Živa
Slavic · deity · pantheon era · deity
The equation of Živa with Vesna is not made here, and Vesna is not ingested. It is a modern conflation: Vesna is a personification of spring in later South Slavic folklore and literature with no medieval attestation as a deity, and Živa is a Polabian tribal goddess named once, in Latin, by a German priest. Popular sources merge them because both are 'the opposite of winter'. That is not an identification, and the census carries Vesna as a REJECT row on exactly that ground. What Živa has, and what most of this tradition does not, is one clean sentence in a dated chronicle.
Domains
- life
- fertility
Relations
- counterpart of: Marzanna
Sources
- Reference treatments of Živa, of the Polabian Slavs and of Helmold's Chronica Slavorum.