Romanian Folk Magic: Bewitching Ideology Daniel Bird

Potions swirling in cauldrons, midnight spells, curses and hidden covens: the witch is a fgure entrenched in our myth and memory. It is, however, a little-known fact that today many witches still reign supreme over parts of modern Europe, holding seats of power in lavish abodes. These supernatural practitioners have refused to be relegated to history and instead have transmogrifed their talents to ft into a capitalist arena where magic fourishes and their arts embed themselves in an industry of their own.

Associated most frequently in European memory with Satanic worship, witchcraft has held a curious grip on the human psyche. The archetype has surfaced worldwide in many cultural iterations, having even received a post-mortem resurgence and transformation in Western pop-culture flm and television. Witches in this medium have been portrayed equally as relatable adolescents and as the more traditionally horrifying hags of the thriller genre, showing the fgure of the witch to be a durable and fexible one. Much the same can be said of witchcraft in the country of Romania, where the practice and sociocultural perceptions of witchcraft have evolved, expired and been subsequently revived in the last century.

To properly articulate the historical trajectory of Romanian witchcraft, I begin by describing its birthplace in the agrarian countryside. I then examine the strug- gles of the practice under the Romanian Communist system which sought to oppress this tradition. The discussion delineates the resurgence of the trade after 1989, and the Golden Age of witchcraft in the new neoliberal setting. I further compare witchcraft to contemporary methods for ‘regaining’ spirituality and meaning, before posing a question about the essential function of witchcraft as a cultural practice—at what cost has this tradition has survived?

The Spiritual Centre

The origins of the Romanian witch are humble, deeply domestic and in certain ways meditative, revolving around a veneration of the home (gospodaria).

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As articulated by anthropologist David Kideckal, ‘each of woman’s sundry labor responsibilities was tied via ritual’ to the feminine character of the peasant context, undertaken with the intent of ‘protecting household strength, vitality, productivity, and growth’.1 As a result, much of what constituted magic in the Romanian countryside was not overtly supernatural, but rather a cathartic extension of the maintenance of familial life. Domestic activities as such— sewing, making bread, knitting, washing and cleaning, for example—operat- ed less as a necessity and more as a sacred procedure.2 Mundanities such as baking demanded ritual to yield the greatest results, such as the placing of coals on top of the oven while reciting ‘bread get up and grow large, like a young girl, just married’. Incantations ensured water buffalo ‘gave sweet milk and plenty of it’, and onions and peppers were seeded using two fngers to ensure their growth by two weeks’ time.3 These rituals existed alongside other more explicitly folkloric concerns, such as precautions to ‘ensure that newborn infants avoid becoming sprites and demons’. 4

Magical acts such as these are indeed also professional, and certain specialists in village communities offer their services to neighbours. One documentary, conducted by Romanian ethnographer Radu Răutu, follows witch Ana Herbel as she re-enacts a treatment on a client.5 As a physician might, Ana also listens to the complaints of her client, of unexplainable nausea, headaches and vertigo. This leads her to a diagnosis: her client has been bound.6 Being bound is the result of envy or jealousy exerted by another village-person. For relief one must undergo an unbinding ritual.7 Among Ana’s components one fnds coal, knives, dried herbs and a raspberry cane, and for her operating theatre, the traditionally termed ‘good room’ adorned with ‘beautiful dowry carpets and embroidered cloths, specifc to the region’.8 Răutu also notices an abundance of religious sym- bols, as ‘her tiny house is graced with extremely numerous and valuable Ortho- dox Christian icons’.9 All these things are believed to attribute positive and holy aids to the space and the procedures undertaken therein—it is a holy space as well as a pragmatic one, prepared for a knowledgeable practitioner: a comforting alternative to the uncertainties of medicine.

Herbel’s procedure is reminiscent of the uniform protocol of the everyday medic. Using charcoal, she inscribes crucifxes on the client’s body and petitions the powers of her holy objects and herbs.10 As the fnal part of the procedure, the bound individual must pass through a raspberry cane circle, evoking imagery of ‘the newborn [which] gives her the vitality of a new beginning, of a new life’.11 Răutu notices however that the re-enactment utilises incomplete components.

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Herbel, as Răutu puts it, ‘does not want to disturb the balance of the world through conjuring the full force of the ritual at a time when it is not actually needed’, bespeaking an underlying faith in the effects of her practice.12 For these practitioners and for their clients, the practice of witchcraft is believed to be real and effective, and reserved for experts.13 It is often not the frst method approached by patients, though it is treated with the same authority. In the public eye, witchcraft treatment at times even supersedes the regenerative capacities of orthodox medicines, dealing with matters out of the reach of Western education.

Agrarian witchcraft was practiced primarily as an integrated aspect of domes- ticity in Romania, most often occupying a supportive role to the everyday toils of subsistence living. Indeed, Kideckal argues that the existence of certain witches ‘was enveloped and enlivened by the certainty of magic to overcome the uncertainty of life’ and that adherence to these traditions linked with labour ‘gave the household substance and integrity’.14 This has, of course, undergone some change with time into the contemporary period.

‘Romania lost’ in the Post-War Period

Contemporary Romanian society occupies a turbulent space in the larger European charter. The collapse of the communist system in the ex-Soviet state of 1989 demanded a wholesale reconstruction of the country’s political and ideological organisation.15 Life under the Ceaușescu Communist party was defned by authoritarian control and censorship, along with the forced collectivisation of communities from agrarian to urban. Romanian academic Denis Deletant reveals how the Romanian state’s Secret Police ‘slowly but surely violated human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion’ among which practitioners of the occult were a choice target.16 Witches all across the countryside bore the encroachment of a state so detached and oblivious to their way of life as to render it unrecognisable.

Ceaușescu’s policy held a callous disregard for, and ignorance of, the concept of the family and the home (gospodaria) which served as the spiritual foundation to the peasant identity. Property, livestock, produce and other belongings once deeply integral and impressionable to the spiritual cultivation of the matron were gradually alienated from their owners by the law of imposed collectivisation and liquidated into the larger system.17 The intensity of ritual was subsumed into more formal ritual practice which likewise reconfgured the social structure of agrarian villages as ‘with each socialist advance, the male-dominated Orthodox

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Church seemed the spiritual center of the village community’, and the occult female tradition of witchcraft was ushered to the margins.18

Ceaușescu launched large-scale coordinated efforts to create ‘a patrimonial state’, or the centralization of power via a cult of personality, inspired by 1970s Chinese and North Korean authoritarianism.19 Romanian ethnographers were at the forefront of the scheme to foster a ‘septic cultural space’, appropriate for the reimagined national history that Ceaușescu had planned.20 Study of traditional customs was undertaken only to analyse ‘the working class mentality[…] useful for the state to understand’.21 ‘Creation houses’ had been in operation since 1953 with the sole purpose of producing new folklore which the state hoped would supplement the traditional customs; traditions which would be increasingly banned and delegitimised in the 1970s.22 Further, Ceaușescu introduced policies that made certain research topics dealing with spirituality and religiosity illegal, as they were thought to be in confict with the ideological direction of the Party and with the ethnic nationalism he envisioned for Romania. Beyond this, cultural institutions and output were dominated by productions waxing lyrical about the grandeur of Ceaușescu, his family and fctionalised cultural narratives of the country.23 This was an approach which developed into a ‘phantomatic distraction to the millions of impoverished and hungry people’ populating Ceaușescu’s imagined utopia.24 Government policy was fercely averse to the witchcraft tradition which it saw as incompatible with its understanding of Romanian culture.

Romania Ensorcelled

The success of Ceaușescu’s campaign to demolish cultural mythologies was dubious. Ethnographers such as Radu Răutu, expressly compelled to frame their work within the Communist ideology, found means by which to subtly resist the paradigm exerted upon them. The 50-minute flm of Ana Herbel’s ritual of unbinding, released in 1971 at the height of Ceaușescu’s aggression towards witchcraft, had an unexpected impact on Romanian society. The documentary was named A popular medical practice as old as time: Unbinding. 25 This was an apparent effort to exoti- cise and so consign witchcraft to the distant past, even though these practices still occurred in 20th century Romania. The flm’s opening features a traditional song accompanying sweeping shots of a wheat feld as the audience hears the words of Herbel in voiceover. The shot was likely intent on illustrating the traditional countryside in an archaic light, an attempt to encourage current members of society to depart from the practice and subscribe to the narrative of cultural progression away from superstition. Indeed, the flm had the opposite effect in a number of ways.

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Upon the release of Unbinding, Herbel ‘gained so much resonance in the village and in the region, that she became notorious as a fortune-teller and witch’ and therefore drew, with this newfound popularity, a number of rich women from the urban centre to petition her services.26 The production even attracted a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the witch’s home to seek magical aid.27 It is believed that even Ceaușescu’s wife held an individual under the pseudonym ‘Mother Caterpillar’ as her personal fortune-teller, revealing a tension between the desires of the Communist Party to both eliminate and beneft from traditions of witchcraft.28

At this time, prominent politicians made use of the occult for their own individual and political ends, exploiting socially constructed superstition to attain power— despite the secular rhetoric of their policies.29 Thus, this was a period of cultural confusion where the ritual activities of peasants were limited, weakening the ties between household members and the familial unit.30 The ethno-nationalism desired by Ceaușescu was thus contradictory: he sought to retain all the veneer of the agrarian lifestyle but stripped of the folkloric foundations upon which it functioned. His vision was evidently ill-conceived, out of touch and ultimately incompatible with a public unprepared to relinquish its hold on a symbolic system which gave signifcance and solidarity to an ‘alleged[…] retrograde peasantry’.31

Later released from the rigid Communist structure, Romania lay at the centre of what might be called a ‘cultural vacuum’ in which the topic of national identity was called into question and yearned for defnition. For many Romanians (along with Bulgaria and Hungary) the ideal cultural identity could be realised in ethno-nationalism which highlighted a cultural nostalgia for the pre-Communist era. In Romania, this denoted a reclamation of ‘the traditional rural life, of the village unaltered by the blow of modernity, of the peasant considered to be the bearer of the ethnic character’.32 Thus, it is possible to see a social disposition towards regaining that traditional identity embodied by village-scale sorcery. Romanian society was primed for the return of the occult.

However, in the wake of the routine organisation of labour under Communism, Romania was left in what amounted to the polar opposite model: a neoliberal free market economy which did not resemble the pre-communist image of the pastoral unit. The transition was conducted violently, with one thousand dead in the wake of December 1989’s revolution, and ongoing resistance to neo- communism for a half-decade after. The university-led ‘Golaniad’ protest in Bucharest demanded former communists to be forbidden from election in an

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initiative to ‘liquidate Romania’s communist legacy’.33 Where communism was discarded for the new political age, the societal model of the village community was also consigned to history. The new economic atmosphere was ripe for business- es and trades, formerly inhibited by strict regulation, among which the peculiar industry of witchcraft would develop and thrive after years of systemic disruption.

The State of Romanian Witchcraft Under Capitalism

In the shift from the restrictive grip of Communist policy and the opening of the foodgates to global consumerism, witches became imbued with new vigour. Where tiny huts in the countryside were the norm, now witches lounged in man- sions. They fourished in the new economic environment, particularly in treating those ailments that seemed out of one’s control in the present era. As articulated by Bratara Buzea from Mogosaia on the outskirts of Bucharest: ‘I practice both white and black magic, like a good mill that grinds everything. I cure children’s diseases, I release men from love spells, I make and break marriages. That’s what I do because I’m a witch’.34

Though certainly borrowing from Christian symbology and lore (for example, the use of the crucifx) Romanian witchcraft is less an extension of the faith and more a synthesis of outsourced occult traditions with Christian elements.35 The art of spellcasting or witchcraft is neither located within nor typically acknowledged by the Orthodox faith, although ‘white’ magic is nonetheless closely associated with evocation of the powers of god. As told by the white witch Radhika, ‘only the white witches can use the cross in their work…everything we do we do with faith in God’.36 Bratara explains that in the new economic landscape, most spells are intended to hurt enemies; ‘black’ magic is more routinely requested, whereas in the past ‘it was rarer that people would ask us to harm someone’.37 Thus the individualistic social mode of capitalist Bucharest demands the magical sabotage of competitors and facilitates the envy which motivates it.

The million-dollar witchcraft business takes advantage of current facilities, for example the internet and telephone.38 Wider audiences are available (‘even from England they call me’, Bratara insists).39 Witches advertise a suite of services dealing with problems from ‘impotence to epilepsy, from fnancial troubles to love problems’.40 In the documentary Casting Curses one witch, Mihaela, is featured brewing love potions with herbs gathered from a nearby feld, while Bratara accepts a client’s request to curse an enemy’s marriage using a spell of cat and dog faeces.41 42 In a society suddenly so economically cut-throat, the witches

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acquired an ever-ready supply of patrons wishing to gain an upper hand on their rivals or pave their futures with good fortune in a newly liberated market, all with the aid of magic.

Political and Social Sway

While many Romanian witches procure power through their accrual of wealth, their direct social and political infuence on the country should not be under- stated. So strong is Romanian public belief in the powers of witchcraft that witches possess dramatic powers of negative and positive sanctioning.43 Individual witches magically revenge slights—an event which occurs both on a personal and a coordinated scale.

In Romania, the magical capacity of the most powerful witches is attributed to their lineage, a complex system of marrying so as to strengthen the magical bloodline. As opposed to the covens featured prevalently in Hollywood flm, witches in Bucharest organise themselves under a ‘Congress of Witches’ where ability is formally recognised with the award of magical diplomas.44 This body operates as a union for spellcasters, advocating for rights within the trade and rallying both mundanely and by way of curses for the protection of their economic freedom. In the streets and in the marketplace, witches like Mihaela are imbued with something of a celebrity status. Passers-by smile with recognition and talk with her jovially: ‘Mihaela! Will you have a photo with me?’.45 Whether out of veneration or fear, witches are by no means undersold by the everyday Romanian nor within the Romanian systems of trade and commerce.

In early attempts to implement taxation on the witch trade, legislation was hob- bled by fears of hexing, one of many negative sanctions threatened by witches. Alin Popoviciu, MP of Romania’s Democratic Liberal Party recalls: ‘some of my colleagues had encounters with witches. They preferred not to pass this law, believing…that bad things would happen’.46 Bratara boasts, referring to her threats to magically paralyse Popoviciu: ‘I’m not scared of them. They’re scared of me’.47 Outraged at the proposed taxation, she asks: ‘did I learn my craft with help from the government? Was there a school to attend? A university degree in witchcraft? This is a gift that came from god and paying taxes serves no purpose’.48 Witch’s perspectives on taxation are not unanimous, however. Mi- haela Minka argues that an income tax would legitimise the profession instead of denigrating it.49 Like any large collective opinions are many and varied, all of them holding sway.

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The paradigm of superstition is deeply embedded in the political and cultural climate of Romania. Rollo Phillip, president of Romania’s television regulator re- called fears of witchcraft: ‘at a certain point when we were drafting this bill, some members of our Commission lost their nerve…they are superstitious as anyone else in this country’.50 The same supernatural pressures are exerted upon clients to similar ends. Mihaela reminded that ‘in the same way I can use my powers to do good, it’s also within my powers to harm. Nobody wants to take the risk of not paying me’.51 Though somewhat alienated from the role of the village wisewoman, witches in capitalist Bucharest exert the same, if not greater, control and authority over the behaviours of others than they once did. The change of setting systematised its economic reach and the proliferation of occult belief.

The Contradiction

The dynamic of witch and city is complicated. As witches endeavoured to amass their fortunes under a recently instated free market economy, by means of a disci- pline inherently entrenched in the rural past, questions concerning the survival of the tradition in its original form were inevitably raised. In fact, a ban on television advertising of witchcraft was one instrumental requisite for the induction of Romania into the EU. Witchcraft is consequently viewed by many as an inhibitor to national progress towards a perceived modernity with the European capitalist states.52

However, how much does the contemporary witchcraft of Bucharest resemble the witchcraft of old? If not entirely congruent with its philosophical roots in rural tradition, it certainly carries over variants of its procedures and intentions. As previously explored, the primary function of ritual for the peasant was to preserve the sanctity of the home and ensure the success of manners of subsistence: food, health, safe- ty.53 In the post-communist context, where money and material commodities have occupied this same space, the personal energies of Bucharest’s witches instead turn to politics.54 Rather than utilising magic predominantly for security and survival, urban practitioners divert their occult attention to the defence of their commercial means of wealth accumulation and to minimising governmental intervention in this process. Though the rules have shifted, protection of family and household remain paramount. The transition into a new economic landscape has allowed the witch to ‘double down’ so-to-speak on her initiative to preserve kith and kin.

More than anything, Romanian witchcraft has been tied to the traditionalist ideology of ethno-nationalism, which was anti-communist and anti-capitalist in equal measure.55 Likewise, it was characterised by deep-seated resentment

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of the antagonistic powers of government which seek to eliminate hallmarks of their tradition. Practitioners of witchcraft thus occupy a liminal and unstable space within a capitalist society which wishes to reject myth and superstition. Today’s neoliberal Romania has long since departed from the origins of witchcraft steeped in the rural ideology of the country’s past. This development reveals a tension or incompatibility between old and new, with the Communist era acting as a buffer between the two iterations of Romanian magical practice in the middle of which the tradition was temporarily stamped out. Nonetheless, the agrarian traditions of the past have found new life under the neoliberal structure, albeit modifed from their humble beginnings as household ritual. Just as anthropologist Todd Sanders observes in post-colonial Africa, in Romania ‘notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly fexible and attuned to the conundrums of our contemporary world’.56 Though resembling magical practices of old Romania, the witchcraft of contemporary Bucharest has been moulded to suit a new platform. This has changed the practice in an essential way, from a secluded and private practice into a business designed to accumulate fortune and manipulate public affairs.

Neo-Paganism: New age religion

Having discussed the Romanian tradition initiated into the capitalist sphere I now examine some modes of spirituality that are the result of the resurrection of older forms. These alternatives signal the crisis of meaning occurring for many in the contemporary world (including Romania) and may explain the culture’s over- whelming attraction to superstitions such as the paid ritualists. It is also possible to draw telling comparisons between these movements and the two iterations of Romanian witchcraft, old and new, which may help to illustrate the social niche that folklore inhabits.

Neo-paganism by broad defnition, is a new age religious following which emphasises the importance of harmony with the natural realm, containing themes of self-transformation (especially through ritual).57 58 Practitioners of neo-paganism subscribe to no standardised doctrine or external authority beyond the intermittent use of instructional ‘Books of Shadows’.59 These manuals are continu- ally subject to the alterations, adaptations and interpretations of the practitioners and so the practices are shaped and changed. Cosmologically, neo-paganism holds great reverence for temporal cycles and the divine is considered as imma- nent in humans, in nature and also the four elements: earth, fre, water and air.60 61 These characteristics suggest that neo-paganism is a contemporary incarnation

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of an animist religion. Critically, this presents a faw in anthropological theories such as Edward Burnett Tylor’s three stages of social evolution, which claims that societies progress from animism to polytheism to monotheism.62 The work of James Frazer is also challenged, particularly in his claims that magic inevitably comes to be understood as fallacious, and that in turn religion will be imminently replaced by science.63 This is contradicted through the adoption of animist and magical forms of practice in the 21st century. This is especially true as neo-paganism has emerged against the backdrop of contemporary capitalist states, in which atheism and monotheism are the most prevalent beliefs, and the post-communist nations that ideologically imitate them more closely over time.

The implication here is that there is no obvious progression from archaism to modernity, especially when spirituality is concerned. The uptake of such unsci- entifc forms of spirituality in contemporary societies which have heretofore seen a trend away from such beliefs suggests their relevance, even in this new space. Functionalism would argue that this emergence of neo-paganism is due to some lacking social dimension generated by capitalist ideology and that this void has been flled by the spiritual in the conception of a reclaimed animist world- view. Malinowski’s conditions for biological and derived needs of culture posits ‘symbolic and integrative needs’ as well as ‘systems of thought and faith’ as essential aspects, both which go unfulflled under secularisation and a brutal market economy.64 Here, I refer again to a Romanian case to illustrate this point.

A Break from Institutionalised Religion

In Romania, divergent reactions to this secular spiritual void have surfaced, both founded on an attitude or reaction to the rise of a capitalist lifestyle. Anthropologist and sociologist Cristine Palaga notices this societal trend in Romanian religiosity.65 This takes the form of a general departure from exter- nally imposed religious practice, noting that it is ‘a transition of the sacred and transcendent from the public to the individual sphere, a byproduct of secularisation and at the same time, a source of de-secularisation, away from institu- tionalisation’. 66 In essence, Palaga refers to the way Romania is experiencing what I will dub a ‘religious rebound’ wherein individuals reject large-scale or- ganised faiths though take action to supplement its absence through other means. This phenomenon occurs as a result of impending materialism which ‘dislocates society from its ‘traditional’ order’ and threatens to leave society ‘disenchanted’, or completely petrifed, mechanic and devoid of meaning.67 68 69 Palaga mentions two distinct reactions to the disenchantment of society.

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The frst takes the form of neo-liberal spirituality, which is consumer-oriented ‘individualistic, socially disengaged[…] de-traditionalised’ and is concerned with the enhancement of one’s position within consumer society.70 This reaction is typifed by self-improvement programs like yoga and meditation. The second, that of the neo-pagan movement discussed earlier, is characterised in the Romanian context by antagonism to the ‘capitalist way of organising social, economic, political and cultural life’ and is thus highly escapist in nature, seeking to fnd success without consumer society.71

Contemporary witches such as Bratara, Mihaela and Radhika are immersed within the macroeconomic ideology of neo-liberalism (resisting state-intervention and taxation) though employ this ideology by way of a traditionalist profession. These witches occupy a strange middle ground between Palaga’s neoliberal and neo-pagan camps. Despite this, the manner in which Romanian witches con- duct their affairs within the larger society follows the neoliberal paradigm (clients wishing to magically advance themselves over others), while rural practice of the craft resembles more closely the neo-paganist ideal (attending to the spirituality of the self). In the following section I show how the two branches of witchcraft (rural-traditional and contemporary-capitalist) are comparable in philosophy to these two privatised reactions (neo-liberal and neo-pagan) and the loss of institutionalised religion.

The Pastoral Magic: Forgotten or found?

A key distinction in the treatment of ritualised magic between urban and rural in Romania is its function as either a domestic practice or a commodifed one. This is not to say that this is a binary distinction: each certainly share elements with the other. For Herbel, fees are an incidental consequence of her practice and most of her needs are met through subsistence living. Whereas for Bratara, the opposite is true: payment is the primary focus, while elements of domes- ticity are seemingly relegated to the incidental. In one documentary scene, Mihaela has barely fnished explaining a ritual over the phone when she begins demanding payment for her advice.72

For anthropologist Michael Taussig, it is often the case that societies ‘on the threshold of capitalist development necessarily interpret that development in terms of precapitalistic beliefs and practices’.73 This mirrors how Romanian peasant beliefs in the ties between property, the home, occult implements, and magic have carried over into the capitalist world in a similar act of translation.

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By looking to the agrarian roots of witchcraft, it is possible to make the argu- ment that the practice, once deeply personal and communal, has apparently sacrifced some modicum of authenticity in its passage into a capitalist arena. The essential purpose of spellcasting, to heal and support family structures, has been cannibalised by the capitalist preoccupation with monetary gain. But in an interesting way, the new experience of commodity production (curses, clairvoyance and blessings) which initially ‘fragments and challenges that or- ganic interconnectedness’ of ritual to life has been ‘inevitably assimilated into patterns that are pre-established in the group’s culture’.74 A philosophical and cultural reprioritisation within the witchcraft practice has occurred, as seen by the emphasis on compensation. However, under Taussig’s schema we may consider the transition one which reconciles this apparent contradiction.

Money is seen as directly integrated into one ritual conducted by Radhika. She asks her client to ‘put the money on the [Tarot] cards and make the sign of a cross’.75 Here, it is in the very act of supplying payment that an element of power is imparted on the service, meanwhile inextricably linking the exchange with the holy symbol of the crucifx. This notion surfaces again when Radhika offers to craft a protective amulet, but only after Diana has procured the necessary components, which she acquires through purchase at vendors around the city.76 The capitalist construct of wide-scale and repeated purchase has found its way into the structural make-up of spellcasting.

There are however a number of ways we can notice the remnants of the peasant ethos embedded in urban witchcraft. Witches in a motherly role, like peasants, are beholden to a large array of responsibilities. Radhika comments: ‘a witch’s worst enemy is time... you’re not only a witch, you are a mother, a wife and a housewife’.77 While Radhika seems to compartmentalise her work as a witch from her other duties, there are clear signs of the position of a traditional maternal character as concerning the maintenance of home and family. Radhika supports her husband’s business endeavours, she ‘gives [him] talismans when [he does] business deals, they bring…luck’.78 This personal use signals the intimate use of magic, not the absolute reduction of it to a service for patients or clients. Rhadika’s talents are sincere, and are used intimately within the family as well as a means to gain wealth.

The observations of ethnographer David Kideckal during his study in the Ro- manian countryside reveal a similar sincerity. He remembers that during his stay, every morning the mother of his host would quietly come into his room

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and light the wood-burning soba within and ‘as she did, she quietly muttered under her breath’ in what he recognised as a ritualised act.79 Rozalia would do this even as David feigned sleep, suggesting that the ritual was not merely performative to the foreign onlooker but held signifcance even when uttered privately to oneself; it was an authentic practice. Both Bucharest and countryside witches show signs of faith in their own abilities.

The use of new technologies presents an equally vexing problem to authentic practice. Business is conducted over the phone and internet with no spatial connection to the home, an aspect lauded as extremely import- ant to witches like Herbel. Instead, steps in a spell can be carried out by mundane individuals in presumably mundane households worldwide which are disconnected from the power base of Romanian witchcraft, the household (gospodaria). Mihaela, for instance, remotely instructs a client from Portugal.80

In Ana Herbel’s unbinding ritual, the importance of the ‘good room’ appeared paramount, where with modern technology it can be disregarded. In so doing, it is tempting to characterise this new way of conducting treatments as a compromised alternative, rather than a deeply involved practice. An individual from the other side of the city is far more detached than a neigh- bour is to their village witch, let alone a patron calling from England or Portugal. Could this, however, be viewed instead as a metaphorical expansion of the village and thus the nexus of Romanian arcana—the gospodaria—to a city-wide or even global scale? Perhaps rather than viewing the migration of witchcraft away from the peasant community and into the international sphere as an abandonment of identity and substance, it can be considered as a process by which the walls of the gospodaria have been far expanded.

Answers concerning the holistic survival of witchcraft are as multifarious as the art itself. It would seem for an outsider looking in that current practices of the occult have become drastically alienated from what we consider to be the conventional image of the archetypal witch. But as observers, it is evident that our conventions do not capture the whole picture. Though having survived, there is something fundamentally changed—one might argue lost—in the adaptation of witchcraft to the capitalist framework. Witchcraft has emerged partially as an arm of the capitalist system it operates within, adopting the ideals such as individual gain, power, and the advancement of material wealth. And yet something remains.

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But there is a reason that beliefs thought long-dead have been revived in the contemporary neoliberal age. Every spirituality, creed or magical practice discussed above succeeds as a result of one central factor: the ability to convinc- ingly offer relief in a society bereft of clear meaning. Malinowski acknowledges this pursuit of meaningful agency, expressing the importance of securing ‘means of intellectual, emotional, and pragmatic control of destiny and chance’.81 In a secular, consumerist landscape that is dispassionate and unconcerned with the experience of the individual, it is easy to infer the dread and absence of purpose arising in the rift.82 Romania’s urban witches, neo-pagans, neo-liberal spiritualists and even its traditionalist peasants can be understood as contemporary actors responding in their own diverse ways to a strange new environment in which the answer to existential insecurity is not offered so freely as it once was.

Romanian witchcraft will surely continue to confront, and adapt to, the growing complexity of the contemporary world. The present, however, echoes the past. As Bratara, now one of Romania’s most senior witches, exclaimed ominously: ‘this advertising ban makes me feel like I am back in communist times’!83 Her worries hint that the occult’s struggle against the forces that wish it extinguished will be a cyclical one.

1 David Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge: Stefania Cristescu-Golopentia’s Pioneering Work on Women, Magic and Peasant Household Integrity in the Inter-War Years’, Revista Romana de Sociologie 24, no. 3–4 (2013). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Alexnader Coțofană, ‘Documentary Film and Magic in Communist Romania’, Open Theology 3, no. 1 (2017): 199. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 207. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 208. 13 Ibid., 199. 14 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 15 Andrei Roth, ‘Ethno-Nationalism: The Romanian Version’, Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 4, no. 2 (1995): 7–36.

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16 Deletant in Coțofană, ‘Documentary Film and Magic in Communist Romania’, 203. 17 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 18 Ibid. 19 Coțofană, ‘Documentary Film and Magic in Communist Romania’, 202. 20 Ibid., 203. 21 Ibid., 206. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 205. 24 Ibid., 205. 25 Ibid., 199. 26 Ibid., 202. 27 Ibid. 28 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’, produced by Free Radical Films, published by Journeyman Pictures, 2007, 0:29-0:35, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDU8g72_rXQ 29 Coțofană, ‘Documentary Film and Magic in Communist Romania’, 199. 30 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 31 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 32 Roth, ‘Ethno-Nationalism: The Romanian Version’, 29. 33 Julia Brotea and Daniel Beland, ‘“Better Dead than Communist!” Contentious Politics, Identity Formation, and the University Square Phenomenon in Romania’, Spacesofdentity.net, no. 1 (2007). 34 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells with the Most Powerful Witches in Romania’, creative director Amel Monsur, Vice Media, 2016, video, 00:14–00:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1g3CYbsssw 35 Ibid. 36 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 37 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 38 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 39 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 40 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 41 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 42 Ibid. 43 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Social Sanctions’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (Free Press, 1965), 205. 44 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘Romanian witches ENRAGED over new taxes curse their gov ... with cat urine!’ ITN Productions, January 6, 2011, video, 1:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqyWKdZlIhU.

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50 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 51 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 52 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 53 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 54 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 55 Roth, ‘Ethno-Nationalism: The Romanian Version’, 29. 56 Alexandra Crampton, ‘No Peace in the House: Witchcraft Accusations as an “Old Woman’s Problem” in Ghana’, Anthropology and Aging Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2013): 9–96. 57 David Cheal & Jane Leverick, ‘Working Magic in Neo-Paganism’, Journal of Ritual Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 7. 58 L. Carspecken, ‘Dream Flowers’, in An Unreal Estate: Sustainability and Freedom in an Evolving Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 28. 59 Ibid, 28. 60 Carspecken, ‘Dream Flowers’, 28. 61 Ibid., 28. 62 Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 14. 63 Ibid. 64 B. Malinowski, ‘The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis’, in Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, eds. Henrietta L. Moore & Todd Sanders (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 88–99. 65 Cristine Palaga, ‘The Quest for the Spiritual Self: Anti-Capitalist and Neo-Liberal Forms of Spirituality in Contemporary Romania’, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia 61, no. 2 (2017): 149. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 148. 68 Ibid., 148. 69 Ibid., 149. 70 Ibid., 146. 71 Ibid. 72 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 73 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 11. 74 Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 11. 75 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Kideckal, ‘Before the Deluge’. 80 ‘Casting Curses and Love Spells’. 81 Malinowski, ‘The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis’, 92. 82 Bowie, ‘Theories and Controversies’, 22–23. 83 ‘Witches Under Threat in Romania’.