March was once regarded as the most malignant of months: life struggles upwards through the cold earth, fighting for survival. One tradition found throughout the Mediterranean is the burning —or sawing— of the terrible Old Woman, an image of the season of abstinence and purification that follows the time of the dead. It is the necessary preparation for the coming of a new cycle with the spring equinox and the young sun’s return to the throne, a sun that will itself, inevitably, end its reign mad and consumed by fire, like those that came before it.