To kill a witch

"Everyone knows that an ordinary bullet can't kill a witch. If you want to kill a witch, load the rifle with 3 grains of wheat and a bit of Easter beeswax candle"... 

This Serbian folk belief is very very interesting and contains in itself a lot of encoded information...

In the past in Serbia witches were actually respected and seen as protectors of community and preservers of sacred medical and magic knowledge. 

I talked abut this in two of my posts: "The skilful one" and "Wrach".

If witch-hunt was not a common theme in Serbian folklore, who is the witch who is being killed in this folk belief? Well the same one which is being killed every year in all Slavic lands: Marzana, Morana, The Goddess of Death, The Hag, The Witch, Winter Earth...

The Climatic Spring starts at the beginning of February. As part of the End of Winter - Beginning of Spring celebrations, Slavs make effigies of Morana/Marzana, The Goddess of Death, Winter Earth, and parade them through villages...

These effigies are then burned, or drowned in flowing water, or both (to be sure to be sure) symbolising warming of the earth and melting of snow. The departure of winter and the arrival of spring...

Christians at the same time celebrate the beginning of Lent, so eventually these beginning of Spring celebrations became beginning of Lent celebrations...But for Slavs the purpose of the celebration stayed the same: Kill the Witch of Winter...

That the witch which is killed is Winter, can be seen from the ammunition recommended for killing it: three grains of wheat and Easter candle beeswax...I will first talk about grains of wheat.

Most grain cultivated by the farmers today belongs to the so called "winter grain". This grain is sown in October-November and is harvested in June-July. It has high yields, thin husks, short bristles and is resistant to low temperatures...

But in the past it wasn't like this. Most grain cultivated by our ancient ancestors was the so calls "spring grain". This grain is sown in February-March and is harvested in July-August. It has lower yields, thick husks, long bristles and is resistant to high temperatures.

The spring grains are the original old grains of the first farmers. They grew better in poor quality soil. They were resistant to diseases and were very good in completing with weeds for nutrients. Basically much better suited for primitive agriculture... As can be seen from this next chart is from the book "Local, intensive and diverse?: Early farmers and plant economy in the North-East of the Iberian Peninsula (5500-2300 cal BC)" by Ferran Antolín.

In my post about Early Neolithic Starčevo culture site Blagotin, I talked about how Serbia seems to have been the place where first farmers from Anatolia learned how to grow grain in continental climate of Europe. Pic: clay grain seeds from Blagotin temple.

 

Serbia is full of alluvial plains formed along rivers, which are flooded every year, and are ideal for primitive agriculture. And the schedule of annual floods which replenish nutrient on these Serbian floodplains favours spring grains.

In "Farming regimes in Neolithic Europe: gardening with cows and other models" by Valasia Isaakidou, we can read that:

"Sherratt and Kruk rejected slash-and-burn cultivation for Early Neolithic temperate Europe, partly because of growing evidence that early (LBK) settlements (as opposed to individual houses) were much long-lived and partly because concentration of habitation along rivers removed both the opportunity (scope for repeated clearance) and need (rapid depletion of soil fertility) for such a farming regime (Sherratt 1980, 315–16). As well as expanding the geographical scope of the fl oodplain cultivation model, Sherratt also now elaborated on how it would have worked. Annual flooding in late winter-early spring replenished nutrients and water supply. As the ‘self-cultivating’ soils dried out, cracking promoted aeration and seeds were spring-sown by broadcasting in the cracks, rendering digging to plant and cover the seed redundant. Labour-intensive weeding, manuring, digging, and even initial forest clearance would have been unnecessary."

Sooooo, right at the moment when Winter (The Witch) gets killed, right at the beginning of Spring, is the time when spring grains are sown...So grains of wheat do seem to kill the Witch...

In the Balkans, even though spring starts in February, cold weather can last until well into March. Witches are hard to kill. So even though grains of wheat mortally wounded winter, it is Easter (spring equinox) which is when people can start singing "Ding dong the witch is dead"...

Oh and guess who gets resurrected every Easter? The "bread of life" of course...