is also a scene engraved in the sequence at Lausesel which may show an act of human copulation, though it is not plain enough to afford any certainty. The only other evidence relating to these figurines is their dating, and here another striking similarity is revealed: all those from context which could be dated may be attributed to the centuries between about 25,000 and about 23,000 BC. All were therefor apparently produced in a relatively short period of the Palaeolithic, that in which the ice sheets were starting to advance southward for the last time. This fact would account for their complete absence from Britain, which the ice was rendering uninhabitable.

So what did they mean? Their earliest discoverers preempted the question by calling them ‘Venuses’, a name which has stuck and which indicated that they were representations of a goddess. For the first seventy years of this century it seemed to be a scholarly orthodoxy that they were representations of a universal prehistoric Earth Mother. This interpretation (which will be discussed further in the next chapter) was not the product of accumulating evidence but a theoretical construction. The figurines were slotted into a preexisting system of thought much as earlier generations had considered Palaeolithic flints to be the discarded weapons of elves. Unlike ‘elf-shot’, the notion of this Mother Goddess is not susceptible of proof or disproof, but there have always been prehistorians who have noted that the Old Stone Age statuettes have no features to mark them off as divine or majestic. On the other hand, the degree of effort invested in them suggests that they were far more than Palaeolithic pinups. any explanation of them needs to take into account the fact that they were apparently a feature of a relatively short span of the Old Stone Age, marked by the cooling of the climate. If the Earth Mother theory is correct, was a cult of this deity related tot he advance of the ice? This seems doubtful because the change would have occurred so slowly that it could hardly have been perceptible to the humans of the time. Were the people, instead, working magic with these images to increase their own fertility and improve their numbers? Or to decrease them, as a hunter-gatherer groups in history have been more concerned to limit their population to a level which the environment could support? The most recent suggestion, made by Clive Gamble, is that they were exchanged as tokens when tribes or clans intermarried as part of a shifting territorial relationship of groups migrating before the ice-cap. This is possible, but the nature of the images themselves demands a context. The Laussel carvings were not tokens but sen to have formed a ceremonial centre. Why were the female figurines there holding objects? Was the bison horn, which is the only object now distinct, an emblem of virility? Or of the moon, or of a wish to have the herds of the animals increased? Was the fact that thirteen lines were drawn upon it of particular significance? And he figure among the skulls at Yeliseevici also suggests the focus of a ritual. Was this to do with hunting the beasts concerned, or were they themselves symbolic of a quality? Or were their heads simply decorative? The blank faces of the figurines parallel the enigma which they pose.”

Ronald Hutton, in The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles.

Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. For this reason each one will dissolve into its earliest origin. But those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble, eternal.

The Gospel of Philip (via cosmic-rebirth)