Marlena is the Slavic and Latin American form of Marlene — itself a blend of Maria + Magdalena, both ultimately from the Hebrew Miryam ("beloved, bitter, star of the sea") + the place name Magdala. A top-1000 US baby name through the 1970s-80s. The 1995 "Marlena is possessed by the Devil" storyline became one of the highest-rated and most-discussed Days of Our Lives arcs; cited in academic studies of supernatural elements in American soap opera. Marlena Diamond — American violinist. The name is also a popular Hispanic-American spelling alongside Marlene and Marlén.
Marlena does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Marlena reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.