Božalość

The elder bush against the wall keeps its own counsel for most of the year. Its flat white flowers darken into bunches of berries, the leaves give off a sour green smell when bruised, and the Sorb households of the Spreewald let it grow close against the timber because old habit told them to. Then, on a still night with no wind to account for it, a sound rises from inside the branches. A woman is weeping. She is small, dressed in white, her hair long and unkempt, and when the leaves shift her eyes show red as banked coals. This is Božalość, and the house she has settled beside will carry a coffin out before long.

The Wends of Lusatia, the Sorbian villages threaded through the marshes and alder woods of what is now eastern Germany, gave her a name that the German ethnographers rendered as Gottesklage, God’s Lament. The word itself has split opinions. Some read it as a worn-down form of Boža žaloć, God’s Pity, the sorrow of heaven leaking down into the world of the living. Others trace the second half to an older term for lamentation that turns up in manuscripts as far back as the seventeenth century, with the divine attribute Boža attached later by folk piety, the same impulse that speaks of God’s wind and God’s sun. Either way the meaning that survived is plain enough. She is the grief of God made audible, and she does her grieving on your behalf, ahead of time.

Her home is the elder. This matters more than it might seem. Across the region the elder bush was treated as a thing not to be cut or burned without cause, a small green sanctuary with something living inside it, and the Lithuanians to the north held a related belief that their gods kept their seats beneath elder trees. Božalość sits in the Fliederstrauch and waits. The clearest record of her comes from an 1886 account of the Spreewald house by W. von Schulenburg, who set down the local memory that she had once come when a man burned his elder, arriving as a little white-clad woman with that same wild hair and those red eyes. To strip the bush and feed it to the fire was to disturb her, and what answered was not anger but lamentation, which in her case is worse.

A generation later the folklorist Biren Bonnerjea fixed the other half of her behaviour in a single line: a little woman with long hair, who cries under the window of someone about to die. That is the whole of her work. She does not enter, she does not strike, she does not bargain. She comes to the glass and she weeps, and the weeping is the message. By the time anyone in the house understands what they are hearing, the matter is already settled somewhere beyond their reach.

She keeps strange company. The Sorbs spoke also of the bože sedleško, a kindred household being shaped like a child in white clothes, sometimes seen, sometimes only heard crying, sometimes slipping through the yard as a white hen. Its appearance carried the same freight of warning, foretelling death, fire, sickness, or flood. Set beside the sedleško, Božalość looks less like an isolated ghost and more like one face of a wider Wendish habit of mind, in which sorrow had a body and grief arrived as a visitor before the event that earned it.

Her power is foreknowledge, and it is total within its narrow range. She knows which house, which window, which sleeper. The cry cannot be misread once you have learned what it is, and it cannot be talked out of its conclusion. Nobody she weeps for recovers. There is no rite recorded to send her away, no coin or charm or prayer that turns her grief into reprieve, because reprieve was never on offer. That is also, in a sense, her limit. For all the dread she carries she can only announce. She does not choose who dies and she does not hasten it; she has no power over the death itself, only over the knowing of it. Bound to her elder and to her single errand, she is closer to a clock striking than to a hand on the throat. The cruelty, if it is cruelty, is only that she tells the truth a little early, in a voice pitched to break the heart, from inside a bush the family planted themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Božalość?

Božalość is a female death-omen spirit from Wendish (Lusatian Sorbian) folklore whose name means “God’s Lament.” She appears as a small woman in white with long wild hair and red eyes, and she dwells in the elder bush. Her role is to weep beneath the window of a person who is about to die.

What does Božalość do to humans?

Božalość does not physically harm anyone. She cries under the window of a household to warn that someone living there will soon die. Her lament is purely a forewarning, and by tradition the death she announces cannot be prevented.

Where does Božalość live?

Božalość lives in the elder bush (Sambucus nigra), which the Lusatian Sorbs treated as a protected, almost sacred plant. According to a tradition recorded in 1886, disturbing or burning the elder could summon her. A related northern belief held that gods themselves dwelt beneath elder trees.

What does the name Božalość mean?

The name Božalość was translated into German as “Gottesklage,” meaning “God’s Lament.” Some scholars read it as a contraction of “Boža žaloć,” or “God’s Pity,” while others trace the second element to an older word for lamentation recorded as early as the 17th century, with the divine prefix added later.

Is Božalość the same as a banshee?

Božalość is not a banshee, but she belongs to the same family of female death-heralds. Like the Irish banshee, the Scottish Bean-Nighe, and the Welsh Cyhyraeth, Božalość announces an approaching death through weeping or wailing rather than causing it. Her distinct features are her home in the elder bush and her Wendish Sorbian origin.

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Bagiennik, Bannik, Bies, Dola, Domovoi, Dvorovoi, Kikimora, Likho, Banshee, Bean-Nighe, Caoineag, Cyhyraeth, Ankou, Fetch, Grim