Verbal Charms Against Authorities and Judges in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia
Andrei L. Toporkov[1]
Academy of Sciences, Moscow This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
Abstract
In the 17-18[1] century Russian manuscript tradition there were no fewer than nine collections (sborniki) consisting of verbal charms that are exclusively or primarily addressed to social issues, and meant to have an effect on judges, military commanders, landowners, bureaucrats, and, not least, on the tsar himself and members of the royal family. The magical purpose of these verbal charms was to have an influence on authorities and judges, to alter the way they felt and their will, their mood and spiritual condition. The tradition of incantations if seen as a whole did not force a person to take this or that specific attitude toward the authorities, but rather offered the possibility of choice either to consider the object of the charm as an implacable foe, deserving of annihilation (if only symbolic), or as someone more positive, from whom love is coaxed. The first type led to the use of “bestial” imagery that was of pagan origin; these charms allowed for the sublimation of aggression and the feeling of social inferiority, channeling these into the creation of fantasy images. The second type makes use of Christian subjects and symbols. Turning to folkloric and then in turn to Christian images, a person would not necessarily contradict himself or play the hypocrite, but rather attempt to resolve on a symbolic plane those practical conflicts that occupied him in real life.
Keywords
verbal charms; authorities; judges; tsar; animal; social psychology
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI 10.1163/18763316-04004016
Verbal charms (zagovory) addressed to authorities and judges make up one of the most numerous thematic-functional groups of incantations represented in manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These verbal charms were meant to be recited as a person set off either to court or to see an official. As a rule, they were recited upon leaving home, while standing on the threshold, and at sunrise. The subject reciting the verbal charm was supposed to have bathed and dried off well.
At least one hundred such texts have survived.[3] [4] In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian manuscript tradition there were no fewer than nine collections (sborniki) consisting of verbal charms that are exclusively or primarily addressed to social issues, and meant to have an effect on judges, military commanders, landowners, bureaucrats, and, not least, on the tsar himself and members of the royal family. These verbal charms, as may be imagined, attracted the attention of the punitive organs and led to prosecution. Down through the middle of the eighteenth century people from all social levels considered the evil eye (porcha) a serious matter. People who attempted to influence judges and other figures of power by using magical words were liable to interrogation, torture and punishment, which in some special cases even included being burned alive.
The magical purpose of these verbal charms was to have an influence on authorities and judges, to alter the way they felt and their will, their mood and spiritual condition. Charms aim to transform socially estranged relationships based on the depersonalized relations of master and subordinate into those of an individualized nature, based on heartfelt intimacy and emotional devotion, and couched in aesthetic and religious terms. These relations are defined not in legalistic or juridical terms, but religious and mythological. The issue of an individual’s guilt or innocence is not even posed.
If a concrete official or judge to whom the verbal charm is directed is mentioned, it is, as a rule, together with other representatives of the hierarchy of power. Even the tsar or patriarch appears not in the singular but the plural, that is, they are imagined not as specific personalities. Because of this, reciting charms could hold dramatic consequences for those who delivered them, as the tsar might be mentioned even in charms that were used in villages far from the capital, and actually directed at some local judges. Thus all representatives of authority are imagined as connected to the tsar, which undoubtedly lends the image of power in charms a symbolic and even mystical aura.
It is interesting that in the two earliest surviving collections of charms of the second quarter of the seventeenth century (from Zaonezh’e and Velikii Ustiug) Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich is mentioned by name. In the collection from Zaonezh’e the tsar acts as the personification of the most sacred beauty, which the reciter (subject) of the verbal charm wishes to acquire.
As this light shines and Christ shows in glory, the light came and Christ was born; thus the dewdrops of evening and of the morning fall on the earth and on the water, thus may fall [shine] the beauty and magnificence of the tsar and sovereign and grand prince Mikhail Fedorovich of All Rus’ (written in “secret writing,” tainopis’). And as the tsar and princes, and the authorities and all the men of state stare in awe at red poppies, let them stand in awe of me, servant of God [insert name], and may beauty fall to me, beauty, beauty of beautiful maidens, to me, servant of God [insert name], and as the Lord Jesus Christ treasures his holy altars of God, let me be treasured too, servant of God [insert name], to whom you speak [insert name], to the tsar and sovereign and grand prince [insert name] of all Rus’ (again written in code) and all authorities, and leaders, and nobles.[5]
Identified in the text in alphabetically garbled, secret-code writing (tainopis’) as “tsar, sovereign and grand prince Mikhail Fedorovich of all Rus’,” Mikhail Fedorovich is ascribed the same beauty as “the colors of red poppies” and “beautiful maidens.” However, the charms’ relationship to the tsar varied widely, from treating him as the highest sacred authority to completely rejecting his legitimacy to act as representative of the court.
Texts which use magic to address social issues are very diverse, in regard to their usage, generic and stylistic character, length, content, and range of motifs and formulas. Charms addressed to authorities are heterogeneous in their concrete goals and emotional and psychological strategies, from attempts to evoke sympathy and even love from a superior to the desire that he be trampled to death and ground into powder. According to some charms, the authorities are meant to submit to the performer of the charm as if to someone of special holiness, to treat him with respect and adoration, and others are meant to strike terror into the authorities, to make them to tremble and lose the power of speech before the one who speaks the charm.
The basic type of incantation addressed to authorities is indebted to apocryphal prayers concerning “going on a trip or to court” that are known in South Slavic copies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As these apocryphal prayers migrated into charms they became radicalized, filled with aggressive images and even marks of sadism. In some, brutal revenge on one’s enemy is described, and judges and other authority figures are conceptualized in a sharply negative way, at times even assuming the characteristics of enemies; they are put on a level with sorcerers, witches and other unsavory types.
The subject of the charm describes his transformation into a wild animal (as a rule, into a wolf), and this animal attacks and tears its victim, as it would a rabbit or grey-hen. This is the case in the following charm from an undated manuscript from Arkhangelsk province, for example:
Give to me, slave of God, the heart of a ferocious lion-beast and a larynx like the jaw of the prowling wolf. Let my opponent, my ruler [insert name], have the heart of hare, ears of a grouse and eyes like a dead man’s corpse; that he not manage to open his mouth and that his clear eyes be troubled, that he not to rail against me in his zealous heart, that his white hands not be raised up against me, servant of God (insert name). <...> All tsars and tsaritsas, boyars and boyarinas, and all civil servants/government functionaries/officials and my opponent (insert name) be like sheep to me; and I, servant, a wolf. I will see [them] with my sharp eyes and catch [them], and take [them] in my hand, and toss [them] onto my teeth, and chew them up, and spit them all out on the ground, and step on them with my foot and crush them.”[6]
On the other hand, charms addressed to authorities may also sporadically include formulas typical of love incantations, and the relationships between the one who recites the charm and the authority figure emerges as one of love, of even almost conjugal tenderness. The subject (“I”) of the charm wants to be beautiful in order to attract the person in authority:
More beautiful than the beautiful sun, more radiant than the radiant moon, more dear than father and mother, sweeter than sugar, honey and the comb (1774).[7] [8] ... let them gaze at Andrei and not look away, let him be more beautiful than the beautiful sun, more radiant than the radiant moon, whiter than the whitest snow, sweeter than father and mother, family and clan, friend and enemy. (1702).[9]
Sometimes, as seen in the spell directed toward Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich above, the subject even expresses the desire that maidens pass their beauty along to him: “and may the beauty, the beauty, the beauty of beautiful maidens fall on me, slave of God, [insert name].”[10] A transitional type of incantation between those addressed to authorities and love charms are those that express the wish that “they be loved by people” (chtoby liudi liubili).[11]
Judges and persons in authority are called to love the one who pronounces the charm “with all their heart, soul, and mind”; to cling to him like a vine around a tree and a bird around a nest full of its young; the authorities can’t live without him, as people cannot live without bread, salt, and drink; they must admire him as they would beautiful red poppies; they should never forget him “on the path or the road, at feast or in conversation, when drinking and when eating, and during the hours of sleep”; they must cherish the subject, like the soul in their body; they cannot forget him, “just as the birds, the swallows cannot forget their nests and their offspring.”[12]
“Orthodox Christians” must be joyful for the subject and defer (bow) to him as to the sun, the sunrise, the moon and stars, the tsar, Christ and the God-Mother, the Easter and resurrection of Christ, the image of the Savior, the cross, the candle before the icon, bread and salt, sugar and grapes, gold and silver, and even the paradisiacal bird Sirin. Enemies must fear him as they would a lion, wolf, eagle, unicorn, thunder from heaven.
For charms addressed to authorities the motif of “being miraculously clothed” in heavenly luminaries is characteristic. This motif includes several basic components which may be manifested and combined differently in different texts. These include: being miraculously clothed in the sun, moon, stars, clouds, wind, as well as thunder and lightning; the acquisition of supernatural traits (like beauty, bravery, the ability to inspire fear); a journey to a mythical world (Mount Zion, heaven, to a cloud or the sun); and the magnification of the body to the size of the universe. Moreover, in texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of this motif may be described as the self-deification of the subject of the charm, something that by the way completely disappears in charms from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
To summarize the various versions of the motif of “miraculous clothing” in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript tradition, this general picture emerges. The subject (reciter) of the charm is adorned or clothed in heavenly bodies or clouds, is washed in dew and the sunrise, dries off by means of the sun or the God-Mother’s chasuble, is covered by the sky, travels through the heavenly bodies and arrives at the sun or a thundercloud, is propped up by the moon, sets fire to (“illumines”) the morning sunrise on Mount Zion, inserts the sun into his own eyes. He sets off from the earth into the heavenly spheres and at the same time is transformed both internally and externally, and expands to the size of the universe, so that the heavenly bodies appear within him. He becomes like the sun or like god, and is compared to the righteous sun-Christ or to the aweinspiring thunderer, God the Father.
The transformation of apocryphal prayers into charms is connected with changes in the milieu in which the texts were used. As opposed to the apocryphal prayers used by narrow group of clerics, magical texts were widely disseminated among relatively broad segments of the predominantly illiterate population.
Charms gradually came to be filled with socially concrete referents. Listing of the authorities came closer to those in the real world, as the tsar and patriarch were addressed in the singular rather than plural, and specific bureaucrats and judges are named. The list of authorities expands, becoming more contemporary and more detailed, for example, a spell recorded in the nineteenth century includes both antiquated and contemporary office holders:
May I be glorious and fearsome, terrible and grand over my rival—enemy and malefactor and all powers and people in authority, in homes and chancelleries, on the road and when seeing others off, before tsars and tsaritsas, patriarchs and metropolitans, archbishops and bishops, archimandrites and abbots, priests and deacons, and before all holy orders, and before all nobles, princes and boyars, courtiers, generals and colonels, majors and captains, and lieutenants all ranks of servicemen, Russians and foreigners and before departmental judges and clerks...[13]
A spell book from the beginning of the twentieth century specifies: “Voevoda and secretary, steward and chancellery clerk, be to me, slave, like father and mother to children.”[14] [15] In general, over time verbal charms acquire a more pragmatic, real character, and lose their cosmism, in fact becoming rather prosaic.11
The wide dissemination of incantations that address social issues in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia may possibly be explained by the fact that they fulfilled a psychological compensatory function, and, when applied in archetypal situations of social conflict, they could serve as a real factor in the influence of one group of people on another. A person could compensate for the feeling of his own helpless by imagining himself as someone all-powerful, someone to whom those to whom he would in the course of everyday life be forced to submit, would here be unconditionally under his control.
The tradition of incantations if seen as a whole did not force a person to take this or that specific attitude toward the authorities, but rather offered the possibility of choice: either to consider the object of the charm as an implacable foe, deserving annihilation (if only symbolic), or as someone more positive, from whom love is coaxed. The first type led to the use of “bestial” imagery that was of pagan origin; these charms allowed for the sublimation of aggression and the feeling of social inferiority, channeling these into the creation of fantasy images. The second type makes use of Christian subjects and symbols. Turning to folkloric and then in turn to Christian images, a person would not necessarily contradict himself or play the hypocrite, but rather attempt to resolve on a symbolic plane those practical conflicts that occupied him in real life.
- [1] Andrei L’vovich Toporkov, Ph.D. in Philology, Main Researcher, Department of Folklore,Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Professor, lecturer of M. Bloch Russian-French Center for Historical Anthropology of Russian StateUniversity for the Humanities; Correspondent-member of Russian Academy of Sciences(2006). He has over 440 publications (articles, reviews, abstracts, translations) in scientificjournals, books and dictionaries in the field of Russian and Slavic folklore, ethnology andhistory of literature, including 4 monographs. In English, his publications include: “RussianLove Charms in a Comparative Light” in Charms, Charmers and Charming: International
- [2] Andrei L’vovich Toporkov, Ph.D. in Philology, Main Researcher, Department of Folklore,Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Professor, lecturer of M. Bloch Russian-French Center for Historical Anthropology of Russian StateUniversity for the Humanities; Correspondent-member of Russian Academy of Sciences(2006). He has over 440 publications (articles, reviews, abstracts, translations) in scientificjournals, books and dictionaries in the field of Russian and Slavic folklore, ethnology andhistory of literature, including 4 monographs. In English, his publications include: “RussianLove Charms in a Comparative Light” in Charms, Charmers and Charming: International
- [3] Research on Verbal Magic, ed. Jonathan Roper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 119-144 (http://verbalcharms.ru/books/res/RussianLiveCharms.pdf); and “Visual Representations ofCharms against Fever on Russian Icons,” Oral Charms in Structural and Comparative Light(Moscow: PROBEL-2000, 2011), 173-179 (http://verbalcharms.ru/books.html).
- [4] See the Index of social verbal charms in: A. L. Toporkov, Zagovory v russkoi rukopisnoitraditsiiXV-XIXvv.: Istoriia, simvolika, poetika (Moscow: Indrik, 2005), 389-400.
- [5] И как свет сей блистаетца и Христос наряжаетца, свет настал и Христос народис(я),и как падут утренные и вечерные росы на землю и на во(ду), також бы пала красота илепота дамя и чолноцамя и шесикочо тпяфа ? ижаиса Зецомошика шлея Мули. И какдивуютца цари и князи, и власти, и все мужи красным маковым цветам, так быдивовалис(ь) мне, рабу Б(о)жию имярек, и пала б красота, красота, красота красныхд(е)виц на меня, раба Б(о)жия имярек, и как любы Господу Исусу Христу свои Б(о)жии престолы, також бы и яз люб был, раб Б(о)жий имярек, кому говориш(ь) имярек,д(а)рю, чолноцаму и шелитору тпяфю имярек влея Мули и всем властем, и началом, ивелльможам.” The italicized sections in the text are written in “tainopis’,” that is, scrambledwriting, and are decoded above. Text published and discussed in Russkie zagovory iz rukopis-nykh istochnikovXVII-pervoipoloviny XIXv., comp, ed. and commentary by A. L. Toporkov(Moscow: Indrik, 2010), 106.
- [6] “И буди у меня, раба Божия, сердце мое - лютого зверя льва, гортань моя, челюсть 5-зверя волка порыскучего. Буди у супостата, моего властелина (имярек), сердце заячье,
- [7] уши его тетерьи, очи его - мертвого мертвеца; и не могли бы отворятися уста и ясныяего очи возмущатися, ни ретиво сердце бранитися, ни белыя его руки подниматися наменя, раба Божия (имярек). <...> Все цари и царицы, князи и княгини, бояра ибоярины, и все приказные люди, и мои супостаты (имярек) - все овцы мои; я, раб, волк;своим ясным оком взгляну и поймаю, и в руки возьму, и на зуб брошу, раскушу и всемна пол плюну, и ногой заступлю и растопчу.” P. S. Efimenko, Materialy po etnografiirusskogo naseleniia Arkhangel’skoi oblasti (Moscow: Tip. Etnogr. Otd. Imp. O-va liubiteleiestestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii pri Mosk. un-te, 1878), pt. 2, v. 20, book 5, issue 2,p. 154, № 10.
- [8] “Краснея краснова солнышка, светлее светлова месяца, милее отцов-матерей,слаще сахару, меду и сота.” Toporkov, Zagovory, (2005), 198.
- [9] “.так бы на него, Андрея, зрели, смотрели, с очей не сносили, казалсяя бы онкраше красного солнца, светлее светлого месяца, белее белого снегу, мелее отца иматери, и роду, и племяни, и друга, и недруга..” ibid., 99.
- [10] “и пала б красота, красота, красота красных д(е)виц на меня, раба Б(о)жия имярек.”Toporkov, Zagovory, (2010), 106.
- [11] Toporkov, Zagovory, (2005), 197-200.
- [12] “Всем своим седцем, и всею душею и всею мысию”; “При пути и при дороге, припиру и при беседе, за питьем, и за ествою, и при постелных часех”; “Как птицуластовицу не могут забыть гнезд своих и детей своих.” In ibid., 197-200.
- [13] “.Дабы я был славен и страшен, грозен и велик над своим супостатом — врагом излодеем и всякой властью и начальными людьми, в домах и приказах, и на путях ипроводах, пред цари и царицами, патриархами и митрополитами, и архиепископами,и епископами, пред архимандриты и игумны, и попы и дьяконы, и пред всякимсвященным чином, и пред всякими вельможами, князи и болярами, стольники ивоеводами, генералами и полковники, майорами и капитанами, и поручиками ивсякими чины служебными, русскими и иноземцами, и пред судии приказными иподъячими...” “Vytegorskii pogost,” Olonetskie gubernskie vedomosti, 1884. № 96, 967.Emphasis mine.
- [14] “Воевода и секретарь, управитель и канцелярист мне, рабу, как отец и мати додетяти.” Toporkov, Zagovory, (2010), 662. Dating discussed on 655). Emphasis mine.
- [15] Toporkov, Zagovory, (2005), 203-207.
