Angela Puca AP: Hello, everyone. I’m Angela, and welcome back to my channel. Today, I am really happy and honoured to have here on my channel James Kapalo from University College Cork he is a specialist in folk religions from Eastern Europe, and he will talk today about folk Magic in the Republic of Moldova. So the first question that I’d like to ask you, James, is can you give us an overview of folk Magic in the Republic of Moldova?

Dr James Kapalo JK: Thank you very much I’m delighted to be speaking to you today.

AP: I’m very happy to have you on my channel.

JK: So again, just to say a little bit by the context and when I was doing the research, more the kind of research I actually did and what I found. So my research was in the south of the Republic of Moldova which is a very, very interesting place. It’s an ex-Soviet Republic and it’s multi-ethnic. So the Republic of Moldova has Romanian speakers, Russian speakers, Ukrainians and my research was amongst a very interesting group of Turkish speaking Christians. So they have some elements of Islamic culture in there which comes through in the Magic too but they also are also Orthodox Christians. So there’s a very interesting blend of languages and cultures that are present, very present in the folk Magic practices, especially in the linguistic aspect of the practices. So I spent maybe a year and a half going backwards and forwards to the Republic of Moldova working in a group of villages, five or six villages and gradually building up to the network’s, friendship networks and contacts to be able to access women healers, most of them are called ‘healers’ in the local context.

AP: So are most of them women?

JK: Most women not all of them, I’d say 80 percent, 80 to 90 percent.

AP: So there are some men.

JK: There are some men but there are some classifications. So women healers who would be healing in a very, let’s say close, with associations, close associations to Orthodox Christian practice will be called Ilaççi, they called the healer, this is somebody that heals. But they also have another category of practitioner which is defined by the texts that they use and they’re called Ocouccus(?) which means readers and they’re readers because they’re passing on charms, verbal charms, small verbal charms. And then there’s a third category which is the Buju(?). The Buju is probably what we would call in English black Magic, more suspect, something people are afraid of.

AP: Evil witches?

JK: Evil, they wouldn’t really have the name Witch but Buju means that Magic they’re practising may be doing harm.

AP: Harmful Magic?

JK: Harmful Magic, exactly. So I could have worked in these communities and got to meet a number of women who are practising in quite different ways. And what helped me a lot, actually, in the field, which is a very fortunate sort of happen-chance, but I actually fell ill during my fieldwork. I had a problem with my leg, my foot.

AP: This sounds very shamanistic. The idea of a disease that brings you to…

JK: Yeah. So I was very fortunate. I met a guy, who was actually from Cyprus but his wife was a local and they invited me to his village to recuperate while I was getting treatment. And then they were able to bring the healers to me and they practised in different ways and because they were actually practising on me, of course, I was able to see what they were doing but they were also willing to engage in conversation because they could see I was it was a genuine case. I obviously disclose that I’m also an academic, I’m interested in these things and I was…

AP: You were not faking it.

JK: I was not faking; I had a real swollen leg. But that was kind of fortunate and what that did was giving me a window on the diversity of different healing practices and once I had that experience then I was able to travel out to other villages, through contacts I had and visit healers. So yeah, that’s really good to come to the general context. What’s important, I think, from that is that the local healers, they were Turkish speaking healers but they were drawing on Romanian Magic which is, in the world of kind of academic studies of Magic, you know, Romanian Magic has this very, very complex tradition but they’re also drawing on aspects of Balkan-Turkish practice and also in Slavic traditions from the Russians and so on. That is characteristic of the people I’m working with.

AP: So do you find it to be eclectic?

JK: Quite eclectic or let’s say dynamic. So as and when different villages were influenced by different cultures they absorbed different elements. So many of the verbal charms, the verbal Magic that I collected had been transmitted through a couple of generations. But mostly, with some, let’s say over one generation away from the transmission from a different language or speaking to people who are using the charm in Turkish but they had actually received it from a grandparent in Romanian or in Russian and they dynamically translated it and used it in their own language. Other verbal charms were much older and you can trace them back to early Balkan traditions, or Turkish traditions.

AP: Do they believe that these practices are autochthonous, that they are from the land or do they acknowledge that there is syncretism and they absorb from other cultures.

JK: I think within the case of the people I’m working with, they refer to the Gagauz-Turkish they know that their recent history is of migration. So they have a sense that, you know, we were recently here. You have 200 years they’ve been in Moldova. Before that, they were in the Balkans. So that is there and I think they understand the dynamism of their own culture. But there are certain things that they consider to be their own to be, you know, this is purely from the Gagauz tradition. It’s not always the case but they have a sense that that is the case.

AP: Mm-hmm and that’s very interesting.

JK: There was one other thing I wanted to say about… oh yeah, no, it’s about the kind of conditions that the healers would work with. And probably the most common, which would be verbal, magical charms against evil eye. This would be one of the most common forms that exist. But then also there was a local condition that they referred to was caut(?) which was fright and it’s the condition that comes over somebody when they’ve experienced a shock or a fright or when they have seen a dead body and it’s some kind of soul… it’s described as some kind of soul…

AP: Yes, the same thing in folk-magic in Italy.

JK: Yeah, it’s like an attack on the soul or a disruption to the soul or a separation that within the soul that needs to be brought back together.

AP: Like you lose part of your soul.

JK: Yes, yes, exactly.

AP: And there’s a soul retrieval that needs to be done.

JK: Exactly and that’s one of the main components of the, let’s say the divinationary Magic that takes place. Because they need to determine what the cause was and how to treat that. So there are a lot of practices around the pouring of…wax…

AP: Lead.

JK: Wax, lead and tin.

AP: That’s in Italy too.

JK: So, the pouring of wax, lead or tin, which is like a divination or a way of seeing into the symptoms of the condition and then from there the practitioner would decide what they need to do.

AP: Did they use this pouring kind of divination just were soul retrieval or even for other types of…?

JK: They use that to determine what the condition is. So it’s partly to determine, okay it’s soul retrieval we need to take away. Well, I wouldn’t call it soul retrieval, I would call it fright. Or, if it’s evil-eye, or this another tradition, to do with bones and skin disease or different things, it’s we’re just deciding what need more to do. So yeah, that’s the best kind of roughly the context, like I said, mainly women practitioners but not all, a lot of women practitioners that would combine, what we would call classically, kind of, magical charms without a religious framing, with prayer, so with Orthodox Christian prayer and also with the use of apocryphal Christian texts. There’s a very strong tradition of the copying and writing of Orthodox Christian apocryphal texts that are not accepted by the church and then using them in a ritual way within a ritual healing context.

AP: That’s very interesting and what would be the definition that you’d give of folk-Magic or Magic even?

JK: Well, that’s a complex question and actually I wrote my whole PhD…

AP: That’s why I’m asking?

JK: I wrote my whole PhD really trying to define what folk religion is and I was very interested in the relationship between the texts that we’ve been used, the verbal charms or the texts and the context in which it sits and the performance itself, the actual magical ritual acts and so my book is actually called “Text, Context and Performance” about this kind of complexity. So I would always hesitate to say, to call something, you know, Magic or religion or magico-religious that is the term that some people use to try and express that. And I see it all sitting within one cultural complex. Magic has always been a way of denigrating what someone does, attacking the tradition, you know, creating an aura of suspicion about what’s done, devaluing and so on. And then if you call it prayer then you could have elevated to sort of heavenly realms. My view is that all of the things that they do or somewhere in between and they may be accepted by the church to a degree or completely rejected by the church. But actually, in essence, that practices themselves combine elements of invocation of angels or the Virgin Mary. They also involve the power of verbal Magic and analogy and so on. You’re getting in magical traditions with the power of the practitioner, that’s accumulated through their own lineage, for example, their birth. One example is women who are born as a twin have certain magical powers to cure. Actually, in one instance I came across it was to cure limbs, so if you’re a twin you would have the power to deal with any problems to do with legs and arms. So that’s interesting. So there are those kinds of things which that’s a Magic being brought into person some kind of power comes to you or from the divine or from the ritual practice itself. So it’s this combination of different elements that is actually very difficult, as a researcher, to capture and it’s very difficult to get the practitioners to explain to you where the significance lies in each compartment of that complex.

AP: Sometimes practitioners just do their practices and it’s up to scholars to try and find patterns.

JK: Yeah, they don’t theorise it for us. We have to do that.

AP: We have to theorise according to the patterns that practitioners show and manifest. So what do you think is Magic as opposed to religion or another practice? What is it that distinguishes Magic?

JK: Again, you know, for me it’s problematic. The distinction in the first place and there’s been a lot of work by Eastern European scholars that try and set up a distinction based on, you know, where what you’re invoking or where power ultimately resides. But as I explained in Moldavian tradition, as in Romanian tradition, as in Hungarian tradition, it’s a multiple directional thing. So the practice sits within this complex tradition. Whereby the power of God or angels or the Virgin Mary is recognized, it’s there, it’s needed, the power of the individual is recognized. So some of the healers themselves draw on and explain that this… I’ll give you an example.

Many enclosing formulas in the Magic in the region end with ‘the power comes from God, the cure comes from me.’ Okay, so there you read like a distinction that the practitioner’s making and I’m drawing on a power but it’s me that’s doing it. The Magic, essentially, resides in the practice of the person and I think that’s to do with the construction of the identity and the power that lies in the secrecy of that role and the natural inclination and attributes, maybe, of the person that’s taking on that role because it’s, kind of, sometimes it can be a conscious career decision. So I’ve met women that spend most of their life, until their 40s and 50s, observing other healers and gathering little bits of knowledge and then understanding: and now I’m ready to practice. And it’s about re-imagining, situating yourself as a practitioner within this cultural complex. So if you want to call them magicians, that’s fine but they are like, you know, cultural agents, like cultural agents and they are inclined usually towards helping people and using a special respect whatever special attributes they have, either through their family unit or through the accumulated life experiences are – to affect Magic.

AP: So Magic, it is solely to come from the person?

JK: The person with external powers.

AP: So it’s like the person is channelling or harnessing…

JK: Channeling, harnessing. The culture of dreams is really important, which I mentioned so far. So at least three or four the most interesting women, that I met, explained their empowerment to practice as having come from a dream, which is a shamanic tradition that would relate directly to, I wouldn’t call it shamanic itself, but I think dream empowerment is an important common aspect in this. And so it’s a visitation, in a Christian context, it’s usually by the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, who in one case, I’ve written about, delivers the charm text to the woman says this is a charm, can’t you learn it. And in the dream or the vision the Virgin Mary requests, her name was Barbara Nene, Barbara Bogue, to please repeat the charm to me and if you can repeat the charm and if you have the charm. So even reading she repeats the charm and receives the words and from that point on she went on to practice as a charmer. And that’s her, you know, she sees it as a direct gift, these magical words were given to me and that was the case in a number of cases. But the Virgin Mary visited women that were having particularly problematic periods in their life. Perhaps, they were recently become widowed, six children, no way to feed them, the Virgin Mary visited and said look these are the texts that will help you cure people.

AP: There appears to be always a religious way of framing the practice with religion, isn’t there?

JK: In the cases of well-known healers this is definitely the case and that’s also to do with the kind of legitimation process. But in some of the simplest charm practices, which may be very, very simple ones, that are passed on to families to protect the children against the evil eye or against fright. Which commonly, you know, there’s things that diagnose and know when a child’s nervous or wets the bed or something, these are the diagnoses. They don’t have this religious framing but then that the practitioner is a member of the family usually and doesn’t need any external legitimation to practice. So there are very…

AP: So basically, do you think that religion is implemented in order to legitimize the practice itself?

JK: Yes, in some cases, but if that would be an oversimplification because it would imply that it’s just a strategy or a tactic, whereas when you grow up in a culture it’s embedded within your cultural consciousness. I recently had a conversation with a scholar and practitioner of Yahei(?) visionary Magic or Ayahuasca Magic and we were discussing how the images of present within the practice come and of course, you know, there is a degree in which the cultural embeddedness of the context gives rise to certain images that make sense to you culturally. So that mother of God for example in Eastern Europe make sense culturally to women there this is one of the figures, it’s an archetypal figure if you like, that is there and that would be drawn on. So that would be my kind of explanation of that.

AP: That’s very interesting. What do you think would be the main characteristics or the main characteristics of folk magic in Moldova?

JK: So it’s this common… I mean, I think I said already, this is this combination of the use of the verbal-charm tradition that’s passed on through families with a strong religious imagery and dimension that manifests through the use of apocryphal Christian texts being incorporated into practices and this dream culture and then perhaps this fluidity. This cultural translation that happens a lot between Turkish speakers, Romanian speakers, Russians because of the Bulgarian speakers. So I worked a lot when I was doing research on women’s manuscripts. In notebooks, they’ve written different texts in and it was fascinating because, you know, one woman would explain what this is; I got this from a local Gypsy woman, Romany-Gypsy woman and then you turn the page and it’s written in Russian. So yeah, I took it for a Russian Church book and then the next page, oh, this is from an exorcism text from the Romanian liturgy. And different elements are sort of woven and commanding to create a kind of quite idiosyncratic, let’s say, syncretic, I’m not so sure I like this term because it could also be used in a derogatory sense because all traditions are syncretic ultimately, they were all accumulating layers of tradition.

AP: Yeah and how do they get initiated? How does this power get passed on?

JK: So again, in different ways. In, like I said, there I found there are families that have traditions that they passed on through the family and so it’s sometimes girls, mother to son, then son to daughters of male-female lines but usually one child would be chosen to carry the tradition forward.

AP: Can somebody outside the bloodline be initiated?

JK: They can, I mean when we say initiated, it’s not initiated but they would mean in the case of the simple magical practices, they would be allowed to listen to the words, capture them and use them and because they’re kept secret. So when you visit a charmer or a healer in Moldova they don’t say the words out loud, they would whisper the words but if they want you to catch them, they will say them a little bit more clearly.

AP: And can you use them once you’ve been able to hear them?

JK: So the idea is that if you’ve captured them correctly, heard them correctly, then you can use them, but you would be… Once that’s happened, the power that the person had to deliver the charm themselves goes. So you wouldn’t expect to be empowered to pass on unless somebody’s, you know, close to the end of their life and they’re ready to pass on the tradition for the next generation. So, like I said, there are women who try to pick up different bits from other practitioners and use them. But in the strictest sense, you know, when my mother or father is passing away they would give me the words and I would take it to the next generation. That would be the most common form, but there is this, like I say, this kind of more learned, engaged tradition of, you know, combining texts and using them in different ways and then using your own different gestures and things to embellish and make it, a kind of larger ritual context that maybe is a little bit mimicking a kind of church context, introducing different materials.

I haven’t spoken about materials, but it’d be common to use a horseshoe for example. See what’s interesting about Eastern Europe especially the Republic of Moldova, and Ex-Soviet Republics because churches were closed down in the 1950s and in the 1960s. And so the power that was considered to be present, protective power that came from religion in the church, sometimes was harnessed by taking bits of the church and then using them in their practices. So one of the women I visited a number of times used an old piece of church chandelier which she secretly got blessed by a Priest, unknowingly and a horseshoe that she found and also got blessed by a Priest. So it’s harnessing, if you like, the power of the church and incorporating that also into the magical practices also the healing practices. So there are a number of different ways that these things can accrue. So the family image is one of them are then harnessing external, you know, as sources of energy or power and using them and incorporating them.

AP: Does secrecy play a big role in this kind of Magic?

JK: It does. That’s one of the ways that, kind of, you know, but we’re talking about communities here where most people know each other. So they have that kind of, you know, traditional communities and if it’s known, for example, that a family holds this healing practice, generally speaking, the community know precisely what that family knows how to heal or cure. If you need a cure for fright then you go to this lady. If you need it for, you know, evil eye then you go to this lady. And so their ability to hold on maintain the secrecy of their particular charm is important because as soon as the community thinks that’s been let out then the idea is, well the powers gone from the family lineage. So yes, secrecy is important, and that’s very clear when you’re witnessing a charm practice and see what people do. They’re quite happy to perform in front of you, to carry out the practice but it’s whispered and it’s never explained.

AP: This was it for today’s video. I hope you liked it. If you liked this video SMASH like button, subscribe to this channel and stay tuned for all the Academic fun. And remember you will find all the references to Dr Kapalo’s publications in the infobox down below, so do check it out.

So bye for now.

JK: Bye.

James Kappalo’s Institutional Page, with Publications and Contact Details: http://research.ucc.ie/profiles/A040/jkapalo

First uploaded 9 Nov 2019