The Rozhanitsy — "the Birth-Givers," from the Slavic root rod ("birth, kindred") — were a group of female fate-figures in early Slavic religion, two or three in number depending on the source, who attended every childbirth and determined the destiny of the newborn. Their cult was a household one, conducted by women, with offerings of bread and cheese and honey at the time of a child's birth. They were imagined as old women who came invisibly to the cradle; what they spoke at the birth was the unalterable fate of the child for the whole of his life.
The Rozhanitsy belong to the wider Indo-European family of fate-goddesses — the Greek Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos), the Roman Parcae, the Norse Norns (Urd, Verdandi, Skuld), the Lithuanian Laima — all groups of two or three female figures who attended birth and pronounced fate. The Slavic case is unusual chiefly in the difficulty of distinguishing the Rozhanitsy as a group from individual fate-figures (Suđenice in South Slavic, Roganice in Polish) who appear in the folk traditions of various regions.
The Christian church regarded the Rozhanitsy with great suspicion, and the polemical texts of the early Russian period repeatedly denounced the practice of "feasting the Rozhanitsy" — the household meal at which the women set out food for the unseen visitors at a child's birth. The cult was nevertheless persistent, and survived in folk practice until modern times, often Christianized as offerings to the Virgin Mary or to specific female saints (Saint Paraskeva-Friday in particular).
