The Marzanna-drowning custom became, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the standard illustrations cited by comparative religion scholars studying seasonal expulsion rituals, most famously James Frazer, who devoted extended attention in The Golden Bough to the Slavic practice of carrying an effigy of death out of the village and destroying it, treating it as a particularly clear surviving example of a widespread human pattern in which a community ritually expels a personified evil, sickness, or the dead season itself, in order to secure the renewal of life and fertility for the coming year. Frazer's comparative method placed the Slavic Death-carrying custom alongside broadly similar seasonal expulsion rites he documented across Europe and beyond, arguing that such rituals reflected a deep and widespread substratum of agricultural magical thinking that predated, and in his view partly explained, the more developed mythologies of the world's major religions.
Modern folklorists have grown considerably more cautious than Frazer about drawing such sweeping cross-cultural conclusions from superficially similar customs, since the comparative method he practiced is now generally regarded as having flattened real historical and cultural differences between the rituals it grouped together, but the Marzanna custom's prominent place in his influential work meant that this particular Slavic seasonal rite became, for generations of English-language readers with no other exposure to Slavic folk religion, one of the most famous single examples of surviving European pagan ritual, encountered through Frazer's synthesis long before most readers would have known Morana or Marzanna's name specifically.