
I won’t have time to read the whole book, but I did want to flag some material from Kivelson and Worobec’s Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine 1000-1900: A Sourcebook for my readers.
(EDIT: I just realized I was remiss in flagging reader Steve for purchasing this for me. Thank you and apologies, Steve!)
Most of my research is on early modern British magic, but I do like to dip into collections of magic from other cultures, to see how their culture, cosmology, and magical philosophy impacts their practices. Given my own limited linguistic skills, most of these are confined to English or Latin-language texts, with others requiring much more effort to master. This, of course, assume that these texts are available at all through a good US interlibrary loan system, which seems to be an issue for a great number of Eastern European works. Thus, aside from some descriptions in Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight, I haven’t seen much of anything in terms of Russian incantations.
That’s why this sourcebook, translating many documents regarding Russian witchcraft trials, has been so welcome. I don’t want to overemphasize the magical material in it – I think it’s often the case that magic, as a technological/cultural practice, and witchcraft as a social phenomena do not entirely overlap. Yet in this case, there’s enough material to make this work worth seeking out, especially given how little of it English speakers have seen.
Most of the items of interest to Papers readers can be located under the index’s “spells” heading. Here’s an example I picked out from a love spell that became cited in an eighteenth-century trial:
Lord God, heavenly Christ!
Hearken, Satan and Devil, I shall conjure on salt and shall cast charms. Not blessing myself, not crossing myself, I shall leave the hut not by the door, I shall leave the courtyard not by the gates, but I shall go into the open fields to the ocean-sea. On the ocean-sea stands an iron hut and in that hut stands a copper stove, in that stove burn ash branches, flame on flame, bright on bright. So let the white body and the fervent heart and the clear eyes of the slave Avdotia burn and seethe for the slave Stepan, by day and by midday, by night and by midnight, at the morning sunrise and at the evening sunset, and by the old moon and by the new moon… (p. 413)
If you’ve read a good deal of magical material, the latter compelling language should be largely familiar in purpose and nature, although the temporal and celestial imagery is striking.
The earlier part of the narrative is more interesting. Many of the spells follow a similar format, in which moving from a domestic setting to a supernatural place – this hut, the rock at the center of the world, or another mythical location – is a key aspect of the narrative. My impression is that Western European charm narratives that include motion usually describe a supernatural figure – Jesus, saints, the Virgin Mary, angels – undertaking the journey, instead of describing the magician doing so. Further, it’s not clear whether this might not be considered part of the process itself, with the magician traveling out from the homestead, if not to a mythical location, at least to a secluded place where the magic can be performed unimpeded.
Oh – and that’s just the first part of this spell. It’s got later calls to Satan and the Devil – yes, two separate entities – sitting on the stove, to Baba Yaga (in one of her first appearances), and some other demon to help out the magician. It’s pretty wild in the imagery, and it keeps circling back around between statements of narrative and purpose in quite an unusual way.
So that’s a taste of the book. I’m interested to hear what other people think of the book – or if they think I’m overlooking some Western European material which is a better parallel. Check it out!
(Also, Cyprian fans – there’s a reference to a Russian magical text attributed to him on page 437, so that should extend the range of his reputation even farther.)