The Goddess in Bulgaria

I’m back from Bulgaria.  Here is some of what I learned.

We all know that storks bring babies.  This is one reason why when storks return to their nesting places in Bulgaria in the spring, it is a sign of renewed fertility and growth.  The beginning of March used to be the beginning of the year in old Bulgaria, a somewhat more sensible seasonal event than beginning the year in the snows of January.

There is a Bulgarian folk tale about Baba Marta, Granny March, and her two older brothers, January, Big Chill, and February, Little Chill.  During the summer they all provide a barrel of wine for themselves.  The two older brothers consume theirs and when they pursue their wintry functions and develop a thirst, they slake it with their little sister’s wine.  When Baba Marta finally has her turn, and finds her barrels empty, and her brothers possibly drunk, she alternatively smiles and rails, giving us the changing March weather, sunshine and cold showers.  There is also a story about how, as part of her spring cleaning, she shakes up her feather bed, releasing a flurry of feathers upon the earth, the last of the winter snows.  

This is very similar to what Frau Holle does in the Grimms’ tale of the same name, and like Frau Holle, Baba Marta is a folk manifestation of the ancient fertility mother goddess. In celebration of Baba Marta, even today, it is traditional for people to tie white and red ribbons, martenitsa, around their wrists, present white and red ribbon gifts to each other or tie these ribbons around trees.  The colors have different explanations, but seem to represent red for female, blood and life, and white for male, spirit.  The ideal of renewed life is a face of pale white skin with red cheeks.  (The red and white have an interesting association with the blood dripping on snow that initiates the desire of the mother in “The Juniper Tree”, another story of fertility and renewal, for a child of similar colors).  The mother goddess, and her relationship with male figures and heroes, has a long, long history in Bulgaria, going back at least to neolithic times in the 5th millennium BCE.  Marija Gimbutas in The Living Goddesses references the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular as a rich source of ceramic goddess figurines.  The city of Varna on the Black Sea coast  (where I waded in the water) was once the site of the earliest culture in Europe, 1500 years before the pyramids in Egypt, and a source of the earliest gold work ever discovered, 1000 years before any similar discovery.  The pieces were found in burial sites along with ceramic masks that Gimbutas claims are Medusa-like snake figures or images of the fierce aspect of the goddess.  In any case, she declares, they indicate rituals of regeneration.

Around the second millennium BCE, Indo-European nomadic tribes invaded Bulgaria and, eventually, collectively, became known as the Thracians.  They were patriarchal and horse herding people (they sided with Troy in the Trojan War).  One of the most consistent images to appear in their art is of a horseman defending the tree of life and its protective serpent from an attack of a wild boar, apparently protecting life and regeneration.  However, the goddess was still strong and appears in many guises, some as huntress protector of animals like Artemis or as the Earth Mother Cybele.  Mythologist Ivan Marazov suggests that the Hero on horseback plays the role of son of the goddess and her, or her daughter’s, lover, ensuring the successful revival of the cycle of life.  The goddess and her dying and resurrected son and consort is a common motif in goddess worship (“The Juniper Tree”, again, maybe).

The Thracians were also devotees of the cult of Dionysus who is at one level a vegetative god who descends to the underworld to rescue his mother Semele and rises with her again, renewing life.  He is also, obviously, the god of wine and intoxication.  The Thracians were noted for their intoxication and scorned by the Greeks because they did not water their wine.  Bulgarian wine is delicious and plentiful.  We passed acres of vineyards and drank glasses of wine.  Nearly every house, big or small, has its own grape arbor.  Bulgarian wine is not easy to find in this country because, as one of our guides suggested, “we drink it all.”  Baba Marta’s anger at her drunken brothers seems to reflect a long history.

Orpheus was born in Bulgaria and became an important Thracian religious figure.  He, also, at one level can be seen as a vegetation deity. Like Dionysus, he was torn limb from limb (Dionysus by the Titans, Orpheus by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads), and the earth remained barren until his head was found and buried.  Orpheus lived in The Rhodope Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria.  We didn’t get there, but came close at the Rila Monastery in the Rila Mountains just to the west.  We did cross the river Maritsa in Plovdiv, known as the Hebros in ancient times, which flows south into the Rhodope mountains and then out to sea.  It was into this river that the head of Orpheus was thrown, carried to the sea and to the island of Lesbos.  (There is a story about a Thracian king, Haemus, son of the North wind Boreas, and his wife Rhodope - rose-faced - daughter of the river god Hebros.  In their pride and arrogance, they compared themselves to Zeus and Hera, earning the wrath of those deities.  As punishment they were transformed into two mountain ranges in Bulgaria, the Rhodope mountains in the south and the Balkan range in the north.) It was suggested by Marazov that it was Orpheus who introduced Dionysus to the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, making him part of the seasonal cycle those two goddesses represent, before he abandoned the earth-centered cult for the sun worship of Apollo.

Ares was originally a Thracian god, of war since the Thracians were a war-like people. Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths, talks about a peculiar ritual.  In March when the ivy (chewing ivy leaves intoxicates the Maenads) begins to grow, if the stem is punctured it releases “a gummy liquid which, when mixed with urine and boiled, turns a blood color…red dye was used to color the faces of male fertility images…In Rome this custom survived in the reddening of the triumphant general’s face. The general represents the god Mars, who was a Spring-Dionysus before he specialized as the Roman god of war.”  So we are using the sap from the Maenads’ ivy to redden, perhaps for reasons of life and fertility, the cheeks of the representative of Mars who gives his name to March, the month of Baba Marta and the martenitsa.  Minor details, but with head-scratching associations.

During subsequent domination by the Hellenistic culture and by the Romans, the names may change but the influence of the gods and goddesses remain the same. The incursions of the Old Bulgars in the 7th century CE, brought pagan nature deities, though perhaps no goddess, and the conversion of the Bulgars to Christianity in the 9th century would seem to have brought all this to an end. In the Eastern Orthodox churches we visited, however, the ubiquitous presence of icons and frescoes of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, attest, as it does in Western Europe, to the popularity and lasting power of The Mother.  In any case, it is clear from present-day custom, that the earth mother, the female figure of fertility and life, still has its place in popular culture. 

Last year when I visited Russia, I searched almost in vain for signs of folklore and fairy tale.  They appeared, at best, in commercialized versions of popular figures like Baba Yaga.  Bulgaria is a different story altogether.  It unfolds in layer upon layer of history, art and mythology going back to the earliest paleolithic evidence of human habitation.  Indeed, it may be true that when homo sapiens made its way out of Africa, the route it took towards the North ran across the Bulgarian plains.  Bulgarian culture is deep and rich, like its soil.Great trip.