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Curse, Maleficium, Divination: Witchcraft on the Borderline of Religion and Magic

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Curse, Maleficium, Divination: Witchcraft on the Borderline of Religion and Magic 9 tion Curse, maleficium, divination: witchcraft on the borderline of religion and magic Éva Pócs This chapter is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised, to my knowledge, only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania. It is possible that it is common among the Romanian population of Transylvania as well, but so far I have not found any relevant information in the Romanian literature. My analysis is based on fieldwork conducted several years ago with my university students in Csíkkarcfakva and Csíkjenofalva, two villages in the old county of Csík inhabited by Roman Catholic Hungarians.1 The two villages are in Transylvania, in the Hungarian block of the Székely land bordering on Orthodox Romanian areas. The Hungarians here have scarce cultural contacts with Romanians; indeed, the cases described below are almost the only examples of any connection between their respective religions. The time spent in the field was unfortunately insufficient for a comprehensive survey of the system’s functioning or for the elucidation of its social and mental environment. What we have managed to observe and record was in fact not so much the practice as the narratives about it, from which we can make only indirect and conditional inferences about the real situation. What follows is a preliminary overview of the findings based on around one hundred collected narratives. Until recently, little was known about the religious variant of witchcraft described here.2 In Csík the priest actively participates in the system of witchcraft. He not only helps remove bewitchment from the sick, but helps carry out bewitchment as well. In this form, witchcraft as a social system regulating personal conflicts, and as an ideological system, has several features that distinguish it from other forms known in Central and Western Europe including aspects of divine jurisdiction, ordeal and divination; in fact, in many respects it functions subordinated to them. The classic West Euro- pean suspicion-accusation bewitchments can be found in Hungarian and Transylvanian witchcraft trials from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and some of its features are still discernible among the twentieth-century Hungarian population of both Hungary and Transylvania.3 Witchcraft as a Éva Pócs - 9781526137975 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/23/2021 06:22:29PM via free access Curse, maleficium, divination 175 social system in village communities typically functions within the network of malefactor-injured-identifier-healer.4 In most cases the role of the malefac- tor is fictitious. The maleficium (bewitchment) employed by the witch is an occult interaction between two people, and it is either accompanied by some actual deed or not. What this basically means is that if I have suffered some misfortune, I attribute the intention and performance of maleficium to somebody that I have good reasons to impute such plans to: I believe my misfortune to be the result of his or her maleficium. According to this interpretation of witchcraft, in fact, there are no actual witches: the witch is almost always the other person, a scapegoat selected for specific reasons. Accordingly, the bewitchment narratives, which provide the basis for the description and interpretation of Central European witchcraft, usually relate events from the perspective of the victim. Such narratives can be found in Csík as well, and from them we can posit a minor role for ‘classic’ witchcraft in communities there. However, the majority of the narratives we collected through fieldwork reflect a different kind of attitude and another system of witchcraft. One of its main charac- teristics is the actuality of the act of bewitchment: witchcraft is not just an accusation.5 People either perform it themselves or have it performed by someone else. This is what Willem de Blécourt has termed ‘practised witch- craft’ or ‘active bewitchment’, and what Per Sörlin defined as ‘maleficent witchcraft’.6 In this environment maleficium is a practice dispensing justice and restoring order, performed as a response to misfortunes. It fulfils the function of norm control as a ‘punitive’, individual kind of jurisdiction. This is particularly clear in those cases when someone is employed to perform the bewitching, which is much more frequent than its personal effectuation. Here the maleficium, the key factor of witchcraft, is usually not a direct (real or virtual) interaction between the two persons involved, in other words the malefactor and the victim. Instead, it is carried out through a mediator who is employed by villagers to perform the witchcraft, or to use the local term megcsináltat (‘to have someone done in’). This mediator is in most cases a kaluger, a Romanian Orthodox monk or priest,7 although sometimes a lay magician – a guruzsló or gurucsáló – from the same or a neighbouring village provides the same service. Compared to the large number of clients of the Romanian priests and monks, though, these mostly female magicians were, at least by the twentieth century, less frequently employed. The kaluger’s curse, commissioned by individuals who want to harm other people, is a specifically religious method of projecting fate and divine justice, for resolving communal conflicts. Thus the usual cast in witchcraft conflicts is joined by an external mediator representing the religious sphere, thereby intertwining and integrating popular witchcraft and certain religious norma- tive jurisdictional systems. The discrepancy between witch beliefs (and the related terminology) and the actual practice of witchcraft also implies that at Éva Pócs - 9781526137975 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/23/2021 06:22:29PM via free access 176 Witchcraft continued least two different systems of different origins have been superimposed on each other. In spite of this discrepancy, there are several factors connecting the various coexisting systems of witchcraft as well. One such link is that the bewitchment – the ‘doing in’ – can be the explanation or cause of the same types of misfortune and injury. The narratives reveal the following examples: incurable and undiagnosable diseases lasting for a long time (even for decades), ataxia, paralysis, paralysed limbs, shrunken limbs, loss of eye- sight and loss of speech. We also find sudden death due to accidents, estrangement of spouses or lovers, ailing animals and cows going dry. A quick succession of misfortunes can also be suspicious. As a woman put it quite expressively, ‘when this devastation starts to come one after the other, somebody’s hands must be in it’. So, we can draw the conclusion that in each system – including the existing traces of the Central European type – people are ‘done in’ within the same social environment and due to the same witchcraft-inducing tensions and conflicts, whether the rites of maleficium are performed by, or attributed to priests or lay persons. In the narratives, the alleged causes of the ‘doing in’, the tensions and conflicts forming within a network of personal interre- lations may become manifest in debates, brawls or fights. Some of the most common types of conflicts are: skirmishes about land boundaries, family conflicts, litigation, perjury in inheritance debates, the breaking-off of an engagement, jilted lovers, breach of promise, the lover’s or the spouse’s jealousy, bad marriages, unfaithful husbands, divorces, abortion, murder (of a family member, which has not led to criminal prosecution perhaps due to the lack of evidence); theft (of money, corn, animals, clothes, bedclothes, food, jewels); denunciations to the authorities (for example about the distillation of brandy or political denunciation), conflicts with communal leaders, hostility, hatred, brawling and fights for indefinable reasons within the family or among neighbours. Many times the objective of the maleficium according to the narratives is not to cause damage but to set right the previous maleficium and to make up for the damage – to make the (bewitched) sick person recover, to catch the thief, to get back the stolen clothes, animals or money. In the context of ‘justified revenge’ the most common element is theft. In these cases the aim of the maleficium is basically to recover the stolen property and at the same time to punish the thief. My informants believed that this maleficium can be performed in several ways, and although they are essentially identical they relate to whether they perform it themselves, or they have employed someone else to do it: (1) Manipulation with objects based on the principles of contagious magic, such as carrying out maleficium using the belongings of the intended victim (handkerchief and matches, for example) or other objects (such as Éva Pócs - 9781526137975 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/23/2021 06:22:29PM via free access Curse, maleficium, divination 177 bone, wool, hen’s heads, thread and chain), or creeping into his or her property (courtyard, house) and placing the bewitching object there so that she or he will get into contact with it unknowingly. (2) The most characteristic personal technique is the curse. This is actually a religious form of curse, in which one does not just wish evil things to someone else but in doing it refers to a higher authority: it is the par excellence form of curse, essentially a kind of exorcism. Instead of the ‘pure’ form of word magic (‘May you break your neck’), one must use its religious form: ‘May God break your neck’. By delegating it to God, the human method of maleficium is elevated into the supernatural sphere, from which it strikes down upon mortal men as a divine blow even if not performed through priests: ‘The scourge of God shall find him. He who deserves it shall be found.’ Thus in a certain sense individual cursing can also be regarded as a characteristic element of ‘religious witchcraft’. As an example, here is a curse text, which allegedly came true (the ‘target person’ died in a traffic accident): ‘May the blessed Lord let your neck get under the wheels!’ The mother of one of our informants cursed someone by kneeling down at the middle of the road, holding up her hands and asking God ‘never to give her luck’.
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