19,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: ibidem
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Witchcraft is very much alive in today's post-communist societies. Stemming from ancient rural traditions and influenced by modern New Age concepts, it has kept its function as a vibrant cultural code to combat the adversities of everyday life. Intricately linked to the Orthodox church and its rituals, the magic discourse serves as a recourse for those in distress, a mechanism to counter-balance misfortune and, sometimes, a powerful medium for acts of aggression. In this fascinating book, Alexandra Tataran skillfully re-contextualizes the vast and heterogenuous discourse on contemporary witchcraft. She shows how magic, divination, and religious rituals are adapted to the complex mechanisms of modern mentalities and urban living in the specific historical and social context of post-communist countries. Based on years of first-hand fieldwork, Tataran offers fascinating insights into the experience of individuals deeming themselves bewitched and argues that the practice can also teach us a lot about particular forms of adapting traditions and resorting to pre-existing cultural models.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 398
Ähnliche
ibidemPress, Stuttgart
Table of Contents
Introduction
In the summer of 2005, my colleague Iulia Hossu and I were beginning our doctoral field research projects in the village of Râşca in the Apuseni Mountains of western Romania. My research at the time was focused on rituals of defense and protection that are part of religious celebrations and seasonal crossings. Armed with carefully selectedtheories and sharp analytical distinctions, we presented the scope and purpose of our investigations to our neighbor and future key informant Rodica (woman, age 53). She nodded approvingly and said she would be glad to help but then gave us a stark and unexpected warning:
You have to be careful about what you ask and how you ask it. Don’t you ever, by any chance, start asking aboutthose things. If you do, people will start thinking that you are actually seeking some sort of spells or whatnot. And … if that’s the talk in the village, nobody will ever talk to you. You can count on it.
This announcement was a big surprise to me. At that time, I could not imagine any direct connection between our research subjects and ‘those things,’ by which Rodica meant the magic/witchcraft discourse. This warning made very clear to me the extent of the difficulties that come with open-field inquiries on witchcraft. Especially in rural Romania, ethnologists who research magical interventions are perceived as suspect individuals, and it is near-impossible for them to establish community contacts. As Dominique Camus wrote in the context of his research in rural France, ‘the ethnologist is perceived as someone who comes to seek power. This relates to the very staging of witchcraft. There is no space for an innocent inquirer’[1]; there is no space for small talk or for casual exchange of information. Jeanne Favret-Saada issued the same caution: in witchcraft, words represent war rather than sharing knowledge; so, ‘there isn’t a place for a neutral observer.’[2]Because magic ispraxis, the only imaginable purpose of talking about it is to acquire magical knowledge that can subsequently be put into effect. In a discourse universe where talking necessarily means already acting or preparing to act, protected by strict guidelines of taboos and secrecy, the gathering of information for its own sake—so intrinsic to any anthropological research—comes as something completely foreign, parallel, and contrary to the witchcraft discourse’s internal logic.
Three years later, my research focused exclusively onthose things.[3] Given the extraordinary recurrence of witchcraft discourses I discovered during my field investigations, I was surprised that this issue is so little represented in contemporary academic studies. The epistemological purview of anthropological research is the analysis ofsocial and cultural phenomena that are both significant and recurrent, whichthose thingscertainly are.Although there is a small number of significant contributions,[4]the contemporary manifestations of the witchcraft discourse throughout Europe, its forms, functions, and regional traitsstill require a great deal of further fieldwork and theoretical considerations. It is entirely possible that sociocultural phenomena relevant to the witchcraft discourse are completely absent in some European regions. It is equally possible that they are more present in Europe than suggested by contemporary social sciences research, simply because the efforts were not made to record them. Whatever the case may be: where, how, and why they do function can offer valuable insights into those contemporary European practices and mentalities that can be individually accessed, in times of need, as strategies of warding offadversity.
The majority of studies of witchcraft in contemporary Europe focus on New Age, neo-pagan, Wiccan practices, and beliefs,[5]but there are no comparable phenomena in modern Romanian society. As a post-communist development, the Romanian market of pseudo religious products flourished after 1989,[6]when a vast category of religious/magical/mystical/occult concepts inspired by Western thought started to be circulated in the media. Actual beliefs and practices in post-communist Romania may incorporate idiosyncratic elements of ancient rural magic and mentalities, religious orthodox practice, modern and urban divination techniques, and pseudoscientific explanations that follow New Age concepts or a belief in the paranormal. Although the span and impact of these new concepts are significant and their emergence in the media probably enabled the reinvigoration of witchcraft discourse in post-communist Romania, the underlying pattern of today’s witchcraft accusations continues to be decidedly rural-traditional.
If neo-paganism can be described as an amalgamate of various forms of new (religious) spiritualties, accessed individually in the name of personal evolution and spiritual growth, the rural-traditional witchcraft discourse represents a type of diagnosis reserved only for times of extreme duress, when all the other explanatory systems have failed to offer viable solutions. Entering this type of discourse does not represent, for the actors, a time for spiritual enlightenment or for gaining a deeper meaning of life. It represents a state of all-consuming war best synthesized, following Willem de Blécourt, as ‘misfortune ascribed to other human beings’[7]based not on a facile mechanism of delegating aggression (like scapegoating) but on the fundamental belief that evil both exists and resides inthisworld. Accessing a neo-pagan religion is a matter of personal choice and the result of a selection operated into the many fields of spiritual paths available at any time out there in our contemporary society. It must have been the success the neo-pagan, urban-invented traditions which gradually emerged in the post-1950s Western world[8]that prompted Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan to declare that magic was becoming ‘a fashionable counter-culture.’[9] In contrast, entering a witchcraft discourse does not play out as a fashionable choice or an informed spiritual decision, nor is it an individual quest. Dictated by stringent need rather than choice, the witchcraft diagnosis stems from a preexistent traditional code of interpreting unhappiness that is community based and usually accessed through the suggestions made by a third-party incidental diagnostician. In short, entering a witchcraft discourse represents a period of marked crisis in someone’s life, one that s/he is most eager to solve (heal) and then leave behind.
The pragmatics of traditional rural witchcraft in Europe is mainly based on what Liiceanu[10]called a ‘favorability transfer’: a vital force set in motion through magical forces, resulting in a winning and a losing side. Economic prosperity, marital success, beauty, and health are all considered forms of vital ‘surplus,’ susceptible of causing envy and vulnerable to attempts of hijacking through spells and charms. The witchcraft discourse of contemporary Romania follows these same general lines, with one significant variation: The rather pragmatic ‘surplus’ stake seems to have lost its relevance, considered less and less a reason for a presumed witchcraft attack. Instead, the actors point to feelings: The suspected magical aggressors are supposedly motivated by pure hate or vengefulness rather than greed, with nothing else to gain from the spell except personal satisfaction out of causing unhappiness. This variation may reflect the modern recontextualization of the witchcraft discourse within urban settings, as well as a marked simplification of the ‘aggressor’ pole under the influence of the Orthodox religious discourse.
However, the (re)invention of spiritual traditions[11]such as neo-paganism, the recontextualization of rural magic in urban settings, and the reimposition of the Orthodox Church on thepublic scene (at least in Romania, Bulgaria and Russia) after the demise of communism are all examples of the reenchantment of the world. As Richard Jenkins argued, ‘The imperialism of formal-rational logics and processes has been, and necessarily still is, subverted and undermined by a diverse array of oppositional (re)enchantments.’[12]Neither the scope and effectiveness of rationalization nor the decline of established Christian religion in the Western world can be denied. But these processes seem to have opened a path for pluralistic forms of reenchantments rather than proving to be dead ends for any forms of spirituality. Whether we talk about urban-based neo-paganism or reinterpreted rural witchcraft discourse, we have to acknowledge beliefs in magic in contemporary Europe as expressions of ‘epistemological pluralism,’[13]not as the erosion of the authority of science. We do live in a secularized world in which the scientific discourse remains the dominant paradigm and rationalistic pragmatism defines the everyday province of meaning.
Researching the Witchcraft Discourse
This study is based on ethnographic material from field researches that I undertook in parts of Northern Transylvania[14]between 2005 and 2009.The fieldwork material is mainly discursive—that is, it takes the form ofdiscoursesabout witchcraft, victims, sorcerers, and spells. Therefore, the material substantiating this study consists mainly of narratives: memories, opinions, stories and happenings, suspicions and accusations, gossip and rumors, recommended remedies, and steps to be followed. It was supplemented by information gleaned through visitingprofessional fortune tellers, often as a client, and attending religious services dedicated to healing interventions. The field material revolves around the victims’ perspectives. Consequently, my theoretical approach is focused on the view of theaccuserrather than theaccused. Although the red thread of this book is a spatially localized case study examining one contemporary form of witchcraft discourse, my aim is to open up and contextualize the data by encompassing, whenever possible, relevant comparative European material of both contemporary and historical characters.
On the basis of the Romanian research material, the following chapters of this study will address four main questions:
·How does a witchcraft situation appear in someone’s life? On what premise does it evolve from a pale suspicion unto an assumed situation that has to be dealt with?What are the reasons for assuming that an abnormality in someone’s life situation can only be explained through the witchcraft discourse?
·Who are the main actors, and what specific roles do they play, interplay, and exchange within the witchcraft situation development plot?
·What are the current healing therapies, or unwitchments, available in the investigated regions of Romania? To what extent do they seem to work for the involved actors?
·One of my research findings is that the position of the therapist seems to be exclusively held by religious specialists, monks, and priests belonging to the Orthodox denomination. What does this exclusiveness tell us about the complex magic and religion relation in a contemporary European society?The particular form of mutual relations between magic and religion in contemporary Eastern Europe, as well as the intermingled sources historically shaping the magic–religious discourses, can offer crucial insights into socially contextualized cultural strategies of dealing with unhappiness.
The overall presentation of my fieldwork material regarding the experiences of being bewitched as a collection of narratives initially concerned me; in anthropology, collecting words (through interviews) is always seconded by recording facts (through the participant observation).However,Jeanne Favret-Saada also experienced this: ‘In the field, (…) all I came across was language. During the long months, all I could find were words.’[15]Only few, if any, elements within the witchcraft discourse can be accepted as clear-cut empirical facts. For instance, a researcher cannot document the palpability, the factuality of the effects caused by a casting of a spell, such as they are lived by the presupposed victim and his/her family. As an outsider to the witchcraft discourse and a representative of the scientific frame of thought, all the researcher can document are the accounts of the events, the actors’ cause–effect interpretations specific to the logic of the witchcraft discourse, and the explicative larger ‘mythology’ surrounding any concrete story. What on the outside may present itself as a plot with specific actors and a narrative structure takes the form of a dramatic sequence of emotionally marked events for the insider, ever to last as a fragment of personal history. Perceiving the episodes of witchcraft aswordsrather thanfactsdoes not make them any less ‘real.’ They are real because they form a part of people’s lives, and they inform their decisions and their general vision upon the world.
Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davis define the witchcraft discourse as ‘a shorthand note denoting the whole complex of thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft.’[16]As it stands, this discourse revolves around a complex relationship between three actors: the accuser (the victim); the therapist (the unwitcher); and the magical aggressor. However, in the field, this is not exactly what the researcher of witchcraft typically encounters.
Rather than accessing the classic triangle (victim, aggressor, and therapist) or rectangle (the victim and his therapist, pitted against the aggressor and the witch), the researcher of witchcraft will always have direct involvement with only one of the two poles—because they are mutually exclusive. As Dominique Camus realized,[17]although they are part of the same drama, an aggressor and a victim, as well as their respective therapists, belong to two different types of discourses. Galina Lindquist’s anthropological research in present-day Russia[18]focuses on the relation between the magi and the client; Jeanne Favret-Saada’s ground-breaking fieldwork in Bocage (France) was based on the victim–unwitcher couple, as the only pole clearly identifiable in witchcraft situations. Dominique Camus’ research in contemporary rural France documents both poles: the couple of the victim and the unwitcher; as well as that of the aggressor, who is the client of the provider of sorcery expertise. However, he took them as independent, unrelated entities, each with its own interpretative discourse and stories. The researcher cannot access the accuser and the accused simultaneously because that would mean a direct link between the two, following the accusation, in the form of the accused publicly accepting the position of aggressor. Naturally, that never seems to happen. Usually, naming the aggressor plays a crucial part in the victim’s own drama, as a process of initial cathartic naming of the source of evil contaminating his/her life, which enables the person to move on to the ritualistic aspect of the unwitchment. It is a verbalization process that has little to do with the accused. When and if at all confronted, the latter can only deny: not only his/her involvement but also the belief in witchcraft altogether.[19]
In the context of my research, similar to that by Jeanne Favret-Saada, the only pole I could clearly identify in the contemporary Romanian cases was that of the victim: the annunciator (or incidental diagnostician), the professional diagnostician (mostly diviners), and the unwitcher (predominantly Orthodox clergy). While I was able to map most of the diviners and the religious therapists operating in the area, I never found any indication of active specialized magical aggressors offering corresponding services. It seems like the only magical specialists active now are the diviners, and it must be noted that their participation into the witchcraft discourse is marginal and minimal (confirming or placing the diagnosis of bewitchment for affected clients). There are virtually no lay unwitchers, no village witches,[20]and no magic practitioners similar to the contemporarymagifigures practicing in Russia as described by Galina Lindquist.[21]Yet, despite the contemporary lack of public magic practitioners to whom people might ascribe wrongdoings to, or to whom they might even appeal when wanting to cause harm to somebody else, the witchcraft discourse persists and gets to play, from time to time, a part in people’s lives in today’s Transylvania. Why that is so, how exactly the process works, and what this tell us about collective strategies of dealing with unhappiness are all questions that shape the aims of this study.
Writing about Contemporary Witchcraft
Writing about European witchcraft discourses is no easy task. The vast specialized literature available is mostly historical in scope. It is as if it has been decided that this is a matter of the past, best placed in the framework of premodern or early modern times of backwardness and superstition, at a time when the light of reason and science had not yet triumphed against the shadows of ignorance. To talk about witchcraft of today comes across as a peculiar endeavor that should be located in some exotic, outer-European context: If witchcraft cannot be confined to the mysterious times of the past, then it should at least be located on some distant, non-European setting, whose distance from modern Western thought allows us to view it as nothing more than a delightful cultural curiosity. But magic and witchcraft have always existed in Europe. And the discourse did not end in the West with the end of witch trials and persecutions, nor did it end in the East with modernization, urbanization, Communism, or post-Communism.
From the point of view of any modern national meta-discourse, this is not the type of research to present a favorable image of a nation, as it carries the risk of portraying the ‘primitive within’ as the rule rather than the exception. Especially for the countries of Eastern Europe, post-communist or not, Greek Orthodox or not, these type of researches can carry the risk of furthering a general perception that equates this region with the darker, less-developedotherside of the ‘European’ coin.
For the actors involved in, or aware of, witchcraft situations in real-life scenarios, this is not ‘folklore’ to be researched. Especially in post-communist countries, the effects of the communist discourse in shaping the ‘folklore’ field (including national dress, local dances, songs, and material artifacts) are ever-lasting and part of the common public perceptions. More importantly, this is not informative ‘knowledge’ to be accessed through casual inquiries butpraxisas equipment for living. The experience of being bewitched always illustrates a deep crisis situation in the victim’s life. This aspect makes it a delicate, nearly taboo, topic for discussion: having been bewitched is always part of the very personal, not representative–collective part of life. At the same time, because witchcraft is generally condemned as retrograde, superstitious, and backward from the position of the dominant positivist–rationalist discourse, the actor is often painfully aware of the disadvantageous, marginalizing effects of a diagnosis of bewitchment. This type of experience is thus inherently isolating and ends up taking the form of a suspended, bracketed story through the years—difficult to research in the absence of a more personal approach.
Between this ‘institutional snake’ and this ‘dragon from theother’s territory,’[22]the social science researcher seems to be the only one who addresses the magic subject (as well as the adjacent, narrower field of witchcraft) as traditions in a dynamic sense, as a common repertoire of meanings and guidelines, as long-practiced collective solutions answering to actors’ needs in difficult life moments.
Whether we consider the witchcraft discourse as a cultural code; a ‘province of meaning’(Alfred Schutz)counterbalancing everyday life or a particular trans-generational vision upon the world that a contemporary individual can access when in need, its ultimate value is empowering: a cultural strategic tool that can assist with fighting off adversity in one’s life.It has to be taken into consideration as one of those phenomena that cannot be dismissed as‘survivors’ from a begone era but as cultural facts that prove to be so neccessary that they get to be continuously reinterpreted and reintegrated into the daily lives of contemporary people. At least for the Romanian case, I can safely argue that the traditional witchcraft discouse is far from demise. The very fact that it adapts to the context of a modern (yet still changing) society means it retains its fundamental value as a functional repertoire of both meanings and means designed to confront unhapiness.
Chapter 1:Difficult Life Situations and Witchcraft
In this chapter, I will describe four main types of difficult life situations that often lead to a witchcraft attack diagnosis, as documented during my 2005–2008 anthropological field research in Northern Transylvania, Romania. The structure of this chapter is dictated by the results of my ethnographic material.
I found the following four types of life situations to be the most common to trigger witchcraft interventions:
1.delay of marriage;
2.unhappy marriage or problematic love relationship;
3.inexplicable illness, ‘mal de vivre’; and
4.Manaand fertility transfer.
The first three types of witchcraft scenarios are still very frequent in contemporary Romania and constitute the main material of my research.The fourth described here, themanaand fertility transfer, is probably the most successful and long-lasting witchcraftscenarioacross all of Europe. As a type, this is the epitome of traditional European witchcraft. All the others are basically variations on the theme of‘misfortune ascribed to other human beings.’[23]The fertility/vitality transfer is also the predominant type of witchcraft situation in the rural areas of contemporary France, as described in the French anthropological and ethnological literature referenced here.[24]However, in today’s Romania, it is the least frequently applied.
In the case of rural France, for instance, the accelerated changes of French society due to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th and 20th centuries only seemed to have reinforced the witchcraft discourse, in particular thefertility transfer scenario. As shown by Owen Davies,[25]this has a lot to do with the tensions created through changes within the French society between a new national identity and preexisting regional identities, between the rural traditional and modern urbanity. The self-definition as ‘paysans’ (Engl.>peasants) is assumed by country people as a badge of honor, expressing their resistance to these social changes; a part of the values associated with this way of life is the belief in witchcraft and magic.
In the case of contemporary Romania, witchcraft and magic have less to do with the rural way of life and its associated values but more with the fundamental ability of this discourse to offer explanations for unhappiness and the means to fight it. For this reason, it has migrated from villages to cities, where it can hold an equal explanatory value to other, more sanctioned discourses. The only one that could not migrate simply because it does not make much sense in an urban setting is precisely thefertility transfer scenario, which is mainly linked to agricultural concerns such as fecundity, milk mana, and crop production. The other types—delay of marriage; unhappy marriage or problematic love relationship; and unexplainable illness, ‘mal de vivre’—are all, in contrast, types of difficult situations likely to be encountered by people from cities and villages.
The final reading of a situation as a witchcraft attack is not always, as I will further show, a simple matter of drawing a conclusion based on the level of duress experienced in someone’s life at a certain time. Sometimes a witchcraft crisis is steeply announced byforms of brusque, violent outbursts (abrupt illness, sudden physical pain, and aggressive altercations in the family), andspecific symptomsimmediately alerting the people involved that something strange is going on. At other times, there is even less time to deliberate and doubt: The actors instantly assume they are in the presence of a witchcraft situation when they find physical object-spells (usually a collection of specific substances wrapped in paper) inside their domestic perimeter. But, no matter how transparent the symptoms or how clear the physical signs announcing the presence of a witchcraft situation, the entrance into the witchcraft discourse is never a matter of a simple leap from‘the world of daily life’into an alternative sphere of meaning.[26]It represents a liminal moment during which the actor has to stop, ponder, and recollect: s/he has to reorganize both memory and identity in order to step on the path opened by the witchcraft diagnosis, which is at that point perceived to be the only one left to offer the promise of resolution.
1.1Witchcraft Situations and Reasons for Entering the Witchcraft Discourse
How does an episode of witchcraft appear in someone’s life? On what premises does a difficult time in someone’s life evolve from a nameless affliction to the suspicion of witchcraft and then further into a situation assumed as a real witchcraft attack by the actors? On the basis of her research in rural France (Bocage region) in the 1970s, Jeanne Favret-Saada[27]outlined the necessary conditions for a difficult life episode to be marked as witchcraft:
·Only misfortunes repeated over time and variable in form qualify for a witchcraft diagnosis;
·A third party delivers the diagnosis of bewitchment based on a previous, similar experience;
·The victim consults a medical doctor, a priest, and a magical therapist, in that order, following the order of discourse. The witchcraft discourse is only accepted after the possibilities offered by positivist and religious discourses are exhausted.
Although this scheme is relevant to the overall discussion in this book, it must be remembered that witchcraft and sorcery 40 years ago in Bocage (France) or any Romanian village are necessarily different from what is found in today’s complex, heterogeneous, multivoiced society. Moreover, today the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant denominations take very different approaches to witchcraft than the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox doctrine, which is the predominant Christian confession in Romania, fully participates in witchcraft discourse, acknowledges the existence of witchcraft as a specific form of evil in the real world, and actually offers the main therapeutic means of unwitching today. This means that, in contrast to Favret-Saada’s scheme, in Northern Transylvania the unwitcher is not the one resorted to after a priest has been consulted, simply because the only legitimate unwitcher nowadaysisthe Orthodox priest himself. Nevertheless, Jeanne Favret-Saada’s conceptualization remains useful in this context because it draws attention to the annunciator (the actor first naming a difficult situation as a possible occurrence of witchcraft) as the main figure triggering the entrance into the witchcraft discourse. In addition, the conditions outlined by Favret-Saada highlight the fact that a witchcraft diagnosis is not a random choice of the afflicted actor but something assumed with due gravity and only when two conditions are met: the crisis extends well beyond any limit of acceptable life difficulty and temporal duration; and the manifestations of the crisis vary, one misfortune being replaced by or added to another, variations that cannot be explained through the more acceptable scientific or religious discourses.
I will now go through the most typical situations encountered during my fieldwork, which may be explained by actors through a witchcraft diagnosis. With these, I hope to illustrate: the physiognomies of the social relations reflected by a witchcraft crisis; normative ideals of ‘wellness’; current conceptions about the extent of insidious evil able to infiltrate someone’s life; and the way in that witchcraft scenarios, just like any other social discourse, can change and become more or less relevant depending on narrative changes within the larger cultural context.
Delay of Marriage
In Romanian society today, being single or uncommitted after the age of 25 years or thereabouts is still a serious issue, especially for young women. Mothers and grandmothers sometimes seem to be more concerned than the young women in question themselves, and they are usually the ones who call for action. There is an acutely perceived social pressure about being married (and thus socially respectable and legitimate), which illustrates very well the persistence of old patriarchal structures and values linked to historical, agropastoral type of society, and culture.
The ‘it goes without saying’[28]assumption operating here is that for a young, healthy, gainfully employed woman who comes from a good family and wants to be married ‘it’s not normal’ not to be. As expressed by Galina Lindquist in the context of contemporary Russian society: ‘A woman, especially, who has never married is likely to be tacitly pitied and considered flawed and incomplete. Parents who fail to see their children (especially daughters) married may consider this as their major defeat in life.’ Being married is an essential legitimation of the social persona in any society where the personal and familial ties are the only fully functional, valid, and safety networks.[29]In Russia, similar to Romania, one of the first targets of the Soviet state was to eliminate the patriarchal family structure and ties, aiming to replace it with an aggregate of homogeneous citizens loyal only to the state and the socialist order. In both Russia and Romania, that social project failed as soon as this ideology clashed with real-life conditions, and faced with serious scarcity of resources, people had to find other ways to survive. Familial ties, as well as any type of common interest ties, became the main route of access to resources, such as extra food, access to jobs, housing, and better healthcare. Crudely put, the communist–socialist regime’s social project in both countries, which aimed to completely pulverize the old traditional familial values, only managed to reinforce them. This is one reason why they are still so pertinent today, even long after the demise of the communist regime. The ‘being married’ theme is to be judged today not only in terms of patriarchally conceived personal identity (legitimizing a young woman through the familial name of her husband’s family) but also in terms of belonging to more than one support network able to assist her in daily life. For the parents, to have their daughter or son married means to finally see themsafe, not simply (supposedly) happy and socially accomplished.
The issue of competition on the marital market can translate into unhappiness in the actors’ love life or even into the impossibility to settle through marriage into a long-term, stable love relationship. Such types of difficulties strongly motivate young women to look for an answer, along with their mothers or other close relatives. The first stop on the route to resolution is, in most cases, a fortune-teller’s card spread diagnosis.
When the client is a young lady, a standard divination session always contains a compulsory card spread toward the end of the session called ‘on the fate’ (Rom.>pe soartă). For all unmarried women, the phrase ‘to have fate’ means to have inscribed in their destiny the clear chance at getting married one day, like a predestination, presented by the diviner along with some elements of the predestined partner mythology. This fate spread is executed regardless of the client’s manifested interest in the subject and so will take place regardless of whether the client specifically asked for it or not. Compared to any other issues that could interest a young woman (career, money, and health), a card divination session for this type of client predominantly stresses the aspects pertaining to: love life, relationships, marriage, reproductive health, and having children.
Determining whether or not a client ‘has fate’ proves to be a generic endeavor, in the end: for most young women, the destiny of getting married is confirmed through this card spread. Therefore, the ‘fate reading’ cannot offer an answer for a case in which the client, despite this positive opening in her destiny, is not yet married. In the context of a divination session, this contradiction between the predestination of getting married (confirmed through the card spread) and the reality of the opposite situation can only be explained through a witchcraft diagnosis. More than providing a name for a difficult situation, this diagnosis points to the malevolent intervention of other people, motivated by envy, competition, or revenge. The subtextual statement at play here is that the only thing able to block a bright, clear, well-deserved destiny of getting married is exterior evil in human form. In Russia, the diagnosis given by the magi for a similar situation is ‘the crown of celibacy,’ defined by them as a ‘spoiling’ of the individual’s bio-energetic field caused by some immoral deeds or crimes committed by the victim’s ancestorsin the past.[30]It, thus, functions more according to the logic of kinship sin, but equally alleviates the afflicted person of any direct responsibility for their marital situation.
In the Bistriţa-Năsăud county of Romania, there is one priest from a small village who has an extended regional reputation for solving marital deadlocks. People lengthily cite numerous cases of young women (teachers, civil clerks, and doctors) who sought his help for addressing this issue from all over the region and, by following the recommended rituals, they spectacularly got married in one year or less from complying with the steps of the ritual. The process is usually based on the generic idea of bridal destiny blockage, which is to be released by means of the religious acts and can, therefore, vary in complexity according to the diagnosis’ particular gravity. The lightest form of this diagnosis can be a mere momentary quandary, in which case, the religious ritual works as a catalyst triggering the desired sequence of events leading to marriage. Being bewitched is at the other end of the scale, a severe and very serious diagnosis—comparable to a chronic, life-threatening condition in a medical context.
The gravity of any case of a magically bound marriage (Rom.> ‘cununiile legate’) can be illustrated by the fact that it has the power to block the marital destiny of the targeted individual indefinitely; or, even more extreme, it can kill its target. In the village ofMocod,[31]in Bistriţa-Năsăud, the case of a medical nurse who found it impossible to get married had been inexplicable to the local community for a long time, given her highly rated personal qualities and good familial provenance. The mystery was solved when an elderly woman asked her to come see her on her death bed, only to confess that she had magically bound the nurse’s marital destiny in favor of her own daughter, less endowed with desirable qualities. Following the dying woman’s indications, the nurse went on to unbind a ‘thread of the dead’ (Rom.>aţă de la mort, used to bind the deceased’s legs in the coffin) from some thorn bushes on a barren field near the village. The old lady finally died at peace, and the nurse reportedly was married shortly after.
In a case from Dumitra,[32]also in Bistriţa-Năsăud, one of my informants’ sisters tragically died very young, at only 21 years. The local community and the afflicted family explained this terrible occurrence as the result of the malevolent magical intervention by the mother of the young woman’s love rival. The sudden, rapidly aggravating, and strange illness could not meet a coherent medical diagnosis at that time. All the supplementary ritual interventions—consulting Orthodox monks and going through religious unwitchments; visiting lay unwitchers; and undergoing magic rituals—proved equally fruitless. In the local collective reading of the situation, the evil spell proved stronger than any type of cure, thus pushing the victim toward her ultimately fatal destiny.
The fatal outcome of such a case illustrates the highly acerbic character of marital competition. In particular, in rural areas, it is sometimes treated as life-and-death war. A spell directly connected to the binding of marriage that can potentially have a fatal effect is called ‘de orândă’inRomanian. In a localized and archaic parlance, this term signifies a spell meant to hijack or break someone else’s rightfully earned marital position. In practice, the spell aims at killing an already married woman so that its beneficiary can take her place by marrying the widower. The suspicion of such a case arises especially when: the presupposed victim suddenly falls ill, afflicted by an unexplained affection, and dies quickly; the widower remarries after a short while; the woman who replaces the firstwife is not, from the point of view of the local community, a partner of equal social status and is known as a ‘woman who knows how to handle those things’ (Rom. >femeie ce ştie a face). The extreme lethal effect of these type of spells is assigned to thefact that they ultimately belong to the larger category ‘of/from the dead’ spells (Rom>vrāji de la mort), the most feared kind of sorcery, considered in today’s explanatory mythology to be the only one that is potentially unbreakable.
It is easy to observe then how the suspicion of witchcraft spread within a rural community can be sufficient to discredit a person and their family. In time, if various unexplained events can be linked to such a person or family by the local community and read as facts proving their witchcraft wrongdoings, the suspicion becomes an irrevocable social stigma.
Q.: How would you know who are the people who ... you know, it’s better to stay away from?
A.: Well, you know because you hear about it around, you listen to people talking. Now, if the mother knows how to handle those things, they say the daughter knows too, you know? And that’s a thing to consider. At any rate, one has to stay away from those ... those evil doers.’ (Rodica, woman, age 53, Râşca village)
For this reason, making an unfounded witchcraft accusation can function as a social strategy to disrepute others. For instance, in a case from Reteag (Bistriţa-Năsăud, North Transylvania, 2007–2008), one local nursery teacher started to invest a lot of time and effort in disseminating the accusation that a woman from a certain family threw spells and magically bound the marriage chances of her neighbors’ daughters in favor of her family’s own eligible young women. This spreading of rumors seemed transparently linked to an ownership dilemma: the nursery teacher and her husband were living, at the time of my research, in an old woman’s house, to whom they were related to as godchildren.[33]Clearly, the right of ownership of the house, in the case of old lady’s demise, fell on the biological family of the latter: the very family accused of witchcraft. Godchildren have no right of inheritance and would find themselves with no place to live unless the lady’s will explicitly states otherwise. Therefore, the accusation strategy can function as a way of gathering public support from the local community, particularly from the presupposed victims’ families, which in the end can lead to public, if tacit, disparagement of the accused family and, more importantly, to the elderly lady’s decision to disinherit her biological family in favor of her godchildren.
Gossip has been widely discussed in anthropological literature either as an institution of social control (usually among peers)[34]or as a form of deflected protest[35]in social contexts where status differences do not allow more room for direct expressions of antagonism. For instance, Staley Brandes shows how the folkloristic narratives pursued by the villagers from Spain, Brittany, or Portugal create the image of the hypocritical, oversexed, and greedy priest, thus undermining the clerical status by gossip and slander.[36]In the context of gossip as a social value maintaining control among peers, as discussed by Regina Dionisopoulos-Mass, the aspect relevant to the Reteag case is the fact that it highlights what exactly is considered a social deviation. However untrue, believed, or not entirely believed by members of the local community, the accusations spread by the nursery teacher point to the fact that witchcraft is a form of disreputable deviance. And, from the point of view of knowledge as equipment for living, such accusations cannot be simply muted, overlooked, or ignored.
Unhappy Marriage, Problematic Love Relationship
A connected yet different situation occurs when the parents of one part of a couple (in many cases the man’s parents[37]) reach the conclusion that the marriage is ill-suited enough as to suggest that their son or daughter has been spell-bound. Such a suspicion comes to the fore when the partner under scrutiny does not reach certain standards (social or educational level, economic status, or family descent). Other aggravating aspects can contribute to a confirmation of the existence of a witchcraft situation, such as: the relationship between the partners is difficult, violent, and awkward; pecuniary interests are evident in the intentions of the other family; and the supposedly bewitched young person would not give up the problematic marriage relation despite advice to do so from family and friends.
It is generally believed that one obvious sign of a marriage that is forced through spells, i.e., where one of the partners is magically bound to the other, is the fact that conflicts arise between the spouses immediately after their marriage. The hallmark of such a situation is the fact that the relationship will not hold in the long run.
‘I’m telling you, since he got married, my Adi has a bizarre behaviour. I tell him sometimes: honestly, Adi, it’s like somebody washed your brains. He’s completely out there… The animosity between them started no more than two months after getting married. And the priest remembered that G. (the bride) refused to drink the wine during the marriage religious service, he said she was the first one, in his experience, who did something like that[38]. So, he held a special religious service a month after they got married. On his own initiative, just because of the wine incident (he told me about that last time we met). And immediately they stopped getting along, completely, until they got divorced.’(Iţu, woman, age 66, Bistriţa)
‘I didn’t have a choice ... I had to let Aurel marry that woman. Because he had eyes only for her. Nine years they stayed together, and then—finished. It’s true that I did my best for him to find another, to not take that one. He was a beautiful boy, but he destroyed himself with that one, our ex daughter-in-law. She destroyed him. I went about it one way, while they [the daughter in law and her parents] went about it the other way[39]. (...) But it never lasts. The partner won’t stay in the end with the one who binds. That’s the way it is. They do it then, but afterwards it won’t work anymore ... It doesn’t last, it un-binds in time’. (Mārioara, woman, age 62, Reteag village)
Laura Stark’s research on witchcraft and sorcery in late19th- and early 20th-centuriesFinland also revealed this motif of forced marriage through spells. Ensnaring a husband through love magic (by feeding him food or drink in which the unmarried woman placed her own bodily fluids, for instance) was considered an illegitimate type of sorcery in Finnish rural life, and it gave rise to a number of narratives exploring the rightful consequences that await the magic-user after the marriage. In one such story, the man was fed magic substances and the couple got married, but ‘almost immediately after the marriage the feeling of closeness ended and in its place came the former feeling of disgust and revulsion.’[40]With divorce hardly an option at the beginning of the 20th century, the only way out of such a situation as depicted in the folkloric Finnish narratives were: suicide or insanity of the husband or attempted murder of the wife. Ultimately, the listeners were warned that the women resorting to magic did reach their purpose (getting married); but they also condemned themselves and their partners to lifelong, bitter unhappiness.
In the case of contemporary Romania, the ones who go forth to remedy the situation are often the parents, frequently against the wishes or even without the knowledge of their son or daughter. The ultimate purpose of the magical–religious therapeutic intervention is to break up the couple, regardless of whether or not they are married already. In the context of the patriarchal values that are still persistent in Romania,divorce remains a social practice discouraged for men and women alike. Gail Kligman’s research from 1978 in Ieud, Maramureş (Northern Transylvania) showed how, with the communist regime in full force, the villagers ‘attributed the high natality and the absence of divorce to the tenacity of religious and secular tradition.’[41]Divorce in rural areas is still rare to this day, whereas the national divorce/marriage ratio for 2010 stood at 28%.[42]Such statistics, as much as they can illustrate contemporary practice, can do little to illuminate the dominant discourses behind them, and one of those is the perception of divorce as an individual’s failure, the suggestion that, if she or he could not last in a marriage, there must be 'something wrong’ with that person.
This can serve to demonstrate how serious a case must be before parents would think of assuming it to be the outcome of a witchcraft situation. The witchcraft discourse actually surpasses the value of marriage and even the parent’s fear to condemn their son/daughter to the still enduringsocial stigma of divorce.
Inexplicable Illnesses, ‘Mal de Vivre’
Another life situation that is often diagnosed as the result of a witchcraft attack is that of prolonged illnesses and misfortunes, frequently combined with anxiety and depression. Although the medical discourse often can explain the mechanism of singular diseases, it cannot explain the recurrence of many illnesses nor the variation in form of the symptoms. By contrast, a diagnosis of a sorcery intervention can explain both the recurrences and the form variations.
Even in our modern society, an illness is perceived to be fundamentally irrational. On an individual level, when it becomes personal and concrete, an illness is something that should not have happened: ‘For the ordinary layman disease is not a rational mechanistic process of bacterial infection but a “thing,” a sort of pervading mysterious essence that strikes you out of the blue. (…) Even the expression “to be taken ill” suggests such an infestation of evil presences.’[43]
