Czech Pagan Rites of Spring Underneath Layers of Christianity and Atheism

polaneis.pl/czechy/wielkanoc-w-czechach-pomlazka-i-inne-zwyczaje-i-tradycje-swiateczne

Pomlázka... Easter Monday

 
The Czech Lands, especially the countryside, quietly simmer with thinly-Christianized pagan traditions that survived centuries of religious turmoil and Communist promotion of atheism and sports.  Easter Monday is a beautiful hot mess of these traditions.

Boys buy (or make) plaited willow pomlázka switches and go from door to door, especially in small, long-established villages. 

Very young boys go around with their parents like Halloween trick-or-treating and politely chant a doggerel poem, threatening hitting with their switches unless eggs are handed over: "Hody, hody, dobra vody!  Give me some eggs, painted or at least white."

When I lived in a big apartment building soon after arriving in Prague, I answered tentative knocks on my apartment door: some kids and their grandmother were going door to door on Easter Monday.  I thought: "Oh, yeah!  I've heard of this!  This is that folk tradition thing!" So I listened to their unison-chanted doggerel spiel, thoroughly confused them by asking them to tap my wrist with their switches (I hadn't heard or understood the tradition correctly), and gave them apples (didn't have any eggs in the apartment at the time).

High school and college-aged boys, however, chase young women around in earnest.  They demand eggs or a shot of schnapps and spank the girls' butts with their switches if they don't get any.  This is a Freudian field day, these thinly-veiled pagan fertility rites of spring: the long willow switches, the girls' surrender of eggs.  Supposedly, getting hit with the pomlázka switches makes girls prettier and rejuvenated ("omladit") for every time they are smacked on the butt. My Czech ex's mother used to ask me to smack her on Easter Monday, as well as my girlfriend, for this rejuvenating effect.

This photo came from an article in the Lidovy Noviny newspaper site: "Is Pomlázka a Cute Tradition or Barbaric Custom?" Photo credit: Jiří Salik Sláma of Mafra media

In many villages, the young women get revenge by soaking the boys with buckets of water, thus "wilting" their willow switches.  "Ahem!  Dr. Freud... Dr. Freud... Paging Dr. Freud!"  In some villages, girls chase boys back with their own switches, either on Easter Monday or the next day or in a leap year.

Photo by Dušan Skala at Obec-Cizkov.cz

 So anyway, I hope you, dear readers, and your families have been doing well on Passover and/or Easter and are doing well on Easter Monday and/or Earth Day.

As for gameable content- that's up to you to sift out of this post!  Maybe something in a general folklore or folk horror or Dark Pastoral vein. Neoclassical Geek Revival did the Krampus-inspired adventures.  Chris Kutalik did Slumbering Ursine Dunes .  What folk tradition beautiful weirdness can you write up?