Romanian Folk Magic: Bewitching Ideology Daniel Bird

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 them- selves 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 world- wide 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). 60 Issue 2 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. 61 Romanian Folk Magic Daniel Bird 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 62 Issue 2 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 supple- ment 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 par- adigm 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.

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