Forge, sun, thunder, and dawn
The bright hours: a smith at the sky’s forge, the giving sun, thunder in the oak, the dawn that later tellings made a pair, and a white god whose name may simply mirror the black one’s.
Kin, damp earth, and the turning year
The spinner of fates and the root of all kin; Lada, whom fifteenth-century churchmen found in a spring song refrain and took for a goddess; and the winter effigy still carried down to the river each March in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia.
The deep places, the river, and the far wood
Past the last fence and under the floor: the cattle-god sworn by in the old Rus’ treaty oaths, a black god a German priest among the Polabian Slavs named once, the singing in the river, and the hut on hen’s legs.
