Last class Todays lecture

1
Last class Todays lecture

• Ryans Popular Forms of Magic
• Emphasis on evil eye
• Background of Russian and other East Slavic magic
  beliefs
• Social
• Religious

• Put lecture one and 2 together
• A bit more about Orthodoxy and other belief
  systems
• Finish popular magic, esp. magic times and places
• Magic of inversion

2
Put together lectures 1 and 2

• Lecture one special thinking that goes into
  magic
• Seeming logic X gt Y
• Difference rain gt wet ground and pen gt good exam
• Some cultures more tolerant of this than others
• Now take it to the evil eye level
• Funny-looking neighbor, or someone compliments
  sweater, or Greg and his height
• Same reasoning as with pen, but MUCH different
  consequences

3
Malefice continued

• Seriousness of malefice accusations me and herbs
  
• Taken one step further you can see how the
  accusations of the Stalin era worked

4
Lower mythology

• Relationship of lower mythology to pre-Christian
  religion
• House spirit or domovoi
• Barn spirit dvorovoi
• Fortune-telling done with these
• Background to them is not only religious
  tolerance, but also social conditions
• Closed society sees space as alive you
  interact with it

5
Interacting with place spirits

• Each place has an appropriate activity (birth in
  bathhouse, marriage consummation in barn)
• You ask appropriate spirit about it
• You can also blame spirits, or rather humans who
  displease them

6
Ancestor cult

• Ancestor cult somewhere in between religion and
  lower mythology
• Importance of return of the dead, communicating
  with the dead
• But, these are NOT ghosts
• Rather, these too can be blamed or human
  misbehavior toward them

7
Devil versus devils

• Devil versus devils
• Devil (Satan) is a western import indigenous
  belief is in lots of little cherti (devils)
• But these are NOT the devil you conjure to
  perform malefic magic
• This is not the devil with whom you make a pact
  to get supernatural powers

8
Protecting self from witchcraft

• Many accusations of witchcraft, many attempts to
  protect self. But were there many attempts to
  practice witchcraft?
• Protection
• Cross and crossing
• Circle
• Dolls and effigies also ward off disease
• Being nice to witches, giving food
• Hiring a vedma or a znakhar
• Many stories of SUCCESSFUL control of witches and
  wizards milk and frogs method

9
Getting an all-purpose blessing
10
A witch conducting an egg ceremony
11
Magical times the turning points

• Night rather than day and esp. midnight
• Blooming fern
• Also dawn and dusk prayers, gathering dew at
  dawn, dispersal of unclean force at dawn
• In year, solstices and equinoxes, esp. Yuletide
• Weird days such as St. Cassian, Feb. 29
• In life birth, marriage, death
• Foretelling the future
• Using things from death, baby, couple as materia
  magica

12
The deceased is quite accessible
13
Magic places

• Bathhouse it is on the edge between human space
  and the outside world
• Place of interaction between domestic spirits and
  spirits of forest, river
• Place of birth, used in weddings, used in cures
• Crossroads, thresholds
• Man made to sit on threshold for cure in video
• Cemeteries, esp. the borders of these

14
Farmstead layout human areas to the left and
unclean areas to the right
15
Stopping at the crossroads during a funeral
16
All relatives throw in 3 handfuls of dirt
17
Magical directions

• All four and spitting or crossing
• Right and left good and bad
• Clockwise and counterclockwise
• Walking backwards

18
Parodies of religion and the power of inversion

• Do opposite to gain access to other or spirit
  world and other world itself often seen as
  inverse, backwards
• Wearing hair loose
• No belt, clothes inside out
• Night rather than day
• Shooting Bible or Psalter, shooting an icon
• Removing cross, stomping on it
• Please note that there are ACCUSATIONS of this
  people do not themselves admit to doing it