Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900

A Sourcebook

Valerie A. Kivelson, Christine D. Worobec, Valerie A. Kivelson, Christine D. Worobec

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501750656, 9781501750649
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750663
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

For any serious scholar of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft and magic, this volume is a 'must read.'... Scholars of folklore and popular culture also will find much of value. â• Folklorica

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.

Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine. 

Part I

Historical Evolution, Law, and Prosecution

Chapter 1

Early Accounts of Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Magic in Medieval Rus

“Rus” is the name given to the lands of the Eastern Slavs in the medieval accounts of the region that now comprises Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia—that is, roughly the area covered by the documents included in this book. Chapter 1 of this book presents some of the very few surviving accounts of magic, sorcery, or witchcraft from the medieval period, here defined as the years between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This chapter is necessarily brief, because few sources survive to document these early centuries at all, and fewer still contain material relevant to the topic at hand.

Conventionally, the narrative history of Rus begins in the eighth or ninth century, when diverse Slavic, Baltic, Finnic, Turkic, and Scandinavian people settled the region. Archaeology can tell us a great deal, but we have only limited numbers of textual sources to supplement the archaeologists’ findings. Along with some Arabic accounts, Scandinavian runic inscriptions, occasional mentions in European documents, and a few Byzantine Greek records, the main textual sources on Rus are historical chronicles written by Rus churchmen beginning in the late eleventh century. Accounts of the earliest centuries are retrospective reconstructions, written long after the events they describe. The chronicle entries are at times schematic: such and such a prince died, or such and such a river flooded. Elsewhere the chronicles’ year-by-year listings are enlivened with theological commentaries, folkloric elements, or gripping stories. When they reported on events in their own times, the authors had more to go on but nonetheless continued to inflect their accounts with their own cultural expectations and morality, as all writers must do.

In 862, according to the chronicle tale, the various tribes collectively invited the Rus, a group of Scandinavian Varangians (as Vikings were called when they headed eastward) to come and rule over them. These Rus gave their name to the land and people they came to rule, and they spawned a princely dynasty, the Riurikovichi. Descendants of the Riurikovich line continued to rule the Rus lands as princes, grand princes, and, eventually, tsars until the line died out in 1598, and a new dynasty, the Romanovs, succeeded them.

The excerpts that follow may tell us about actual historical events, or they may tell us more about how their authors thought about their history and their present. In either case, they are good stories, and they tell us how these medieval authors thought about magic and sorcery, and about how those practices interacted with other issues of concern: with the paganism that remained active long after the formal conversion of Rus; with teachings about the devil and his wiles; with ideas about men and women and their respective characteristics and proclivities toward sorcery.

1.1 Pagan Soothsayers and Magicians in the Primary Chronicle

Sources: Primary Chronicle excerpts and translations are adapted from Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Shobowitz-Wetzor, trans. and ed., Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), 69–71, 134–35, 150–54. Public Domain.

Few written records survive from the earliest centuries of Ukrainian and Russian history, the era of medieval Rus. This was a period before nations as we know them had taken shape. Polities were hazy and informal, built around warlords and their military retinues. The Primary Chronicle, or Tale of Bygone Years, is the main source on the early centuries. Its history starts with the division of lands and peoples among the sons of Noah after the biblical Flood, and it recounts the history of the Rus in annalistic fashion—that is, year by year—up to the year 1116. Its historical content combines legend and religious commentary with more straightforward records of wars, reigns, and decrees.

Magic and magicians crop up not infrequently in the pages of the chronicle. These passages are lively and interesting in many respects. Written by churchmen long after the episodes they describe, these sections reveal ambivalence regarding vestiges of pre-Christian paganism in a recently converted land. (Rus was ostensibly converted en masse by order of Grand Prince Vladimir in 988, but actual conversion was a long, extended process.) Also noteworthy in these passages are the occasional notes of skepticism about the power of magicians. Many modern readers find this kind of early medieval skepticism surprising, but here the Rus shared a position widely adopted in the Christian West at the time as well. Christian leaders of the period known as the “Dark Ages” generally dismissed magic as superstition and those who claimed to practice it as charlatans. They condemned those who believed in it as succumbing to false belief and delusion, although they assumed that such believers were led astray by the devil. Such skepticism about the reality of magic may explain a vein of dark humor that runs through these accounts. A far harsher assessment of witches and a deeper belief in their power emerged later in European history.

Another theme to consider while reading these passages is the representation of men’s and women’s involvement in acts of magic. Note that all of the magicians described here are men and their victims for the most part are women, yet the chronicler reminds his readers of Eve’s responsibility for man’s fall and connects that story to a more general female proclivity toward witchcraft.

Dates are presented in two formats, using the chroniclers’ dating system and our own. The chronicle dates events from the Creation of the World, which Byzantine scholars calculated through complex numerological manipulation as having occurred 5,508 years before the birth of Christ. Thus this first passage is marked in the chronicle as happening in the year 6420, which translates into 912 CE in our calendrical system.

Oleg and the soothsayers

This description of the death of the pre-Christian Prince Oleg has the feel of myth or folklore. It is noteworthy that although he was writing about a pagan prince and his wonder-working magicians, the clerical author interjects no words of judgment or condemnation of their sorcery. He underscores the irony of fate but withholds comment on the apparently genuine power of the soothsayer-magicians. The interplay between sorcery and fate is a recurrent theme in literature. Famously, Shakespeare explores this same tension in Macbeth, where he leaves open the question of whether the witches’ predictions or Macbeth’s own actions control his destiny.

(6420) 912 CE

Now autumn came, and Oleg (the prince of Kiev) thought about his horse, which he had caused to be well fed, yet had never mounted. For on one occasion he had made inquiry of the wonder-working magicians as to the ultimate cause of his death. One magician replied, “Oh Prince, it is from the steed which you love and on which you ride that you shall meet your death.” Oleg then reflected and determined never to mount this horse or even to look upon it again. So he gave command that the horse should be properly fed, but never led into his presence. He thus let several years pass until after he had attacked the Greeks. After he returned to Kiev, four years elapsed, but in the fifth he thought of the horse through which the magicians had foretold that he should meet his death. He thus summoned his senior squire and inquired as to the whereabouts of the horse which he had ordered to be fed and well cared for. The squire answered that he was dead. Oleg laughed and mocked the magician, exclaiming, “Soothsayers tell untruths, and their words are naught but falsehood. This horse is dead, but I am still alive.”

Then he commanded that a horse should be saddled. “Let me see his bones,” said he. He rode to the place where the bare bones and skull lay. Dismounting from his horse, he laughed and remarked, “So I was supposed to receive my death from this skull?” And he stamped upon the skull with his foot. But a serpent crawled forth from it and bit him in the foot, so that in consequence he sickened and died….

What shall we say of those who perform works of magic? … All these things exist through the sufferance of God and the agency of the devil, that by such means our orthodox faith may be tested as to whether it is firm and secure, cleaving to the Lord and not to be seduced by the Enemy, through false miracles and satanic acts performed by the servants and slaves of his wickedness…. For the Lord often gives grace to the unworthy that it may benefit others.

Satanic inspiration and devil worship: Magicians in Suzdal

This second excerpt from the chronicle describes an episode that took place in 1024, over a century after the first one. In the interim, the people of Rus had nominally adopted Orthodox Christianity, by order of the grand prince. However, pre-Christian practices retained a strong hold among the population. The “magicians” in this passage may or may not have been practicing pagans, but that seems to be the implication of the author’s editorial comments about their adherence to the devil. Devil worship and pagan practice are often undifferentiated in these early Christian texts. It is interesting that in this passage, the “magicians” accuse “old people” of somehow causing the harvest to fail—that is, of exercising malevolent force themselves.

(6532) 1024 CE

In this year, magicians appeared in Suzdal, and killed old people by satanic inspiration and devil worship, saying that they would spoil the harvest. There was great confusion and famine throughout all that country. The whole population went along the Volga to the Bulgars from whom they bought grain and thus sustained themselves.

When (Grand Prince) Yaroslav heard of the magicians, he went to Suzdal. He there seized upon the magicians and dispersed them, but punished some, saying, “In proportion to its sin, God inflicts upon every land hunger, pestilence, drought, or some other chastisement, and man has no understanding thereof.”

Shamans, devils, and skeptics: Rus princes in the Novgorod lands

This long passage from the chronicle describes a series of magical encounters that took place half a century after the previous one. The magician-prophet in the first paragraph utters apocalyptic predictions about geographic upheavals. The same prophesies, in more or less the same form, would circulate in the Rus lands into the early modern period. The subsequent accounts of magicians working their mischief along the Volga River are packed full of information about the interactions of various ethnic groups in the region, of pagans and Christians, and of populations with their princes. The stories also gave the chronicler an opportunity to reflect on the role of the devil in human lives and to spin out a marvelous alternative creation myth, which he attributes to one of the magicians. In its idiosyncrasy, this variant on the biblical creation tale is reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio’s radical cosmology, described by the historian Carlo Ginzburg.¹ This is not your standard Adam and Eve story! We cannot take the chronicler’s version as an objective transmission of indigenous belief but instead as a reflection of what beliefs he attributed to the magicians. As in the previous entry, we see the evil magicians here blaming local inhabitants—in this case, women—of working their own destructive magic, and therefore deserving to die.

(6579) 1071 CE

At this time, a magician appeared inspired by the devil. He came to Kiev and informed the inhabitants that after the lapse of five years the Dnieper would flow backward, and that the various countries would change their locations, so that Greece would be where Rus was, and Rus where Greece was, and that other lands would be similarly dislocated. The ignorant believed him, but the faithful ridiculed him and told him that the devil was only deluding him to his ruin. This was actually the case, for in the course of one night he disappeared altogether. For the devils, after once encouraging a man, lead him to an evil fate, then scorn him with their laughter, and cast him into the fatal abyss after they have inspired his words. In this connection we may discuss infernal incitation and its effects.

While there was famine on one occasion in the district of Rostov, two magicians appeared from Yaroslavl and said they knew who interfered with the food supply. Then they went along the Volga, and where they came to a trading-post, they designated the handsomest women, saying that one affected the grain, another the honey, another the fish, and another the furs. The inhabitants brought into their presence their sisters, their mothers, and their wives, and the magicians in their delusion stabbed them in the back and drew out from their bodies grain or fish. They thus killed many women and appropriated their property. Then they arrived at Beloozero (a settlement in the north, and about three hundred men accompanied them. At that moment it happened that Yan, son of Vÿshata, arrived in the neighborhood to collect tribute on behalf of Svyatoslav. The people of Beloozero recounted to him how two magicians had caused the death of many women along the Volga and the Sheksna and had now arrived in their district. Yan inquired whose subjects they were, and upon learning that they belonged to his Prince, he directed their followers to surrender the magicians to him, since they were subjects of his own Prince. When they refused to obey his command, Yan wanted to go unarmed in search of the magicians, but his companions warned him against such action, urging that the magicians might attack him. Yan thus bade his followers to arm themselves; there were twelve of them with him, and they went through the forest in pursuit of the magicians. The latter arranged their forces to offer resistance, and when Yan advanced with his battleaxe, three of their number approached Yan an...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Timeline
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction
• Part I. Historical Evolution, Law, and Prosecution
• Part II. Magical Practices, Everyday Matters, and the Power of Words: Trial Excerpts
• Notes
• Index