DUGNAI*

 

Blessed be those Slavic women

For creating the goddess Dugnai

It was she they prayed to ages ago

For the rising of the dough

 

Women’s work was always trivialized

Yet earliest recorded history shows

Bronze Age women’s flour fabrications

Containing the secret of fermentation

 

Baking and then beer-making was the domain

Of the sacred art of women

So to move from flatbread to loaves

Is an act of alchemy arcane

 

But oh, sometimes the dough did not rise

And women needed a successful guarantee

A household spirit named Dugnai was invented

To keep the dough safe and sour-free

 

Dough was a food but also a medicine

Infants were wrapped in fever-reducing flour

Since unable to afford twelve fever demon dolls

Baked twelve pies to defeat illness’s power**

 

But here I am diet-baking and un-fermenting

Because flatbread is lower in calories and surely

Those wonderful women once praying to the house spirit

Are the ghosts I hear frantically dissenting…

 

© 2024 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGES: Slavic Bread/Herod’s Daughters (Fever Demons) from Ethnographic Museum, St. Petersburg

 

 

*Name and Responsibility from the Encyclopedia of Russian and Slavic Myth and Legend

 

**Herod’s 12 daughters (fever dolls) see photo The Bathhouse At Midnight by W.F. Ryan