Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth [1 ed.] 9781527514737, 9781527511118

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Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth By

Claudia Costin

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth By Claudia Costin This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Claudia Costin All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1111-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1111-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular The Custom of the Lads from ùcheii Braúovului: Mythical Reminiscences and Symbolical Valences ........................................ 1 From Mythic-ritualistic Gesture to Popular Show Căluúarii ................ 12 The Sânziene—Between Tradition and Actuality ................................ 21 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 The Woman in Historical Romania The Imaginary of the Female Body in Romanian Folklore.................. 25 The Symbolic Valence of the Female Body in the Context of Various Calendar Customs......................................................... 26 The Body—an Integral Component of the Universe in the Cult of the Mandrake ............................................................................. 29 The Body, the Ritual of Banishing Plague and Witchery .................... 32 The Woman in the Traditional Romanian Society ............................... 36 The Ia—the Imperative Element of the Uniqueness of the Romanian Woman’s Traditional Costume ........................... 45 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 Demonic Mythical Beings The Iele ................................................................................................ 53 The Rusalii ........................................................................................... 60 The ùtima Apei .................................................................................... 62 The Woodwoman ................................................................................. 67 The Strigoi ........................................................................................... 75 The Living Strigoii ......................................................................... 77 The Dead Strigoii ........................................................................... 78 The Narrative Imaginary ................................................................ 79

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Table of Contents

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 87 Artistic Myths and Expressions The Cosmogonical Myth...................................................................... 87 The Myth of Creation through Sacrifice .............................................. 93 The Myth Reflected in Folk Literature........................................... 95 A Few Considerations on Ballad Variants ..................................... 99 The Structure of the Ballad: Motifs and Symbols ........................ 102 The Myth Concerning the Pursuit of Immortality .............................. 108 Illustrations .............................................................................................. 119

FOREWORD

Anchored to the by no means easy and simultaneously thorny route of globalization, the human society of the twenty-first century seems to be more preoccupied with the idea of an identity than that circumscribed to the relationship between the national and European/Western identities. For the former communist states from the southeastern and Eastern European area, the legitimization of the national and implicitly cultural identity reveals, through the mediums of tradition, collective memory, and intercultural communication, a unity in the grand diversity, and presents this diversity as an ontological dimension through which values are expressed and the differences of the Other are augmented. Any national/ethnic identity is grafted onto a customary code of norms, values, symbols, and principles that are agreed upon and recognized by the members of that collectivity, all of which shed light on what is specific and unique in comparison with the other national entities. It is known that: The nation and its identity are expressed and revealed in authentic memories, in symbols and myths, in the vernacular inheritance and culture of the people that forms a historical community and destiny, but the intellectuals and the specialists of this community have to authenticate, save and incorporate this culture and inheritance in and through educational institutions in an autonomous homeland.1

From this standpoint, the conceptual articulations of Otherness no longer subscribe to hostility, but to tolerance and comprehension. And, after all, what is this Otherness in the big mirror of the plurality of the worlds? Is it “diversity interpreted as difference,”2 the “litmus test of our existence”3 when meeting with the Other, “the inevitable curse of the human condition,” or the “individual’s chance for self-assertion?”4 Located in the southeast of Europe, at the crossroads of the pathways to the West and the East, on the outskirts of ever-expanding empires (the 1

John Naisbitt, Patricia Abuderne, Anul 2000—MegatendinĠe. Zece noi direcĠii pentru anii 90 (Bucureúti: Humanitas, 1993), 126. 2 Vintilă Mihăilescu, Antropologie. Cinci introduceri (Iaúi: Polirom, 2007), 18. 3 ùtefan Aug. Doinaú, “Eu úi celălalt,” Secolul XXI, 1–7 (2002), 5. 4 Ibid., “Fragmente despre alteritate,” Secolul XXI, 1–7 (2002), 6.

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Foreword

Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Romania has remained for the most part a keeper of cultural traditions and values that have been forwarded and inherited throughout the centuries. What characterizes it the most, apart from the area it is a part of—the Balkans—is its ethnic and implicitly cultural diversity, which is reflected in popular culture (music, dances, gastronomy, fairy tales, specific ritualistic sequences at weddings, etc.). The tradition-bearing folkloric elements, as well as those with new innovations, best reflect the aspects of identity by emphasizing the inner, spiritual structure of any given people, subsequently that of the Romanian people which has resulted from the merger of the Dacians who lived north of the Danube, and the romans who, during the reign of Emperor Trajan, conquered them in AD 106. Various elements belonging to the cultures of the neighbouring peoples (Bulgarians, Serbians, Magyars, Ukrainians) or the communities that migrated from other spaces other than the Romanian (Székelys and Saxons in Transylvania, Poles, Hutsuls, and Ukrainians in Bukovina, Ukrainians in Maramureú, Turks and Tatars in Dobrudja) were inserted into the ancient cultural background inherited from the Thracian-Dacian and Roman ancestors, with the stipulation that only those in line with the spiritual structure, with the forma mentis that was specific to the Romanians, were accepted and assimilated. There is a vast amount of Romanian folkloric and mythological and it is lesser known in the Western area because just an infinitesimal part of it was translated in international languages, with this aspect being a shortcoming for the research in ethnology and compared mythology. This is why I took it to be necessary to shed light on some aspects from the Romanian folklore and mythology. But since this book addresses more than just specialists but people from all walks of life, it can be seen as a “bridge” between cultures, between people willing to discover, beyond the elements that reveal identity and aspects that configure or reconfigure the similarities in the grand diversity. I have chosen the elements I consider to be significant and even topical on account of the interrogations they generate and their always-challenging universe of symbols. An important chapter in the exegesis of the Romanian folklore from the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century was represented by the calendar holydays. Connected to religious holydays or significant moments from the agricultural activities during spring and summer, many customs disappeared as society evolved or after the establishment of communism in the 1950s. The reasons why they have

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

ix

disappeared are diverse and were generated by mutations that took place in the collective mentality which, although conservative, could not remain uninfluenced by the modernization of the world after the Second World War. On the other hand, the communist system that was established in Romania after 1947 compelled the youth from the rural environment to migrate to the cities, where they became industrial workers. As a consequence, practicing customs was no longer possible anymore, and in fact the peasants were not allowed to respect their traditions since the communists saw them as being obsolete. Most of the customs became reminiscences, since they survived only in the memories of the older peasants; we could mention the Paparuda and Caloianul (customs intended to summon the rain during droughts), the Crown of the Wheat (practiced when the wheat was harvested and a form of solidarity between the youth of a community with the purpose of harvesting all the wheat from the land of a fellow villager), and Equinoctial Fires (on March 9 the peasants burned all the weeds that resulted from cleaning the land around the household in courtyards and gardens; when the fire died down the members of the family jumped over the flames so that the smoke would permeate their clothes—they took this as a sign that they were going to be healthy for the next year; also, in certain villages, the peasants used to hit the fire with clubs in a gesture that had a magical-ritualistic valence, because they thought this practice could reconcile the weather, so it would get warmer sooner). The custom entitled Howling over the Village ought to be mentioned as well, due to the fact that it had a redeeming, judicious character in the ancient world of the Romanian village. A boy was chosen to “howl” and was called the Leader of the Gypsies [Voevoda Ġiganilor]. The other young boys from the village would tell him what social and behavioural norms were violated by the other villagers in the period of fasting before Easter. On the Saturday of Easter, after dusk, all the peasants gathered in front of the church of that particular village. As the bell rang and the toaca was played, the Leader of the Gypsies climbed a tall tree. Meanwhile, a heavy silence fell as he called out the names of the members of the community and pointed out the digressions from the norms they had made (sloth, drunkenness, lying, and the incapacity to do certain agricultural activities or domestic tasks). The ones who were not called out the night of the Saturday of the Easter were lucky because they did not have to face the irony and scorn of the villagers. Two of the calendar holydays that were practiced in the ancient Romanian world and are kept to this day, albeit sequentially or with changes determined by the civilizing dimension, are the Dragobete and the

x

Foreword

MărĠiúorul. The Dragobete, a young god of love from the Romanian pantheon, an autochthonous Cupid, is still celebrated on February 24, which is considered to be the date when birds mate and start to build their nests. This mythical representation was imagined as being a protector of the youths’ true, sincere love. The youth used to go in singing, gleeful groups to the forest where they picked the first flowers of spring. The saying “the Dragobete kisses the girls” could be heard everywhere. Today, the youngsters that remember the Dragobete give each other presents and exchange declarations of love. However, the holyday of the Dragobete became obscure because, after 1990, Saint Valentine’s, held on February 14, became much more important and was more mediatized than the traditional day. On one hand this emphasizes the tolerance of the Romanians for novelty and, on the other hand, the increasingly bigger and more pronounced dimension of the consumer culture that dominates contemporary society. The MărĠiúorul (loosely translated as “the March trinket”), an ancient custom still practiced on March 1, consists of offering a symbolic object to women and children. This object can be shaped as a flower, horseshoe, bird, butterfly, or zodiac sign, and is typically made out of metal. It is tied with a braid of red and white threads. The trinket is worn on one’s chest, around the wrist or the neck. Many moons ago, a silver or gold coin used to be tied to the braid. In the traditional society, the trinket was given with the purpose of preserving beauty and ensuring health and prosperity. The trinket, a well-known symbol of spring in Romania, Bulgaria, and the Moldavian Republic, was recently accepted in the representative list of the UNESCO patrimony. Other complex calendar customs have been reduced to only their spectacular dimensions, with their ritualistic sequences, laden with mythicalmagical valences, becoming a beautiful story only for the contemporary person. This is the case of the custom known as Căluú or Căluúari which, in past centuries, rounded up an uneven number of men for ten days during spring. This group was invested with miraculous powers by the collective imaginary. The peasants believed that the Căluúarii were granted, through rituals and incantations known only by them, the power to ward off evil spirits (the Iele, in particular) and cure ill people. This custom, whose origin is still very much unknown, has not ceased to amaze various ethnologists through the complexity that it draws from the ritualistic sequences, the magical elements it contained, and the diversity of the melodies and dances executed by the members of the group. The whole ceremony was reduced after 1950 to the spectacular element that is known today as the Dance of the Căluúarii and is part of the UNESCO patrimony. Perhaps the Căluúarii was a complex rite of initiation for the young men,

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

xi

just like the custom known as the Junii Braúovului [The Lads of Braúov]. This, too, had certain complex ritualistic sequences removed from it on account of not being topical anymore or simply because they don’t make any sense to today’s youth, given that they are not acquainted with its mythical-magical signification. Time, this unbeatable enemy, does not allow the members of the group to reiterate these sequences in a world that is on fast-forward and ignorant to the necessity of having a close relationship with nature and the sacred. Nowadays, if the weather allows it, the streets of Braúov become the scene of a unique show that consists of the parade and the dance of the boys on the first Sunday after Easter. The mythical dimension has disappeared from the customs of the Căluúarii and the Lads, probably forever. The spectacular dimension has however remained, and was even augmented after the fall of the communist regime. This does not fail to amaze and captivate people of the twenty-first century. It is precisely this connection to the present that I consider to be challenging in making the dialectics of some folkloric facts known to the wide public, concerning what they used to be and what they have become. The Sânziene, another custom presented in the first chapter of this book, had the same fate as the previous ones: there is nobody left to practice it in the contemporary rural universe that is now inhabited mostly by elders, since the youth are abroad in the West for better pay and higher standards of living. The ritualistic scenario of yore has been diluted to a frail note of playfulness and show. In Bukovina, a legendary Romanian region that attracts numerous foreign tourists with its landscapes, hospitality, and ethnographic authenticity, the young girls who possess folkloric information passed down from their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents get together on June 24 and make crowns from yellow sânziene flowers. The women fill their houses with these nicely-scented flowers and wear the gorgeous traditional shirt (the ia), which is passed proudly from generation to generation. It is not by accident that I considered it to be necessary to dedicate a chapter of this book to presenting three customs in the chronological order of their practice: the Lads of Braúov, the Căluúarii, and the Sânziene. Also, I think that the woman had a role in the folkloric Romanian universe that was by no means negligible. She has been marginalized for centuries because she has been seen as an inferior being not worthy of attention and respect and subsequently looked at suspiciously due to the misconception that she made pacts with the Devil and was not a “human” like the man, and consequently with different rights. A truth must be told viva voce: in the traditional society, the woman was not only a housekeeper, wife, mother, and preoccupied with solving

xii

Foreword

all the family issues, but also a creator of beauty and a keeper of the customs, beliefs, and knowledge of folk medicine. Her beauty, hardworking character, and active, innovative, and beauty-creating spirit were all emphasized especially by the foreigners who travelled in Romania during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and confirmed her dignity and true status of a human being. Through disenchantments, charms, incantations, lullabies, stories, magical practices focused on warding off diseases, and summoning or fulfilling love, and through her quality as an artisan and expert in weaving carpets and sowing popular costumes, the woman has enriched the existential universe that was almost permanently under the auspices of the “terror of history” [Mircea Eliade]. The Romanian imaginary was contoured, resized, forwarded, and preserved because she, the woman of the archaic Romanian world, has kept watch over it tirelessly. But because she was, as mentioned previously, always suspected of collaborating with the Devil and other evil forces, we can easily understand why most of the representations of evil that can be found in the Romanian lore are feminine. In a mythology that does not own a pantheon of very important deities, demonology has gained a significant role. Thus, the Iele, the ùtima Apei, the Woodwoman, the Rusalii, Strigoii, and Strigoaicele, the Samca, Zmeii, and Zmeoaicele, the Pricolici, Tricolici, and Moroii, the MarĠolea, and the JoimăriĠa are mythical demonic beings that work against the human being. Everything that was unknown or irrepressible was transformed by the imagination of the archaic human into hyperbolized dimensions. As the mythologist Romulus Vulcănescu opines, “In the crude but fiery imagination of the prehistoric man, life grows to the proportion of the fierce battle with the obscure, gigantic and nefarious forces that were considered to be permanently hostile.”5 What characterizes these demonic beings is their physiognomy, their typical structure (morphological) and their mythical-ethical function (found in the Woodwoman, ùtima Apei, the Iele, Rusalii, Pricolici, Tricolici, and Moroii) or magicalreligious function (the Strigoii, Samca, MarĠolea, and JoimăriĠa). The violence of the forces of nature, but also the near-death experiences lived by the people of the archaic world in eerie, isolated places late at night and the inexplicable dangers that lurked in the dark, fuelled the imaginary and preserved it for our modern society. Since the Romanian has always proved to be more conservative than their neighbours (Serbians, Croatians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians), they have respected the 5

Romulus Vulcănescu, Mitologie română (Bucureúti: Academia Română, 1985), 294.

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

xiii

unwritten laws to a greater extent and used the mythical function of these supernatural beings they have created as a pretext for imposing ethical norms and a common behavioural code that had to be respected by all the members of the community in order to stay safe from all sorts of dangers. It is surprising that, in the Romanian space, the fierce evolution of sciences and technology has not managed to remove the belief in such beings. We are talking about the belief in strigoi, which is alive and well even in the century we live in, particularly in a southwestern region of Romania called Oltenia where, in 2005, the peasants from a village near the city of Craiova performed the ritual of “de-vampirization,” exhuming the corpse of a man they suspected of having become a “strigoi” and driving a stake through his heart so that the villagers could go on with their lives. Behold, then, how superstitions, ancient beliefs, and mythical memories strongly anchored in the collective mentality can determine an atypical behaviour in our contemporary society. This aspect proves that there is a mysterious, unseen “thread” in the human being that connects them to the world of myths. The demonic representations from the Romanian mythology, through symbolic images of evil, reveal the ancient person’s way of being, thinking, and knowing themselves, and understanding that the lack of responsibility towards the ideal behavioural model can lead to dramatic effects. The mythological vision and concepts regarding life, the world, the role of the person in the universe, the genesis, the sacrifice that has to be made in order to create something, the attempt of the human being to overcome their condition—all of these are reflected in the intimate structure of the folk literary creations of fairy tales and legends. The mythical theme of how the world and everything in it was built by a limited, tired God in need of helpers, the theme of having a human being sacrificed so that a construction can be finalized and stand the test of time, and the theme of pursuing “life without death” have found their artistic expression in the texts of Romanian literary folklore. Perhaps the talented, anonymous creator through narration granted the myth a certain force in his attempt at escaping—as Bo Carpelan put it—from “the harassments of alienation.” Without a doubt, the cosmogonic myth that was detached from the biblical vision and substantialized by the folk Romanian Christianity would not have survived the journey through the darkness of the ages if it had not worn the charming clothing of the legends we know today from the anthologies of folk texts collected from the peasants in various regions of the country by Simion Florea Marian and Tudor Pamfile. The same thing happened to the myth of the sacrifice with the purpose of creation—

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Foreword

the most well-known myth after the genesis and eschatological ones, spread among almost all the peoples of the world—which, in the Romanian cultural space, has known superior artistic valorization in the ballad of the Master Manole, also known as the Ballad of the Argeú Monastery. In what regards the myth of pursuing immortality, which also exists in the mythology of the Celts, the Chinese, and the Japanese, it found its endurance to the inexorable flow of time through the folk fairy tale Youth without Caducity and Life without Death, collected in the nineteenth century by Petre Ispirescu, a fairy tale that could possibly be the remnant of a larger mythological fragment that has been lost. All these aspects pertaining to the mythology and the folklore of the Romanian people that make up this book shed light on the way of thinking and living, on the identity, moral and spiritual elements, and on the specific cultural code of the people who have lived and still live north of the Danube, at the crossroads of East and West. The book will follow its own path, but its entrance into the literary world is not solely the reflection of my own work, but also that of its translator, Sebastian Priotese, whom I thank for his effort and struggle to prevent the significance of the message from being lost in translation.

CHAPTER ONE CALENDAR HOLYDAYS: THE MYTHICAL DIMENSION AND THE SPECTACULAR

The Custom of the Lads from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului: Mythical Reminiscences and Symbolical Valences The cultural elements people have created throughout the centuries, be they literary creations, songs, dances or customs, and ceremonial rites or superstitions, endow them, in space in time, with a certain particularity and individuality within a large diversity. Understanding this helps us to fathom the psychological and spiritual structure of such people, as well as their mental paradigms. Romanians have through the ages created their own traditions against the Roman and Thracian-Dacian background that can be considered the “solid and stable component of the social being” [Eugeniu Sperantia]. These traditions, which have been concretized in customs, dances, rites, and ceremonies inherited and transmitted from generation to generation, and which have been simplified or enriched, depending on the influence of the social-cultural evolution, generate the idea that the Romanian people have perceived certain “schemes” or mythological patterns only by transposing them in a material existential universe. The collective heroes of a mythical-magical nature who recall ancestors and hark back to the ancestral beings with which people have struggled to maintain an unaltered essential spiritual connection have held a worthwhile place in the collective memory. To a certain extent, modern folklore has tried and is still trying to restore a “typology” of the “collective mythical-magical heroes,” starting from the customs known as Călu‫܈‬arii, the Lads from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului, Bori‫܊‬a, and Turca, whose impact on the mentality of the Romanians from the regions where they are still practiced cannot be denied.

2

Chapter One

Several mythological representations pertaining to the solar and Mithraic cults, the Dionysian and Orphic cults, and the cult of the Danubian Knights were merged into the complex and probably prehistoric custom practiced in Bra‫܈‬ov. The custom encompasses practices, dances and magical formulas, and ritual acts practiced by a group of men strictly hierarchized—just like in the case of the Călu‫܈‬ari—into “vătaf,” “arma‫܈‬ul mare,” “arma‫܈‬ul mic,” “suta‫܈‬ul,” and the “lads.” The Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov is nowadays a highly exquisite and entertaining ceremony for the inhabitants of the city of Poalele Tâmpei. We ought to mention that this custom was initially practiced for a long time by a single group only, but from the second half of the nineteenth century, other groups, “somewhat parasitic”1 as Ion Mu‫܈‬lea called them, started to form. They were known as the “Old Lads,” “White Lads,” “The Turkey-Lads,” “Red Lads,” “the Lads from Doroban‫܊‬i,” and the “Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov.” Because this custom is inherently connected to the Young Lads (the Lads from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului), and given that the other groups ruined the name of the Lads,2 our attention is directed towards the former. The first documentary attestation of the Lads from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului was made in 1728, and the first publication that mentioned their name was The Transylvania Gazette (March 26, 1839), when George Bari‫܊‬iu wrote, in an article dedicated to them, that the custom, unpractised in other areas, is similar to the custom of the Călu‫܈‬ari from Ardeal, it’s just that it is “much more.”3 The custom is described from the nineteenth century to the present day by G. I. Pitiú (Sărbătoarea Junilorla Paúti. Obicei particular al românilor din ùchei, Braúov, 1889), Silvestru Moldovan (ğara Noastră, Sibiu, 1894), Simion Florea Marian (Sărbătorile la români, vol. III, Bucureúti, 1901), Julius Teutsch, Ion Scurtu (“Junii” din Braúov, 1907), Constantin Lacea (1926), St. Stinghe (Junii úi originea lor, 1926), I. Muslea (Obiceiul Junilor braúoveni, 1930), Mihai Pop (Obiceiuri tradiĠionale româneúti, Bucureúti, 1976), Ion Ghinoiu (Sărbători úi obiceiuri româneúti), and Vasile Oltean (Junii din Эcheii BraЮovului—monografie istorică, Ia‫܈‬i, 2005). It was difficult for these researchers to pinpoint the origin of the custom due to its considerable age and polyvalence (but many hypotheses have been formulated in this regard). For instance, Julius Teutsch saw it as 1

Ion Muúlea, Cercetări etnografice úi de folclor, I (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1972), 106. 2 Ion Muúlea opines that, barring the group of Young Lads, the others were formed much later in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The group of the Old Lads is the second oldest, while the White Lads formed in 1870, the Turkeys in 1879, the Red Lads in 1908, and the Lads from DorobanĠi in 1926. 3 Muúlea, Cercetări etnografice úi de folclor, 37.

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

3

a “a celebration of the renewal of nature,”4 Adolf Schullerus saw the Lads and Călu‫܈‬ari as guilds of youths with magical origins5 while Constantin Lacea saw them as the remains of a military organization that probably originated in Bulgaria,6 and for St. Stinghe the custom purportedly started during the reign of Michael the Brave.7 Ion Mu‫܈‬lea thought that the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov is a vestige of a complex ritual of initiation of the youths,8 whereas Ion Ghinoiu considered as plausible the “hypothesis according to which the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov preserved, up to the present day, elements from a ritual scenario of the New Year that was celebrated in spring, during the spring equinox.”9 From our point of view, the complexity of this custom, unique in the Romanian space and certainly born in what is Romanian territory today (so not south of the Danube, as was believed), during times that are difficult to pinpoint, the so-called legendary times, can be explained by the corroboration of certain mythic-ritualistic elements from cultures (Dionysian, Orphic, and Mithraic) that were practiced by forefathers, on top of which influences from Christianity overlapped throughout the ages. The ample process of the custom from which certain mythical-ritual valences were lost enlaces precise sequences: forming the group of young men and assessing the leaders (vătaf, arma‫ ܈‬mare, arma‫ ܈‬mic, and suta‫—܈‬who fulfils the role of the treasurer and flag-bearer), the unfolding of the ceremonial acts in the same places each year (‫܉‬imăn’s garden, Pia‫܊‬a Prundului, Coasta Prundului, Solomon’s Stones, Podu Dracului, and St. Nicholas’s Church from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬volui), the dances and games (the “hora,” a traditional Romanian dance, and the “lady-dog”), and the ritual feasts and customs (the throwing of the mace, the burial of the vătaf/leader). In order to reveal the preservation of some mythical-magical elements and symbolical valences in the practice of the custom, we need to consider those sequences we consider significant, which provide an invisible, mysterious connection of the being from the modern, contemporary society with the mythical universe that is laden with sacredness. Of course, there is no novelty for the receptors in the fact that the participants interviewed could neither reveal the motivation behind practicing a certain ritual nor say what the role of a ritualistic object used within a “spectacle” offered by the lads at the onset of spring in the 4

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 91–2. 9 Ion Ghinoiu, Sărbători úi obiceiuri româneúti (Bucureúti: Elion, 2002), 205. 5

4

Chapter One

picturesque Transylvanian town was. According to the paradigm of the collective mentality, a sequence, if not an entire ceremony, unfolds in virtue of common law and aesthetic value. The Holyday of the Lads and Spring, as the custom is known today, lasts for ten days: one day during the Annunciation (Blagove‫܈‬tenie), one day during Palm Sunday, and eight days starting from Easter Sunday and ending on the next Sunday, a day otherwise known as Duminica Tomii [the Easter of the Dead], thus encompassing the whole week that Christians call the Enlightened Week. The debut of the custom on March 25 (the Annunciation), very close to the spring equinox (March 21), is by no means accidental, for the Sunday of the Annunciation marks “the final point of all beings coming back to life and the decisive moment of the awakening of verdure,”10 and, according to the popular belief of the Romanians, “the first day of the year when the sun is gleeful.”11 The group of Lads is formed before the Annunciation by assessing the new members (in other words, “who messes with the Lads”) and the “‫܈‬erjele”12 (vătaf, arma‫ ܈‬mare, arma‫ ܈‬mic, suta‫܈‬, and stegar). Until the first half of the nineteenth century, whoever wanted to be chosen as “vătaf,” i.e. the leader of the formation, had to “bid” for this role by offering a large quantity of wine to those who would vote for him. Because quarrels among the Lads were frequent, the archpriest Ion Popazu concluded in 1838 that the “‫܈‬erje” had to be established in chronological order, so in concordance with how long each man had been a member of the Lads. Thereby, the Lad with the oldest membership was designated the leader, the second was designated “arma‫ ܈‬mare,” and the third, “arma‫ ܈‬mic.” Their role was, as it is to this day, that of ensuring the precise unfolding, without any incident, of all the ritualistic sequences. On the Day of the Annunciation, the first ceremonial act of the Lads is “Going out with the Surla.” In this, some Lads accompany the trumpeter to the leader of the group and then to the other two. After they reunite, they go to Pia‫܊‬a Prundului, where they blow the surla, then climb the Coasta Prundului, where the Lads from other formations and a large group of people with a thirst for entertainment are waiting for them. This is where

10

Antoaneta Olteanu, Calendarele poporului roman (Bucureúti: Enciclopedică, 2000). 11 Elena NiculiĠă Voronca, Datinele úi credinĠele poporului român adunate úi aúezate în ordine mitologică (Iaúi: Polirom, 1998). 12 “ùerje” comes from the French word for the NCO of the Austrian army. In Romania, the term was used to denominate the leaders of the group of lads: vătaf, armaú mare, and armaú mic.

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

5

they would dance, but nowadays, due to the influence of the church, they can only throw the mace because it is a period of fasting. The leader, actually the president of the group of Lads, collects money from those outside the group who wish to throw the mace or from people who make donations so that those who practice the custom can pay for the expenses (horses, musicians, etc.). Since the two ritualistic objects—the “surla” and the mace—are among the props of the Lads even today, it is necessary to make a few comments on them. The Surla is a musical instrument shaped like a small trumpet, with six holes for digitation. It is thirty-five centimetres long and has a diameter of 11.5 centimetres. In line with the common law, only the young lads are allowed to carry this instrument which emits shrill, inharmonious sounds that only the trumpeter can harmonize with. The so-called “music” of the trumpeter is known only by him and is transmitted from generation to generation. The origin of the instrument is unknown, but most researchers agree with ethnographer Ion Mu‫܈‬lea’s theory that it is of Muntenian descent, since the trumpet may have been used in the orchestra from the court of the Muntenian voivodes (dukes). One thing is certain: that the melody: of the surla is ancient and has a sacred character, an aspect that is confirmed by its ritualistic transmission and by the fact that the people from ‫܇‬chei endowed it with the attribute of holiness because, on The Day of the Annunciation, when they heard its sound, they used to utter: “Thank you Lord for making me worthy of hearing the holy trumpet one more time!”13

We consider that the role of the surla was of announcing the commencement of the solemn, sacred ceremony occasioned by the renewal of nature. It is known that in antiquity, Greeks used the trumpet during the great processions brought about by Dionysus’s holydays; likewise, this musical instrument was an essential element in the Roman religious ceremonies. The second ritualistic object, the mace, was not always shaped like it is today. In was once made of hardwood and then wrapped in wire. Starting from the twentieth century (after the Grand Union of 1918, to be more precise), the mace was made of brass; it is thirty centimetres in length and has a weight of up to 1.5 kilograms. Annually, the three leaders of the group received a mace as their own distinctive sign. 13

Vasile Oltean, Junii din ùcheii Braúovului—monografie istorică (Iaúi: Edict, 2005), 68.

6

Chapter One

Symbolically, the mace is associated with lightning. For a long time, it has been a symbol of the “confraternities of initiation in the army.”14 The mace has “obvious phallic connotations,”15 being similar to the cultic instrument worn by the Mute from the groups of Călu‫܈‬ari. The lads hurled the mace whenever the “hora” was danced, the mythic-ritualistic gesture symbolizing the idea of fertilization of the space simultaneously with the moment of natural resurrection, and also served as a support for the sun so that it can “transcend the critical point of the spring equinox.”16 In the folklore of the European peoples, the mace is generally a symbol of the group/collective of the Lads who went through different levels of initiation. Returning to the scenario of the ceremony, from March 25 until Easter the attention of the Lads is directed at the rigorous preparation of the ritualistic sequences they have to participate in during the “enlightened week.” There is one exception, however, generated by the evident influence of the church, which consists in the fix-up of memorial feasts for those who passed into the shadows, in line with the Christian ritual. These feasts are prepared by men. Women are only invited to them. The period with the greatest manifestations is the one between Easter and the following Sunday, known in folklore as the Easter of the Dead or the Easter of the Gentle Ones. For Christians, this entire week is just an extension of the sacredness of Christ’s resurrection. On the second day of Easter, the Monday, the Lads dressed in traditional costumes, wearing hats decorated with flowers (replacing the wreaths that were worn by those who participated in the feasts commended to Orpheus or Dionysus) with ruje [roses] or cocarde [ribbons] on their chests as insignia, would split in three groups, each accompanied by musicians. They would visit the houses of their acquaintances, in particular the girls who were old enough to marry, from whom they would collect eggs coated in red paint—the colour of the sun at sunrise and sunset. This aliment, endowed with powerful symbolical valences in universal mythology, a “substitute of the primordial divinity,”17 is sacramentally consumed during the Easter holydays. Accordingly, the gesture of the Lads of collecting coloured eggs is ritualistic. To this is added the splashing of the girls with water, a custom that is not practiced anymore 14

Ivan Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor úi simbolurilor culturale (Timiúoara: Amarcord, 1999), 445. 15 Ibid. 16 Ion Ghinoiu, Panteonul românesc. DicĠionar (Bucureúti: Enciclopedică, 2001), 33. 17 Ibid.

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

7

because the modern Lads usually use a can of spray. In former times, as in many other regions in Romania, the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov splashed the girls ritualistically with water from a well, or would even throw them in it, the gesture signifying the idea of purification. After finishing the visitation of all the houses from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului, where all the girls aspiring to wedlock lived, the group of Lads went to ‫܉‬imăn’s Garden, where all those present would revel. Food was laid on an elliptical table dug into the ground. This was one of the ritualistic meals of the Lads. Because the garden does not exist anymore, having been transformed into a graveyard, they party at the triptych by the Holy Trinity Church and at night time, when they return, the second leader cooks dinner for all of them at his house. The entertainment of the Lads and other members of the community is resumed the next day in Pia‫܊‬a Prundului and then on Coasta Prundului, where they dance the hora, hurl the mace, and yet another ritualistic meal is organized, but this time by the girls who had danced the previous night. Within the complex custom of the Lads, a rarely seen ritualistic sequence is the “throwing in the carpet” or the “throwing in the rug,” which until around the second half of the last century took place at the leader’s house, in private company, giving the impression that the practice is mysterious, and so has to be done under the rose, away from the eyes of the curious. Most probably, the “throwing in the rug” (done three times) is part of an initiation ritual that neophytes were subjected to in order to become members of the group of Lads. Also, many centuries ago this may have been a secret association of young men. This practice existed in multiple areas, in the dance of the Călu‫܈‬ari, in Muntenia, in Ardeal, and south of the Danube River in Bulgaria, or in other Romanian customs practiced on Whitsuntide, New Year, etc. As Ion Ghinoiu puts it, the gesture can be interpreted as “an instantaneous death and resurrection.”18 Only the lads who were missing that certain Thursday night were “thrown in the rug” the next day, only this time it was done in public, possibly as a punishment for those Lads who, for various reasons (refusal, fear, absence), had removed themselves from a ritual that had to be respected religiously. In contemporary times, the mythical gesture became a “spectacular” one, practiced publicly on the Friday of the “enlightened week.” A significant place in the complex cultural phenomenon of the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov is held by the whole procession that is organized on the Easter of the Dead, the last holyday, and the most important one. 18

Ghinoiu, Panteonul românesc, 208.

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Chapter One

Nowadays, this is known in Bra‫܈‬ov as the “Sunday of the Lads.” We must mention that until the communist period, when many folkloric “practices” were forbidden, this ceremony was held during the week, on Wednesday. In the following years after the 1990s, the Lads postponed the ritual for a week or even more if the weather did not allow it. On this day, the Lads visit the ‫܈‬erje, then go to Pia‫܊‬a Prundului, in front of St. Nicholas’s Church, where the parish priest sanctifies their flags. The traditional norms are respected with unwavering strictness, without any deviation from the fixed itinerary and the moments that constitute the scenario of the ceremony. The Lads walk a long road up to Solomon’s Stones, an open-air amphitheatre guarded by five cliffs. This is where they dance to a special melody called the Hora of the Lads, followed by various other dances like sârba, breaza, brâul, etc., to which girls are invited. The throwing of the mace takes place during the hora. The throwing of the mace was initially a virility test, a ritual meant to initiate the pubescent boys who might have wanted to join a secret association of warriors or maybe become practitioners of a local cult like that of the Danubian Knights (first century BC to fourth century AD). For a long time, the Lads never danced the hora without throwing the mace three times each—each time celebrating, in order, the renewal of nature, the triumph of light and warmth, and the conquest of demonic, chthonian forces. We can glimpse in this ritualistic sequence, in spite of all the mutations produced throughout the ages, a reminiscence of the cult of Dionysus, of the Dionysia, those ritualistic holydays of spring with a relatively long duration (six days), but also of the cult of Orpheus, known through the initiating character and the promotion of the idea of purification and the annulment of mistakes through the pleasures of dancing; we can see a recollection of the cult of the Danubian Knights as well, which considered that initiation is made in various phases, the final objective being acquiring immortality. Solomon’s Stones is also where a feast is organized, In earlier times, lumps in the ground served as tables, whereas today the tables for the same occasion are manufactured from wood and metal. This pastoral “holyday” of spring, which took place in a picturesque location in Bra‫܈‬ov, in an open space where traces of a Dacian fortress were found, is a distinguished moment in the life of the city, just as the pastoral Dionysia were in ancient times, when the ancestors organized processions, sacrifices, contests, and a Komos (a banquet with dances and songs). Beyond the innate changes and simplifications determined by the evolution of society, a certain “monotypy” of some cultures and ancient

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

9

rituals was preserved in the vast majority of Romanian customs, including the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov. After a day of partying amidst Chetri (the local name for Solomon’s Stones), the groups of Lads (all seven existing groups: Young, Old, Red, Doroban‫܊‬i, White, Turkeys, and Bra‫܈‬ovecheni) are led by their leaders on the same path they climbed to the stones on. They go to the cemetery where the tomb of the poet Andrei Mure‫܈‬anu is, and sing “the Christ has revived!” and a fragment from the national anthem, “Awaken thee, Romanian!” After this, the groups break up, and all those who are present say “May you live long!” to each of the leaders. Congruous to the information that we find in a recent monograph (2005), published by a contemporary researcher of the custom, Vasile Oltean, the holyday of the Lads continues on the following Sundays, each group organizing, in a place established beforehand, the dances that are aimed at allowing them to invite unmarried girls to dance. It is likely that this was practiced before the communist period, as well as after 1990 when the “folkloric phenomenon” was updated in its entire amplitude and splendour. Unfortunately, with the progressive departure of the human from the mythical universe, two mythic-ritualistic sequences with a powerful symbolic charge have been lost: “the burial of the leader” and the “ladydog.” The climax of the custom of the Lads was “the burial of the leader,” which occurred on Thursday at dusk, when the leader was strapped to a ladder, covered with a blanket, and carried by four Lads, two “disguised” as a priest and professor, parodying the religious texts customarily read at funerals and mimicking dirges. “Talanga” is also an item that can be found in the props of the Lads, so everything is practiced in lines with a genuine funeral ceremony. The retinue walked the streets from ‫܇‬cheii Bra‫܈‬ovului and stopped at drinking houses. If it rained, they placed the leader under the gutters of the houses to get him wet, saying that it was necessary for him to be “softened, for he was quite rough.” At dawn, they reached the place called the Devil’s Bridge, where the leader was thrown onto the waterless riverbed. He was taken out of the “grave” only after he promised a considerable amount of alcohol to the other Lads. The ritual ended with a party, usually at a drinking house, where they consumed the alcohol promised by the leader. “The burial of the leader” is a funeral simulacrum that can also be found with other European peoples, habitually practiced during the Carnival. We can also find it in the dance of the Călu‫܈‬ari, only that the Mute is the one buried in this case rather than the leader. The burial and the resurrection, the temporary disappearance and the comeback, the

10

Chapter One

occultation, and the epiphany were frequent rituals for the peoples of antiquity, as part of a religious mystery/cult like the cult of Zamolxis for the Dacians, the Eleusinian mysteries for the Greeks, Dionysus for the Thracians, and Isis and Osiris for the Egyptians. The ritual was meant to symbolically underline the miracle of the renewal of nature, but also the reaching of another initiation phase in the great mysteries of life and death. The throwing of the Lad’s leader signified the symbolic “death” of the one that had not yet reached full initiation, and getting out of the grave marked the symbolic resurrection, the completion of the initiation. The previous year faded with the ritualistic burial of the leader; a certain relationship of the human being with adverse natural forces was annulled, and once he was taken out of the (waterless) grave at the Devil’s Bridge, a new beginning loomed under the zodiac of the sun, a resizing of the human’s relation to the cosmos and the world which they parted with momentarily, being drawn out of its order. This mythic-ritualistic “scenario” of “the burial of the leader” is similar to “the burial of the Carnival,” a custom practiced by the Saxons from Transylvania, described by James Frazer in Creanga de aur [The Golden Bough, III] and consisting of a scarecrow wrapped in white silk, symbolizing the Carnival. The procession was accompanied by local lads who rode horses and were gilded with boughs. The Carnival was sentenced to death for doing the villagers a lot of harm by damaging their footwear and making them tired and sleepy. Therefore, it all revolves around the myth of nature’s death and rebirth, which existed for all peoples because the human has always been fascinated by these phenomena, and their wish to know and explain them has determined their staging and acting them out in rituals.19 The sequence of the “burial of the leader” was followed by the game called “the lady-dog.” The dog was probably a totem of the Romanians from this area of the country, just like the wolf had been a totem of their Dacian ancestors. This ritualistic dance unfolded as follows: after the leader’s “revival” and after all the alcohol he had promised was consumed, at the order of one of the Lads all the young people had to take their shirts off as quickly as possible in pitch-black darkness and then scourge each other with their belts. The game would come to a stop when one of the Lads said: “the lady-dog came back from the mill.” The ritual, practiced by the youths at weddings when nobody could have seen them, can only be explained as a simplified, evolved reminiscence of the Dionysian orgiastic dances, whose aim was to consecrate the act of initiation and, at 19

James George Frazer, Creanga de aur III, trans. Octavian Nistor (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1980), 30–1.

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11

the same time, to consecrate a collective alliance which was in communion with the deity that awakened the nature. The ritualistic game “the ladydog” can be viewed, in this light, as a reflection of the animistic mentality of a collectivity that believed in the miracle of nature’s eternal resurrection, which the collectivity expressed symbolically. This fact allowed the people who were anchored to the mythical universe to feel as if they were messengers of that god, to feel free and detached from the strict spatial and temporal coordinates, and to feel like conquerors of the maleficent forces of winter, equated with death. All of the ritualistic sequences that formed and are still forming, with some simplifications imposed by the evolution of society and the fifty years of communism, the complex custom of the Lads from Bra‫܈‬ov— picking out the leader of the group, blowing the trumpet (surla), the ritualistic feasts, the dancing of the hora and the throwing of the mace, the procession on the streets of Bra‫܈‬ov with a fixed itinerary, the burial and the revival of the leader, the “the lady-dog” game, the throwing of the Lads in the rug—reveal the preservation, in its essential data, of a mythical mentation and behaviour of the human being that carries, through time, the invisible, mysterious connections with the mythical universe in and through which it has tried to define itself. As in all Christianized spaces, the influence of the church in the practice of this custom is natural. Because it could not remove some old, so-called “pagan practices,” the church assimilated them instead. Thereby, the Lads, from the nineteenth century, came under the wing of the church and were supervised by priests, singing “the Christ has risen!” whenever possible and with the fir trees they carry to Solomon’s Atones at the forefront of the suite, then drop in front of the gate of the leader, decorated with wooden crosses offered by the priests and lain at the triptychs from Bra‫܈‬ov. Because the custom of the Lads is connected with the return of spring, it usually manifests on Easter, this holyday marking the renewal of the verdure, Christ’s—the solar hero—resurrection and life’s triumph. However, the church could not transform the custom of the Lads in a religious ceremony, so the archaic mythic-ritualistic structures were preserved. The custom of the Lads is relevant within the contemporary society for the way in which an entire community assimilates and integrates the sacred through and abreast a group of youths.

12

Chapter One

From Mythic-ritualistic Gesture to Popular Show: Călu‫܈‬arii Through the literary creations they made and the games and customs they inherited and adapted in concordance with the evolution of society, the Romanian gives the impression that they can understand mythological “patterns” only if they transpose them onto their concrete, quotidian universe. Moreover, the Romanian seems to be much more interested in the detail of the message that is transmitted than its trajectory. In popular memory, the collective mythical-magical heroes have always had a significant place. In key-moments, the peasants’ mentality has imposed a certain connection with the collective character, in particular with the ancestors. Romanians had and still have an essential connection with their forefathers, a tie which people have always tried to maintain unaltered. There is a landmark of the Romanian mentality here, considering the individual as an entity that has been determined on the genetic line that can be traced back to the ancestors who provided the ancestral landmarks of the nation (even though there is no reference to their actions). A typology of these collective mythical-magical heroes can be reformed through the well-known Romanian ritual-dance of the Călu‫܈‬ari, a constant term of reference in our folk culture. Its impact on the mentality of the Romanians is undeniable. The custom, also known as Călu‫܈‬, formerly spread through most of Romania, but today is found only in the south of Oltenia and Muntenia (Olt, Teleorman, Dolj, Arge‫܈‬, Ilfov, and Ialomi‫܊‬a), and represents, as Mihai Popa opines: “the single most important folk manifestation in which, within the realm of customs, dance as a way of expression has a prevalent role.”20 Valuable information with respect to the unfolding of the custom can be found in various studies from the eighteenth century to present day: Dimitrie Cantemir (Descriptio Moldaviae, 1714), F. I. Sulzer (1781, Viena), Lazăr ùăineanu (Studii de Folclor, 1896, Bucureúti), Tudor Pamfile (Sărbătorile de vară la români, 1910, Bucureúti), T. T. Burada (Istoria Teatrului în Moldova, 1915, Iaúi), Romulus Vuia (Originea jocului căluúarilor, 1934), Horia Barbu Opriúan (Căluúarii, 1969, Bucureúti), Mircea Eliade (Notes of the Căluúarii, 1973, S.U.A.), and Mihai Pop (Căluúul, 1975, Revista de Etnografie úi Folclor, Bucureúti).

20

Mihai Pop, Obiceiuri tradiĠionale româneúti (Bucureúti: Univers, 1999), 109.

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13

It was and still is quite difficult for researchers to assess the origin of this dance, which is certainly the memento of an ancient cult. It is possible that the dance originates from Coli Salii Romani21 (both appertain to the same group of customs—the dances with weapons, whose aim was that of driving away the demons that affected people’s health). The name comes from the appearance of the horse (“călu‫)”܈‬, which was considered to be a daemon of good health and fecundity. Through its curative character, the dance of the Călu‫܈‬arii from Romania is different from the similar customs one can find in the south of Macedonia in Bulgaria. This is precisely its distinctive and most peculiar mark. One proof that this custom and the solar cult are not complete strangers to each other is the fact that both respect the two moments of the day—sunrise and sunset—because the participants do not dance before the sun rises or after it sets. In Banat, the Călu‫܈‬arii perform two dances: the dance of the sun at sunrise and the dance of the sun at dusk. This is the origin of the mythical-solar nature of this custom. In the probably prehistoric dance of the Călu‫܈‬arii, two mythological representations were merged by overlapping two holydays celebrated on different dates: the veneration of the Iele (the Rusalii or the Vântoase, Romanian mythological beings similar to the harpies) and the cult of the horse. The Călu‫܈‬arii is a highly entertaining ceremony during which the equine god (Mutul Călu‫܈‬ului), the protector of horses and summer, celebrates with the group of Călu‫܈‬ari on Whitsuntide week. The dance embodies practices, magical formulas, and ritualistic acts that are carried out only by a group of men strictly hierarchized as mute, vătaf (leader), ajutor de vătaf (second-in-command), flag-bearer, and common Călu‫܈‬ari. The so-called Mute has the most important role, because he is forbidden to talk during the days in which the custom is being carried out. The cause of his muteness is more of a psychological nature. He wears a mask, and probably according to a certain set of rules, masked figures had 21

Coli Salii Romani were the twelve priests of Mars, keepers of the holy shields. In March, during the holydays consecrated to this god, they participated in competitions and danced with the shields. Their jumps represented the rebirth and the prosperity of nature, as well as the banishing of evil spirits. Some philologists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fervent supporters of the latinity of the Romanian people, have opined that the custom of the Căluúarii originated in the Roman practice. Since it is impossible to trace the true origin of the custom and taking into consideration the powerful influence exerted by the Romans on Dacia after the conquest in the year 106, we daresay it is not an exaggeration to see in the Călu‫܈‬ari a reminiscence of the custom that was practiced by the aforementioned priest.

14

Chapter One

to be silent so they could not be recognized and augment the mystery that characterized the Călu‫܈‬ari. His mask is grotesque and is customarily made out of leather or rags, and his costume is bicolored, recalling the harlequins from the carnival games. His prop is always a phallic object hanging from his belt, suggesting that he is the representative of the daemon of fecundity. He is also the one seen as the protector of the Călu‫܈‬ari, because he drives the “Iele” away with whiplashes. The euphoric state and the mystical cohesion between the Călu‫܈‬ari, who are tied by an oath of allegiance, are obtained through performing, to physical and psychological exhaustion, the sacred dances to melodies that are sung by musicians who are not part of the group. In this way, the dances of the Călu‫܈‬arii have the same effect as the ritualistic debaucheries held on New Year’s Eve and also recall the orgiastic dances of the Bacchantes during the Dionysian holydays. The first detailed description of this ritualistic dance is to be found in the eighteenth chapter of the monograph Descriptio Moldaviae by Dimitrie Cantemir: Călu‫܈‬arii meet once a year, they dress in women’s attire, they wear wreaths of wormwood leaves and all sorts of flowers on their heads, they talk like women so they cannot be recognized and cover their faces with a white cloth. They carry swords with which they would stab any man from the crowd that would dare to snatch their masks off. This is a right that was given to them by an ancient custom and is so powerful that they cannot be held accountable for murder … For ten days, between the celebration of Christ’s Ascension and Whitsuntide, they have no rest, but go dancing and running through all the cities and all villages. They only sleep under the roof of a church in all this time.22

This is how the ritualistic dance was carried out at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Cantemir wrote about it, underlining its nature as a custom used for curing some diseases. His remark regarding the acquittal of the Călu‫܈‬ari who relied on murder to ensure the secrecy of the dance and that the ritual was respected with strictness is important for understanding the Romanian mentality regarding the magic spectrum. We find that the Romanian is not interested in probing the magic or the occult, or in the discovery of new modalities of penetrating the secrets of existence—they just have a tremendous respect for them. They accept that there are initiated persons (the group of Călu‫܈‬ari, in this case) and offer

22

Dimitrie Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei (Bucureúti: Academia Română, 1973).

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

15

them their respect and total trust, considering that the initiates are the only ones who can be held accountable for their actions. Starting with the second half of the twentieth century and thanks to research conducted by specialists in the villages from the South of Romania (Oltenia, Călăra‫܈‬i, and others)—where the custom is still in practice, unlike in other areas of the country—it has been found that superstitious praxes and magical acts were eliminated and the Călu‫܈‬ul became nothing but “a great dance of virtuosity.”23 At the basis of the practice of this custom, which embodies numerous elements pertaining to the spectacular and which generates, even today, some question marks for the neophytes and specialists alike, is the group itself. It was formed by swearing an oath as secret as the behavioural rules of its members. The group of the Călu‫ ܈‬has a very rigorous arrangement, customarily formed only by men between twenty and sixty years old. Once, the group was formed by seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen men, for a period of three, five, seven, or nine years (the numbers are not as respected as they used to be). They wear the traditional costume (in earlier times it was the costume worn on holydays). They usually cover their heads with hats with large brims, beautifully decorated with multi-coloured marbles and ribbons. Their waists are gilded with multi-coloured baldrics; they also wear miniature baldrics placed diagonally on their chests. They wear braided ornaments and small bells behind the knees and around the ankles. While the custom is carried out, Călu‫܈‬arii wear the opinci (traditional Romanian shoes made of a rubber or leather rectangle and tied around the foot with thread). These shoes are equipped with pinteni (metal plates on the outer edges), and together with the bells they emphasize the rhythm of the melody and dance. They always carry a white flag with them. This prop represents the most important element of the custom and is made during a special ceremony which takes place before swearing the oath. This is how the flag is made: they grab a wooden pole that is more than three metres long and tie a manually-woven towel, fresh garlic, and wormwood around its tip because, according to traditional belief, these have healing properties. The flag is held for as long as the custom is still in process by the first Călu‫܈‬ar in the group, who is not allowed to let it fall since something bad is bound to happen if it does. As mentioned previously, the person in the group named “the mute” is forbidden to utter as much as a single word for the entire duration of the 23

Mihai Pop, Obiceiuri tradiĠionale, 117.

16

Chapter One

custom, and carries an oversized wooden phallus between his legs. The phallus symbolizes fecundity and fertility in this case, as well as “an ambiguous aggressiveness and insult towards the Iele.”24 CăluЮarii hang garlic and wormwood around their waists and carry wooden swords, bows, and sticks. The role of these mandatory instruments among the props of the custom is that of serving as defence against evil spirits, the Iele in particular. The Călu‫܈‬arii stayed together for ten days. This period was, for them as well as the collective they belonged to, an exit from everyday life and a penetration into the ritual, the transition from an ordinary dimension into the mythical-magical one, in which they had to respect certain interdictions because it was believed that violating them attracted the punishing wrath of the Iele. This was the interval in which the community engaged all of its attributes in the protection of the group. The group was formed as follows: the members met in remote places (frequently at crossroads) so they were shielded from the indiscreet gaze of any intruder and drove the white flag into the ground. The mute sat on the ground right next to the flag, and each dancer had to jump over him and the sticks of the Călu‫܈‬ari in two rows. In the aftermath, each călu‫܈‬ar swore on the flag that he would respect the orders of the leader at all costs, that he would not divulge their secrets for three years, and that he would not touch any woman while the custom was being performed. If he broke the oath, he was at risk of going insane for the rest of his life. Here are a few oath formulas of the Călu‫܈‬ari: I swear on the souls of my ancestors and on my horses and cattle to respect the Călu‫ ܈‬and its law until the unbinding of the flag (Arge‫)܈‬. We bind ourselves to be united, to help each other, to stay with the Călu‫܈‬, not to wish for money and not to touch women as long as we are in the Călu‫܈‬. So help us God! (Teleorman) In the name of God, the Holy One, we bind ourselves, swearing faith to the flag that we will dance in justice, without sorrow and quarrelling. (Muscel)

It can be seen that the text or the oath differs from area to area. It must be specified that the oath was renewed each year, especially when the group got another member. It is possible that this is the reason why it was divulged in the first place; it is also possible that it is precisely this 24

Mihai Pop, “Căluúul (Lectura unui text),” in Folclor românesc, II (Bucureúti: Grai úi Suflet—Cultura NaĠională, 1998), 273.

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17

divulgation that hides a secret sacred text. We are ushered towards this idea by an older magical form of the oath, signalled in Oltenia by the Austrian researcher R. Wolfram in 1934. This was the ritual according to his account: two weeks before Whitsuntide, after the election of the leader, the Călu‫܈‬arii went to an old witch. She gave them a black handkerchief that had once belonged to a bad woman who had died recently. She tied an enchanted clove of garlic to one of the corners of the handkerchief (it is said that the smell of enchanted garlic is very powerful). That handkerchief was then tied to the pole, as a flag, and was waved above their heads. Whomever the leader stopped the flag on had to dance in a gradually more alert rhythm until they fell to the ground, dizzy and entranced. In the morning of the following day, the dancers went to the witch once again, where they danced. During the dance, they shouted “Hălai ‫܈‬a ‫܈‬i iar a‫܈‬a.” The witch went around the circle of Călu‫܈‬ari with the flag in her hand, and uttered various disenchantments. When the dance reached its climax the witch waved the flag above their heads in order to test its power. If the Călu‫܈‬ar on whose head the flag stopped blacked out, its miraculous power was guaranteed. The swoon was the proof that the disenchantment(s) had worked and the flag had been subsequently endowed with magical power. The woman would then give the flag to the Călu‫܈‬ari, telling them: “Go in peace.” They would answer: “Fearless and with plenty of luck.”25 This complex form of oath has not been discovered by any of the other Romanian folklorists or ethnographers. This aspect proves, on one hand, that the ritual has been increasingly simplified and, on the other, that neither the passing of time nor the pervasion of the civilizing elements could infuse the “secrets” of the Călu‫܈‬arii with an esoteric feature. After swearing the oath (which confirms that the group is ready to defend the village, the collectivity, from the “aggression” of the Iele), the group introduces itself to the community on Whitsuntide morning. (The folk believed that during holydays maleficent forces were more active, and the presence of the Călu‫܈‬arii ensured a prompt defence.) They go from house to house, dance and carol (uttering good wishes). Carolling, like the similar practice of New Year’s Eve, was based on the principle that each household was a “whole” and played a part in the welfare of that community. Not receiving the Călu‫ ܈‬group led to exclusion from the community and the relinquishment of defence in a critical situation. It could also hint at a pact with the evil mythological representations (the Iele, in this case). In similar fashion, if the group of dancers did not visit a 25

Pop, “ConsideraĠii etnografice úi medicale asupra căluúului oltenesc,” 79.

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house, this would have been considered a serious deviation from the (sacred) duty of defending the community. An important role which the collectivity assigned to the group for hundreds of years was that of healer. The curative, beneficial function of the group was the most important of all functions (that of initiation and defence of the community) owned by this complex and ancient custom, which has been enveloped in a shroud of mystery throughout the ages. An ill person was diagnosed through music, with a musician playing certain songs that pertained to the dances of the Călu‫܈‬arii (Calul, Chi‫܈‬erul, Sarea ‫܈‬i lâna, RaĠa, BăĠul, CătrăniĠa, and Floricica). It is considered that each malevolent spirit or disease is embodied in a song. That is why, in order to be diagnosed, all the songs in the medical repertoire were sung to the patient until they gave a sign that they had been touched by a particular song. [We mention that only the leader and one of the musicians went into the room where the ill person was]. It is said that the person was cured when the Călu‫܈‬arii danced the dance affiliated with the song that had produced the reaction. However, if a person did not react to any song at all, the Călu‫܈‬arii gave up and doubted their competence. We must mention that the Călu‫܈‬arii never cured people suffering from epilepsy or other neurological diseases. The healing process was carried out through a “dance with a knockdown.” There were two ways of doing this: by breaking a pitcher filled with disenchanted water or by touching someone with the flag, both of these sequences being endowed with magical valences. The following scenario is known for the breaking of the pitcher: the leader placed a pitcher with water, wormwood leaves, and garlic in the middle of a circle formed by the members of the group. The musicians played and the Călu‫܈‬arii started dancing. The leader then chose with his gaze the one that had to play the role of the victim by getting close and looking at him insistently (an attempt at hypnosis), dancing all the time in front of or around him and gesticulating in order to impress him. The rhythm of the song was increasingly chaotic, as was that of the dance. Meanwhile, the chosen one was splashed with water from the pitcher, and he too started to dance chaotically and give signs that he was clearly dizzy. When the dance reached a paroxysm, the leader spat chewed garlic on him and hit the pitcher with the stick until it broke; the disenchanted water splashed all over him and he fell to the ground and started to somersault. A peasant that had been a member of group testified that, “A Călu‫܈‬ar falls down because that is his oath and the leader knows his secret.”26 26

Ibid., 83.

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

19

In the case of the knockdown with the flag, a revealing description was given before the First World War by N. I. Dumitra‫܈‬cu (who witnessed it in the locality of Bârca) and inserted by the folklorist Tudor Pamfile in the study Summer Holydays of the Romanians: When the dance is in full fling and it is time to knock him down, the musicians play faster and more passionately. The leader grabs the flag and everybody watches him. He holds the flag a few centimetres above the head of the Călu‫܈‬ar that is about to fall. The other ones keep on dancing and do not look at what the leader is doing. The leader gets gradually more depressed, wan and restless, he blushes, he does not think of anything, he does not hear, he does not see, he dances more and more intensely while the others do it gradually slower, until they almost come to a stop. The leader gets the rag with the garlic clove closer to the head of the Călu‫܈‬ar. The latter dances chaotically and the leader keeps on bringing the rag closer to him until he puts it on his head. The Călu‫܈‬ar dances even faster, is covered in sweat and all of a sudden he tumbles and falls down.27

It is worth mentioning that, in the aftermath of fieldwork conducted by Mihai Pop, he reached the conclusion that, in most cases, knocking down the Călu‫܈‬ar did not take more than three minutes. We add that, when he was knocked down, the patient was compelled to arise and start running. A leader told some Romanian folklorists that “he did that out of fear.” From what has been presented, we can see that the leader played the major role in the ritual of the “knockdown.” The leader of the group, who certainly was the most initiated out of them all, knew hypnosis techniques that he used on vulnerable, easily impressionable people. The Călu‫܈‬ar, who was picked for being knocked down, was the mediator between life and death, between the human and non-human. The ritualistic gesture suggested a certain form of sacrifice through which one was granted victory against the evil spirits—the Iele. Therefore, the suggestion had an important role in this healing ritual— so important that, notwithstanding that the Călu‫܈‬arii were believed to cure the sick, there were numerous cases in which the “cured” ones had fallen sick again. This aspect makes us think of it, not as a proper healing ritual like the one performed by specialized persons through disenchantments, but more as a ritual intended to re-establish the equilibrium and, by extension, help the villagers affected by the Iele.

27

Tudor Pamfile, Sărbătorile de vară la români (Bucureúti: Academia Română,1910), 72.

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The ending of the custom was carried out ritualistically until the second half of the twentieth century. On the last day, the group once again visited each household in the village where they danced a “hora,” in which all those present were invited to participate. In the evening, the group was split somewhere outside of the community in a place where nobody could see, because no outsider was allowed to participate in this sequence either. The Călu‫܈‬arii broke the pole on top of which the flag had been tied and destroyed the signs (the flag and the badge—in some places where there was no explicit phallic symbol they wrapped a thirty centimetre piece of wood which was bent at the tip in rabbit skin), after which each of them left the place, going in different directions. Once the ritualistic time was finished, the interdictions were annulled and the life of the community went back to normal, having ensured that it was rid of the aggression of the Iele. This complex traditional custom lost its superstitious fundaments through the ages, and eliminated the magical elements and procedures borrowed from witchcraft, known today around the world as a grandiose folk show. The whole custom lost its esoteric character. The gestures of the Călu‫܈‬arii in the modern day are not related to witchcraft, but to the spectacular. From the second half of the twentieth century, even the spectators saw that the members of the group faked their swoons in line with a convention they had established between them. It seems that with the swearing of the oath, the order of the knockdown is decided as well, and each of them agrees to simulate the fall at a precise moment. Researchers noticed that during the communist period in particular, beginning from 1950, a certain “disintegration” of the mythical-magical content of the custom occurred, because the symbolical numbers—so important in the formation of the group—the ritualistic sequence of the splitting of the group, and the interdictions ceased to be respected. Some villagers did not even receive the Călu‫܈‬ari, and some members of the group were missing from the dances for days on end because they had to go to work. The real objective of the dance was to move one artistically and, of course, everything that once pertained to occultism remained under the aspect of time. The genuine custom, the one practiced in earlier times—that is where we can discover the meanings and a particular dimension of the Romanian spirituality and mentality. Undoubtedly, through the impressive, unique dance of the Călu‫܈‬arii, we, the Romanians, can remake a secret connection—even though it has

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

21

become so frail nowadays—with what exists beyond the perceptible and the world of myth just by looking towards the past.

The Sânziene—Between Tradition and Actuality One of the most anticipated and valued holydays of the Romanian people is known as the Sânziene, and it takes place on June 24, the day on which the Christian Orthodox and Catholics celebrate Saint John the Baptist’s birth. Since it happens two days after the summer solstice, this holyday circumscribes to the cycle of a ritualistic renovation of time. The term Sânziene connects three elements: the mythical representations of the vegetation (the Sânziene and the Drăgaice), the holyday itself, known as the Drăgaica in the southern part of Romania, and the yellow flowers (Gallium verum) that bloom when the holyday draws near, known for their apotropaic powers. According to the Romanian collective mentality, the flowers—vegetal substitutes of the fairies (the Sânziene)— receive outstanding attributes on June 24, becoming healing plans, the main reason why older women, sometimes joined by younger ones, went into the fields to collect them (not only Sânziene flowers, but also others that were considered good for healing certain diseases). The plants were collected only after the women put bread and salt on the sites, the aliments representing an offering, and uttered a ritualistic formula: Flowers, sisters, I give you bread and salt, And you be medicinal And blessed by the good God.

The Sânziene and other plants were picked before sunrise, and the women strove to get home before sunrise lest the apotropaic attributes of the plants disappear. Also, they considered that only the flowers called Sânziene protected the people against the maleficent spirits in their houses and brought luck upon them, which is why the peasants from Bucovina decorate their houses with the Sânziene on June 24. The name of the mythical beings, Sânziene—creatures the Romanians envisioned as fairies, incredibly beautiful girls who lived in the forests or on the plains—can be retraced to the Latin language, to the Sancta Diana, a deity with lunar, sylvan, cynegetic, and agrarian attributes (as Romulus Vulcănescu opines, because she “reminds us of the rites of ploughing and planting during a night with full-moon, so the crop will be abundant”28). It 28

Romulus Vulcănescu, Mitologie română (Bucureúti: Academia Română, 1985), 489.

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Chapter One

is not accidental that their folkloric holyday came to be celebrated on June 24, halfway through the year, when the cuckoo stops singing and the sun is shining powerfully, two days after the summer solstice, the myth of the Sânziene being charged with “an astronomical significance inherited in winding ways maybe from the ancient astrologers from Dacia.”29 Subsequently, the holyday has a considerable age and a Thracian-Dacian origin on which the holydays of the Roman deity Sancta Diana and the Christian saint John the Baptists overlapped across the years. The Holyday of the Sânziene is marked by rituals of descent, of banishing the sun and summoning the moon. In this sense, there is a relevant ritualistic sequence once practiced by village boys, which implied lighting torches and rotating them from east to west, saying: “Go sun, come moon/ and tame the Sânziene.” Western Europeans (especially the Spanish) honour Saint John the Baptist on June 24, since they don’t have a pre-Christian divinity in their mythological pantheon. In the Christian universe, setting this extremely important religious holyday (the birth of the one who, alongside Christ, would build the foundations of new forms of communicating with the sacred) on the aforementioned date is no mistake. People thought that the summer solstice was the best moment for opening the road that facilitated the descent into darkness. It is known that, in line with Pythagorean symbolism, this moment is an exit destined to the human being, in contrast with the winter solstice, which is a gate for the gods. Because of that, it was thought that during the night of the Sânziene/Saint John the Baptist, the sky opened and people gained access to the knowledge of nature and the cosmic. From a mythical perspective, each temporal step is, as Georges Dumèzil opines, an opening towards Deep Time. The holyday of the Sânziene is therefore a holyday of cosmic harmony. The collective mentality imagined the Sânziene wandering the fields during the night, granting them bearings and protecting them against hail, protecting the married women, multiplying the animals and the birds, and healing people of various maladies. However, their judicious spirit was extremely powerful and they could change their qualities radically: they could become malign creatures in the blink of an eye, provided someone did not respect them as they ought to during the day. The Sânziene holyday itself (attested under this name in Oltenia, Banat, Transylvania, Maramure‫܈‬, and Bucovina) is laden with premarital practices. The girls who were old enough to marry made wreaths with these flowers and then threw them on the roofs of their houses. If a wreath 29

Victor Kernbach, Universul mitic al românilor (Bucureúti: LUCMAN), 305.

Calendar Holydays: The Mythical Dimension and the Spectacular

23

stayed there, it was a good sign because legend said that the girl would get married soon; if it fell from the roof, she had to wait (in this case, the girl had to throw it a couple of times more, in order to know how many years she had to wait until she would eventually get married). In some areas of the country, the girls put the flowers under their pillows, as this was considered to make them dream about the men they were going to marry. On the morning of June 24, many girls practiced the ritualistic custom of washing with morning dew because this was seen as divine water. The ritualistic washing imposed certain conditions for obtaining the desired effect (good health, beauty, and a strong sex appeal towards the loved person), one of which was that the dew had to be collected by older women from the petals of the Sânziene flowers in an unused white cloth and then drained in a brand-new pot. Those who collected the dew were not allowed to talk until they got home and were not allowed to meet anybody on the road either. Popular belief has it that whoever washed with that dew was going to be healthy, beautiful, and loved for the entire year. In some areas of Romania (Muntenia, Dobrogea, and south and central Moldova) this custom was known as Drăgaica, this Slavic name having overlapped with Sânziene centuries before when the Slavic language had an important influence on Romanian. Just like the Sânziene, Drăgaica was conceived by the collective imaginary as a mythical being, a “lady of the flowers” or agrarian divinity, a protector of the wheat fields and married women. As a ritualistic custom, Drăgaica stands out through its playful character. According to Ion Ghinoiu: In the Romanian customs, beliefs and folklore, Drăgaica keeps the memory of the Neolithic Grand Goddess, a lunar, equinoctial and agrarian divinity identified with Diana and Juno from the Roman pantheon and with Hera and Artemis from the Greek pantheon.30

Also called by folk people the empress, the mistress of the sisters and the queen of the fields, she would dance on the earth and through the air, and would sing during the night of the summer solstice, accompanied by beautiful fairies. In the southern part of the country, the custom took place in line with a mythic scenario: a beautiful girl from the village was chosen to play the role of the divinity. She was dressed as a bride in a white gown, and wore a wreath made from Sânziene flowers with ears of wheat on her head. Sometimes, she was armed with a wooden sword and was accompanied 30

Ion Ghinoiu, Obiceiuri populare de peste an. DicĠionar, (Bucureúti: FundaĠia Culturală Română, 1997), 68.

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Chapter One

by beautiful girls from neighbouring villages. They were called “sisters,” “drăgaice,” or “sânziene” for as long as the custom unfolded. The cortege, considered divine, had an even number of participants, who were chosen on a yearly basis. If the number of the girls was uneven, one of them sported a flag called the Flag of the Drăgaice. The “sisters” from the Queen’s retinue were dressed in holyday clothes, wore silk kerchiefs, and adorned themselves with Sânziene flowers. In some places in Oltenia (Teleorman County), the sisters were armed with sticks (like the men from the group of the Călu‫܈‬ari). In some villages from Ialomi‫܊‬a and Constan‫܊‬a, the girls had symbolic scythes or sickles that suggested the coming of the scything season and the symbolical death of the spirit of the wheat. The Drăgaicele danced, sang, and jumped over the ground with their arms spread at the edge of the village, through the fields of wheat, then on the streets of the village, the ceremony becoming similar to carolling at the peasants’ houses. A ritualistic act specific to the custom was that of ripping strips from the kerchiefs of the Drăgaice and distributing them among the hosts. The women, in exchange, offered them children’s clothes to tie to the flag. The custom is, in its entire dimension, a complex, syncretic one that emphasizes, through its various forms of manifestation, practices of a magical exploration of the future, purification, and fertilization. It is possible that these represent the mythical remnants of a cult that was dedicated by our ancestors to a deity of vegetation, wealth, or a solar deity. Like the other calendar customs (such as Whitsuntide, the Night of the Strigoi, the Girl Fair, the Călu‫܈‬arii, Caloianul, and Paparuda), the Sânziene or Drăgaica proves how strong the mythical dimension of the Romanian being is.

CHAPTER TWO THE WOMAN IN HISTORICAL ROMANIA

The Imaginary of the Female Body in Romanian Folklore The identity of the human being in general, and the woman in particular, has been bound to its body, because existence itself is defined and articulated through corporality. In comparison with the modern and postmodern individualistic society that perceives the human being in a dual manner in which the very notion of “body” is problematic and unclear, because, as David le Breton opines, “the modern notion of body represents an effect of the individualistic structure of the social domain, a consequence of the rupture of the solidarity that connects the person with a collective and with the cosmos through a network of correspondences where everything is connected,”1 in the archaic, traditional society the body is circumscribed to the cosmic and the world as a whole. The body is not seen as an isolated entity, but in a relation of interdependence with nature and others. In this respect, the said anthropologist makes a pertinent assertion: In traditional societies with a holistic, communitarian component where the individual is impossible to see, the body does not amount to the object of a scission and the human being merges with the cosmos, with nature, with community. In these societies, the representations of the body are actually representations of the human being, the person. The image of the body is an image of the self, fueled by the raw materials that constitute nature, the cosmos, in some kind of indistinctness.2

Therefore, we can speak of the “feeling of kinship, of man’s active participation to the totality of life.”3 For the collective mentality of the archaic world, the body does not exist as an element of “individuation,” of 1

David Le Breton, Antropologia corpului úi modernitatea, trans. Doina Lică (Timiúoara: Amarcord, 2002), 13. 2 Ibid., 19–20. 3 Ibid.

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Chapter Two

isolation, but on the contrary as a unifying element of the communitarian energy and harmony, as a means of the being’s communication with the universe of symbols that resize the existence of the collectivity. Undoubtedly, in the eyes of the human being as the creator of myths and rituals, in an intimate coalescence with nature and the universe, its own body was always a mystery. The attempt to come up with an answer to this issue has fuelled the popular imaginary throughout the ages, so that it found a way of expressing the feelings, ideas, wishes, and aspirations of the collectivity through practices, rites, customs, and artistic creations. These syncretic, complex ways of communication were imposed as cultural codes circumscribed to a system of values that was treasured and transmitted from generation to generation.

The Symbolic Valence of the Female Body in the Context of Various Calendar Customs In the beliefs, traditions and customs that were practiced for centuries in various Romanian areas, the body of the woman was always in contact with the world and was seen as an integral part of the human, as well as the cosmic universe. This aspect is all the more obvious in the social roles and ceremonies performed, in many cases exclusively, by girls and/or married women, in the repertoire of dances and ritualistic sequences within customs like Drăgaica, Lăzărelul, and Cununa, the dances of specific rituals like collecting mandrake, driving the Plague away, or those that revolve around witchery practices. The echelon of the subjects has articulated, over the centuries, the existence of the generations of girls in the same moments of a calendar year. Drăgaica takes place around the summer solstice, collecting mandrake usually around the spring equinox, Cununa during the harvesting of wheat, and Lăzărelul during Palm Saturday or Lazarus’s Saturday. In most of these ceremonies, the performance is conferred by three attributes pertaining to the feminine: purity, beauty, and the power of creation/fertility. Drăgaica (known in some regions, such as Bucovina, Maramure‫܈‬, Oltenia, Banat, and Transylvania, as Sânziene) is a folkloric manifestation of a group with an odd or even number of girls that unfolds on the brink of the summer solstice, on June 24, a day on which the Christian Orthodox and Catholics celebrate the birth of Saint John the Baptist. The Romanian mental collective has a deity of prosperity and fertility, a protector of the wheat fields and the married women, likened to:

The Woman in Historical Romania

27

The memory of the Neolithic Great Goddess, lunar, equinoctial and agricultural deity, identified with Diana and Juno from the Roman pantheon and with Hera and Artemis from the Greek pantheon.4

In the mythical plane, this deity is in a relation of antinomy with the Rusalii and the Iele, who are “endowed with negative connotations from the viewpoint of the sacred.”5 Drăgaica, also called Dârdaică, the Empress, the Queen of the Harvest, the Bride, and the Mistress of the Sisters, is, in connection with the sacred, an image of sacredness situated on the coordinate of the profane and, as Lucia Berdan opines, “a magic transposition of the agrarian deity’s nuptial ceremony,”6 which would walk on the ground or float in the air, as well as sing and dance accompanied by fairies and beautiful girls on the day of the summer solstice. The girls that compile the group of the Drăgaica are dressed in the traditional holyday costume and wear Sânziene flowers and, as a compulsory piece of garment, a kerchief on their heads. The most beautiful, robust, and healthiest girl from the village or the surrounding villages is chosen to be the Drăgaica and become the symbol of the traditional community she belongs to, the embodiment of spiritual and physical perfection and of utmost harmony, who is designated to shed blessing, welfare, bountiful crops, and plenty of livestock upon the collectivity. The community puts all of its hopes in the prospect that it will have abundant fruit, and therefore the prospect that it will thrive throughout the year. This accounts for the matter-of-course ritualistic interdiction of the young girl chosen to be the Drăgaica to marry for the next three years. In its archaic form, the ceremony unfolded amidst the wheat fields, where the Drăgaice danced and jumped from the ground with arms spread wide open, their kerchiefs fluttering in the breeze as if they were actually flying. Afterwards, the ceremony started in the village, with the singing of a short song, ripping the kerchiefs to shreds and leaving the tatters at the houses they visited, and, perhaps the most important aspect, performing a dance replete with vigour and intensity through ample bounces and jumps. The image of the beautiful girls dressed in exquisite garments led by the most beautiful of them all, who wore a crown of ears of wheat and Sânziene flowers, is worthy of a Renaissance painting, a masterpiece by Botticelli, because it signifies the sacred descending into the profane, the 4

Ghinoiu, Obiceiuri populare, 66. Lucia Berdan, Totemism românesc: structuri mitice arhetipale în obiceiuri, ceremonialuri, credinĠe, basme (Iaúi: Universitatea Al. I. Cuza, 2001), 87. 6 Ibid. 5

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Chapter Two

sacred being revealed in its “numinous” (Rudolf Otto) dimension, as well as the victory of light and the sun—the ultimate welfare. However, the most important elements of this ritual were the choreographed language, the expression of the total dedication of the actress, and the overcoming of the temporal threshold in a significant moment in which the year was “born” during the night of Saint Vasile (because immediately after the summer solstice, the day is increasingly shorter and plants lose their apotropaic valences), towards the opening of what Georges Dumèzil calls “the Great Time.” The dance of the Drăgaice, with successive jumps over the ground and fluttering kerchiefs, has a mythical-magical substratum, a solar nature, as well as a chthonic/mundane one (“the sisters” danced in the shape of a cross, “as if they opposed or fought against each other”7), because it stimulates the fertility of the soil and crops. The body of the Drăgaica and the girls in her group become for the collective mentality, in the mythical plane, the instrument of the communication that belongs to sacredness, the instrument that ensures the symbolic connection between immanence and transcendence, as well as the expression of social and cosmic oneness. The same valences of the feminine body can be observed in the custom known as the Cununa (The Wreath) or the Cununa Grâului (The Wheat’s Garland/Wreath), found in the intra-Carpathian arc. Performed by girls and women, with purity being an optional attribute, the ceremony is ampler, composed of “gradual sequences, with emphasis on the role and its relations.”8 The sequences in the ceremony of the Cununa are the following: the making of the Wheat Garland (shaped as a circle or cross, and in the latter case called “mace”) when the harvest came to an end; this was made with the last ears of wheat (wildflowers can be added to them) by all the girls who participated in the harvest and sometimes by “forgiven” women, who had received the Eucharist from the priest and women which had moved from a physiological point of view to another stage in their lives (the menopause). The wreath was then taken to the house of the person who organized the reaping session and was usually placed on the head of a beautiful girl who was about to get married. That girl had to be a virgin, laborious, beautiful, and have both parents alive. On the way from the field to the worker’s house, the retinue sang the ceremonial song of the wreath and was splashed with water. When they got to the worker’s courtyard, he had to splash water on the wreath, and 7

Ghinoiu, Obiceiuri populare, 59. Germina Comanici, Cercul vieĠii. Roluri úi performanĠă în obiceiurile populare (Bucureúti: Paideia, 2001), 140. 8

The Woman in Historical Romania

29

then the retinue had to go around the table in the house, on which bread and a bottle of wine were laid, three times. The wreath was put on the table and the host had to pick it up. This wreath was kept as a priceless, cultic object, being a symbol of fertility and abundance, until wheat was planted again or until the next year’s harvest. The wreath could be used in magic rituals for healing humans and animals and for fertilizing the fields, and it was believed to have apotropaic valences. In the context of the entire ceremony, a vital role was fulfilled by the dance of the wheat crown/wreath that was performed by the dancers when they left the host’s house, at noon, on the field, at the end of the harvesting, at the gate of the host’s house when the group got back from the field, and at other significant moments. During this ceremony, the woman’s body, involved in the most important ritualistic sequences of the wreath—reaping, binding of the bundles, wearing the wreath, dancing, singing the specific songs— reconfigures the dimension of the social reality through the spectacular and transfers the signification of the ritualistic act to the gaze. Even though the body remains under the auspices of discretion, the ritual does not diminish its obviousness but sublimates it, revealing its mobility and functions in the progress of human existence thanks to the woman’s popular costume, with its impeccable cut and being so beautifully adorned. The corporeal symbolism accentuates and even augments its force during the ritualistic acts, revealing the tonality of the relation with the world and the universe. The woman from the traditional Romanian society has a well-articulated awareness of her body and its manifestations in an ontological universe that is anchored in rigorous, inherited norms that must be respected and transmitted from generation to generation. As it is revealed to us by the sequences of the ceremony of the wheat crown, the woman’s body, in its different manifestations (dancing, walking, gathering the ears of wheat, binding them in bundles, braiding them in order to make the masterful wreath, etc.), endorses its harmony with the environment, nature, itself, and the others.

The Body—an Integral Component of the Universe in the Cult of the Mandrake Mandrake, known as an erotic, aphrodisiac plant, has a special place in the European mythical botanic, its cult being widespread and having, from one people or region within the same cultural space to another, various and frequently surprising manifestations and forms for the modern person. Also called:

30

Chapter Two The Good Lady, The Great Lady, The Forest’s Flower, The Empress, The Devil’s Candle, it has been divinized since Antiquity, being attributed a spiritual efficiency thanks to its properties of a poisonous, hallucinogenic or soporific plant and its similarity to the human face.9

As Mircea Eliade puts it, “it is a plant that has been presented everywhere with anthropomorphic qualities,”10 since its roots bear similarities to the human body. The magical powers of this plant’s roots can be used with a positive purpose when they are engaged in helping girls get married, conferring fecundity, harmony, richness, and a positive influence on a person or family’s economic status, healing of certain diseases and, of course, boosting luck in matters of love. They can also be used for negative purposes: inflicting damage on a person, focusing the hate of the population on the head of a human being, and even making someone go mad or fall ill. Mandrake is collected in a long-established period between two essential Christian holydays, Easter and the Ascension of Christ, because, according to the Romanian folk mentality, the plant loses its magical efficiency after the Ascension. It is usually gathered in a far-flung forest, where the barking of the dogs and the singing of the cocks cannot be heard, in great secrecy by women or girls, and very rarely by women and men. Therefore, the ritual imposed that mandrake could not be collected by all people and in a reckless manner. For instance, in some villages in Maramure‫ ܈‬it could be collected by seven women, in other villages by three or four girls, and in several other rural counties by two women or by a girl and an adult woman. Sometimes, the ritual had a sequence that had been established beforehand identifying the plant and tying a red ribbon to it one week before plucking it from the ground. The collection itself knows complex, multifarious forms and unfolded as follows: the women/girls start walking towards the place where the mandrake is, at the break of dawn, so they do not meet anyone on the road. They must be dressed in clean or even brandnew clothes and must be in good cheer in order to win the benevolence of the plant, the ritual implying the necessary act of purification. The interdiction of being seen or heard by someone is generated by the belief that mandrake loses its magical powers if a person sees the women or a dog starts barking at them. They are not allowed to talk with each other for 9

Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 279. Mircea Eliade, Meúterul Manole. Studii de etnologie úi mitologie (Iaúi: Junimea, 1992), 238.

10

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31

the same reason. The magical precaution also applies to the ritual that must be fulfilled in utmost intimacy, with no indiscreet gaze and without touching the plant as it is collected because the magical effect of the plant would be annulled. If the plant is collected for erotic purposes like marriage, healing, or obtaining money, the women or girls take food with them (sarmale, eggs, pies, and pancakes, all of them hallowed in the church beforehand), as well as alcohol (typically wine, sometimes spirits or moonshine). When they get to the mandrake, they hail it with respect, talk nicely to it, and undress and collect it, and then lay it on the ground. The food and alcohol are placed around the plant, the women and girls eat and drink, kiss, embrace, and caress each other, dance naked with their hair unfolded, and then sit on top of each other, simulating the sexual act. Then they talk about the person(s) whose love they want to win over or the objective they pursue with the help of the mandrake (luck, wealth, respect, success in various activities, etc.) The hole in the ground where the mandrake had been was filled with sugar or honey and coins, rewarding the soil for the mandrake it provided. Wine was then spilled on the hole and the mandrake itself. The homecoming was also done ritualistically: the women held the mandrake clasped to their chests or in their arms. In Maramure‫܈‬, they were prohibited from talking as they returned home; however, in other areas of Romania the women had to do a lot of things so that the plant would not lose its magical force, among which was talking politely to everyone they met on the road, and they were not allowed to spit, urinate, or taunt anyone. Getting home with the mandrake involved other ritualistic acts, such as laying it on the table, feasting, dancing, embracing, and uttering magical formulas. At home, the mandrake was kept in the garden, in a place far from the eyes of the curious, in the attic, over the door, or tied to a corner of a mirror. From the succinct presentation of the Cult of the Mandrake as it took place in the Romanian space, one can observe a much richer symbolism of the woman’s body than in other customs and rituals due to its total involvement in a context that is dominated by the mythical-magical thought, and by ancestral beliefs. The ritualistic dance circumscribed to the mandrake collecting ceremony that associates, in the mythical-magical plane, with the rite of nudity, is widespread in space in time, existing with the Gauls, Persians, Arabs, Celts, Hebrews, Indians, Aegean cultures and Semites from northwestern Mesopotamia.11 This naked dance in a circle is 11

Pamfil BilĠiu, Studii de etnologie românească, II (Bucureúti: Saeculum I.O., 2004), 77.

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“the ritual of the magic, protector circle, generalized in folklore,”12 as Pamfil Bil‫܊‬iu believes. According to Hans Biedermann’s opinion, it is an image of the “dancing circle,”13 with magical features and a mythological substratum, a ritual dedicated to “Mother Earth” [Terra Mater] as a thanks for the “magical plant” [Mircea Eliade], but also for the femininity and creative power it endows people with. The naked bodies, freed by the clothing that differentiates the human being socially and hierarchically, expresses the primordial state of the woman’s purity and innocence before Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, the desire of being in coalescence with the cosmic, the universal, superior forces, and energies. The nudity and dishevelled hair augment the quality and efficiency of the magical act of attracting a man’s love or luck in one’s household. The ritualistic nudity dissolves the physical barriers but also the spiritual ones that separate the being from the world and the cosmos. The woman’s naked body becomes a crucible that collects the magical forces of nature through the transfer, by means of sympathetic magic, from the root of the mandrake, likened to the human body, towards one’s self. Nakedness, in such a context, is not a symbol of seduction, but an expression of purity, vitality, integrity, fullness, and the paradisiac existence in which time has been abolished.

The Body, the Ritual of Banishing Plague, and Witchery Apart from the ceremony of collecting mandrake, nudity represents a mark of corporality in the ritual of banishing the plague, as well as in some rituals practiced by witches in Romanian folklore. Like for other European peoples, ritualistic nudity is, for Romanians, a very efficient means of banishing unholy spirits and disease from a human micro-universe. Plague, together with cholera, death, Samodiva, and Bâca, is part of “the category of personifications of concepts or diseases and mythical representations.”14 This horrendous, devastating disease has generated an entire mythology, starting with its appearance, personified by the collective mentality. The Romanian imagined plague as a woman dressed in white (in the area of Ia‫܈‬i) or as a monstrous being with a human head, ox horns, and a snake tail with a big sting at the end (in Bucovina). Its power resided in this sting with which it touched and killed people. As 12

Ibid. Hans Biedermann, DicĠionar de simboluri, trans. Simona Petrache (Bucureúti: Saeculum. I.O., 2002), 90. 14 Pamfil BilĠiu, Studii de etnologie românească, I (Bucureúti: Saeculum I.O., 2003), 305. 13

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it is revealed to us in legends and popular beliefs, it also appears in other hypostases: as a very ugly woman, with a horrifying nose and face, as a woman covered in hair who walks barefoot and whose feet are bitten by dogs, a tall woman who walks barefoot with such long hair that it reaches the ground, reminiscent of the Woodwoman, which is another mythological being, a representation of the monstrous feminine especially seen in the folklore of Maramure‫܈‬.15 We must mention that the anthropomorphized image of this horrible disease exists in the mythological imaginary of other European peoples as well, such as the Hungarians, Bulgarians, Russians, Serbians, Lithuanians, and Saxons. In order to banish the plague, the people used spells and put their hopes in their effect. Nevertheless, the stake was equally powerful for some ritualistic practices that circumscribed ancient forms of magic. Among others, these were: the manufacturing of a shirt called “the plague’s shirt” by an exact number of women who spun, wove, and sewed a linen shirt in twenty-four hours and then burned it, going around the village with black oxen, the characters played by women or children, and the ritualistic ploughing around the village with a plough tied to black, twin oxen, usually four in number. The magical ritual of encircling the village and ploughing is presented in a story found in the writings of Archbishop Marcus Bandius, whom the Pope had sent to Moldavia in 1646. He writes that: He saw how priapos were raised at all the crossroads, as such: the peasants had cut a very tall oak to which the masters had given a humanoid appearance, with feet and hands. This prestigious statue held a scepter in its right hand, with a tensioned bow with two arrows and a spear in its left hand which, while vibrating, seemed to threaten that it was going to strike. The [Romanian] nation, ignorant and bred in superstitions, believes that, with this craft, it can scare away the Plague that haunts the lands of Transylvania, so it does not attempt to get close to the lands of Moldavia … Apart from these, men worthy of all the trust recounted that in a dark night, ten old, naked girls, ran many times around the village, gesticulating with jumps and dancing on songs, and throwing sticks on a fire; they were met by ten lads, naked as well, armed with shining spears, and they saluted each other in silence. By doing this, the Romanians believe that the Plague would not touch naked people; it would be ashamed and spare the young instead. And this was not the end of the follies either, because all the ten lads had carried a plough with oxen in that place during the night, ploughing the land around the villages, with as many girls behind them, mixing laughter with singing. The villagers, armed with maces, sat with 15

Ibid.

34

Chapter Two their faces turned towards Transylvania where the land had been ploughed to fight against the Plague.16

However, from the information that was collected in the previous centuries by ethnographers and folklorists from the connoisseurs and the performers from the rural universe, it appears that girls, in particular “forgiven” (“sinless”) women and very rarely men, participated in the magical ritual of going around the village and ploughing the land. The humanized plague could symbolize the monstrous dimension of the sacred that descends into the profane to perturb the order of the world, because the human being disturbed the natural order created by divinity through its deeds and demeanour. Ploughing is associated with fecundity and the circle with an apotropaic valence, and represents at the same time a magical act of regaining reign over a space and embedding it in the cosmos.17 The performers of the ritual are not accidentally girls or women considered clean, both spiritually and morally. Chastity is one of the requirements that must be fulfilled to obtain the effect of the magic, which is “augmented by the miraculous and apotropaic force that is attributed to feminine nudity.”18 The formidable magical forces granted by nakedness can exert a major influence on nature, men, unclean spirits, and monstrous beings that destroy the everyday universe. This accounts for the fact that the naked bodies of the girls and the women have the power to generate the shame of the devastating plague, and ultimately banish it. The ritualistic gesture of uncovering the body is met in the universal mythical history of humanity, one of the most well-known sequences originating in Greek mythology. In this story, the hero Bellerophon, who was angry at the inhabitants of Lycia on account of their behaviour, asked Poseidon to punish them. According to Plutarch: The rising sea followed him [Poseidon] and covered the fields. Since men could not appease him, regardless of how much they begged him, women got in his way, pulling their gowns and uncovering their bodies, and thus he averted in shame and the waves, as it is said, did the same.19

16 I. Aurel Candrea, Folclorul medical român comparat. Privire generală. Medicina magică (Iaúi: Polirom, 1999), 167–8. 17 Eveev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 67. 18 Ibid., 81. 19 Ibid., 318.

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This gesture in which the body is screened not only by clothes but also by the various misconceptions that surround them, indecent and shameful in the context of the modern world, was natural in the archaic society and served as protection against magic; it was feared by fearless heroes and implicitly, in the folk mentality, by maleficent beings like the plague. The body that is perceived in a mythical plane as a microcosm, the most revealing expression of the self, is a magic tool used for defending the ontological universe that is in an indissoluble connection with the sacred in all its hypostases and dimensions. We consider that the image of the body of the witch from the traditional Romanian space is relevant for the theme we are discussing in the practice of certain rituals. For instance, in order to bring or chase away rains, a witch went outside and around the garden naked, walking backwards with a crane in her hand, chanting specific charms. Likewise, in order to take or transmit the “dew” of the fields, the witch stripped herself naked, trundled through the most beautiful and dew-covered fields, walked backwards, and then trundled through her own fields, therefore taking the “dew” from other fields and transferring it to her own. Another magic ritual refers to the growth of the witch’s powers: in the middle of a fullmoon night, she would go to a stream in the proximity of the village she lived in, strip naked, and bathe herself in it. It is said that this ritual, carried out in complete silence and discretion, temporarily augmented her capacity to make spells. In these situations, the nudity of the feminine body is equated with the total integration of the being in the rhythms of the cosmos by eliminating the attrition and dimension of physical time so that the contact with the universal energies (“binding” or “unbinding” the rains, enhancing the powers required for the magic) or the chthonian ones (taking the “dew”) would be re-established. In all these mythical-magical rituals, the woman’s body, especially the one freed from garments and all restraints that influence its freedom, is revealed to us as an archetypal image of beauty and even of the perfection of the divine creative act, as a mystery, and as evidence of being and coming into being. The body of the woman represents, in traditional Romanian society, which is still strongly anchored in ancient beliefs and mythical-magical belief, regardless of hypostasis, regardless of whether it is clothed in customary garments, holyday costume, or naked, a cultural symbol that reflects the significant aspects of a system of beliefs and collective values expressed in a syncretic form (musical, chorographical, gestural) in calendar customs and rituals.

36

Chapter Two

In antinomy with the modern view of the body—an object for advertisement, pleasure, and marketing—and with the alienation of the human being from itself, a being whose own body became an alter ego, a factor of “individuation,” within the archaic Romanian world, the woman’s body was a receptacle of the sacred or something essential that kept a dose of sacredness in itself. There was no distinction between the human and the existential universe. The human could not be anything else but itself, the true image of the self.

The Woman in the Traditional Romanian Society The woman has always, directly or indirectly, been a subject of maximum interest for historians, sociologists, psychologists, artists, and writers. An object of research, a central character, or model in the grand creations of humankind, from antiquity to modern day, the woman has generated sufficient disputes and interrogations, even in the postmodern society, or especially in this, because, even though always tuned to what is imposed as new, she proves to be a being that is connected to the ancestral, ancient horizons through her internal structure. The other half of the mythical androgynous being, the woman permanently tries to auto-define herself in relations with others, and even with the sacred. Adored and loathed, loved and humiliated, respected and marginalized, her value being recognized or taken for granted, she finds herself in an endless search for her identity and in open conflict for the rights that have been forbidden for centuries by those who, in the same fashion as the catholic bishop at a council, doubted that “the woman is human.” In contrast with the countries from western Europe, in the Romanian space, due to historic, politic, and economic realities, the woman had an altogether different status in the previous centuries (starting with the middle ages, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to today), one that was uncertain, devoid of security, and a well-defined perspective, because, for the most part, the regions of Romania (Moldova, Muntenia, Transylvania) were under the political dominance of the Ottoman Empire for a long stretch of time. In such conditions of submission, the Romanian women, regardless of their social status (the king’s wife or daughter), regardless of other women from the royal court, be they from the high echelons of society or simple women from the rural environment, “they were all under the curse of the ruthless fate that could humiliate, taunt

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37

them and transform them in bondswomen in the harem or as slaves.”20 Beyond this aspect, one has to admit that they were the bearers and transmitters of the customs, beliefs, and traditions of the Romanian space, all of these being transferred in the quotidian existence, since they had a much more important status than the official laws and beliefs themselves. It is known that, when discussing or writing about the woman, she is given a major role within the family, regardless of whether the discussion is about the family she comes from or the one she creates through marriage. All those who travelled to the Romanian regions in the previous centuries and met the people here, with their social realities and common law, appreciated the diligence of the women, and their active, tolerant spirit, and some of them emphasized the contrast between husband and wife in respect to their role in the current family activities. Therefore, in a chronicle from the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the authors record that: The women work drudgingly, they raise the children and after all this effort, they “wear the sigil of oppression and slavery on their faces,” while their husbands “look around, most of the times dizzied by booze, with defiance and fury”21

This truth, noted without any circumspection by Western scholars, reveals the special role of the woman who engaged her full responsibility, competence, and ability in supporting and protecting a complex household: She combined all learnings to create a pleasant atmosphere in a modest house … All those who went through the Romanian Countries were impressed by the way in which the small households became pleasant, thanks to the way in which they were taken care of, with this merit being attributed to the women.22

The feminine existential universe from the traditional Romanian society obviously knew more than this administrative, organizational dimension, and also understood a no-less important spiritual one. In fact, this reveals the true richness and beauty of the feminine spirit and the depth and uniqueness of the feminine feelings. The women’s access to knowledge and the process of learning was quite arduous due to prejudice, 20

Ilie Grămadă, Femeia în Evul Mediu (Iaúi: Vasiliana ‘98, 2003), 201. ùarolta Solcan, Femeile din Moldova, Transilvania úi ğara Românească în Evul Mediu (Bucureúti:Editura UniversităĠii, 2005), 132. 22 Ibid., 145. 21

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Chapter Two

but once this path was open the rupture between the women who were part of the elites and the others deepened. Whereas the former strove to learn, those from the modest rural (and even urban) families either did not have a decent enough financial situation to go to school or refused to learn altogether. The attitude towards the process of learning marked the life of the woman from the Romanian society. Thus, the common women remained anchored to the world of traditions and superstitions. Even though most of them did not attend church, they respected the times of fasting and involved themselves, with their full responsibility, in the preparation of the Christian holydays. In the same fashion, they lived in an archaic universe with a unitary concept of the cosmos, focused on an intuition that encompassed everything and projected the human being in the space-less and timeless, in an intimate communion between the sacred and the profane. In such a context, the young women learned from the older ones in the villages, who were initiated in magical practices and then, in turn, transmitted the chants, charms, and spells, as well as the “art” of taking care of new-born babies, ensuring the birth of a child and its spiritual protection to the next generation. The role of the woman as doula was extremely important, and the woman that had this status was revered by the members of a community, because the fate, health, and evolution of the children, and subsequently the future of that rural society, depended on her knowledge of folk medicine. Her role continued simultaneously with the practice, in some areas of Romania, of a ritual generated by the belief in the fates. Since these unseen mythical spirits had, according to the folk mentality, the capacity to foreshadow the existential coordinates of the human being, beyond time as a physical and historical duration, and the capacity to bestow the best of what life had to offer to the new-born baby, the doula prepared a ritualistic feast, called “the feast of the fates.” This was established on the third or seventh day after the birth. The doula underwent intense activity in preparing the meals that were going to be part of the ritualistic feast. The way in which she prepared the dishes and her behaviour while doing it exceeded the coordinates of common life, receiving symbolic and foreshadowing valences. Through each gesture and through each dish she made, she aimed towards the completion of a magical transfer from the properties of this behaviour to what was going to become the physical and mental characteristics of the child. The diversity of the meals and their abundance were motivated by the idea that the fates had to be “brightened-up” through a flush feast, so that

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39

they would endow the child with a beautiful and bountiful life. Afterwards, the doula wore a girdle that belonged to the baby’s mother, representing a kind of “magic circle,” and she went around the table with it. This ritualistic sequence was meant to fulfil the destiny of the child through the presence of the meals and their childhood and teenage years through their parents’ vigilance. The feast for the fates was protected throughout the night by the child’s parents, who were going to find out what the fates had decided for them. The next morning, the doula came back and distributed the offerings to the children from the neighbouring houses. This complex ritual, which took place until the second half of the twentieth century, emphasizes the significant role that the village doula— the magician-woman—had for centuries on end in the Romanian society. Apart from that of the doula, the world of the Romanian village created yet another role—the witch-woman or the disenchanting-woman. She had an active presence, especially in difficult times, given that she had the mission of banishing evil manifested in various forms: epidemics, individual physical suffering, spiritual drama, etc. The individual or the entire community used traditional magical-symbolical structures inherited from ancient times, because these satisfied functional requirements. The banishing ritual conducted by the witch was actually a way of transmitting “the results of a collective experience and a sociocultural behaviour, fixed in time through a collective consensus, through the authoritative force of tradition.”23 Through the witch-woman: The traditional system of making disenchantments as a cultural mediator fulfills the therapeutic and psychotherapeutic functionality on two fundamental coordinates: the removal of the condition and the restoration of the person’s physical and mental equilibrium.24

The reaction of the collectivity on the onset of a plague epidemic at the end of the seventeenth century is presented by the Italian Antonio Maria del Chiaro, who lived in Muntenia for a few years and worked as Constantin Brânconveanu’s secretary; he also travelled in the other Romanian provinces and knew the realities that existed in this geographic and cultural space at the time. He wrote that: When a contagious disease enters the Romanian Country, a certain number of women meet and, for a period of 24 hours, they spin, weave and sow a 23 24

Nicoleta Coatu, Structuri magice tradiĠionale (Bucureúti: BIC ALL, 1998), 18. Ibid., 21–2.

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Chapter Two linen shirt and then burn it in the centre of a courtyard and believe that by doing this, the plague is destroyed at the same time as the shirt.25

The ritualistic action occurred according to a certain scenario, with adequate ritualistic tools (the distaff), by associating certain gestures with a specific code, transmitted from generation to generation by the women who knew and practiced it: It is necessary that we mention that the plague, in Romanian folklore, had the appearance of a very ugly crone, dressed in white, with a sickle in her hand; sometimes she has the head of a human, the horns of an ox and the tail of a snake, on the tip of which there would have been a great sting with which she touched people and made them sick. From the ethnographic studies we also find out about magical methods of fighting plague, one of them being the ploughing of the land around the village by nude women or girls with dishevelled hair. In the ritual evoked by Antonio Maria del Chiaro, the shirt, woven and sown by old women or virgins during a single night and placed in the supposed itinerary of the disease, had an apotropaic role, and therefore it was a magical defence.26

We see that the woman had the most important role in the quotidian existence of the traditional collective mentality, because it was her—the virgin or the sinless woman, the mother (in Romanian mythology, there are countless “mothers” and “women”: The Woodwoman, the Windmother, the Mother of Earth, The Sunmother, the Mother of Daybreak, Mother of Rains)—who was endowed with magical powers and the capacity of overcoming the profane state, and creating an opening towards the integral, cosmic vision. She was a substitute, in the terrestrial, material dimension, of the Great Goddess, the Great Mother of the primordial, mythical times. We believe that this aspect is confirmed by the “feminine groups” that existed from ancient times until the middle of the twentieth century. The researcher Monica Brătulescu, in the study Ceata feminine—încercare de reconstituire a unei instituаii tradiаionale româneЮti (loosely translated as The Feminine Group—an Attempt at Restoring a Traditional Romanian Institution), opines that the feminine groups were preoccupied with ceremonies concerning:

25 26

Solcan, Femeile din Moldova, 261. Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 278.

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(a) The important role given to women in the folk tradition, ceremonial-wise (knowing plants, exorcisms, disenchantments, funerals). Monica Brătulescu opines that women were the: Main agents in the funereal ceremonies and exorcisms; this implied extensive knowledge in regards to plants, represents, if not an exclusive prerogative, at least a feminine specialty.27

(b) Ceremonies manifested through words, music, and dancing. Research shows that the role of carollers was given ex officio to women and girls. The specialty studies reveal that the role of carollers was assigned to girls and young women by tradition. The gathering, another important ceremony in the Romanian cultural space, was supported by a group of girls, usually during the winter, when agrarian chores could not be done. The group met at a “host,” customarily an old woman, chosen by the group for a period of between one to seven or even fifteen years. The host was invested with the power of kicking out those people considered inappropriate. This Romanian ceremony comprised—Monica Brătulescu mentions—a repertoire of sung texts and an ensemble of charms, disguises and games that fringed eroticism and had affinities with the funereal, too. In its recent forms, the ceremony was organized by the women who, during wintertime—save for the Christian holydays and those days that were considered ominous—gathered at a host that was changed on a weekly basis.28

During the gathering, the girls wove, spun, and sowed certain embroideries (in accordance with the skill and ability of each of them), told stories, and sang ballads, doinas, carols, and folksongs. A girl could be admitted to the group when she became thirteen. Before marriage, a special song was sung at the “girls’ meeting.” The lyrics of the songs affiliated with this ceremony underline the fact that the girls were prepared for their lives as women, wives, and mothers. Therefore, in such a sociocultural context of initiation, they were granted the knowledge of a code and a lexicon, as well as knowledge of the signification of those encodings found in the elements that had a symbolical value. Likewise, we 27

Monica Brătulescu, “Ceata feminine—încercare de reconstituire a unei instituĠii tradiĠionale româneúti,” Revista de Etnografie úi folclor 23 (1) (1978): 37. 28 Ibid., 41.

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must mention that the group of females had utmost authority in the youth of the community and had the power to punish those boys who did not marry the girls the group had recommended. Moreover, in order to woo a girl for marriage, a man had to get approval from the group of women. As Monica Brătulescu underlines in the aforementioned study, “the group of the women was transformed gradually in an institution with multiple roles … It was a girl’s school, with a crucial role in matrimonial matters.”29 This institution was the only one that allowed and facilitated, in a human universe anchored by prejudices, the free speech of women, in spite of the fact that this was done only metaphorically, through songs. Certain moralizing songs, collected by specialists from various women who participated in rituals, were included in folk anthologies. Their texts, which are very difficult to translate due to the cornucopia of regional terms used in them, contain chidings against the young men who refused to marry the girls whom they had had sexual relations with. The critical, sarcastic tone was dominant in these folklore creations because celibacy was neither accepted nor encouraged, and was therefore seen as a clear disrespect for a certain norm. As Monica Brătulescu observes in her study, the group of women functioned as a “rostrum of the feminine opinion,”30 as a “club” in which “news was transmitted, announcements were made, jokes were told and gossips went around,”31 as an initiation “school,” and as an “influential institution in matrimony.”32 Even though the church disagreed with this group of women because the texts, formulas, and ritualistic practices pertained more to the archaic, mythical universe than the Christian one, they lasted the test of time, almost until the present day. We think that this can be explained, on one hand, through the capacity of the Romanians to withstand what Mircea Eliade called “the terror of history,” and on the other through the extremely conservative spirit that suffused folk Christianity, a fruit of its own imaginary, with more importance than the type of Christianity supported and promoted by the specific institutional setting. In regard to the attitude towards the woman, the Romanian church did not condemn her on account of heresy or witchcraft, like in the West, but there was an influence of the word uttered in the church on the way in which family and the moral, social, individual, or collective life was organized.

29

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 54. 31 Ibid., 55. 32 Ibid., 57. 30

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In church, concerning feasts and when they participated in weddings, funerals, and calendar holydays, the positions each of the members of a community had were conditioned by sex and age. For instance, in the vast majority of the counties in Transylvania, the frontal part of the altar in the church was occupied by men, and the rearward part was occupied by women, with the two spaces usually separated by a one-metre tall fence.33 The space occupied by the men and the one occupied by women actually represent, as Ernest Bernea opines, “qualitative spaces” determined by importance, and the value assigned by the Romanian folk belief to each sex. According to the Romanian collective mentality, the woman was assigned an inferior status (essentially unchanged to this day). The primary sin has pressed on this status heavily. Because of that, it is not at all surprising that the woman was seen as being more powerful than the man only insomuch as she did magical acts, since she was “more apt of working with the Devil.”34 This idea that has crossed the centuries was so strongly anchored in the Romanian mentality that even women themselves believed it to be true. For example, in 1971 a countrywoman called Maria ğogoe, who was sixty at the time, knew how to read and write, and lived in the mountain village Poiana Mărului in the area of Braúov, said that: “women do more charms because, you see, they’ve been destined to from the start; the serpent went to her. That’s why she’s so into these things.”35 In rural communities, the women who had developed aptitudes concerning magic were known in general, and even the rituals they did to rejuvenate their forces were anything but a secret to the wider public. The people assimilated enough elements expressed by the representatives of the church, which were transposed in folklore and can be found in an infinitesimal percentage in other peoples. Thereby, concerning the creation of the woman, the Romanian parodies the biblical text and endows it with their natural sense of humour, saying: God considered And reconsidered … He thought that taking the woman From Adam’s heel would make her too Obedient to her man. And that wouldn’t be good. 33

Ernest Bernea, Sociologie Юi etnografie românească: Ordinea spirituală (Bucureúti: Vremea, 2009), 47. 34 Ibid., 75. 35 Ibid.

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Chapter Two But if he took the woman from Adam’s head, the woman would be Greater than the man, and again, That wouldn’t be good.

The continuation is the following from a different version: If I make Eve from his head, She will be wiser. If I make her from his eyes, She will see farther; If she is made out of his mouth, She’ll be talking so much that Nobody will ever want to listen …

Eventually, the creator made the woman from Adam’s rib, so she would be neither too superior nor too inferior to the man. Therefore, the social position of the Romanian woman is somewhere in the middle—she is the man’s life companion and has the power to make decisions! In general, the Romanian people have always appreciated the sharp intelligence and fascinating skill of the woman, often used for bad deeds. Because of this, the Romanian peasant thought that the Devil himself could not have competed with her, had aged because of her, and that “she judges the Devil, and somehow, the Devil ends up being indebted to her.” The woman’s ingenuity determined the Romanian peasant to think that God made some serious mistakes when he created the woman. In a story from the volume The Story of the World of Yore by Tudor Pamfile, making fun of the woman’s character paves the way for parodying her creation. It is said that after he created Adam, God summoned an angel and asked him to steal one of the man’s ribs and bring it to him so he could make the woman from it. After he took the rib and was returning to God with it, the angel met a Devil who stole the rib and ran back to hell, with the angel on his trail. When he was about to enter the doorway to hell, the angel caught his tail and pulled it so hard that it broke. When he got back to heaven, God didn’t ask him what he had brought and he started a blessing, saying: “May a woman be made out of it! And a woman there was.”36 From a second story, we learn that the woman was created from a dog’s tail. After he created Adam, the creator decided to create his pair from his own rib. While he stitched his wound, the Devil, transformed into a dog, stole the rib. God—who becomes the main character of the story—cannot find the 36

Tudor Pamfile, Povestea lumii de demult (Bucureúti: Paideia, 2002), 98–9.

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rib and starts looking for it. He sees a dog chewing on a bone in a bush and realizes that the Devil had tried to destroy his act of creation. God runs after the dog, catching it by the tail and making it jerk. God starts pulling and ends up with the dog’s tail in his hands. Upset that things did not go according to his plan, he slams the tail down and states: “May the woman be made out of the dog’s tail.” And as he said, so it was done. And ever since, the woman has devil-hair. Man will never have any respite until he plucks it all out. This gave birth to the belief that, if you want to make a dog go bad, like women, you must cut its tail and feed it to it, and he will turn as evil as the Devil.37

The same scenario can be found in the story in which the woman was purportedly created from a cat’s tail, her genesis from this inferior “material” accounting for her penchant for guile. According to Tudor Pamfile, the Bulgarians, French, Portuguese, and Arabians also have these stories concerning the woman’s creation,38 which shows that men always sought to acquire supremacy, making the woman inferior in the process. Because the woman has been created through errors of a divine nature, she needs to resize her own valence on a regular basis and militate in favour of what is so painfully obvious: her well-defined role in the Romanian society, and this on account of the fact that everything pertaining to her was looked on and judged as a Fata Morgana type of thing—in other words, she was judged by what she could have been, but was not. To conclude, we can say that in the Romanian traditional society the woman had a disadvantaged status, from a social standpoint, having been marginalized and looked on with superiority. But from a cultural standpoint, she has generated countless questions and a deep fascination. The pages—written or unwritten—about the woman in the Romanian traditional society remain open.

The Ia—the Imperative Element of the Uniqueness of the Romanian Woman’s Traditional Costume Like any other people in the world, the Romanian identifies themselves through their traditional costume, which exhibits remarkable artistic attributes. Unitary in its ensemble, even though some notes may differ 37 38

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102.

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from one region to another, this traditional costume is eye-catching for the aesthete thanks to its sombre cut and the decorative element of each piece that goes into it. Anthropologists and ethnologists alike have observed that the Romanians inherited, for the most part, the costume of their ancestors, the Thracian-Dacians, a thesis that confirms the fact that the most important piece of their traditional costume is the shirt (for both women and men), attested on Trajan’s Column and the Monument of Adamclisi (built at Trajan’s bidding between AD 108–9). On this monument one can see the simple, archaic cut of the woman’s shirt. The research that has been conducted by specialists in the last century could not assess the exact date when the traditional Romanian shirt appeared, but presumably it was worn for the first time by the population of the Cucuteni culture. The age of the most important piece of the woman’s costume (the ia) caused its involvement in the issues of the ethnogenesis, unity, and continuity of the Romanians from the Danubian-Carpathian space. The name “ia” comes from the Latin term tunicae lineae (a light tunic worn on the skin), and is used in the Romanian space for the woman’s shirt only, whereas the word for its men’s counterpart is “shirt” (camisia), a term also borrowed from the Celtic background of the Latin language, denominating “a piece of garment worn in the colder regions of Europe.”39 The ia, in many villages in Bucovina, Maramure‫܈‬, and the surrounding area of the Apuseni Mountains, is still made by women for themselves. Centuries ago, girls could not get married if they didn’t know how to weave, sew, spin wool, or tailor a shirt. Because of this, the outstanding beauty of the ia comes from not only the fabric, colours, and ornamental motifs, but also the love, trust, and hope the Romanian women pour into making it. The ia is connected with the entire context of the fabric culture of Romania, starting with the raw material and the technique used in processing it, because the linen it was made out of was woven in the households of those peasants who cultivated linen and hemp in the first place. Later on, the women started using cotton and silk threads, particularly in Moldavia, Muntenia, Dobrudja, and Oltenia. The old form of the traditional shirt was “a long shirt with hems,” which became “a short shirt” or “ie” by removing the hems. These are tied to the waist separately. An essential general feature of the ia is the sleeve: it is always long and never low-necked, the round opening being closely tied around one’s neck. 39 Zamfira Mihail, Terminologia portului popular românesc în perspectivă etnolingvistică comparată (Bucureúti: Academia Română, 1978), 49–50.

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There are two main types of women’s shirts: the linear/straight and the corrugated (ie). These, in their turn, produce various regional models. The two types spread over a vast space, beyond the boundaries of Romania. The first and oldest is simple, being tailored from a single piece of linen, with an opening in the middle at the shoulder-line. It does not have any seams on the shoulders and is always collarless. The second type is considerably more complicated and implies a more advanced technique, albeit having a simple form, being made from four straight pieces of linen, corrugated with a thread around the woman’s neck. One piece falls to the front and one to the back, and two pieces fall at the shoulders. By uniting these pieces of linen and corrugating them, the shirt that is worn in most of the Romanian space, except for Maramures, Dobrudja, and east of the Bărăgan Plain, is formed. The corrugated shirt is also called the “shirt with alti‫܊‬a”—this is, a wide, ornamented strip sown onto the sleeve. It represents the defining element of the model or piece of linen that is introduced along the sleeve in order to widen it. It can also be a triangle of linen used in widening the ia at the base of the neck. Apart from the fundamental technical criterion, we must pay attention to the aesthetic one as well, because it has its own technical implications in respect to the ornaments. The corrugated shirt distinguishes itself through the extremely fine decorations of cutting-edge artistry. These ornaments were made of fabrics like wool, linen, and silk thread, usually in their natural colour, and in the last decades women started to use artificial wool, mercerized cotton, and vegetal silk. However, these latter fabrics altered the chromatic harmony of the shirt due to their powerful colours. In some areas, also used were golden or silver metallic wires, marbles, and sequins in order to make the shirts shiny and emphasize the decorative richness and variety. The motifs sown onto the shirts are displayed by specialists in three categories: geometrical, vegetal, and zoomorphic. They can appear either individually or as combined in various ways. x The commonest geometrical motifs are the square, rhombus, circle, triangle, hexagon, and rectilinear and spiralled lines. Usually, the square and the rhombus form the basis of the ornaments. The point or the circle is the central element of the ornament. x The vegetal motifs are most important in the weavings on an ia. It must be mentioned that these are not standalone motifs, but appear in combination with the geometrical ones. Moreover, we ought to say that until the second decade of the twentieth century, the vegetal ornament was not developed in a naturalistic way, but was stylized. The stems, branches, and petals were disposed as

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agglomerations and labyrinths of lines, points, and circles. From the end of the 1920s, the naturalistic motifs started to appear sporadically in many Romanian areas. x The zoomorphic and avimorphic motifs are seen on an ia more rarely. The commonest avimorphic one is the little chicken. Another aspect that catches the eye concerns the chromatics used by the Romanian women in making the ornaments. The fundamental colours in doing this were red and black, to which orange, yellow, blue, and green were added later. The women used vegetal colours. At some point, each region got its own palette of colours, refined and revealing the love of the Romanians for aesthetically pleasing designs. With respect to the preference for certain colours, it is known that the older women and those who were married opted for colder colours, while the younger ones chose warmer ones. Worn during holydays, weddings, and funerals, the ia, undoubtedly the most beautiful element of the woman’s costume, granted the Romanian women grace, beauty, and even noblesse for centuries on end. Today, it is worn rarely, during folkloric festivals, the National Day, and weddings, and is considered by some to be a museum object, and others a thing with magical properties which, once seen, is branded in one’s mind forever because for the women in Romania the lecture on dignity and beauty could start with the ia. In recent years, the ia has regained its place in the quotidian clothing, this time as an avenging gesture meant to recover its identity and traditional manifestations. Countless national and international projects (usually organized by the Romanians in the diaspora) intend to present the ia as being not only a national brand, but one that requires integration with the UNESCO patrimony. This is the reason why, during the night of the Sânziene, there are many events dedicated to the ia, on which the symbolism of the patterns and colours is explained, alongside polemics concerning the value of these art objects in regard to the techniques of sewing and weaving, exhibits of photos and the ia, workshops for weaving and sewing, film and traditional art festivals, conferences, and scientific presentations. And even more important than this is the fact that the ia became a part of everyday outfits, since it works fine with jeans or skirts, and can be worn on holydays as well as at the office. Several manufacturers attempt to recapture the patterns and sewing techniques of the ia. Many Romanian fashion designers use traditional elements (sometimes authentic, ancient pieces) in their creations. The ia is in vogue nowadays and that is a reason

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to be proud. Keep in mind as well that it is the most impressive gift one can make to a friend, regardless of whether the friend is Romanian or not.

CHAPTER THREE DEMONIC MYTHICAL BEINGS

The mythology of the Romanian people, like any other mythology, is a bona fide “show” of the human being’s imagination. Thanks to its orality, it was substantialized in superstitions and rituals, stories, fairy tales, and legends. All of these exhibit important aspects concerning the archaic mentality. The folk creations circumscribe certain existential and ethical codes of the collectivities that inherited, maintained, and transmitted them to the next generations. Many mythic and ritualistic elements were preserved, even though communism for the most part removed the traditional dimension of the Romanian village, and in spite of the fact that, after 1990, the rural environment adopted aspects of modernity. There are villages in Bucovina, Maramure‫܈‬, Oltenia, and Transylvania in which the traditional lode has seen a new re-dimensioning. It is true that the human of the third millennium does not quite understand the beliefs of the archaic world which, in confrontation with inexplicable, unknown forces, used various magic-ritualistic practices in order to remove them and re-establish the existential equilibrium. Demonology (or “mythic daimonology,” as Romulus Vulcănescu calls it) originated in the Romanian beliefs and superstitions, determined by the fear of the violence of the difficult-to-master natural forces, and fear of those beings with superhuman attributes, like witches and demons. This demonology is populated by good beings (fairies, elves, the serpent of the house), maleficent beings (strigoii, werewolves, ogres, pricolici,1 tricolici,2 1

Pricolicii are zoo-anthropomorphic demons. They can be live people that have been transformed into wolves for a certain period of time or the souls of evil people that have not been allowed to enter the underworld. It was believed that illegitimate children whose grandparents or parents had been illegitimate children themselves, or those who had died without having baptized, could become pricolici. The ninth child born in the same month as his bigger brothers, a corpse a cat had ran over, people who had passed under the catafalque of a dead man, people who had drank their blood or other people’s blood, those who had committed suicide, and those who did not know the most important prayers—all of

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the Woodwoman, the Iele, the Rusalii, the ‫܇‬tima Apei), or ambivalent ones (the Fates, Joimări‫܊‬a,3 and Mar‫܊‬olea4). All of them can act in favour of or against people, or can have judicious attributes, thus influencing a person’s destiny. The Iele, the Rusalii, the ‫܇‬tima Apei, and the Woodwoman are known as mythical “cultural models” of the witches. As Mircea Eliade observes, “the Romanian witches illustrate the authenticity of a pre-Christian scenario built of oneirical travels and an extatic ritualistic battle—a model attested in many other European regions.”5 The Romanian mythology did not encompass a pantheon with vital, distinct deities; therefore, the area of divinities became large and varied. In the context of demonology, which occupies a significant place in the Romanian cultural space, the beings and spirits with feminine features are in the highest number. They are neither one hundred percent maleficent nor benevolent, so, as Ivan Evseev opines, their attitude is determined “not as much by their fundamental attributes as by the behaviour of the people,

these were prone to becoming pricolici. They could transform into dogs, cats, donkeys, pigs, bears, and mice, as well as wolves. The metamorphosis, however, is not total because they keep their human appearance. Salvation can come if a person throws a piece of bread to a wolf. The pricolici are active during the night, particularly during the night of Saint Andrew (November 29–30), also called the Night of the Strigoi. 2 Zoo-anthropomorphic demons. The word comes from Greek and means “man with wolf hair.” Those born out of intercourse between wolves and women or shewolves with men could become tricolici. They wandered during the nights with full moons and killed the living. 3 A mythical demon imagined as a very tall, hideous woman, with a huge head and sparse teeth, covered with a thick blanket. She appeared on the Thursday before Easter in the houses where fire was lit in the stoves and food was laid out for the dead. She was seen as the goddess of hemp. She checked to see whether or not women had weaved all the hemp they had. She punished those who had been lazy by putting their hands on the embers or crushing their fingers. She also punished the men that had not finished ploughing their fields. 4 Another Romanian evil spirit. She punished the women that span wool on a Tuesday night by crushing their fingers or stabbing them. She sometimes took the form of woman’s mother, helping her finish her work before taking vengeance. In order to get rid of it, the woman had to scream that the Canagal hill was burning. The spirit then disappeared because the Canagal hill was where she lived and her children were home alone. 5 Mircea Eliade, Ocultism, vrăjitorie úi mode culturale (Bucureúti: Humanitas, 2006), 102.

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by the quality of the answer given to the challenges from the world of the numinous and the unfathomable.”6 Within the rich demonic pantheon, the Iele, the Rusalii, the ‫܇‬tima Apei, and the Woodwoman are most represented in the Romanian folkloric beliefs and creations. We must mention that, in the mythical vision, “meeting” with such demonic beings is imagined as taking place in nature (in the woods, on the fields, by a river or a well, at a crossroads), but only at or after midnight until the break of dawn. The period is not random, because it is known that this short temporal extent (three to four hours) is generally considered to be replete with perils that can hardly be anticipated, as it contains a maximum coefficient of magical charge. Likewise, let us not forget that the night and darkness signify the unconscious, anguish, regression, and state of chaos. That is why, in the past, peasants refrained from leaving the house or lingering on the road after midnight. The collective mentality imagined all sorts of maleficent beings (the Devil, witches, strigoii, Iele, the Woodwoman, etc.) that roam freely in open spaces in the interval between midnight and four am. In the situation in which someone met such demons they used the ritualistic gesture of drawing a circle. The person sat in the middle of the circle and prayed to God to defend them from what they could see and hear. In general, however, the peasants of the traditional Romanian world respected the ethical and behavioural norms of the collectivity in an attempt to avoid nefarious situations that could generate disequilibrium in both the individual and the community they belonged to.

The Iele One of the mythological representations of the demonic, the Iele, recalls the groups of girls from antiquity that, during certain holydays, went into clearings and danced, revealing in the process a message from a collective dimension of the ludicrous. Their beauty, singing, and dancing suggested the return to a primordial, heavenly universe. The generic profile of these fascinating mythical beings is captured in the legends, disenchantments, fairy tales, and beliefs of the traditional Romanian world. Demonic spirits or ghosts, “droll beings” (as Marcel Olinescu7 calls them), and “fairies of the forests and the fields” (in Romulus Vulcănescu’s 6 Ivan Evseev, DicĠionar de magie, demonologie úi mitologie românească (Timiúoara: Amarcord, 1998), 8.

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opinion8), the Iele are personifications of the ever-changing atmospheric conditions, mysterious mythical beings that are “capricious, frolicsome and ambivalent ghosts” (according to Ivan Evseev9). The belief in the Iele existed in the entire space inhabited by Romanians, as well as elsewhere in Eastern Europe (for instance, the Bulgarians call them Samovila and the Serbs call them Vila). Their description and demonical features differ from region to region and from people to people. The collective mentality, regardless of area, in the Eastern European space pictured them as beings that inhabit the sky, forests, rocks, riverbanks, fields, caves, and crossroads. They were imagined as capable of flight and having all sorts of musical instruments and musicians “taken from the world.”10 Their definition is debatable, because they were imagined as women or as “cute Drăgaice,” evil spirits of the firmament that “enter the man” as “rabid, horrifying” storms, “devilish, evil souls” or saints “with great power,” but “dangerous” and “redeeming.”11 In the view of Romanian linguists, “Iele” is the phonetic transcription of the personal pronoun “them,” with reference to the feminine form. However, there are also other explanations from the people of the culture of the nineteenth century. The most interesting hypothesis is formulated by the writer, ethnologist, and mythologist Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, who opined that a superposition can be made between the Romanian word “Iele” and the Greek word “ghele.” The coincidence of the “Iele” in the Romanian language with the “ghele” from the Greek provincialism, prior to the Slavic invasion, demonstrates that the Greeks and Romanians could not get them from anyone but the old, intermediary population between Thrace and Hellas, and therefore from the Thracians only. The Serbians later took them as Vile … The Sanskrit correspondent of the “Iele” is vêlâ, which can surely satisfy all the material and functional conditions herein. The Sanskrit vêlâ means, on one hand, illness and quick death and, on the other hand, a volatile party … derived from the root vêl, “to move,” which applies to wind, too, explaining the epithet of our Iele (“mistresses of the wind”) … The Greek

7

Marcel Olinescu, Mitologie românească (Bucureúti: Saeculum I.O., 2001), 320. Romulus Vulcănescu, Mitologie română (Bucureúti: Academia Română, 1985), 428. 9 Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 208. 10 Ion Muúlea and Ovidiu Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului din răspunsurile la chestionarele lui B.P.Hasdeu (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1970), 211. 11 Ibidem, 209.. 8

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Ghela, the Serbian Vila and the Romanian Iela, all of them corresponding to the Sanskrit vêlâ, were three provincial Thracian forms.12

Bogdan Petriceicu Ha‫܈‬deu’s theory, which descends into Sanskrit and Thracian mythology, justifies only the euphemistic denomination of “Mistresses of the Wind” offered by the people of the archaic society. In our opinion, the etymology brought forth by linguistics, according to which it is a phonetic transcription of the pronoun “them,” seems much more plausible. This places us closer to the mythological paradigm concerning the various euphemistic names attributed to the Iele: the Gorgeous Ones, the Ladies, the Merciful, the Beautiful, the Prideful, the Girls of the Field, Them, the Girls of the Woods, the Virgins, the ‫܇‬oimane, the Vântoase, the Empresses of the Firmament, the Goddesses, the Night Saints, the Mistresses of the Wind, the Irodi‫܊‬e, etc. This polynomiality emphasizes an exceptional mythical polyvalence.13 Besides, the word “Iele” itself is a euphemism, a “ritualistic appellative.”14 The people used it because, according to the collective mentality, the one who would have discovered its signification and uttered their real name was at risk of being deprived of their voice. In the vast majority of the Romanian regions, the peasants attributed them normal names like Cosânzeana, Sânziana, Trandafira, Ana, Magdalina, Ro‫܈‬ia, Todosia, Ruxanda, Ruja, Rudeana, Lemnica, etc. A widespread belief says that the Iele have a master called Irodia, Irodeasa, or The Lady. According to the Romanian collective mentality which contoured its own Christian mythology, Irodia or Irodeasa had fallen in love with John the Baptist, but because he did not return her love she asked the emperor Herod to behead him—she wanted his head so she could caress and kiss it. Because of this, the divinity punished Irodia, causing her to fail in finding rest until the end of the world. The Romanians believed she became a spirit that travels incessantly and dominates other phantoms, like those of the Iele. Her quality as master of the Iele, attributed by the Romanian collective mentality, is not random, because, just like Irodia, the “masters of the firmament” are imagined as being in permanent movement, wandering, causing disequilibrium and disorder in peoples’ lives. This would explain why, to a certain extent, one of the folk beliefs concerning their origin states that they might be the souls of spellbound 12

Apud Lazăr ùăineanu, Ielele sau Zânele rele: studii de folclor (Bucureúti: Saeculum I. O., 2012), 104. 13 Vulcănescu, Mitologie română, 429. 14 Ibid.

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young women that cannot be forgiven by God because of their evil deeds and are under the reign of the Devil. From this standpoint, the Iele could be considered instruments of evil that serve to produce chaos and ontological disequilibrium. The Iele have represented a symbol of the atmospheric forces and the impossibility of the archaic person controlling and dominating them. As for their origin, the Romanian legends offer us the following hypotheses: (1) They could be the souls of spellbound women and that is why they cannot find rest in life or death, and God does not want to have anything to do with them (2) The Iele are the daughters of a certain Emperor Rusalim, whose subjects were christened; that’s why they hate Christians and withdrew to forests and fields (3) According to another folk belief, they were the three housemaids of Alexander the Great (Katrina, Zalina, and Marina). After they found a flask of water and drank it, they started to fly, looking for the Emperor’s horse, which had also drunk from the water. The horse, called Ducipal, hid at the bottom of the sea, and the girls were to find him when the end of the world drew near and return him to Alexander the Great. Then, the Emperor and three girls will enter paradise, where they will live happily. From that moment, their punishment of humans will cease. From a version that combines the two previous stories, we learn that the Iele (nine of them) are the daughters of Rusalim, an ancient emperor in whose kingdom Alexander the Great accidentally entered. He took the water and, when he left, took the nine girls as servants. They drank the water and became immortal. They grew wings and flew out of the window, transforming into Iele. Ever since then, they travel to three parts of the world, each of them with their own trade. It is said that three of them steal people’s veins, three make love charms, and the remaining three (the oldest) take care of the new-born babies. (4) Finally, the last “explanation” that we know from the folk people in regard to their origin is that the Iele are either beautiful girls transformed into ugly crones, or ugly crones transformed into extremely beautiful girls, as a consequence of wronging God or the Devil, who cursed them to change their appearance until they decided to lift the curse. This also accounts for their capriciousness.

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(5) There is a belief that the “Iele originate in the souls of the girls who died by drowning before getting married,”15 indicating their membership to “the feminine spirits of the ancestors.”16 Those who appear as beautiful women are dressed in white clothes or are completely naked and have long hair. They are sensual and can be seen after midnight by certain people, in particular young, unmarried boys who fall madly in love with these “phantasms.” It was said that the boys who were consumed with love for the Iele ran restlessly in search for them, day and night, especially at crossroads. This passion for the Iele sickened them. In order to treat the malady, spells and disenchantments were used. However, they could not be cured completely. When they appeared as ugly crones, they used the same means of seduction as their beautiful counterparts. In this hypostasis, if they were refused by the boys they made them ill or killed them. The mythical meanings attributed to them are dyadic, as they are seen as good or evil fairies. When the women who dealt with magic wanted to get a favour from them, they summoned them with euphemisms, like in the following example: You, good fairies, Beautiful, Powerful, Pitiful, Courageous, Loved Mistresses, I beg of you with Sweet words, to help X.17

In order to constrain them, the folk people used insults, like in the following example: You Unmerciful, Evil, Old, Hideous, what did he do to you That you did not like? Why did you disfigure and doom The loved one? 15

Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 209. Ibid. 17 The witch uttered the name of the person who had to be cured of the malady caused by the Iele. 16

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58 Damn you, Old girls, Vile, dissolute fairies.

The group of Iele is always uneven: three (the ugly ones) or seven to nine (the beautiful ones), their number varying from one region to another. For instance, in the disenchantments from Bucovina, the folklorist Simion Florea Marian identified three Iele named Margalina, Savatina, and Rujalina. This aspect inspired the esotericist Vasile Lovinescu to identify the similarity between the Iele and the triple Hecate from Greek mythology. In the books of Romanian mythology for the most part written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is stated that they could be seen only at night, floating through the air, by the wells, through the trees, and on the roofs of houses, joined by musicians. Wherever they danced, the soil was burned and the grass was blackened. These were the distinct signs of their presence in a certain space. The Romanians considered that these “fairies” had vigilante qualities, because they punished the people who did bad deeds, fell asleep under trees (the trees that belonged to them, the Iele), drank from their wells, refused to dance with them, or did not respect the days consecrated to them: nine Thursdays after Easter, the fiftieth day from Easter (Whitsuntide), and the holyday of Sânziene (Drăgaica), which coincides with the Birth of Saint John the Baptist (June 24). Those people were lifted from the ground and disfigured. If a bad man met them and they wanted to punish him, they lured him with songs, put him to sleep, and danced their dance three times around him, cursing him to be unable to talk, to go mad, and to find no cure whatsoever. Therefore, some forms of rheumatism and neuropsychiatric maladies were attributed to these demonic beings. The sudden sickness and death of the cattle were also blamed on the maleficent Iele. Other phenomena were also blamed on them, such as floods, hail, and the withering of trees. It was believed that where they danced, the grass did not grow anymore; in isolated cases, if it did, it had a dark green colour and the cattle could not eat it. For peasants, this was a clear sign there was something evil in their existential space. Concerning the effect of the “hora of the Iele,” the mythologist Victor Kernbach claims that it is considerably old: Be it that a certain superstition was spread to more peoples, be it that it was brought by the Romans in Dacia, because we find an example mentioned by Tacitus, when some soldiers, suddenly stricken with delirium, charge with their swords into the centurions (“Repente lymphatic, destrictis

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gladiis, in centuriones invadunt”); supposedly, these soldiers saw a nymph at a spring, and they went delirious, frenetic and insane, since the attack on the centurions was not motivated by evident antecedents.18

We consider that the researcher is right when he observes certain similarities between the Iele of the Romanian, the Nymphs and the Nayads from the Greek-Roman, and the Elves from the German mythologies.19 The chaotic, nocturnal dances of the delirious Iele in the open fields remind us of the orgiastic dances of the Bacchantes during the antique holydays in honour of Dionysus or Bacchus. It is possible that these mysterious beings of the Romanian pantheon might have been a reminiscence of some of the Bacchantes from the Thracian-Dacian space, initiated in the mysteries of a deity that might have born similarities to Bacchus/Dionysus, but whose name was not maintained in the oral tradition. In order to defend themselves against the Iele, the villagers ate garlic— especially during the days consecrated to them—wore wormwood or garlic tied to their belts, put horse skulls on the roofs of their houses, and, on Whitsuntide, danced the dance of the Călu‫܈‬arii. Legend has it that the person who saw them had to fall three times to get rid of their evil influence on his health. It must be mentioned that they had no negative influence on good, hearty people with outstanding qualities. The Romanians say that the Iele are not made of flesh and bone; they are radiant ghosts, with women’s faces, and that only angels can be more beautiful than the young and magnificent ones. Their songs are particularly excellent, having no equivalent in the mundane space, and they were probably heard somewhere back in time by the young boys who slept outside during the night, with their heads on the threshold. It is only that those boys did not remember the songs completely, just some fragments of them. This is how our peasants explain the genesis of our folk songs. The peasants considered that the extraordinary sounds of various musical instruments (whistles, pan pipes, and trumpet) were the effect of Iele “spells.” Belief has it that the one who wanted to acquire such an instrument had to fill the digitation holes with wax to lubricate it and then fill it with milk, following which, naked and with their hands behind their back, they buried it during the night at the crossroads. The instrument (usually a whistle) was left there for one or three nights. When the peasant 18 19

Kernbach, Universul mitic, 236. Ibid., 235.

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went back there at midnight, they met with the Iele who asked them what it was he wanted. They asked them for “the gift of the song,” and the Iele asked them for a limb in exchange (a hand, foot, or finger). The peasant had to agree to give them one of their little fingers. When the Iele were about to take it, the person talked to the Iele until the break of dawn when they disappeared because their power ceased at that moment. The person subsequently got away unharmed. Then, still naked, they dug up the whistle, which was now “charmed by the Iele, because they took it from the ground, played it and put it back.” From that moment onwards, the person had the “gift of the Iele,” i.e. the ability to play incredibly well.20

The Rusalii The demonic spirits of the air that can generate storms capable of causing human and material damage are the Rusalii, mistaken in many Romanian villages for the Iele. These are mythical beings that preside over the holyday of Whitsuntide, religiously known as the Descent of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the term defines both a holyday and a category of mythical beings that wander the fields, forests, and lakes at night for a week. They are imagined as being old, ugly crones generally grouped in an uneven number (three, five, seven, or nine). During the nights from Easter to the Descent of the Holy Spirit, they manifest their aggressiveness, and if it so happens that they are seen or heard by a human, that individual must not move or speak to them. There is a belief according to which the Rusalii disfigure humans: “they rotate their heads backwards, they break their arms or legs, gouge their eyes out, lift the men into the air and then let them fall to break their bones … they can make men go mad,”21 or “they send diseases and various handicaps to those who wander in forbidden places, particularly during the night.”22 Obviously, such brutalities represented for the collective mentality a consequence of violating certain moral principles that were crucial for the rural community, as well as trespassing strict, ancient religious and existential norms, transmitted from generation to generation throughout the centuries. What is remarkable is that the representatives of the Christian Orthodox Church were not able to remove the pre-Christian 20

Muúlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului din răspunsurile la chestionarele lui B.P.Hasdeu, 211–12. 21 Ion Taloú, Gândirea magico-religioasă la români. DicĠionar (Bucureúti: Enciclopedică, 2001), 128. 22 Antoaneta Olteanu, DicĠionar de mitologie. Demoni, duhuri, spirite (Bucureúti: Paideia, 2004), 368.

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beliefs and superstitions, which were preserved, in an unaltered form, in the conscience of the masses. They attempted to do this for a thousand years, but were ultimately unsuccessful. In order to avoid the perils generated by the Rusalii, the peasants did not work the fields during their week, did not get water from the wells during the night, and in the night before the holyday they put wormwood on their beds, above their doors, or on the roofs of their houses. If they did not have wormwood, they used garlic and lovage, having faith in their apotropaic value. Moreover, they thought that welcoming the group of Călu‫܈‬ari into their houses was beneficial. Even today, Romanians give alms for the dead on the Saturday that precedes Whitsuntide—the “Saturday of the Summer Graybeards”— because it is thought that these brighten the Rusalii up. This aspect justifies the fact that the Rusalii were considered to be the feminine spirits of the dead. In line with popular belief, these spirits were allowed to visit their families in the weeks between Easter and the Descent of the Holy Spirit, after which they returned to the “otherworld.” Other southeastern European peoples give alms for the dead as well, such as “pots for milk with rose garlands and colored eggs.”23 The rose garlands are probably reminiscences of the Roman holyday dedicated to the Rosalia flowers, recorded in the southeastern part of Romania called Dobrudja. This used to take place at the end of spring and was converted, through the centuries, into Whitsuntide. Just like the Iele, the Rusalii are characterized by restlessness, wandering, a penchant for singing, and especially a passion for dancing frenetically. The choreographic act is finalized by the “falling into a hypnotized sleep: the Downfall of the Rusalii (a ritual on the Sunday of Whitsuntide), attested to by the Romanians from Timoc (Serbia).”24 The Rusalii from the Romanian mythology are the counterparts of the Rusalki from the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Bulgarian mythologies, with the only difference being that the latter are pictured as beautiful, winged girls with long blond or green hair. The same magical valence of the dance is attributed to the Rusalki, their choreography ending with the “running on the fields during the Week of the Whitsuntide”25 (the period between the Ascension and the Holyday of the Holy Trinity).

23

Ibid., 129. Kernbach, Universul mitic, 237. 25 Ibid. 24

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The ùtima Apei Another representation of the mythological feminine demonic is the ‫܇‬tima Apei, also known as the Lady of the River. In the Romanian language, the term “‫܈‬timă” was borrowed from the German “stimme,” which translates as “voice.” Subsequently, ‫܇‬tima Apei means “Voice of the Water.” In the Romanian mythology, she was pictured as a tall, robust woman with golden hair as long as her body and dressed in a white shirt that reached her ankles. She bathed or played in the water. She was often seen as having a cartoonish appearance, her breasts so big that she has to throw them over her shoulders. Some say she was half woman, half fish (a siren of the running waters of Romania), or half woman and half man (an image of the primordial, androgynous being). She lives in streams, generally in wide rivers. She is particularly fond of wreaking havoc during the night, especially when the moon is shining. Because she is preoccupied with preserving the equilibrium of the waters, she requires a human sacrifice during periods of drought or floods. The people saw her as being sly, because she lures her victims with an obsessive moan. From time to time, she says: “The time has come, but the man did not!” According to some legends, this ghost of the telluric collaborated with the Devil, which, upon hearing this formula, sent her a human, usually a man. In line with other Romanian legends, she is the Devil incarnate. This idea appears in legends from Bucovina—before the world was created, there was only the water in which God and the Devil, the primordial beings, swam. At some point, God got tired of travelling on the endless ocean. He wanted to rest, so he decided to do something about it. He took dirt from underneath his nails and moulded a small island on which he and the Devil (who did not ask for permission) sat. God, exhausted, fell asleep. The Devil thought of pushing him into the water and drowning him so he could become master over everything. It’s just that, the more he pushed God, the greater the island became; eventually, it reached such a great size that it became the Earth we live on today. Then God woke up, took the Devil by the head, and threw him into the depths of the water, cursing him to spend his life there for all eternity, and that “whoever would cross that water and would fall prey to his charms, to be drowned.”26 Legend has it that, ever since, the Devil has lived in water and drowned people in it. The name for him became “the Devil from the Valley,” “‫܇‬tima Apei,” or “the One Who Drowns.” It was believed that the Devil 26

Simion Florea Marian, Mitologie românească (Bucureúti: Paideia, 2000), 66.

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did not show himself as he was, but as a man or woman, depending on the gender of the person he sought to drown, functioning on the principle of the attraction between sexes. Generally, he appeared as a woman, which explains the feminine “‫܇‬tima Apei.” She has children known as the “Water People” or the “Water Girls.” This mythological character is circumscribed to an ancient system of beliefs that existed in Europe with the peoples from the northern part of the continent, where legends about this aquatic demon exist. The mythical “scenario” we find in the Norwegian and the Romanian legends is the following: in the proximity of water, especially a river, a certain voice can be heard saying “the hour has come, but the man did not.” It does not take long for a human (customarily a man) to arrive, wishing to cross the water or just bathe his feet. Whoever might be around him and try to stop him would be unsuccessful, because the “called” one dies at the touch of the water or drowns unexpectedly in shallow water. The Ethnologist Constantin Eretescu mentions that, “in some versions, the legend boils down to the voice that can be heard from the river and then the news that a person drowned in that place a little while afterwards.”27 The Norwegian folklorist Reidar Thosalf Christiansen includes thirtyfive versions of the legend in The Migratory Legends: a Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of Norwegian Variants (1958). Consequently, as Constantin Eretescu shows, “the density of the variants in rapport with the territory is decidedly in favor of the Scandinavian countries,” and generates the supposition that the mythological legend about this supernatural being “was created in the north of the continent, wherefrom it irradiated towards the south, reaching the space inhabited by Romanians.”28 In Romania, a few variants are incorporated by Tudor Pamfile in Mitologie Românească (1916) and by Maria Ioni‫܊‬ă in Cartea Vâlvelor. Legende din Munаii Apuseni (1982). Both of these books have approximately the same content as the one presented above. For the sake of a better example, two of the stories included by Tudor Pamfile in Mitologie românească are edifying. In the first, it is recounted how some people who stood on the banks of the Prut River29 heard the ‫܇‬tima at midnight saying: “The hour has come, but the man did not!” Shortly after, they saw a young boy on horseback, riding speedily towards the water. 27

Constantin Eretescu, ùtima Apei. Studii de mitologie úi folclor (Bucureúti: Etnologică, 2007), 10. 28 Ibid., 11. 29 The Prut River is Romania’s natural eastern border, which separates the country from Moldava and Ukraine.

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The men caught him by the hands in an attempt to stop him. He begged them to let him soak his feet in the river’s water. They agreed and the boy died as soon as he touched the water.30 The second story was narrated by an informant from the area of Dorna in Bucovina, and was based on real facts she had experienced as a young girl. On a Saturday, during summertime, the woman was making the hay on a field into haystacks, and finished the job around midnight. After this, she decided to take a shortcut along the shore of the Bistri‫܊‬a River. At some point she heard a voice from the water, repeating thrice: “The hour has come, but the man did not!” The third time the voice said these words, a “beautiful lad, as beautiful as a star, astraddle a horse like a dragon”31 came out of nowhere. He was riding speedily and beating his horse to get it to enter the river, but the horse did not want to. Ultimately, due to the boy’s beatings, the horse jumped into the water. When the two reached the middle of the Bistri‫܊‬a River, they drowned. The witness of this occurrence adds that the animal got out of the water foaming, but the boy “remained at the bottom of the abyss.”32 Most of the time, regardless of the geographical area where these stories about the ‫܇‬tima Apei were collected, the "scenario” always features the same two variants. There are, however, in certain folklore collections, some variants that emphasize that the people lured by the ‫܇‬tima Apei were destined by the fates to be victims from birth. The story of the Marked Man33 from Maria Ioni‫܊‬ă’s anthology Cartea vâlvelor: Legende din Apuseni [The Book of the Vâlve: Legends from the Apuseni Mountains] belongs to that category. From the short story, in which the narrator is also the main character, we learn that in a village in the Apuseni Mountains, in the region of Transylvania, there lived a woman and a sick man who had not left the house for half a year. One day, his wife went to the neighbouring town of Câmpeni to buy household items. While she was gone, her mother-in-law found out (we do not know how) that her son was “marked” by the ‫܇‬tima Apei, and his only chance of escaping it was for another person to go with his clothes to the water that ran near the village and throw them in it. If that person returned home, then her son would have died. If the person drowned, then her son was going to be safe. When the woman got back home, her mother-in-law informed her that it was only her that could save her husband. For this to happen, she had to throw 30

Tudor Pamfile, Mitologie românească (Bucureúti: ALLFA, 1997), 252. Pamfile, Mitologie, 252. 32 Ibid. 33 Maria IoniĠă, Cartea vâlvelor. Legende din Apuseni (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1982), 46–7. 31

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some of his clothes into the water. Without asking any questions or lingering too much, the woman took some of her husband’s clothes and threw them into the river. The journey back home, however, proved to be very difficult, because, probably due to her emotional state and fatigue, she had the impression that the bridge she had to cross was occupied by a bunch of soldiers that barely let her through. Then, unknowingly, she reached a clearing, and her boots were soaking wet. Also, the voice she heard from the bridge was eerie, urging her to look over her shoulder, and trying to convince her to go back to the banks of the river. This was the call of the Vâlva which she did not follow, and subsequently she got away with her life. As fast as she got home, her husband, who had not got out of bed for months, finally rose and went outside, saying, “Wait, I’m coming!” Quickly, he headed to the river, where he drowned. The villagers were positive that the Vâlva had taken him and that this “had been his mark,” i.e. the fates had decided he was to drown. Irrespective of the “sequences” the folk informants add to the narrative “pattern,” we observe the tragic end of these people who, by drowning, require at least one witness. The drowning of a man who was innocent, but also, according to the collective mentality, “marked” and “fated,” symbolized a sacrifice that the demon/spirit of the water required, frequently at midnight, in times of natural disequilibrium when there was drought or the waters of the rivers were swollen due to the quick melting of the snow or the abundant summer rains. The belief in a water spirit is extremely old and has existed for many peoples of the world. The waters (rivers, lakes, and wells) require sacrifices and are: Satisfied—says Gh. F. Ciau‫܈‬anu—so they stop asking for human lives, a plethora or less important things … Several fruits of the earth are thrown in the river, and silver or copper coins, talismans, fragments of pottery or even whole pots are thrown into the wells. The ones who care a tad too much about the ancient sacrifices unto the genies of the water throw bread in the wells.34

The bread is made with wheat from the previous year, collected before the harvest. A few blades of Verbena officinalis were tied with a red ribbon and thrust in the centre of the bread. The Amerindian peoples softened the rivers and the lakes by offering them “presents: knives, 34 Gh. F. Ciauúanu, SuperstiĠiile poporului roman în asemănare cu ale altor popoare vechi úi noi (Bucureúti: Saeculum I. O., 2001), 159.

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bracelets and especially tobacco.”35 The Scottish also believed in an evil water spirit called kelpie.36 These water beings were perceived as cruel, because they needed human sacrifices: “the River Olt, for instance, is said to require one human sacrifice per year.”37 The Bulgarians called the ‫܇‬tima Apei Lamia and believed this demonic being asked for young girls as a tribute in order to allow people to get out of lakes and wells.38 In truth, this is the same old sacrificial practice that functions on the principle of do ut es (I give to you so you can give to me), and the mythical being that requests it is considered to be more powerful than the human being. In the archaic Romanian vision, its destructive action cannot be annihilated by the collective force. The community can only warn the individual to respect the interdictions and behavioural norms. In all the variants of the Romanian legend about the ‫܇‬tima Apei, the folk-narrator reveals the danger which the individual, not the collectivity, is exposed to. Their name is never mentioned, because it does not have any importance for the traditional collective mentality. The one who became the victim of this mythical being that was imagined as a personification of the natural and telluric forces actually trespassed the behavioural code of their community. In almost all stories, “the call” of the ‫܇‬tima Apei came at midnight, and the journey of the person, on horseback or on foot, to the riverbank was a deed outside the norms and ontological patterns of the archaic collectivity, because they exposed themselves to danger. The fear of the unknown and the menace that threatened the peasants at midnight at approximately every step were normal in the world of the Romanian village. Because of that, this danger was given various forms and the most varied and fascinating embodiments, all of them circumscribed to the anthropos. This helps to explain the belief in the existence of the ‫܇‬tima Apei and its metamorphosis, generated by the augmentation of the destructive, evil force. This is emphasized by a belief from Bucovina: Some say that even those who drowned get out of the water for up to seven years, especially during nights with a new moon, at the hour they drowned at, because that is when they have power; they, in their turn, drown those who pass by at midnight, just as they were drowned. But those are not the 35

Ibid. Ibid. 37 Ibid., 158. 38 Ibid. 36

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ones who drowned, but the Unclean, the ‫܇‬tima Apei or The One Who Drowns, who shows himself wearing the faces of those whom he drowned and seeks to drown some other ones.39

Beyond the widespread and well-known belief from the rural environment lies the ethical, behavioural code that included strict rules for living, working, respecting the universal equilibrium, the cosmic rhythms and avoiding dangerous, magic-laden places (rivers, lakes, watermills, etc.), especially at late hours replete with evil (midnight).

The Woodwoman Another feminine representation of the demonical from the Romanian mythology is the Woodwoman/The Mother of the Woods. In comparison with the Iele, Rusalii, and ‫܇‬tima Apei, the Woodwoman belongs to the category of feminine demonic beings that govern the Earth, nature as a whole (Mother of Earth, Mother of Rain, Mother of Flowers, Mother of Wind, etc.), and even the cosmic (Mother of the Sun, Mother of God). These mythological beings have identities, distinct features, and different forms and roles, but they share the symbolic term of “Mother.” This empowers the hypothesis that was formulated by some of the Romanian researchers who worked on this topic (e.g. Traian Herseni, Ivan Evseev, and Ion Ghinoiu), according to whom these beings are, in the context of the mythical-cultural network, “images” of the principle of maternity, whose origin can be retraced to the primordial mother goddess, probably endemic to a region from the European space (at least the southeastern part of Europe). The strong cult of maternity that existed during the age of matriarchy, its entire psychological-social complex, and the role of the mother-woman in human society generated the mythical ensemble of the “mothers,” who are very well-represented in Romanian mythology. They distinguish themselves through appearance, roles, and symbolic valences; sometimes, they differ in the context of the very same representation of the folk imaginary, from one region to another. In Romanian beliefs, the Woodwoman is both a mythical, feminine representation of evil and a symbolic vestige of a primitive “mother.” She is also known as the Pădureanca, Păduroaia, the Crone, Vidma-Pădurii, the Flame of the Woods, the Plague of the Woods, the Voice of the Woods (‫܇‬tima Pădurii), the Sister from the Woods, the World’s Envy, and the 39

Marian, Mitologie, 67.

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Mother of the Forest. The idea of her age (lost in the darkness of the eons) is underlined by Traian Herseni, who says that: This mother of the woods, however, has a decidedly archaic character, being the mother of everything that is in the woods and the clearings, being represented by what is maternal in this area (the roe, female ox, the female aurochs, the wild goat, the she-bear, the doe), therefore, when all is told, she is the mountainous mother-goddess, the maternal principle of the mountain, the mountain itself with all its appearances.40

A significant aspect is that this divinity could sometimes have positive valences, especially when the women summoned her in order to get help in times of need, when struck by misfortune. She is seen as an anthropophagous being that acts during the night, in an atypical place that is replete with sacredness: in the middle of the forest or at its edge. The night, a symbol of chaos, inferno, and death, has a negative psychological influence on the man that finds himself, occasionally, in an atypical locus that is “tempting and simultaneously hostile, suggestive a post-cosmogonical state.”41 It produces unease, fear, the darkening of the conscience, and hallucinations. During the night the “objective dangers” are transformed into “subjective dangers,” the “fear in darkness transformed into the fear of darkness.”42 This offers us a helping hand in explaining why, according to the mental mythic-folkloric pattern (which always sought to explain the natural unknown) and the imaginary that blew the elements of reality out of proportion, the Woodwoman/Mother of the Forest was pictured as an anthropomorphic, powerful being, either as a woman or hermaphrodite, as a hybrid being, usually half-person, half-tree. She has an outstanding height (“as huge as a house,” “as tall as the tallest trees”), “a withered, crooked body, covered with long hair that resembles twigs, extremely long ox feet, a head as big as a bushel,” “flashing eyes as big as plates and teeth as big as sickles,” and “long hair that reaches her heels.” Her hair reaches close to the ground and her hair falls onto her bony shoulders like snakes, this image reminding us of the Furies or the Medusa from Greek mythology. We must mention that in line with the folk belief, the power of a being is concentrated in its hair, and the fact that the Woodwoman is 40

Traian Herseni, Forme străvechi de cultură poporană românească: Studiu de paleoetnografia cetelor de feciori din ğara Oltului (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1977), 295. 41 Kernbach, Universul mitic, 340. 42 Ivan Evseev, DicĠionar de simboluri úi arhetipuri culturale (Timiúoara: Amarcord, 1994), 115.

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pictured as having very long hair confirms the outstanding power that was granted to her and the size of the hyperbolized evil with which the human is compelled to confront. The capability of modifying the size of her body from gigantism to miniaturization (“as little as a rabbit”), so that she can fit into the hollow of a tree, and her therianthropy (shape-shifting capability) which allows her to transform into any animal, but particularly a cow, mare, or she-wolf, are common features that all para-human beings are endowed with. The character’s garments (her body is covered in rags, old, white, or black silk, green moss, flowers, and leaves) highlight her status of a supernatural being that belongs to the mythical dimension. It is no small thing that the people granted her real maternal qualities, as she is often pictured as a sad mother who cries, moans, and emits strange, horrifying noises whenever the trees, her children, are cut down in a forest. This theory is reinforced by the belief that the Woodwoman coerces the unmarried women who aborted their children into eating them in the other realm. This plethora of aspects situates this mythological being at the border between the human and supernatural. Moreover, it reveals a certain note of sacredness that is difficult to grasp at first glance. Her repugnant appearance that she uses to drive the enemies of her forests away and her redeeming attitude, manifested beyond the mundane spatial-temporal dimension, grant her sacredness. In the text of a disenchantment, the Woodwoman/Mother of the Woods is shown to be the mother of Zorilă (Dawn), Murgilă (Dusk), and Miazănoapte (Midnight), personifications of the times of day. As a consequence, she is summoned as a mother with cosmic attributes which merely reinforce her sacredness: U! Mother of the Woods/ You have seven sons/ And seven daughters-inlaw/ Chide them, Chide them:/ So they won’t go round/ Scaring/ so they won’t frighten N./ Chide Murgilă/ Chide Zorilă/ and Desărelu/ and Miazănoapte …

Her behaviour towards humans can be dyadic. Most of the time, she is malevolent and can influence the judgement of those who linger in the forest at night, determining them to wander. She can also make them sick or kill them by smothering them while they sleep or simply eating them. She can steal people’s dogs and cattle. These deeds are done at night, “before the first crow of the cock.”43 Sometimes, she can tolerate humans if they offer her a piece of bread or if the one who sees her makes the sign 43

Muúlea and Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului, 200.

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of the cross—gestures that work as a remedy and a defence mechanism. Of course, they show the generosity and faith of the Romanian peasant. She is described as having a beautiful appearance and a sense of justice in a fragment printed by a folk collector (the teacher Novacoviciu) in the area of Banat: There’s a supernatural being in the forest; she looks over forests, she takes care of them, she makes them grow and protects them against those who enter the forest to wreak havoc in it. She maims them, she throws wood on their hands, breaking them, she straightens their axes so they cut their own legs and she breaks their wagons, wheels or something else. However, those who enter her forest with humbleness and faith get help from her; if they’re weak, she helps them chop and load wood, she protects them against all the dangers that may befall them. Apart from all these, it is strongly believed that her kindness towards the misfortunes of the people is extremely great. She offers the poor advice and prescribes them various cures …44

This certain viewpoint on the Woodwoman is isolated and can be found only in some fairy tales and legends from Transylvania, where she appears as a good fairy that helps children who get lost in the forest by showing them the way out. We discover that in these areas of Romania, Transylvania, and Banat the captivating and beneficial side of the divinity of the forest, called fascinans by Rudolf Otto, was conserved. The Woodwoman has the same attributes in a single fairy tale collected in Moldova by the folk collector Al. Vasiliu. The text is entitled The Story of “I Don’t Know.” In this, it is the Woodwoman who helps the hero (“I Don’t Know”). He walks down the road to initiation in order to fulfil his mission and has to cross a forest made of brass, silver, and gold. The Woodwoman becomes a mythical donor, a positive character, in spite of the fact that the narrator presents her as having a disgusting appearance. In general, however, the Woodwoman as a bad character (tremendum) is more deeply impregnated in the Romanian mythology and folklore. Other European peoples have this view as well, particularly the Slavic ones. The Romanians see the Woodwoman walking through the forests with a crane, mourning and living in the depths of the dark woods in a wooden shack. When she gets tired or night falls before she gets home, she sleeps in hollows or in tall trees, another sign of her sacredness (this time, in its 44

Candrea, Folclorul medical, 191.

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monstrous version), a sign that hints towards her detachment from the common, profane world. She knows absolutely all the trees in the forest she governs over, taking care of them, chiding them if they grow up crooked and if they upset her, as well as cursing, cutting, or hitting them with bolts of lightning. According to popular belief, the most beautiful trees of the forest that were hit by lighting were subjected to the Woodwoman’s punishment for their disobedience. Despite the fact that she is hideous, the Romanians think she has many children with the Devil or the Grandpa of the Woods,45 both of them evil and always upsetting. Because of this, it is said that the Woodwoman steals the sleep of the unprotected children in order to give it to her own. This aspect, vital for a forma mentis deeply anchored in an ontological dimension pertaining to the mythical, was for a long time a strong reason for women to take precautions in respect to their children. Therefore, they were protected until their baptisms, and if it happened that they remained unprotected, the women encircled them with various objects (a sickle, pliers, an axe, scissors), considering that these were going to ensure the children’s defence against the Woodwoman. Most of the time, they also uttered disenchantments, like the following: Reaping sickle, As you reap at day, So may you be a protector at night For N. In his bed, Underneath his bed, In his sheets, Underneath his sheets!46

The Romanians used all sorts of elements laden with symbolism (silver coins, basil, incense, garlic, embers in three locations by the door) and various magical practices in order to ward off the monstrous divinity accused of stealing their children’s sleep when they twitched and cried at

45 The Grandfather of the Woods is the masculine correspondent of the Woodwoman, an anthropophagous, evil deity, a protector of the woods that also goes by the name of Păduroiul (in Transylvania and Oltenia). Victor Kernbach says in Universul mitic al românilor that the Grandfather of the Woods is “an archaic Indo-European god, identified with the so-called Man with a Hook from the superior Paleolithic” (341). 46 Pamfile, Mitologie, 194–5.

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the same hours each night. One of the beautiful disenchantments uttered in such a situation was the following: You, these embers, Become three good angels, And protect outside the house, Inside the house, Underneath the house, In bed, Underneath the bed, Wherever you might find the Woodwoman, You may take her, Destroy her, Eat her heart, Keep her out of the house For the Woodwoman woke my baby up And killed him! Mother of Mothers, Mother of the Woods, I call you So you answer me; I give you, You give me; I’ll give you my children’s crying, You give me the repose of yours, So he can sleep as a log And be as silent as the hazelnut tree; Just like the birds sleep in you, So shall my child sleep!47

This mythical “cultural pattern” manifests as a principle of evil, making use of the mythical-magical gesture of “stealing the sleep” of the children or replacing the children of the humans with her ugly, crying progenies. Usually, in the Romanian legends and fairy tales from the collections of Petre Ispirescu, Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Simion Florea Marian, Ion Pop-Reteganul, and Dumitru Stăncescu, the Woodwoman is described as a demonic, terrifying being that tries to murder those who dare to trespass on her territory. Sometimes, she proves to be vampiric, because she is pleased with sucking the blood of her victims. They die shortly after, but can be revived if a brave man cuts the Woodwoman’s haunch, collecting the blood and pouring it down the throat of the one who 47

Ibid., 195.

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was her victim (most of the time, as it appears in fairy tales, the victim is the girl of a poor family, home alone in a house in the woods; the saviour is also a boy in a precarious economic situation, who falls in love with the girl and eventually marries her). The Woodwoman appears as an anthropophagous being that devours her victims. Only the chosen one, the hero of the fairy tales, can escape her challenge alive. The rendezvous with her implies courage and a long initiation, because her terrifying presence itself means menace. The hero must use a special behaviour when this demonic being is, in many variants, the owner of the horse with nine hearts, an animal with miraculous powers that must be taken by Prince Charming so that he can fulfil his mission. He must serve the Woodwoman for three days; she lives in the depth of the woods in a wooden shack surrounded by twelve poles, on top of which she has impaled the heads of those who failed to meet her standards. The image of these impaled heads is construed as a warning for any neophyte that, once in the sacred space over which the divinity reigns, proves to be incapable of respecting an ensemble of ritualistic rules. The hero of the fairy tales can take the horse only with the help of some adjuvants (a bird, a fish, a wolf, a fox, etc.), usually as a reward for the help they’ve received from the boy on previous occasions. This shows us that the Woodwoman is the representative of a cosmic power, and defeating her is bound to fail if the combatant does not detach himself from the profane world so that he can gradually and safely enter the sacred one. In some texts whose substance resides in the mythical universe, another attribute of this sylvan divinity is shown to us: the sickly and obsessive pursuit of the men whom she punishes for refusing her love or for making it a public affair. For instance, in Maria Ioni‫܊‬ă’s collection entitled Cartea vâlvelor, there is a story entitled “Pedeapsa vâlvei” [“The Punishment of the Vâlva”] (Vâlva is the Transylvanian term for the Woodwoman, who reigns over the forest, treasures, and mines). In this story, an unmarried man is taken by the Woodwoman to her house and they live together for many years. At some point, the man starts to miss his house and asks for her permission to go back to his village and visit his parents. She warns him not to tell anyone he is married, but he violates his promise and when he returns to the forest she takes her revenge, lifting him in the air to a high altitude and letting him fall onto the tip of a tree. The story thus ends with the death of the man. The text, short as a narrative dimension, emphasizes that the universe of the sacred, the dangerous, remains a forbidden territory for the human who is defined by

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wildness, who feels disarmed in the confrontation with the unknown that limits their capacity to defend themselves and take action. The Woodwoman can also manifest as a principle of evil by taking vengeance on those who dare to imitate her voice or talk about her sarcastically; she either kidnaps them or renders them voiceless. Such examples can be found in the aforementioned anthology in the stories “The Child and the Woodwoman” (in which the Woodwoman renders a boy speechless), and “The Woodwoman’s Wagon” (in which a woman, who has the courage to get out of the house at night after hearing some odd noises, is rendered voiceless and powerless). The Woodwoman appears as a maleficent, destructive being in the mythical scenario, according to which cutting down a forest climaxes with the death of the human being, because it was believed for a long time that she “requested” a human once the harvesting in the forest came to an end. All these attitudes attributed to the Woodwoman by the folk imaginary do nothing but reflect a judgement within a mythical frame on the behaviour of the human, a behaviour that must be circumscribed to an ethical code and a code of collective values, because any deviation drives the human farther away from their ideal condition. What we consider extremely significant for the Romanian mythological mentality is the fact that the people never asked themselves whether this “ghost” of the forests really existed or not, since it was felt as a reality. In the collection of stories from the Apuseni Mountains, compiled by Maria, one of the informants declared in 1979 that: With respect to the Woodwoman, the Mother of the Woods … there was talk about them a long time ago. And these were realities. It’s a very damaging thing that they start to disappear nowadays. The youth is especially not too keen on believing in the Woodwoman, who did great miracles. Now, even though she might be real, they say it’s the Devil or whatnot …48

Anchored in the concrete, real existence, but looking beyond it, beyond boundaries, towards the unknown, the human realized that evil originates in themselves and the practice of life. Thus, everything they felt was evil, everything that scared them or did not inspire trust was concentrated in an agent, a bearer, an isolated demonic being. It is possible that the Woodwoman, a definitive image in the Romanian mythology, was created through the same process. The collective mentality sought to impose

48

IoniĠă, Cartea vâlvelor, 91.

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certain ethical norms, a mutual behavioural code through the belief in such a being, so that people could avoid danger.

The Strigoi Since demonology is a large topic, with each mythical representation having different structures, physiognomies, and functions, we will only tackle the strigoi because they have the greatest mythical importance, confirmed by the fact that, even today, many people from some regions of Romania (particularly Oltenia and Transylvania) still believe in their existence. Considered by Romulus Vulcănescu to be “a low-rank sexed mythical being,”49 the strigoi can be either male or female (when it’s a female, it is called “strigoaică”) and is similar, in terms of structure and function, to the vampire of the Western peoples. The etymology of the term “strigoi” is of Latin origin, from the adjective strigosus, which translates as “stripped of flesh,” “disembodied,” but also comes from the substantive striga, which in Latin mythology designates a legendary owl-like bird, a vampire-bird that sucked the blood of the children during the night. In Romanian mythology, the Striga is considered to be “an inferior evil divinity, assimilated with the Strigoaica or any other gaunt, hideous witch with the pallor of a corpse and the tail of a dog. Her powers allowed her to rend the cattle barren of milk and mutilate the unbaptized children. In Transylvania, the Striga denominates a group of demons whose empress is the Baba Coaja.”50 The belief in strigoi existed in “the entire Indo-European area”51 in eastern and southern Europe, “a genuine preserver of strigoi, a territory that gradually came to be known as the cradle of these monsters.”52 The belief was unaltered in Romania and still exists in various villages. This belief seems to be founded, on one hand, on the ancient conviction that the soul lives after death and therefore can return to the real world, among the living. On the other hand, the archaic human being, who lived in a mythical universe, believed they had two souls, of which one could leave the body during sleep and act independently, with no restraint. According to Claude Lecouteux, the author of the study Vampires and Vampirism: the Autopsy of a Myth, in Romania: 49

Vulcănescu, Mitologie, 301. Kernbach, Universul mitic, 325. 51 Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 443. 52 Claude Lecouteux, Vampiri úi vampirism. Autopsia unui mit, trans. Mihai Popescu (Bucureúti: Saeculum I. O., 2002), 46. 50

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Chapter Three The origin of the strigoii is explained as follows: there are dead whose corpses animals either jumped over or crawled under, or persons born with hair, who swallowed their umbilical cords; in this latter case, the woman who helped with the birth had to take the cord away and bury it, or even burn it and feed the ash to the newborn, or put it on the roof of the house, to warn people that a future strigoi had been born. There were also those who started breastfeeding again after their mothers had weaned them, or those who wept in the wombs of their mothers; moreover, there are the children of witches, bastard children killed or abandoned by their mothers before they’ve been baptized, the children born out of incest, the children of assassins and witches, the seventh child of a family and even changed children, those replaced with the children of demons or other supernatural beings. They are born with tails, a sign of their vampiric predestination, but they can be saved if their tails are severed with a coin. There are also people who, during their lives, made pacts with the Devil—the connection with witchery is extremely frequent in folk beliefs.53

The ancient collective mentality pictured them as strange creatures with horse legs, hairy hands, and extremely large mouths. According to a belief, only those born on a Saturday could see or recognize them. In the traditional society, people believed that a village had strigoii if there was drought there, because the strigoaice drove rain away during hail and thunderstorms (it was a godly revenge) or when it rained, despite the fact that it was clear outside, this being a sign that one of the strigoaice was about to get married.54 Romanian mythologists, starting from the nineteenth century—such as Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu—and continuing into the twentieth century, when Simion Florea Marian, Tudor Pamfile, Marcel Olinescu, and Romulus Vulcănescu were working, classified the strigoii into two distinct types: dead and alive. In fact, this classification was generated by the belief that the human “has two souls, that one of them can leave the body during sleep and, as the person’s doppelganger, be capable of its own independent deeds and gestures.”55 The distinction between them is made through provenance, evil structure, and their capability to inflict damage on the members of a family, as well as on the members of the community in which they lived, or still live.

53

Ibid., 47. Pamfile, Mitologie, 121. 55 Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 443. 54

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The Living Strigoii These are “flesh and blood” strigoii. They are living people with demonic, para-human powers. It is believed that children born with tails or patches of skin on the top of their heads are predisposed to becoming living strigoii. This sign was the consequence of a violation of the norms; for instance, the mother drank demonized, unclean water during pregnancy, in which the Devil drooled, or went outside at night time with her head uncovered. The seventh child of a family, a woman’s third bastard child or the person that, while alive, converted to Satanism could also turn into a living strigoii. In respect to their manifestation, it was said that, as children, they developed at a much faster rate than normal ones, were very strong physically, killed animals, stole, and lied. When the strigoi-child grows up, it can be recognized by its teeth (it has prominent canines, just like the vampire), bloodshot eyes, a tail that cannot be hidden, and its evil deeds. A fascinating thing that is worth mentioning is that the strigoaice, the female counterparts of the male strigoii, were considered to be more powerful than the latter and were the main culprits in most cases of witchery. Their power could be equal to or even bigger than God’s. Therefore, in a short story from Bucovina in the northern part of Romania, inserted by Tudor Pamfile into Romanian Mythology,56 a dialogue between God/Jesus Christ (joined by Saint Peter) while he climbs onto the cross and a group of strigoaice that want frost to fall on a certain holyday (June 23) is presented. When God refuses to fulfil their wish, they declare that they won’t allow him to ascend to the sky. Jesus tells them they are free to do whatever they want and that he will be interested in what they’re doing only when they come after him in the sky. The story emphasizes a severe conflict between the divinities that belong to the profane and the sacred, determined by the intention of the celestial divinity to acquire full control over the world. However, the force of the sacred monstrous proves to be bigger than that of the pure sacred. The peak of the activity of the strigoii is usually during certain nights—Saint Andrew’s (November 29–30, the Romanian Halloween) and/or Saint George’s (April 22–23)—when, during sleep, they leave their bodies, exit the house through the chimney or the door, fall three times in order to transform into wolves, dogs, cats, pigs, or frogs, ride on barrels or broomsticks, and go to places known only by them (in the woods, at various crossroads), where they meet with the dead strigoii. There, they 56

Pamfile, Mitologie, 133.

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return to human form and fight each other until one of them wins. The victor becomes their leader for one year. After the fighting stops they heal their wounds immediately, transform into animals once again and return to their homes before the break of dawn. Once home, their souls enter their bodies and, just like those suffering from somnambulism, remember nothing about their nocturnal “existence” and “activity.” It is widely believed that, during the night, the strigoii frightened the people in their community by entering the houses of the peasants and knocking objects over. They also scared off travellers. In order to protect themselves against them, the villagers smeared garlic on their bodies, lit fires in the gardens and courtyards, turned all pots upside down, and made all sorts of noises to drive them away. The collective imaginary brought to the fore a “dance” of the living strigoii after midnight, where their feet did not touch the ground. They danced around the derelict minarets of abandoned churches and at crossroads. Drawing a circle on the ground near these places was a form of protection. Whoever was inside the circle could not be touched by the strigoii due to its magical powers. In the same fashion, they could be driven away with the sound of the bucium (a traditional gigantic trumpetlike instrument with a funereal sonority), lovage, disenchanted wormwood, and especially garlic, with which people smeared their doors, windows, and thresholds of stables.

The Dead Strigoii According to Ion Ghinoiu, the dead strigoi are “the most dangerous evil spirits of the Carpathian pantheon.”57 They can cause various illnesses and send rain and hail over a community they want to exact vengeance on, and it is believed that they can “take” the souls of their close relatives, killing them in the process. One of the most efficient ways of identifying a dead strigoi was the following: a man (very rarely a woman), a relative of the one suspected of having become an evil spirit, went to the cemetery at night and jumped over graves on a black horse. According to popular belief, the grave the steed would not jump over was the lair of the strigoi. He had to be exhumed and killed ritualistically by driving a wooden or iron stake through his heart. To annul “possession,” the people respected a certain sequence during a funeral where all the orifices of the corpse were covered with incense. If those orifices were left uncovered, the Devil could easily enter the body 57

Ghinoiu, Panteonul românesc, 224.

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via one of them and then bid the corpse to rise from its grave. Under the Devil’s supervision, the dead strigoi returned into the world of the living to carry out his bidding. The strigoi sucked on the blood of its relatives and its power grew greater. People went as far as to imagine that strigoii lived in the underworld, too, where they had families and the capability to procreate.58 The strigoii from this category do their devil-may-care deeds during the nights with a new moon, and the nights of Easter and Saint Andrew. They haunt and damage the houses they lived in, torment their relatives and drive people away from the village, and create widespread panic and anxiety. Things can take a turn for the worst when they transform into wolves, dogs, or even snakes. The misbehaviour of the strigoii is blamed on premature, violent deaths, their post-death wishes not having been fulfilled by the members of their families, and murdering a person that cannot leave the world of the living until the death is avenged. Subsequently, it haunts its murderer and punishes them. Naturally, violating the human, social, and religious norms was a serious deviation from the unwritten, traditional laws of the community. As a consequence, the soul of a dead person could not go into the light and join its ancestors. It remained suspended between the two universes until the individual/collective equilibrium was re-established. .

The Narrative Imaginary In the study Reprezentări ale destinului în folclorul românesc (Representations of Destiny in Romanian Folklore), Niculina Chiper states that “in the stories about strigoi, destiny acts with a much greater force than in other stories on the topic of death,” because: The causal relation between the deeds of the people and the apparition of the strigoii indicates an extremely acute perception of the notion of destiny. The vast majority of fairytales and stories about stigoii insist on macabre details, odd apparitions and a dubious picturesque.59

The stories about the strigoi are similar to those texts that are circumscribed to the “horror” genre. The multitude of these texts demonstrates the inclination of certain folk storytellers for the aforementioned genre, as well as of the richness of a collective imaginary anchored in superstitions 58

Olinescu, Mitologie, 360. Niculina Chiper, Reprezentări ale destinului în folclorul românesc (Bucureúti: Saeculum I. O., 2006), 209.

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and practices so deeply rooted that Christianity, introduced to Romania in the fourth century AD, could not annul them. More often than not, the texts from the anthologies compiled by Tudor Pamfile (Romanian Mythology), I. C. Chitimia (Stories, Anecdotes and Legends), I. Oprisan (Fantastical Romanian Fairy Tales, Vol. IV), and Maria Ionita (Where the Rainbow Feeds) revolve around the image of the “dead strigoi” that, due to external or ethical factors, return into the world of the living and destroy the order of things, an ontological micro-universe affected by the violation of the norms of the community. A good example illustrating such an epic nucleus is the sixth story from Tudor Pamfile’s Romanian Mythology, collected from Bucovina. The content is as follows: an orphaned, poor boy was hired by a peasant as a day-labourer. The peasant had a daughter. After a few years, when both the boy and girl reached adolescence, they fell in love, but this was impossible because the girl’s parents disagreed with it. The boy travelled far away from the village, after which he fell ill and died. The girl was unaware of his death and kept thinking of him. She didn’t know what to do to see him again. She went to a witch who told her there was something she could do, but if he was dead then the risk she was exposing herself to was much bigger. The young girl insisted that she would do anything to see him again, dead or alive. The crone advised her not to go away with the boy on the first night, but to look closely at him and report back on his looks. The boy came on the first night, more beautiful than ever before, and asked the girl to follow him. The girl, however, postponed the departure for the next night. She did as the crone had told her—she got some clothes and left with her paramour the next night: They strolled and strolled, then rose to the sky and flew above the villages and the forests until they reached a field. When they got there, they dismounted, the horse disappeared and they were left on the ground.60

There was a burrow in which the boy lived, and he invited the girl in. She asked him to go in first and gave him his clothes, and when he took them inside the burrow she ran until she reached a small shack in which a light was burning. Here, a dead person was lying on a box. The girl turned all the objects in the house upside down immediately. It didn’t take long for the boy to come after her. Because the door was locked, he asked the dead body to open it, but the feet of the corpse were tied with thread, so it could not do it. The boy asked the objects in the house to open it, but they could not do it either since they were turned upside down, except for a 60

Pamfile, Mitologie, 159–60.

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lamp which tried to open the door, but fell from the stove and broke into pieces. Then, the boy again asked the corpse to open the door. This time, the corpse walked as well as it could and opened it. The boy got into the house, but a rooster crowed and the two men crumbled to the floor. The villagers went to the house in the morning and found the girl unharmed. They started looking for the boy’s grave and found it in a field, not a graveyard as would have been normal. That’s when they realized he was a strigoi. They drove garlic-greased stakes through both his and the corpse’s hearts and then buried them. When she recovered, the girl left for home and seven years elapsed until she finally got back to her parents’ house. The moral of the story is granted an axiomatic valence as it reveals the intervention of the sacred into the monstrous in an attempt to punish excess and restore the equilibrium: “This is what happened to the girl that wanted to love the dead, and this shall happen to all girls that do not let the dead sleep!”61 In another story, the third from the same anthology, collected in the southern region of Moldavia, the “dead strigoi” is pictured as a tool of the monstrous sacred in a much more terrifying setting wherein it can take one’s life. Even though he belongs to another dimension, he transgresses the space and becomes violent in the universe of the living, killing and creating chaos at the everyday level. The narrative units, which could serve as the script for a horror movie, are as follows: once upon a time a boy and a girl loved each other, but hid their love from the girl’s parents because the boy was not from a good enough family. Her parents spoke against their marriage and the boy hanged himself. He became a strigoi, and went to the girl at night to make love to her. After a time, the girl grew increasingly sick of her “friendship with an evil spirit,”62 so she went to a witch and asked for guidance. She was told to put a needle in the boy’s shirt. She followed him one dawn and saw how he entered his grave. On the same day, after dusk, the girl went to the cemetery again and saw him getting out of the grave, desecrating other graves, eating the hearts of the dead, and then taking the road to her house. When the two met, the strigoi asked where she had been and what she had seen. The girl’s negative answer (“I went nowhere and saw nothing”) made the strigoi threaten to kill her father, and her father died the next day. After a time, the strigoi repeated his question and the girl answered in the same fashion. He threatened to kill her mother, and her mother died the next day. The third time, he threatened to kill her if she did not tell him the truth. She proved 61 62

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 153.

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to be courageous and lied to him again. As the witch had advised her, she summoned all her relatives and told them that, if she were to die, to demolish a wall of the house to get her out: “not through the door, not through the window, not under the eaves, but demolish a wall and get her out through the hole,”63 and then bury her at the edge of the forest. The girl did die, and her relatives respected her wish. Before long a gorgeous flower, like none other, grew on her grave. The emperor’s son passed by, took the flower, and replanted it in a jar on his windowsill. At night, the flower transformed into the dead girl, more beautiful than she had been while alive, who fell in love with the emperor’s son. They got married, but their happiness was marred by the fact that the young empress never left the palace because she was afraid of her ex-boyfriend, the “dead strigoi.” One day, however, her husband took her to church by force, and the strigoi was waiting for her there. She managed to save herself by running into the church and hiding behind an icon. When the strigoi went inside to seize her, the icon fell on him and he turned into smoke. The young couple was saved from the punishment of the strigoi. We observe that, in this story, destiny is incredibly powerful and facilitates our understanding of the process of “becoming a strigoi.” According to the peoples of antiquity, life must be lived until the end, for as long as the gods wish it to be. If it is cut short, deliberately or violently, both the dead person and those around them can suffer serious consequences. In the story above, the boy who decides to take his own life violates the divine law, and that is why the consequences are severe. He becomes imprisoned at the border between the world of the living and the underworld. He is driven by the thought of taking vengeance on the one whom he had loved and all those who opposed him while alive. The strigoi is, in this context, not only a punishing tool but also an image of death. The girl that becomes the prince’s wife is absolved of the sin of having made love to an evil spirit by dying. The girl’s death and resurrection allow for the restoration of the spiritual and social equilibrium, both at the individual and the collective levels. Another significant aspect seen in folktales is the transformation of these demons into dogs, cats, snakes, and wolves—animals considered to be evil. Almost all epic texts talk about the metamorphosis of the strigoi into a wolf, the most ferocious animal of Romania, which “had impacted deeply the popular thought and imagination.”64

63

Ibid., 154. Mihai Coman, Mitologie populară românească, I., VieĠuitoarele pământului úi ale apei (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1986), 144.

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Throughout the centuries, the Romanian peasants created the “days of the wolf,” special days in the calendar that marked the dread of this animal. They strove to advise people that: By respecting these magical interdictions and prescriptions, the evil influence of this animal would be driven away from one’s house and belongings … The Days of the Wolf are the fourth of a year’s total number of holydays. Of course, the prestige and the importance of this animal are explained by its destructive nature and the continuous damage it does to a man’s house. To a certain extent, the wolf is the very notion of feral, hostile nature. The fear of the wolf is actually the fear of the wilderness and the permanent aggression of the darkness in the forest. This is why the holydays of the wolf are more than the holydays of a being: they are the celebration of a general idea, of a complex principle: the ever-wild, aggressive, ready to attack, fascinating and vindictive nature.65

The strigoi and the wolf are nocturnal beings associated with the devouring of the moon. Evil, cursed people, the child that weeps in its mother’s womb, and the child born with a red patch of skin on the top of its head are all susceptible to being able to transform into wolves. They are called wolf-men or pricolici, and have this ability to transform because they are cursed. They are widely seen in Romanian tales about strigoi. A good example is a story written by Otilia Teposu and published on the website www.memoria.ro. It is from an anthology of tales about strigoi entitled The Ritual of Spring or About spells, Strigoi and Wolves in the Poiana Rusca Mountains. The writer mentions that the article was written in the aftermath of a visit to the village of Poeni, in the Poiana Rusca Mountains, in the summer of 2005. The story was told to her by an old woman that had been bitten by a wolf. Here is the short version. On a summer morning, the woman was returning from a field where she had been making hay. She was with her mother and her two-year-old daughter, Lenuta. It was sunny and beautiful outside. There was no wind at all. Suddenly, “a wolf, an evil wolf made of curses” ran from behind and bit her head. The woman thought the wolf was “evil, unclean” because “wolves don’t wander into villages.” Her mother attempted to help her but was bitten on the head and the neck. The little girl got away with a minor scratch. After that happened, the wolf disappeared pretty quickly. The woman blacked out, and when she recovered she crawled to a nearby river to wash her eyes. She went home 65

Ibid., 150.

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with a lot of difficulty, since with one hand she had to support her mother and with the other one her daughter. The neighbours helped the two women get to the hospital in Timisoara where they would be given proper medical care. The woman that told the story was hospitalized for two and a half years, but never fully recovered. A few weeks after that, while she was still in hospital, she was informed that the same wolf, on the very same day, had attacked her husband at his sheepfold, a few kilometres away from home, along with his sister and her brother-in-law. All three had been bitten by the wolf and they managed to cut his throat in the intercalation. They saw “the blood leaving him.” Two days after that, her mother, husband, and brother-in-law died. Unfortunately, even though she was given treatment, the woman healed only partially, both spiritually and physically. The scars left by the beast were as horrifying as they had been fifty years before when the inexplicable, odd happening had taken place. What is even more enigmatic and out of the ordinary is the author’s testimony, also written in 2005: I am telling you, those who are reading right now, that in her house my camera didn’t work, my voice recorder was blocked and the car I got there in, parked at the gate, was hit by a truck with timber. I don’t want to ask myself if these are omens that should give me some food for thought. It would make no sense, given that I got here. I keep thinking about what Vasi Serafin, the bookkeeper of the town, who lodged me until another car came to get me out of those eerie lands, told me later on. He told me that in Pietroasele, Poeni, and Fărăsesti (villages at the border between Banat and southwestern Ardeal), wolves are scarce, and ever since he had been a hunter, for years, he only heard once of one of them wandering the village: it was a weak, sick wolf that had got lost between the houses in Tomesti. He also told me that the world knows and talks about the fact that the lineage of those bitten by wolves started more than a hundred years ago, when somebody affiliated with that family murdered someone for a gun with beautiful steel ornaments …66

This story emphasizes a constant of the folk imaginary that keeps on searching for a rational explanation for something that is, in essence, considered to be inexplicable. The unforeseen apparition of the wild animal that generates fear, the terrifying atmosphere, and the monstrous figure of the victim—all of these blur the boundary between the worlds and shed light on the necessity of (re)establishing a social, spiritual, moral, 66

Otilia ğeposu, “Ritualul primăverii sau Despre vrăji, strigoi úi lupi în MunĠii Poiana Ruscăi,” https://www.memoria.ro/marturii/domenii/traditii_si_obiceiuri.

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and timeless equilibrium inside a human micro-universe. Destiny, beyond freewill, is also an unseen thread of Ariadne. However, only the human that respects the laws of the collectivity they belong to can pick it up. On the brink of the third millennium, when science and technology have reached levels that people from the past would not even dare dream about, the belief in haunting beings like the strigoii can be considered by Western peoples as an act of anachronism, of cultural backwardness. And still this belief exists and is alive, and who knows for sure if it is ever going to disappear? From this standpoint, it underlines the traditional view on life and death: life is seen as a relentless clash between good and evil, lies and truth, justice and the violation of ancestral, unwritten laws. What fuels the collective imaginary incessantly is the strong belief in life after death, in another unknown plane, imagined by the human as being in line with their moral, spiritual, and cultural structure and mentality.

CHAPTER FOUR ARTISTIC MYTHS AND EXPRESSIONS

The Cosmogonical Myth The obsessive theme of the genesis occupies a privileged place in the various mythologies of humanity, precisely because it is their foundation. Within the mysterious paradigm of the origins, the human being always sought an explanation, a “mythical” motivation for everything around and beyond them, as well as for their own existence. The “scenario” of the creational process is reflected in narrative forms that were preserved in a collective forma mentis, collected and processed by Romanian folklorists (such as Tudor Pamfile, Marcel Olinescu, and Simion Florea Marian). Certain stories were collected from Ukraine, too— Simion Florea Marian, for instance, collected some in Chernivtsi (part of northern Bukovina). The collective has stacked elements of Christianity on top of the remnants of an ancient myth (probably Indo-European), resizing the entire framework of an archaic, mythical, symbolical, and magical universe. The cosmogonical legends from the Romanian space talk about the unique opinion of the peasants in regard to the mythical “adventure” represented by the creational act, and theirs is unlike the biblical one, both structurally and symbolically. In this light, the cosmogonical legends collected by Simion Florea Marian more than one century ago from Bukovina (on Romanian and Ukrainian soil), legends that are not very different in terms of content, substance, motifs, and symbols from the same type of texts found in the other regions of Romania, are invaluable. These works show how organic the process of universal creation and the orderliness of all things seen and unseen were in the eyes of the peasants. What’s more, another drop of originality is given by the transference of the mundane within the sacred and vice versa. The plurality of those who partook in the creational act as either agents of action (God, the Devil), mediators (the bee), or catalysts (the hedgehog) is also specific to the traditional Romanian cosmogony.

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In the legends collected by Simion Florea Marian, the Romanian people imagined a creator marred by limitations, imperfections, and doubts during the creational process. Their second-in-command in the “making” of the Earth was the Devil. In the fourth legend [The Myth of the Cosmic Header], the people illustrate God and the Devil as creatures belonging to the primordial/deep time, wandering “to and fro above the unfathomably grand and deep water” because “there was no ground, no sun, moon or stars and no light.” God had become tired after wandering on the waves for seven years and asked the Devil for a “handful of mud” from the depths to make a bed out of. After his second diving into the abyss, the Devil gives him three grains of sand and keeps the rest for himself, “so he would share the land God was about to make.” God took those grains and made a small island as a resting place. The attempt of the Devil to get rid of the demiurge by rolling him over in the water and drowning him proves to be futile, because the small island keeps on getting bigger and bigger until the Earth is formed: “smooth and straight, a plain so limitlessly large that if you were to roll a pear on it, you could have watched it roll along until it went out of sight.” The apocryphal load of this text allows us to observe the duality of the divine (good-evil, being the Devil’s brother) and his allegiance to a transubstantial, etheric, absolute, and meta-germinating ontological matrix, completed by the Devil’s whose immersion in the depths of the primordial sea emphasizes the consubstantiality with what will be created from the marine sand—the world and the land. We consider that God and the Devil are not enemies but complementary divinities, the latter being, symbolically speaking, the alter ego of the former, his organic, mythical dimension that, within a mythical syntax, completes the cosmic, transcendent dimension. God’s metaphysical fatigue, generated by the mysterious ritualistic act of the genesis, places him “between contradictory impulses, driven and fueled internally by a strong antagonism of finality.”1 As a consequence, symbolically speaking again, the required relaxation will impose a different pace of the manifestations of the divine—they will succeed each other according to an internal logic based on the “transcendent” (Lucian Blaga) structure of a defining coordinate of the Romanian spirituality—the inveterate Christianity. The creational manifestation, in line with mythical timeframes circumscribed to the same internal logic, is shown to us in the first, second, and third legends. We discover that God made the sky “much bigger than the land,” and that this cosmic error/asymmetry must be 1

Lucian Blaga, Geneza metaforei úi sensul culturii, in Opere, 9, Trilogia culturii, (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1985), 459.

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corrected for the land to be “as big as the sky.” The divinity—which can be remnant of a superior god from the Thracian-Dacian mythology “borrowed” by the Romanians and endowed with Christian elements— calls upon “all the beings in the world” for a council during which he asks for advice as to how to solve the problem. The only one that has the solution to perfecting the cosmogony is the hedgehog. Within the collective imaginary, the hedgehog is not the agent of the action but its mythical catalyst. Either by direct conversational cooperation (the Third Legend) or indirect (the First and Second Legends, in which the mediator is the bee), the hedgehog agrees to reveal the secret of the cosmic reconfiguration. This is just another vision that explains, within the mythical-ontological sphere, the ancient desire of the human being to integrate with the cosmic dimension. This is what we think can be deduced from the wisdom of the hedgehog, which is a metaphorical, symbolical avatar of the civilizing hero from the Greek mythology: But God, you’re so much more intelligent than I am! You know how you will dry out at least a portion of this Earth—I take it you know pretty well how to make hills and mountains, so that the land is higher in some places and lower in some other ones … You do this, and then the water will flow downwards and the Earth will dry out. Springs will come out of the foot of the mountains and the hills and the water will be drunk by all beings! And if you, God, know how to make a human in your image, so that he could reign over all these creatures, which will fear and abide to him, then make that human, and he will think of you, Lord!” (Second Legend).2

This solution underlines a complex creational act, from the ideational towards the concrete, towards a dialectic of the real and the functional. On the other hand, the image of the mountains and the valleys represents the “Romanian cosmic horizon.”3 As Lucian Blaga puts it: The mountains and the valleys are nothing for the Romanians but a commonplace natural phenomenon. Their presence is felt as an exceptional aspect that engages the beginnings—in some form or another, but only the beginnings. Their presence is granted, through this projection against a background of beginnings, a nimbus of exceptional and deep mystery. The

2

Simion Fl. Marian, Basme populare româneúti II (Bucureúti: Grai úi SufletCultura NaĠională, 2004), 335. 3 Lucian Blaga, Gândire magică úi religie, in Opere, 10, Trilogia valorilor (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1987), 280.

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This “indefinitely undulated matrix-space”5 metaphysically sublimates an unmistakable Romanian “sense of fate.”6 Another significant aspect in performing a symbolical reading of these legends is the fact that, at a first glance, the texts make us acquainted with a God incapable of finalizing a perfect, balanced creational act and configuring the cosmogony perfectly. Therefore, even this God seems to have gnoseological limitations, or transcendental “brakes,” so to speak. In the depths of the texts—the meta-text, and the mythical-logical categories it puts forth—God calls all beings to a council in order to get a cosmogonical solution, using a strategy of transference by transferring the divine substantiality into the profane; the hedgehog thus owns the secret of remaking the mundane space and making the human in the image of its creator, and is therefore godly itself. The creation is invested with a sacred valence by its creator; therefore, the hedgehog exhibits the capacity to “open” itself to the objective universe, to the world and the understanding of the universal. The hedgehog is not seen as a demiurge but as a mythical catalyst of the divine. It does not act “factually,” like God does, but suggests what and why God should create through a certain logos. This strange-looking animal, the inventor of fire and agriculture7 and adviser of the humans in the ancient mythologies of the Oriental peoples, does not have a distinct status in the Romanian mythological bestiary by accident. According to Mihai Coman: The natural attributes of the hedgehog, its ability to squeeze and enlarge itself and its mundane ambivalence (between fauna and flora) have incited the archaic thought and suggested the analogy between its way of being and its structure, which is in contradiction with that of the world. In this way, the hedgehog has been used as a logical operator in solving profound rational issues; meditating through and with the hedgehog (i.e. its symbolical figure), the people of the popular culture transformed it into a “conceptual” entity, into an instrument of thought that, through its connotations, offered coherent solutions to unsettling questions regarding

4

Ibid., 281. Lucian Blaga, Geneza metaforei úi sensul culturii, 196. 6 Ibid. 7 Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, DicĠionar de simboluri, I, trans. LaurenĠiu Zoicaú (Bucureúti: Artemis, 1994), 140. 5

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the world’s order, its pace, the causes of the contradictions and the sense of becoming.8

It must be mentioned that, as far as we are concerned, it is only in the Romanian mythology that the hedgehog is imagined as being wise, omniscient, and capable of suggesting the shape of the earth. Its features and unique status in the world of the wordless represent, in line with the Romanian mythical imaginary, the gratitude of the divinity for its contribution to the perfecting of the cosmogonical process. This is emphasized in the Third Legend: Ever since the beginning, the hedgehog had fine, sable-like hair and all other creatures, even the tiniest one, persecuted the hedgehog, and it had to suffer because, apart from its small teeth, it had nothing with which to defend itself against them. However, God gave it a shield as a reward for its good council, and he turned its sable-soft hairs into thorns or spikes, so it would have something to defend itself with, and, apart from the human, no one could kill it.9

Another creature that partakes to the cosmogony is the bee. It is, as Mihai Coman opines in the study Romanian Folk Mythology, the mythical mediator10 between God and the hedgehog, the spy that has to get from the latter the secret of correcting the aesthetic and functional error. Its Godgiven mission, however, issues the curse of the hedgehog: that whoever sent it ends up eating what it made (honey). The curse is transformed by God into a blessing. The peasants thought this blessing accounted for the production of honey. The action of the hedgehog generates and modifies the form of the tiny creature. According to the archaic thought that made a habit out of establishing a causality with the paradigm of the real as a starting point, the lonely and grumpy hedgehog, convinced that whatever it will say will reach God’s ears, creates a substantial morphological modification by hitting the bee: The hedgehog, seeing the bee and asking itself what exactly the bee was doing in its lair, quickly produced a whip, ran after the bee and hit it right in the center so hard that one can only wonder how he did not cleave it in half (First Legend).11

8

Coman, Mitologie, 89. Marian, Basme, 339. 10 Coman, Mitologie, 109. 11 Marian, Basme, 333. 9

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The consequence of spying is the morphologic and functional mutation suffered by the bee, which becomes the catalyst of its own transit from an ontological to another level, as it becomes a creature just like any other, used by God as a “dialogic” tool, “a unique creature, an almost divine being endowed with incredible powers and qualities.”12 The image, interconnected with the micro-universe and its movements, role, and internal rhythm, is explained by the metaphorical language and symbolical props of The Cosmogonical Legends. This is attested by the texts in which the peasants present the genesis of the mole. In two of the legends collected by Simion Florea Marian, the metamorphosis of a human being into a mole is the outcome of (1) a divine curse, a punishment for the “reluctant” attitude of a woman who always badmouthed God, or (2) a hex placed by the mother of the “Holy Sun” on an unbelievably beautiful girl who had fallen for her son but “whom she did not want as daughter-in-law.” In the fifth legend, it is said that this animal was created from a piece of God’s clothing with the objective of helping some peasants. They were upset because, due to a curse put on them on account of their sinning, everything they cultivated “fell to the ground.” The situation was straightened by God and his new creation, which he advised not to be killed, because “whoever kills it will have sinned terribly.” Another legend told to the folklorist by an informant in the Mahala County, a region of Chernivtsi, explains that the mole appeared through the transformation of a greedy boy who is asked by his parents to burrow under the ground so that when the commission sent to measure the field asked the field itself the question of how large the family’s field actually was, the boy would give a favourable answer. The question, obviously, is recommended by the sly peasants. Lying and greed are punished by God by turning the boy into a mole. According to mythical logic, the peasant from the traditional Romanian village explains the appearance of the mole as follows: “And as the mole was initially a man, it is known that its front paws look very similar to people’s hands” (Sixth Legend).13 Within the sphere of the symbols, the mole that, according to Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, suggests “all the forces of the earth”14 is seen as an initiator in the mysteries of the subterranean world, and a creature that ensures the equilibrium of the material world through its activity in the netherworld. It is known as the symbol of the unknown circumscribed to the unseen world, of the ontological anxieties in respect 12

Coman, Mitologie, 105. Marian, Basme, 353. 14 Chevalier and Gheerbrant, DicĠionar, 335 13

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to the relation between life and death, light and dark, cosmic and earthly, through which the universal harmony is configured permanently. The cosmogonical legends collected by Simion Florea Marian reveal a complex image of the world as it presents itself to us and as it was perceived by the peasant. This image explains the existence of the Romanians and the micro/macro-universe when placed in the paradigm of the mythical logic and spiritual structure that characterize the Romanian people.

The Myth of Creation through Sacrifice Together with the genesis and eschatological myths, the myth of sacrifice as a means of creation knows the largest prevalence, as it is known by almost all the peoples of the world. Its origins must be sought in far-flung times, in the childhood of humanity. As Mircea Eliade opines, it is possible that this myth was founded in the cosmogonical one, “the model of all myths and rituals pertaining to the ideas of ‘making,’ ‘creation’ and ‘work’.” The mythical motif of the “creation” of the construction erected through sacrifice can be found in Oceania, Indonesia, Africa, and a myriad of European peoples, and therefore in a large geographical space. The collective mentality allots the creation of everything there is in the cosmos and implicitly on our planet (races, other beings, plants, etc.) to the sacrifice of a god, or even the self-sacrifice of a primordial giant. The rites of construction in the European space have their spiritual origin in this mythical horizon, because, just as the world appeared through the primordial sacrifice of a deity, every construction came to require the sacrifice of a being. Initially, a human being was sacrificed. As years passed, it was replaced with an animal, bird, or even one’s shadow, trapped through the practice of a certain ritual: a man called “the seller of shadows” furtively measured the shadow of a passer-by and sold it to masons so they could bury it at the foundation of the future construction. It was thought that the shadow was part of the man, a projection of his soul, as James Frazer says in The Golden Bough: “If his shadow is trampled, smitten or pierced, the man will feel the wound as if his own body had suffered it, and if this shadow is taken from him entirely (which he thinks is possible), he will die.”15 The burial of the shadow was analogous to the

15 James Frazer, Creanga de aur, II, trans. Octavian Nistor (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1980), 118.

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burial of the man’s soul, who died after forty days and became the guardian of the construction. Through the reiteration of the ritualistic act, the cosmogony is prolonged. Moreover, any construction (house, palace, temple, or fortress) was an image of the universe, an “axis mundi.” In the southeastern European space, this vision is granted a sacred dimension, because: Until very recently, the people in the Balkan-Danubian area were aware that a church or a monastery represented the Cosmos, as well as the heavenly Jerusalem or the Paradise: in this case, there was an awareness of the architectonic and iconographic symbolism etched into the sacred constructions, and this awareness was acquired both through religious experience (liturgy) and traditional culture (theology).16

The myth of sacrifice has particular valences in the southeastern European space, granted by the uncountable artistic revaluations in the folklore of this region. Throughout the past centuries, legends concerned with the human sacrifices required for the construction of fortresses, bridges, castles, cities, and churches were created. In Germany and France, for instance, there was a certain legend about a bridge that had been made by the Devil in one night, in exchange for the first soul to cross it the next day. In the same fashion, people think that the foundation of the Royal Palace in Madrid accommodates a human sacrifice. For the Greeks, this idea is woven around the construction of the Arta Bridge in Epir, the Tower of Cettinge (Montenegro) for the Serbians and Deva, and Rozafat Fortresses for the Magyars and Albanians. The Serbian version of the folk ballad about the construction of the Scutari fortress, well-known in southeastern Europe after it was published by Vuk Karadžiü, is, just like the Romanian ballad of the Master Manole, based on creation through ultimate sacrifice. The content of the ballad is the following: for three years, the brothers Vukašin, Goiko, and Ugliesa worked with three hundred masons to build the Scutari fortress on the banks of the Boiana River. However, everything they built during the day was demolished by a fairy, Vila, during the night. In the fourth year, Vila commanded them to immure two twin brothers, Stoian and Stoiana, in the foundation. The man who was sent to search for them returned after three years of travel empty handed. Then, the fairy asked the brothers to immure the wife that came with food first on the next day. The brothers swore to keep the secret, but it was only Goiko who kept his promise and agreed to 16 Mircea Eliade, De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han, trans. Maria Ivănescu and Cezar Ivănescu (Bucureúti: Humanitas, 1995), 60.

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immure his wife. The anonymous author emphasizes the despair and internal turmoil of the sacrificed woman.

The Myth Reflected in Folk Literature Starting with the nineteenth century and continuing until the present day, the attention of folklorists was focused more on the origin and the evolution of the text that re-evaluates such an ancient myth rather than its aesthetic valences. The theme of building a construction through immurement was crystalized in epic writings in the Balkans, each of the peoples there adapting it in accordance with their own forma mentis. The number of the variants discovered in this European space proves it: 311 Greek, 165 Romanian, 87 Bulgarian, 38 Magyar, 37 Serbian-Croatian, 19 Albanians, five Dobrudjan, and four Gipsy.17 At the end of the twentieth century, foreign and Romanian folklorists like Lazăr Săineanu, Mihail Arnaudov, Giuseppe Cocchiara, and Petru Caraman launched the hypothesis—accepted by the vast majority of folklorists—according to which the Balkan variants were based on the Greek prototype. Analysing Petar Skok’s theory, formulated in 1929, according to which the ballad was created and scattered by the Dobrudjan masons, Petru Caraman proves, using the anthroponym Manole and the simplicity of the text, that the ballad first appeared in Greece. He states that “the anthroponym ‘Manole’ is characteristic of Greek onomatology and has, at once, a purely Greek sound,” and that “the character Manole—contrary to current opinion—was widely known in the Greek popular tradition and the legend-song literary species, but was later replaced with other names.”18 Therefore, “if this Greek autochthonism of Manole is verified integrally, then it means that the birth of the ballad whose hero he is could have taken place on Greek soil.”19 The researcher does not however consider this hypothesis to be grounded enough, and that is why he adds an aspect he considers to be extremely important: Of all the peoples in southeastern Europe that know of the ballad with the motif of a woman’s immurement, none has the simplicity of the epic theme 17

Ion Taloú, Meúterul Manole. ContribuĠie la studiul unei teme de folclor european (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1973), 139. 18 Petru Caraman, Studii de folclor, I (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1987), 188. 19 Ibid., 189.

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like the Greeks. In addition to this, the Neo-Greek song carries some of the features of the inchoate asperity through which something from the fatally cruel and barbaric atmosphere of the ancient belief that was, in fact, a reality that held tyrannical dominion over the popular soul, reaches all the way to the present day. This is, from our standpoint, an undoubted proof of the primitivism of the Greek variant. It appears as a first phase in the concretization of this legend—captured straight from the spring of superstition, with no intermediary whatsoever—in durable poetical forms. For the other peoples—the Romanians, Serbian-Croatians and Bulgarians—the ballad is much more evolved. It reached superior aesthetic developments that place it among the most thoroughpaced accomplishments of folk eposes. With all these, we observe, at the same time, that the general scheme of the ballad is the Greek theme. In consequence, with the biggest possibility, the Greek were the creators of the epic song of the Master Manole.20

Preoccupied with the issue of the genesis but going past it, Petru Caraman considers that the Romanians played a crucial role in spreading the ballad on Balkan territory. Also, he underlines the heroic character of the Romanian version and its aesthetic valences: It is about the masterpiece of famous masons, especially the master architect. He is a hero, a superhuman. He is in contact with the divinity or certain geniuses—himself almost a genius. And on the other hand, his wife, another superior character—is a concretization of the boundless devotion towards her husband and motherly love, since she does not mourn her death, but mourns the departure from her loved child and his fate. These characters are projected on the gloomy background of a painful conflict—between man and destiny—that is solved with reconciliation through a heroic resignation of man, who consents to sacrifice.21

An interesting standpoint on the Romanian version of the ballad is Lucian Blaga’s, who, from the perspective of the cultural philosopher in the study Spatiul Mioritic (1936), talks about the geological age of the myth, whose remnants were preserved with the European peoples until the middle ages: The motif of sacrificing a human for a building originates in geological times, when man had to ensure through this sacrifice his protection against the evil powers of the world and the deities of darkness. Reminiscences, sometimes clear, sometimes vague, of this custom or belief can be found in 20 21

Ibid. Ibid., 164.

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the middle ages for many European peoples. The motif of human sacrifice for a building, incredibly primitive in essence, was preserved poetically and processed in almost all peoples in the European southeast.22

Judging the motif from a “sofianic perspective” (according to Blaga, “sofianic” refers to a “stylistic determinant” that creates the traditional Eastern and southeastern European spirit), he observes that through its sublimation, the Romanian ballad is granted a distinct note, because: It is only the Romanian people that believed that sacrifice is in balance with a heavenly deed. The Master sacrifices his wife for a church. This is a “sofianic” sublimation of the ancient motif that is of an incredible cruelty. The sofianic orientation must have been deeply etched into the soul of the Romanian people if it knew how to borrow this transfiguration of a motif which all of its neighbours, stranded in practicality or in a heroic medievalism, had fought ineffectively in an effort to sublimate.23

Another famous interpreter of the ballad, D. Caracostea, in the study South-eastern European Material and Romanian Form—The Master Manole (1942), comparatively analysing the versions from the Balkans, observed that some of them (Magyar and Bulgarian) emphasize the realistic features of the master’s wife, while some others underline the woman’s love for her children and the wife’s shame (in the Serbian ones) or contain other aspects of the drama (the master tricks his wife with a ring that had fallen on the foundation, as happens in the Greek versions). In contrast to these, the Romanian ballad, he opines, is superior from an artistic standpoint: When compared with all the other types and south Danubian variants, the ballad that was conceived here and for us is naturally on top of the rest. The fact that, according to our Romanian type, the ballad sheds light on the turmoil, the guilt and the tragic fall of the master does not decrease the figure of the wife, so tender and humane. The fate of both of them is inseparable. And due to having everything looked upon from the perspective of the inner torment of the master, the ballad is given a horizon and a deep meaning.24

22 Lucian Blaga, SpaĠiul mioritic, in Opere, 9, Trilogia culturii (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1985), 250. 23 Ibid. 24 D. Caracostea, Poezia tradiĠională română, II (Bucureúti: Pentru Literatură, 1969), 220.

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Mircea Eliade wrote about the remarkable value of the Romanian versions as well. He considered the ballad superior not only “in respect to its equilibrium and artistic expression, but also thanks to its mythical and metaphysical content,”25 the work in itself being “a folkloric product of a cosmogonic type, inasmuch as the sacrifice is a human imitation of the primordial act of the creation of the Worlds.”26 Therefore, the human sacrifice is placed at the foundation of “any initial activity … whenever the gesture of Creation is repeated.”27 Mircea Eliade considers that the origin of the ballad can be retraced to the Greeks, but its faultless form is the Romanian one. Moreover, it is in an ancient cultural substrate, inherited by the Balkan people, he sees the main element of the spirituality of these peoples because, even though the rituals pertaining to constructions exist in large areas, “nowhere else but in the Balkans and the Romanian Countries did the legends derived from these rituals give birth to aboriginal literary products.”28 This discovery determines the historian of religions to opine that: The peoples in the south-east of Europe, and especially the Romanians— because it is at them where we find the ballad encompassing all the theoretical elements in a magnificent synthesis—have the legend of the Master Manole as one of the central myths of their spirituality.29

The choosing and fructifying of this myth with roots “in an ancient, ecumenical metaphysics” in this part of the world are not accidental, since the myth “used to satisfy a certain spiritual need … met a resonance in whose way it did not stumble randomly.”30 Moreover, the Romanians and the Southern Danubian peoples rediscovered in this myth about “creative death” their own destiny, profoundly marked by dramatic history. In connection with the capitalization of death, Eliade makes a few interesting observations about the Master Manole, saying that in this literary creation, death “is creative, like any other ritualistic death,” and that is why he identifies: “a heroic and mannish conception of death. The

25

Mircea Eliade, Comentarii la Legenda Meúterului Manole, in Meúterul Manole (Iaúi: Junimea, 1992), 74. 26 Ibid., 84. 27 Ibid., 90 28 Ibid., 129 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 130.

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Romanian neither seeks nor wishes for death—but he does not fear it; and when we’re talking about a ritualistic death he welcomes it happily.”31 This opinion is in contradiction with the one that was formulated by Emil Cioran, who wrote about “Romania’s telluric, subterranean scepticism … a suffering, grimaced skepticism that lacked niceness and elegance” (Schimbarea la fată a României, 1943). By analysing the ballad rigorously and profoundly, seen from the perspective of the myths, rites, and ancient beliefs, we think that the opinion of the one who studied the religions of the world is closer to the true dimension of the Romanian spirit.

A Few Considerations on Ballad Variants Documented studies were written in a second half of the past century about the ballad The Master Manole, among which are: Ovidiu Papadima’s Neagoe Basarab, Mesterul Manole si “vânzătorii de umbre” (1962), Gheorghe Vrabie’s Jertfa zidirii sau Mesterul Manole (1966), Adrian Fochi’s Versiunile extrabalcanice ale legendei despre “jertfa zidirii” (1966), Ion Talos’s Mesterul Manole. ContribuĠie la studiul unei teme de folclor European, and Horia Bădescu’s Meúterul Manole sau imanenĠa tragicului (1986). Ion Taloú’s book brings new elements into the exegetical universe of the ballad by researching the Transylvanian variants neglected by researchers, variants that, in comparison with those from the rest of the country, were still infused with a much older, archaic background. The folklorist investigates a large chunk of material with a special interest in ethnographic realities, and sees that: While the versions from Oltenia, Muntenia and Moldova were rejuvenated, the ones from the northern part of Transylvania maintained their ancient configuration and are nowadays considered to be the first known stage in the evolution of the versified text.32

He also observes the transformation of several Transylvanian variants into prose legends, which caused their closeness to the “superstition that sits at their foundation.” They “go counter-clockwise on the path they took initially, from superstition to legend and then to ballad.”33

31

Ibid. Taloú, Meúterul Manole, 265. 33 Ibid. 32

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The Transylvanian texts are shorter and presented as carols. They keep their ritualistic character, and the name of the masters are Manea, Miclău‫܈‬, Siminic, Petre, and Constantin. In the ballad variants that circulated in Romanian regions (Moldavia, Muntenia), the name of the main character is always Manole and the location is always given. In Muntenia, where “numerous architectural monuments able to give wings to the popular imagination”34 were built, the ballad chose “the most impressive out of them all: the Curtea de Arge‫܈‬ Monastery.”35 This location caused consequences for the text that became, from an ethnographic standpoint, a veritable literary creation: the most interesting aspect is that through this location, the main motif of the poem, i.e. the sacrifice of a woman, gained more profound meanings: from some tragic occurrence, a prevalent sense in the Transylvanian variants, the woman’s sacrifice is tasked with the job of building a monastery “like no any other.” If the text had a somewhat ethnographic text until then, it rose to the status of a grand literary value through the sense it was invested with by the location. This is, we daresay, an example that illustrates the rejuvenation of the folkloric themes.36

In a less-known variant called Trisfetitele (which circulated in the northeastern part of Romania), the story unfolds in another famous building—the Trei Ierarhi Monastery from Ia‫܈‬i. In this one, the period is mentioned as being Vasile Lupu’s reign (in the seventeenth century). The content of the text is the following: the Lord decides to build a church in which to lay the relics of Saint Paraskevi and chooses the best architect from Moldova to get the job done. The architect, knowing that each construction requires a soul to protect it, steals the shadow of one of his enemies and then the shadows of some of his friends. This is not enough, and the building keeps on crumbling down. He goes to a witch who informs him that his labour is thwarted by an evil spirit that cannot be driven away unless he immolates his wife and child. Loving fame more than his family, the master decides to immure them and thus finalize the construction. On the day in which the church was about to be hallowed, the voivod finds out what the architect has done and gives orders for his name to be removed from the edifice and for him to be taken to the roof, with no possibility of climbing down. The master therefore builds a pair of wings from pieces of wood and flies towards a nearby field. However, a 34

Ibid., 264. Ibid. 36 Ibid. 35

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storm comes, breaking his wings, and he falls into the River Bahlui, where he dies. Two variants of the ballad say that the moans of the sacrificed persons can still be heard in the courtyard of the Trisfetitelor during the night. Another says that the architect was killed, so he will never build such a church anywhere else. This ballad is widespread only in and around Iasi. Three variants are known, all of them in prose, recorded by the Russian traveller Struve (1792), Mihail Kogălniceanu, and G. Enăchescu. From the thorough analysis made by Ion Taloú, the observations vis-àvis the structure and style of the ballad are not missing. According to him, the motifs are: the crumbling of the walls, the revelation of the requirement that a human being must be immured in the foundation, choosing the victim, the victim’s qualities, the gradual immurement, the main character, the other characters, the place on which the walls will be built, and the object of the construction. In his efforts to find similarities and dissimilarities between the variants of the work, the folklorist observes that what all variants share is “quite little, i.e. certain motifs: the waywardness of the walls, the necessity of having a woman immured in the foundations, the sacrifice of the most beautiful wife.”37 In fact, “this is the skeleton of the song, which was adapted by each Balkan people to its own nature, weaving, according to their own skills, the motifs that were part of their own dowry.”38 Another merit than can be attributed to the researcher is that of having marked a turning point in the orientation of the genetic hypothesis. Whereas his predecessors had supported the Greek origin of the ballad, the ethnologist is reserved in formulating a definitive hypothesis, underlining the difficulty of deciding which people authored this epic song since a certain unity can be seen in the Balkan versions. This is granted by the skeleton, the overlapping of cultural strata, and the displacement of the population throughout the Balkans. Therefore: The ancient Hellenic culture that is taken sometimes as an argument by certain authors does not give the right to suppose that the Greeks created the song, because it has been proved that the Balkan people conserved cultural strata that are, sometimes, older than the “classical” mythologies, the Greek and Roman. If the culture of the Greek came to be known to us, it does not mean that the other peoples from the Balkans and the Carpathians were devoid of culture and the capacity to create valuable folkloric works. The high number of variants collected from the 37 38

Ibid., 390. Ibid.

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Romanians and the Greek cannot be taken as a deciding argument in favour of the two versions, because intensive collections from the other peoples might shed light on a much richer plethora of variants. The remarkable artistic polishing of the Romanian and the Serbian-Croatian version cannot be summoned as an argument in the discussion concerning the origin of the text; the more archaic character of the Greek variant— even though its close connection to the myth cannot be questioned—falls into that same category, because it only proves that it represents an older stage in the evolution of the text, just as the Romanian variants from Transylvania are not older, origin-wise, than those from Oltenia, Muntenia and Moldova, but conserve an older stage in evolution.39

We can now see that the problem of the genesis of such a famous folkloric creation is far from being cleared up, and maybe this will be a major research theme for the scholars of the twenty-first century. In respect to the publishing of some of the variants in Romania during the nineteenth century, we ought to mention that, besides the text published by Vasile Alecsandri in Poezii populare ale românilor [Folk Poetry of Romania] (1852), a prose variant of Trisfetitele, published by Mihail Kogălniceanu (1842), another version published by Cezar Bolliac entitled The Master Manole, not as a folk text but as a personal creation, and another variant published in the volume Poezii populare române [Romanian Folk Poetry] (1885), collected by G. Dem. Teodorescu, there are no others. The person who marked the “aesthetic destiny” of the ballad was decidedly the variant enclosed in Vasile Alecsandri’s anthology.

The Structure of the Ballad: Motifs and Symbols The Romanian variants (165 according to the statistics compiled by Ion Talos), in comparison to the ones from the Balkans (Serbian and Bulgarian), which put an emphasis on the suffering of the immured woman, underline the inner conflict of the master and the fatality of a human being destined to create beauty. The myth of the creative sacrifice, which found its poetic essence and artistic transfiguration in the folk ballad of the Arges Monastery (“an esthetic myth,” according to G. Călnescu), is part of the category of myths defined by Blaga as “transsignificant” (without a logic equivalent). Even though Negru-Vodă (either Radu I Basarab or Neagoe Basarab) is mentioned—a detail that is of no interest in the analysis of the text’s artistic value—the ballad suppresses the profane, historical time and introduces us to the eternal present, a 39

Ibid., 390–1.

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temporal coordinate that is unique to any myth, a sacred time called by Mircea Eliade the “illud tempore”—a time beyond history (relatively analogous to the notion of deep time).40 The space “Down the Arges River/On a beautiful shore” pertains to mystery and is a sacred space within the myth. Here, “On a wall derelict and unfinished,” the masters have to build, “A tall monastery, like no other.” The place that was chosen by the ruler seems to be haunted by evil spirits, because “As quickly as they see it/ Dogs throw themselves at it/ And bark at the void/ They bark funereally.” The choice, however, is not accidental. The walls delimitate the space, and enclose a world. The fact that they are unfinished suggests the ingress of certain influences, inferior in origin, and the existence of evil spirits, announced by the barking of the dogs. In mythology, they are associated with death and the underworld, and the unseen kingdoms of the chthonian divinities. They can be conquered only by building a church. This way, the new construction will facilitate the communication between transcendence and immanence and the descent of the sacred into the profane. The church itself symbolizes the city of Jerusalem, the kingdom of the chosen ones, a microcosm. On one hand, the construction of the church will have satisfied the ego of the Lord who, during the Dark Ages, was considered as being chosen by God, and on the other the Master Manole will have fulfilled his destiny as an artist. Another crucial aspect in the Romanian ballad is the number of the master builders: “nine great masters/ apprentices and masons.” In the work Romanian Fairytales, Lazăr Săineanu explains the magical value of the numbers found in folklore. He mentions that they play an important role in the mythologies of all the Roman, Slavic, and Germanic peoples. The number nine, a multiple of three (in the Pythagorean system, three is the symbol of perfect harmony), suggests perfection, the end and the beginning, “in other words, a dislocation to another plane. This is where the idea of rebirth and germination, as well as that of death, can be found,”41 in the opinion of Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, the authors of The Dictionary of Symbols. Without doubt, this number confers the ballad a ritualistic character and expresses a standpoint on the subject of life. Through their creative activity, the masons partake in the “cosmic rhythms” and the building of the church, which is a symbolic centre of the Romanian world.

40

Mircea Eliade, Morfologia úi funcĠia miturilor, in Secolul 20, no. 205-206 (1978): 21. 41 Chevalier and Gheerbrant, DicĠionar, 352.

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The group of masons is rounded by Manole, the tenth master. He is somewhat aloof from the others, since he is the Artist, the Ingenious Creator. The number ten has an interesting symbolism, as it expresses the idea of wholeness, perfection, life, and death, as well as a profound dualism of the being. In Romanian folk beliefs, even numbers are generally seen as harbingers of doom. That is why images from the beginning of the ballad, where ten is mentioned, anticipate the tragic ending, an ending that is concerned with a metaphysic of death. The aspiration of the artist to overcome his human condition is to be found in Manole. He receives information on what is required for the building to be completed via a dream (a bridge between the human and the divine, the conscious and subconscious): the immurement of a close, loved being, the wife or the sister of one of the masters, the first one to happen to come with food: And a dream he was dreaming Then he woke up and spoke: Nine great masters, apprentices and masons, Have you a clue what I dreamt of Since I went to sleep? A whisper from yonder above Has told me Whatever we build Shall fall during the night Until we decide To bury in the wall The first wife The first sister That happens to show Tomorrow morn To bring food To her husband or brother.

The redeeming solution does not come from the exterior, a bird (as with the Greeks), or a fairy (as with the Serbians), but from the depths of the conscience of the one who will have to sacrifice or self-sacrifice to satisfy the necessity of creation. The next motif is that of the oath, respected only by Manole, who elevates himself to the supreme conscience of the artist: If you desire To finish The holy monastery For alms

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Let us all swear And bind ourselves To keep the secret; And any wife Any sister that Tomorrow morn Shall appear first She shall be sacrificed Immured in the wall!

The violation of the oath, an oath that could have made possible the sacred unity of the representatives of the same guild, creates a rupture—a “level rupture,” as Mircea Eliade would call it. This will precipitate the action on a course, i.e. burying Manole’s wife, to whom the secret is not revealed. Ana (in Alecsandri’s version) or Caplea (in Teodorescu’s) is predestined to rouse the church through a transfer of substantiality, all the more so that she conquers all the obstacles caused by Manole’s requests to God (the rain, the wind, and even the Termagant that appears in Tudor Pamfile’s version) and completes the first level of initiation. Even though the anonymous author immortalizes in lyrical, visual, and sonic images the torment of the sacrificed woman, the emphasis does not fall on this, as happens in some south Danubian versions, but on the inner torment of Manole the creator, who proves to be stronger than Manole the man. The inner struggle, the battle between the two egos on one hand and between the creative ego and human destiny on the other, is underlined when Manole puts his wife on the scaffold to immure her: And Manea was rabid He was kissing his wife He was embracing her But was still climbing her up the scaffold And was jokingly saying: “Don’t be afraid, my love We are only pretending That we’re burying you alive” And Ana was faithful And was laughing cheerfully And Manea was sighing And was starting To bury her And fulfil the dream.

From now on, the tragic is in a continuous crescendo until the end of the text. In this sense, we observe a significant aspect in Alecsandri’s

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version. The halving of the ego is suggested by the use of two names: Manole and Manea. The second name, which could be hypocoristic, suggests the detachment of the artist, his breaking away from the ontological universe he is part of. We consider that it is not the prosodic necessities that determined the poet to use the noun Manea but his intention to underline that the master in the ballad is the symbol of the artist’s condition, which implies overcoming the limit of the human to the end of its own deification. In this hypostasis, he appears in the vision of the folk poet, whereas for Ana he remains, until the end, Manole, her loved husband and the only one for whom she put up with the “joke” of being immured. Once the sacrifice was made, the building was raised unto eternity. The monastery becomes a microcosm, an image of the sacred world, and stands out through its beauty. The ambition of the masons, who say they can build whenever they want—“Another monastery/ For alms/ A lot brighter/ And more beautiful!”—falls short of their wish due to the bidding of the voivod, who wants to be the founder of a unique masterpiece, and also due to his incredible selfishness. Because of this, the masters, individualists until the end and devoid of the understanding of human suffering, are punished. On the other hand, they have become initiates in their craft and are not allowed to divulge its secrets. This is the reason why the ruler commands the ladders be taken away, so that the masons are sentenced to death. The death of the Master Manole is explained as follows: And poor Manole The Master Manole When he tried to hurl himself Lo, he heard a voice From the wall A chocked Much beloved voice, Manoli, Manoli, Master Manoli! The wall clamps me badly My life is shrivelling, Manole heard it And lost it His eyes were covered His world upturned The clouds rolled And from the roof The poor Manole fell

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And where he fell A gentle well With shallow salt water Moistened with tears Grew.

The destruction of the ladders creates a rupture in the level and “makes possible the transition from one existence to another”: from the profane to the sacred, from the human to the ideational. A suggestion of an outstanding depth in regard to the motif of the ladder is given by Mircea Eliade: The ideas of sanctification, death, love and liberation are implied in the symbolism of the ladder, each of them representing, indeed, the abolition of the human, profane condition, so an ontological rupture: through love, death, sacredness and metaphysical knowledge, the man passes, as it is said in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, from the “surreal to the real.”42

He is speaking about the ultimate reality the human being aspires to and which Manole attained only after he overcame his condition and acquired the divine one, which he had before his “jump” into existence. Creation shines and fulfils human destiny. Manole the Artist can now free himself from the limits of the human being in order to regain inner freedom and harmony. This is the necessity of the flight that reminds us of Icarus. The broken flight does not symbolize the dissolution of the man into nothingness, but his coming into being. In the gushing thrills, the “gentle well” brings tranquillity and suggests purity and regeneration. The death of the master is violent, and consequently creative, just like the death of his wife. The creation ensures its permanence, probing the idea that the destiny of the artists is dramatic or tragic, because nothing can last without a sacrifice. D. Caracostea pertinently opines that: “It is neither the mystique of death nor the survival of the superstition, but the feeling of creativity, with all the tragedy it brings about, that is the axis on which the Romanian expression was crystalized functionally.”43 The ballad of The Arges Monastery or The Master Manole has poetically clothed—in the Romanian space—the ancient myth of burying people alive, as well as that of the creation that requires sacrifice, because it grants it permanence in the unyielding passing of time. 42

Mircea Eliade, Imagini úi simboluri, trans. Alexandra Beldescu (Bucureúti: Humanitas, 1994), 63. 43 Caracostea, Poezia tradiĠională română, 190.

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The Myth Concerning the Pursuit of Immortality The human being has always sought answers and explanations in regard to their role in the world, their knowledge of themselves, and their relation with the creator of all things. The obsessive issue of the human is, however, the reflection of time in their soul and conscience, the inexorable passing of time—their own invention that became, in the meantime, their most feared enemy, mute and impassable. Having lived since birth with the “tragic feeling” of time, the human never ceased to look for and hope to find the “elixir”, the “well” or the land of eternal youth, asking themselves, like Fernando Pessoa: How is the eternity in the stone from the pillars of the pyramid any better than the eternity from Shiva’s thought? How is the power of the sky any better than the power of a word that wakes up the Lord in a man’s dream?44

From primordial times, the human has always wanted to be happy, and in order to be so he has tried, in many ways, to solve the “mystery” of eternity. Because of that, Yuan Ke opines in The Myths of Ancient China, the people from the past: Drank morning dew, swallowed air and, on a daily basis, with their faces lifted towards the sun, practiced deep breathing. Some of them fed themselves with plants and minerals that symbolized purity like, for instance, chrysanthemums, jade, gold and cinnabar, or strove to make their bodies light enough to fly, which is why they did not eat grains; they swallowed air and the elixir of eternal life or fed on immortality while studying alchemy. The most impatient of them used the method of relaxation, set themselves on fire or committed hara-kiri, so that their souls could ascend to the sky, thinking that by doing that, they would become immortal and would live forever in paradise.45

At once mysterious and wildly captivating, time has been perceived by the mythical thought as a primordial reality replete with sacred valences. In contrast to the human of the modern and postmodern societies, who sees time linearly and as being irreversible and irretrievable, the human of the ancient societies saw it cyclically, as being reversible and retrievable 44

Fernando Pessoa, Cartea neliniútirii, trans. Dinu Flămând (Bucureúti: FundaĠia Culturală Română, 2000), 188. 45 Yuan Ke, Miturile Chinei antice, trans. Toni Radian (Bucureúti: ùtiinĠifică úi Enciclopedică, 1987), 271.

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through the practice of certain rituals. As the mythologist Victor Kernbach says: That primordial, ancestral time, called by an Australian tribe “the time of the dream” (alcheringa), persists anywhere in the mythological conscience of mankind; it’s the time that’s been there since the start of it all and it is, accordingly, sacred, illud tempus, die Urzeit, which precedes the empirical, profane time.46

The attempt of the human being to find immortality is reflected in ancient literary works. The first and most famous is The Epic of Gilgamesh from the Sumerian-Babylonian mythology and dated to the third millennium BC. A historical figure (according to historical research), the king of the Sumerian fortress of Uruk, Gilgamesh— “a typical hero of an evolved civilization,”47 a partially divine hero—is the first figure (that we know of) to seek immortality. The death of the giant Enkidu generates ontological unrest in his soul: “When my time will come, will I not be like Enkidu?” The revelation of his own destiny and ephemerality forces him to take action, and he leaves for the far-flung land of Utnapishtim, an ancestor and survivor of the flood who had been blessed with immortality by the gods. After fighting lions and walking twelve leagues through the darkness, the hero reaches the sea that goes all around the Earth and talks with Siduri, an alewife. She tries to convince him to give up his desire of crossing the dangerous waters of the cosmic ocean, which can be crossed safely only by the sun god Shamash. Moreover, Siduri tells him the truth about the perishable fate of the human being: “The eternal life you are seeking will never be given to you./ When the Gods made humankind,/ They destined men to die./ They kept eternal life for themselves!” (Tablet X). The hero eventually finds Utnapishtim “The Faraway,” who tells Gilgamesh that he could talk to the gods in his favour, but with one condition: Gilgamesh has to stay awake for six days and seven nights. The hero fails to comply, as he falls asleep and wakes up just before the seventh day. Consequently, he cannot obtain immortality, but Utnapishtim tells him about the secret of the plant of rejuvenation, which grows in the depths of the ocean. Gilgamesh collects it and intends to use it later on, when he needs it. A snake, however, is lured by the pleasant smell of the flower and steals it from him as he is bathing in a spring. Gilgamesh

46

Kernbach, Universul mitic (Bucureúti: LUCMAN), 363 Ioan Petru Culianu, Călătorii în lumea de dincolo, trans. Sorin Antohi (Bucureúti: Nemira, 1996), 79.

47

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cannot enjoy eternal youth and his destiny is no different from that of any other human being. The mythical theme of the pursuit of immortality is also presented in Irish mythology in the saga of Imram Brain maic Febail [The Adventures of Bran, son of Febail]. The hero, the son of King Febail, learns from a beautiful woman from the mysterious island of Emain that the island is a blessed paradise where lies, sadness, evil, death, disease, and old age do not exist. Anxious to get there, Bran sets out on the road the very next day, together with “three times nine men,” each group being led by “one of his brothers, of the same age.” They get to an island “where everybody was laughing,” and a man from Bran’s crew joins them. This is the Island of Happiness. Their travel continues and they reach the Island of Women, where they are welcomed by the queen of that realm. At first, they think they have stayed here for a short time, one year maximum, but in reality several years have elapsed. Because one of Bran’s friends, Nechtan, the son of Colbrain, is struck with homesickness, they decide to return to native soil in Ulster. The queen does not manage to convince them to stay, but advises them nonetheless “to refrain from setting foot on native soil.” They sail to a village named Cape Bran and the hero discovers that the locals have heard about Bran’s adventures from legends. Without taking into account the advice of the queen, Nechtan jumps from the boat and is instantly turned into “a heap of dust, as if his body had stayed in the ground for hundreds of years.” Bran recounts all his adventures to the locals. Afterwards, he bids farewell to them and no one ever hears of his whereabouts again.48 The mythical dimension of immortality is substantialized in the Japanese story of Urasima Taro, included in the poetic anthology Manyosiu from the eighteenth century. The main character, a modest fisherman who lived in the village of Mitsunowe in the Tanko province, manages to reach the land of immortality, but does not stay there. Urasima Taro is not controlled by an obsession to become immortal, like Gilgamesh, because he does not have any ontological anxieties. He reaches the land where there is no death as the result of having accepted the proposal of a frog whose life he had saved, which offers to lead him into the depths of the palace of the dragon, king of the sea. The frog, therefore, is the catalyst of the hero’s entire existential route. His accession to that deathless space is, in fact, the reward for his good deed according to the dragon’s daughter, the beautiful Otohime: 48

Victor Kernbach, Miturile esenĠiale (Bucureúti: ùtiinĠifică úi Enciclopedică, 1978), 378–82.

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We thank you, glorious Urasima, for dropping by. By saving the frog’s life, you have done a good deed in favour of our kingdom. So we invited you here to reward you with whatever we are able to.49

Urasima is impressed by the unbelievable beauties of the palace and its garden: On the east side it was spring, with sour-cherry and plum trees in bloom and with sparrows singing from a plumage of emerald; on the south side it was summer, with weeds grown luxuriously and with locusts and crickets singing all over the place; on the west side it was autumn, with the rustling of the red leaves of the maple trees and bloomed chrysanthemums; on the north side it was winter, with trees drowned under snow and rivers and rivulets enclosed in clinking, translucent ice.50

Time is mythicized here because it “passed as if it were in a dream,” but the dimension of memory is activated all of a sudden. Urasima starts to think of his parents and is struck with a desire to go back. When he leaves, he is given “a beautiful box” by Otohime and is forbidden to ever open it. When he reaches his native lands he sees that everything is changed. He finds out that seven hundred years have passed since his departure. Saddened by the fact that he is a stranger in the world he once belonged to, he opens the box from Otohime. A cloud of smoke emerges from it, and when Urasima touches it he grows old and dies. Just like Nechtan, he lives the experience of eternal youth, but he cannot keep it because he violates a crucial interdiction: he comes into contact with the worldly and the perishable that contain the germs of death. This theme is present in Chinese and Vietnamese mythologies, as well as the Romanian, in the fairytales “Youthfulness without Caducity and Life without Death” (from the collection The Legends and Fairytales of the Romanians by Petre Ispirescu) and “Three Poor Boys” (from the anthology Romanian Folktales by Cristea Sandu-Timoc). We ought to mention that “the Romanian form has an originality that, without excluding certain contaminations, is most certainly based on a local, ancient substratum.”51 The archaeological research done in the last century in the Romanian space reveals that their ancestors, the Dacians, were responsive to the issue of time, and demonstrated by the rectangular sanctuaries from Sarmisegetuza (the capital fortress of Dacia), and the sundial from Histria 49

Ibid., 374. Ibid., 375. 51 Kernbach, Universul mitic, 364. 50

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(which indicates hours, months, the onset of the seasons, and the day’s decreasing coefficient after the summer solstice and increasing coefficient after it). These are completed by the information that exists in the books of the ancient writers like Herodotus, Strabo, and Plato. In Histories, Herodotus says the Dacians believed in immortality: “Their belief is that they die and whoever dies goes to Zalmoxis, a divine being (a daimon)”; initially, Zalmoxis was the great priest of the Dacians and then gained the status of deity. After his return from Greece (where he was Pythagoras’s disciple), and having known: The Ionian lifestyle and some manners more high-brow than those in Thrace, he asked for a hall to be built so that he could throw feasts for the most illustrious of citizens; during these feasts, he taught his guests that neither he nor them will ever die, but merely move to another place where they will live eternally. As he hosted his feasts, a subterranean home was built for him. When the construction was finished, he disappeared from the ranks of the Thracians and climbed down into the depths of his subterranean chambers, where he hid for three years. The Thracians regretted his passing and mourned him as if he were dead. But in the fourth year he returned and made the Thracians believe everything he had said was true.52

One can clearly see that the Dacians had a very unique concept of time. It was perceived as being circular (and thus reversible) and even infinite, if we consider their belief that the messenger who was thrown onto the spikes got to Zamolxis alive. It is known that the mythical thought saw time as being reversible, because it could be retrieved and relived through rituals. This time was sacred and non-historic and engorged the objective, biological, and profane time. This conception is well reflected in mythical tales. In the epic space of the imaginary, the discourse is “woven” masterfully in an “enigmatic key,” and this is why it sometimes clashes with our way of thinking, which is anchored to this immediate reality. An atypical fairy tale in our Romanian literature is Youthfulness without Caducity and Life without Death by Petre Ispirescu. The fairy tale was first told to the author by his father and was initially published in the newspaper The Romanian Peasant (1862), then in his anthology The Legends or the Fairy Tales of the Romanians (1872; 1882). Unique through its strangeness, the philosophical beliefs imbedded in it, and its deviation from the stereotypical scheme of the fairy tale, this text, whose 52

Herodot, Istorii, I, trans. Adelina Piatkovski (Bucureúti: ùtiinĠifică,1961), 345–6.

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stylistic structure was changed by Petre Ispirescu, has generated countless commentaries from various Romanian men of culture, for instance: Constantin Noica, Mircea Constantinescu, Lazăr Săineanu, Victor Kernbach, Maria and Mircea Muthu, and Adrian Alui Gheorghe. It has a “hidden meaning” that was carefully crafted within the discourse and universe of symbols. We think it can be seen as a genuine folk epic. The content of the text is the following: an emperor and an empress, “young and beautiful,” wanted children, but their struggles and advice from philosophers and shamans had all been to no avail. Having heard of a “skilled shaman” in a neighbouring village, they went to him to ask for some remedies. He gave them the medicines and warned them that they would indeed have a child, but not for long. Before his birth, “the child started to cry with such terrible passion that no shaman could reconcile him.” He stopped crying, however, once the emperor promised him “youthfulness without caducity and life without death.” The whole kingdom rejoiced for an entire week after Prince Charming was born. He gained a special status among the children of his age thanks to his outstanding qualities. On his fifteenth birthday he asked the emperor to give him what he had promised before his birth. Since the emperor could not keep his promise, Prince Charming had to wander the earth in pursuit of “youthfulness without caducity and life without death.” He went to the royal stables and chose a “skeletal, scabbed horse” for his journey. The horse was in fact the same one his father had when he was young. The horse advised the prince to get the broadsword, spear, bow, satchel, and clothes his father had worn as a young boy. He took care of the horse and prepared it for the road for six weeks. He also polished his weapons and cleaned his clothes, before leaving on the third day. On the outskirts of his father’s dominion, he shared his riches with the soldiers and sent them back home. He kept with him only as much food as the horse could carry. He left for the east and rode for three days and three nights, until he reached “a large plain replete with many human bones.” The horse told him that he was in the land of the Gheonoaia, an evil creature that killed all those who set foot in her territory. The creature had once been a woman, but the curse of her parents, whom she disobeyed, had transformed her into a hideous being. The next day, as the two were getting close to a forest, the Gheonoaia got in their way. Helped by his magic horse, Prince Charming managed to injure her with an arrow. She begged him not to release the second arrow and testified that he was the very first mortal that dared to walk so deeply into her kingdom. They went to her house, where the creature asked Prince Charming to marry one of her daughters, each of them of an outstanding beauty. Prince Charming

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refused her proposal and told her what he was looking for. After three days, he left and reached a beautiful plain. On one half, the grass was fresh and bordered with flowers, but on the other half all the grass was scorched. He learned from his horse that they were in the territory of the Termagant, the twin sister of the Gheonoaia, who had been cursed for disobedience as well, and transformed into a hideous creature with three heads. She was a lot crueller than the Gheonoaia. The horse also taught him that the two creatures were enemies and that when the Termagant was upset she “spat fire and pitch.” The scorched grass was the result of their dispute. The next day, the hero battled the Termagant. Prince Charming chopped off one of her heads and the creature asked for forgiveness. They then stayed at her palace for three days, and then left. They reached a plain “full of flowers and an eternal spring.” Again, the horse warned the hero they had to face yet another danger, because they were inching towards the palace where “youthfulness without caducity and life without death” was to be found. This palace was surrounded by a thick forest where feral animals, the protectors of that space, roamed free. The horse suggested his owner go to the palace above the forest, which he did. They got to the palace and were welcomed by a “cute, beautiful, tall and thin fairy.” Her two older sisters also lived in the palace. They begged Prince Charming to live there with them because they were “sick of loneliness.” It did not take long until Prince Charming married the smallest of the sisters. He was allowed to walk anywhere save for a place called the Valley of Mourning. Time flew by, but he was still as young as when he got there. He was living in peace with his wife and sisters-in-law, enjoying the beauties of that land, and frequently went hunting. One day, he saw a rabbit and started to chase and shoot at it with arrows. He managed to kill the rabbit with the third arrow, but realized he had ended up in the Valley of Mourning. When he went back to the palace, he was struck with homesickness and started to miss his parents. He became very depressed and wanted to go home, thinking that only a few days had passed since he had got to the realm of “youthfulness without caducity and life without death.” Both the horse and the fairies tried to stop him, saying his parents have been dead for hundreds of years, but failed. He pined for his parents and the horse told him he could take him back to his father’s palace for an hour, but that they had to return after that. Prince Charming accepted and the two set to the road. In the places where the kingdoms of the Termagant and the Gheonoaia had been, cities had been raised and the “forests” turned into plains. He asked about the two creatures, but the people did not seem to have heard of them. Their ancestors, however, once spoke about them. They laughed at him and accused him of daydreaming. He was upset

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by their behaviour and left, but was unaware that his beard and hair had whitened and that his feet were shaking. When he reached his father’s kingdom, he saw new cities and places so changed “he could not recognize them.” At his father’s palace, now “derelict and eaten by weeds,” the horse bade him farewell and left “as quickly as an arrow.” The prince, now old and with a knee-long beard, wandered through the ruins of the palace. He found a box and opened its lid, from which a weak voice said: “Welcome home; if you would have tarried longer, I’m afraid I, too, would have perished.” It was Death. It slapped him and he died immediately, having turned into dust. This fairy tale, fascinating for its ontological poetry, is singular in Romanian folk literature due to the fact that the ending, which is usually happy and optimistic, is realistic in this case, inasmuch as it reveals that the human being carries in themselves the germs of death from birth. The whole structure of the epic discourse is specific to “a myth treated with the technique of the fairy tale” (Mircea Constantinescu). This is emphasized by the theme of the pursuit of immortality, a theme that differs from those of other Romanian fairy tales in which we are greeted by the conflict between good and evil. Moreover, Prince Charming (the archetypal hero of Romanian fairy tales) does not go through the common steps of initiation and does not have to fulfil a mission in the name of a human collectivity, since everything is circumscribed to individual destiny. The birth of the hero is also special. Sometimes, heroes are born miraculously after an emperor’s daughter has swallowed a pea or a dove has blown air into her mouth, has swallowed a plant, or has eaten the meat of a golden fish. The birth of Prince Charming in this fairy tale is placed on the horizon of the miraculous, because the empress falls pregnant thanks to the medication given by the shaman. The critic Mircea Constantinescu sees this shaman as a corresponding to the “mythical ancestor” that introduces us to the mythical space. We consider that this character is rather an image, a representation of the sacred that obviously knows the destiny of the hero and warns the emperor and the empress about it. Prince Charming is the chosen one and proves his outstanding qualities before he is even born. He comes into a mythical dimension and secures his existence in the profane universe with something no human being can offer to another: immortality. We are told that he started to cry before he was born. In this situation, his crying does not express pain or desperation, but a metaphysical sadness. Crying is a metalinguistic code; as Andrei Ple‫܈‬u calls it in Minima moralia, it is, “a paradoxical deed of the

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mind: it is metanoia, the leap of the mind beyond itself, in another plane of understanding.”53 Prince Charming’s mission only concerns himself and his destiny as an immortal being. This is the objective of his “leap” into the world. His journey is from nonexistence towards existence. The path he walks in order to find immortality is circumscribed to the profane space (his father’s kingdom), the quasi-mythical crossing space (the territories of the monsters) and the mythical one, loaded with sacredness (the realm of the fairies). This imaginary real appears only in this fairy tale and differs from that “other world” that is frequently summoned in other literary creations, where the hero descends into a world that is populated by dragons who live with the most beautiful human women. In the same lines, the realm of “youthfulness without caducity” is a locus amoenus that does not resemble the paradise of Christianity. As Victor Kernbach opines: The most fascinating territory from that Other Realm (singular in this mythological cycle, because it is a quadra-dimensional area) is called Youthfulness without caducity and life without death, its name belonging at once to the place, the palace and the fairy-queen. This territory is not seen as a space in the geographical sense, but rather as a chrono-spatial one; if that Other Realm is almost entirely made out of a series of cosmic planes with variable forms and spaces, the series of the Youthfulness without caducity is an area where there is no time, and therefore a cosmic variant of the durations and not even of eternity itself, but of the annulment of duration.54

In regard to the spaces the hero goes through, we are interested in yet another aspect. We cannot talk of a pure space because the everyday one contains insertions of sacredness through the presence of the shaman, and the sacred one contains insertions of the everyday realm through the presence of a place mentioned in the Bible: the Valley of Mourning. In the text, this place is given an obvious symbolic meaning. It generates the anamnesis. Does Prince Charming get to this valley by accident or because he is guided there by the thread of his inexorable destiny? Unlike Gilgamesh, who must face countless obstacles and does not come to know immortality, the hero of the Romanian fairy tale does acquire immortality, but he cannot keep it. He is stricken with dor55 over 53

Andrei Pleúu, Minima moralia (Bucureúti: Cartea Românească, 1988), 136. Kernbach, Universul mitic, 361. 55 The word “dor” is untranslatable. It refers to a deep, painful nostalgia and is similar to the Portuguese “saudade,” the German “sehnsucht,” the Welsh “hiraeth,” and the Russian “toska.” 54

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his parents and his home, but this dor is just a pretext. And what is dor, after all?—a specific Romanian word with no equivalent in the languages of other peoples, translated beautifully by a French man of culture as “la nostalgie de la nostalgie.” In the Encyclopedia of Cultural Signs and Symbols, Ivan Evseev defines it as “the most elevated, spiritualized and ennobled aspect, similar to the ‘Platonic love’ and ‘Uranian love’ of the ancient ones,” “a love enhanced by the melancholy over the absence of a loved one,” “a love that is reverberated by a real or imaginary distance”56 that separates the human from the object of their affection. From the perspective of cultural philosophy, Lucian Blaga, in “Spatiul mioritic” from the volume The Trilogy of Culture, defines “dor” as a feeling that is specific to the Romanians, “a trans-horizon aspiration, an existence that drains entirely towards “something.”57 This feeling is also considered “an impersonal power that devastates and enslaves” like a spell, “a cosmic illness,” “an invincible element of nature,” “an alter ego,” and “a spiritual emanation of the individual.”58 Consequently, Prince Charming’s travel to the Valley of Mourning, which generates “dor,” represents the necessary restoration of the inner human order. If Prince Charming had stayed in the realm of eternal youth, time would have been absorbed to annulment, but “that other destiny, the mundane one, drags the young traveler backwards and the hero leaves from the infinite towards the duration.”59 His departure becomes necessary because immortality did not offer him happiness. It cannot be real unless it can be shared with his loved ones. It is precisely these loved ones Prince Charming is devoid of in the space of eternal youth. The fairy tale does not present details concerning the sentimental life of the hero after he marries the fairy, but deduces that he has no descendants, so the regrets over leaving that place behind are minimal in relation to his agonizing “dor.” His existence in that realm seems to have been boring and valueless. And boredom, as Dostoievski puts it, “is born out of the missed meetings with God, from the battles with ourselves that are not mediated by a transcendental mediator.” The human being’s destiny must follow its natural course and, because of that, Prince Charming’s travel to his home goes as planned, with no obstacles whatsoever. The moment he returns is not only a travel in time, 56

Evseev, Enciclopedia semnelor, 141. Lucian Blaga, SpaĠiul mioritic, in Opere 9, Trilogia culturii (Bucureúti: Minerva, 1985), 294 58 Ibid., 291. 59 Kernbach, Universul mitic, 365. 57

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but also the moment he meets himself. He is unrecognizable, the young man having been replaced with the old man “with a knee-long white beard” who lifts his eyelids with his hands and moves with difficulty. In the final scene of the fairy tale, Death jumps from a box. Even Death itself is pictured as being old, bent, and weakened by so much waiting, because the Prince dared to ignore it for hundreds of years and thus overcame his destiny. This upsetting audacity determines Death to slap the one that has violated its laws. Besides, the “double negation in the title had to lead to the overthrowing in the final … and he became dust immediately.”60 The ending reveals, in a realistic key, the condition of the human in the universe. Life contains the germs of death and nothing can change what has been predetermined. The death of the hero is not a punishment but that unknown force which ends a certain duration in order to open the door to the grand cosmic travel.

60 Mircea Muthu and Maria Muthu, Făt-Frumos úi “Vremea Uitată” (Bucureúti: Euro Press Group, 2008), 59.

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Fig. 1-1 Căluúarii

Fig. 1-2 Căluúarii

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Fig. 1-3 Căluúarii

Fig. 2-1 Traditional Romanian woman shirt—Ia

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

Fig. 2-2 Traditional Romanian woman shirt—Ia

Fig. 2-3 Traditional Romanian shirt—Ia

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Fig. 2-4 Traditional Romanian woman shirt—Ia

Fig. 2-5 Traditional Romanian woman shirt—Ia

Folkloric Aspects of the Romanian Imaginary and Myth

Fig. 4-1 Three Hierarchs Monastery from Iaúi

Fig. 4.2 Three Hierarchs Monastery from Iaúi

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Fig. 4-3 Curtea de Argeú Monastery www.travelsmart.info

Fig. 4-4 Curtea de Argeú Monastery www.povestidecalatorie.ro This marking on one of the walls of the monastery is supposedly indicating the spot where Ana, Master Manoleƍs wife was immured.