Živa

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: MarzannaA non-symmetric kind, deliberately. The life-against-death pairing is how the seasonal material is read, but it is a reading, and this record will not push a symmetric claim onto a pre-existing record that was not authored with it.Reference treatment of the Slavic seasonal opposition between the goddess of life and the goddess of winter and death. (secondary)

Sources

• Živa is the goddess of life of an Obodrite tribe of the Polabian Slavs, named in Helmold of Bosau's twelfth-century Chronica Slavorum.: Reference treatments of Živa, of the Polabian Slavs and of Helmold's Chronica Slavorum. (secondary)