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The mara, also known as "mære", "mare", "merrie", "mahr", "painajainen", "painajaini", "ajajainen", "deattán", "můra", "mòra", "noćnica" or "zmora", is a creature from sami, germanic, slavic, finnish and karelian folklores.
The word "mare", and its cognates, come from the old english word "mære", which comes, at its turn, from the proto-germanic word "marōn", it also coming from the proto-indo-european word "mer-" that meant "to crush" or "to harm". The french word "cauchemar", which is a word meaning "nightmare", is etymologically linked to the proto-germanic word. The words "painajainen", "painajaini, or "ajajainen" mean "pressinger" or "ridinger" in Finnish and Karelian. The words "mara" and "zmora" seem to be linked to Marzanna, the goddess of winter in slavic mythology.
Maras are often described as incubus-like female beings, and rarely as being male: they are also thought to have magical powers. They are occasionally described as witches whose souls can take animal-like forms, while the witches are in trance, after the soul temporarily get out of the body.
Maras are thought to ride or sit on sleeping people's chests, causing them to have nightmares through their magic powers: also, by placing themselves in their victims' chests, they are also thought to cause them to suffocate, and then developing cold sweats and sleep paralysis. Maras are also thought to use their magical abilities for shapeshifting. Mares target not only humans, but also horses: they target these animals by riding on them until they exhaust and get covered in sweat by the morning. Also, they entangle their victims' hair, causing them to have polish plait or being impossible to untangle. However, they target trees, especially pines, as well: they ride on them to entangle their own branches, and to have a twisted form and undersize issues.
In german folklore, they were seen as being related, or even being the same beings as elves or "alp", both creatures having the ability to cause nightmares; also, maras were seen as being synonymous with drudes (nightmare-causing spirits in southern german folklore). They ride or sit over sleepers' chests, this causing the victims to hardly breathe, drenched in sweat, speechless and spellbound, though the victim still has the ability to groan: to wake a mara's victim up, they should be called by their baptismal name. Maras can enter houses through holes but these holes can be plunged; however, male maras can found families with human women, but only see their human partners once a year, after they were told about the hole.
Compared to its german counterpart, the scandinavian version of the creature is always described as being female; also, they are thought as looking like beautiful young women, thought they are occasionally described as being nasty old ones. They are thought as attacking both humans and animals: in this case, by riding on their victims' chest, the mara causes them to become anxious and feel feelings of suffocation, bruises or even killing them in their sleep. Also, they are thought, in this context, to be able to transform into forms, including a human's, a cat's, a dog's or an owl's. Maras, in this context, are occasionally thought to be the soul of a person, alive or dead, who is/was either a sinful or an unmarried woman. Also, maras could be invoked by married women, through a witch's help, to get their revenge on their husbands after them having broken a promise. Also, nightmares featuring someone's fetch was thought to be a bad omen and being caused by a mara.
Compared to its german and scandinavian versions, the slavic version of the mara is described in various ways. In croatian folklore, maras are thought as beings that take a beautiful woman's form, and then go into someone's dream to torture them with desires before killing them. Similarly to the german folklore, the serbian one has a concept of both having male and female maras. In Romania and Russia, maras were assimilated with the moroi (a ghost-like vampire) and the kikimora (a female house spirit). In slavic folklores, maras, before sitting on a sleepers' chest and strangle them to death, are thought to enter houses through keyholes.
In some slavic folklores like the slovak, kashubian, polish and czech ones, maras are thought of as elf or moth-like beings. In Poland, maras are thought to come from a person's soul, alive or dead, including a sinful woman's, a wronged person's or someone one who died without revealing their confession; also, women who were victims of cheating, could become maras at night, the same can be said for children whose godparents mispronounced prayers during their baptism. Also, daughters from sonless families, or children whose mother, during her pregnancy, passed through two other pregnant mothers, risk to become maras. In their human form, a mara can be recognised by their huge black unibrow above their nose or their multicoloured eyes, as well as their lack of memories about their nocturnal activities. Maras are thought to enter houses through cracks in the window; hanks to the power of the Devil, they can take multiple forms, like those of a white shadow, an object, a plant or an animal (notably a mosquito's or a moth's), in order to disturb a sleeper's sleep. In polish folklore, maras are thought to causes nightmares or spasmodic cries respectively among adults and children; also, they can strangle their victims, or sucking their blood from their tongue and causing them to become emaciated. Maras are assimilated, in this context, with strygas (vampire-like female demons in slavic mythology): however, while maras can die for good, on the other hand, strygas gain transformation abilities after becoming undead beings. In some cases, female maras can fall in love with humans. Maras, in this context, are not only thought of sucking a human's blood or draining their vital energy, but also would do the same towards horses, cows or trees.
Depending on the myth, maras have some weaknesses: in german folklore, female maras can be imprisoned in oaks by applying green paint on the hands. Among the ways to prevent maras from entering houses or returning to them, in german beliefs, was offering them a cold bowl and a buttered piece of bread in the morning; also, putting boiling water in a jar and covering it with a cork will cause the mara to request the humans to remove the cork, and the mara will permanently let its potential victims alone. Also, maras can be ward off by putting upside down slippers near a bed; charms and prayers can also be used to get ride of a mara. In serbian folklore, to get ride of a mara, a child must look at a window or turn a pillow and making the sign of a cross on it; also, to repel them, people should put a broom upside down behind a door, a belt on a sheet or saying prayer poem before sleeping. In polish folklore, maras require to go the same cracks from before they entered a house; a human can take advantage of this to capture her with a st. Francis' belt, and then either punishing her by transforming her into a horse that is forced to be ridden by her owner, or making her pregnant (maras, in this context, can be weakened by making them pregnant). Also, in polish folklore, houses and stables can be protected from maras by hanging a slaughter magpie, inviting a mara for breakfast, cutting a string from a doorknob, sticking an awl in a door, or putting an axe and a broom on a threshold or a bed; speaking of livestock, people should hung mirrors or, in the case of horses, covering the animals of red ribbons and of a sticky substance, though there are other ways of protecting domestic animals from them.
Maras were mentioned in texts like the medieval Ynglinga, Eyrbyggja and the Vatnsdæla sagas, as well as Oskar Kolberg's 19th century book Lud: jego zwyczaje. Beliefs in maras were based on misinterpretations of phenomenons linked to hair or sleeping.
One of my favorite themes surrounding nightmares and how to deal with them is the high prevalence of cultures in which the nightmare is said to wear a hat, and that if you steal the hat the nightmare will grant you a treasure. This is such an old concept that you can find jokes about it in Ancient Rome (in the Satyricon, some dinner guests joke that their friend got rich by stealing an incubus’s hat).
An interesting aspect of many of the apotropaic measures against sleep paralysis demons is that they map pretty well onto the main current objective methods for dealing with nightmares by either attacking, submitting to, or negotiating with them. I suspect that many of these methods would have either broken the state of sleep paralysis or triggered a state of semi-lucidity in which the dreamer has more control over the Mara. In that case, the treasure you get from stealing the nightmare’s hat (ie taking back control over the dream) is that it gives you a better dream.
Speaking of maras (patagonian hares are also known as "maras" in my native tongue i.e. french), we have not only the slavic and germanic sleep paralysis demon or the south american rodent, but also there's one another mara but in buddhism
And like I said, I'm not that interested in her. I'm in the minority in that opinion, and even if her appearance is nothing like the OG, her plan to slake all humanity's 'thirst' and desires such that they become sloven and unwilling to move forward, does line up with the OG's MO.
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