Conjuring Hope
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Conjuring Hope

Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia

Galina Lindquist

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Conjuring Hope

Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia

Galina Lindquist

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About This Book

Notions of magic and healing have been changing over past years and are now understood as reflecting local ideas of power and agency, as well as structures of self, subjectivity and affect. This study focuses on contemporary urban Russia and, through exploring social conditions, conveys the experience of living that makes magic logical. By following people's own interpretations of the work of magic, the author succeeds in unraveling the logic of local practice and local understanding of affliction, commonly used to diagnose the experiences of illness and misfortune.

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Information

Year
2005
ISBN
9781782384717
Subtopic
Anthropology
Edition
1

Chapter 1

Marketing Magic

While the occult, by definition, is a hidden knowledge, urban magic in big cities is a conspicuously public phenomenon. As such, it is created by the media and upheld by the market as a thriving field of service and commodity exchange. The upsurge of paranormal performances and services in Russia in the late 1990s subsided somewhat by the beginning of the 2000s. By then, magic and healing came to occupy a more stable place on the market of services, at times converging with more conventional kinds of interpersonal help, such as business consulting, psychotherapy, and various types of health care.
According to the estimates of Russian sociologists, in 1998 there were more than 50,000 officially registered ‘specialists in non-traditional1 healing methods’ in Moscow alone (Pachenkov 2001). For the whole of Russia, Nezavisimaia gazeta (10.06.1996) gave an approximate number of ‘hundreds of thousands of “magi, sorcerers and fortune-tellers” [magi, kolduny, predskazateli]’. This figure seems to me rather arbitrary, since there are plenty of practitioners who never register nor advertise; there are also people who practise magic and healing in their free time, treating friends and relatives, and combining these activities with other professions that may have nothing to do with either medicine or magic. Thus, an informant told me about a female lawyer who held an administrative job at a ministry in Moscow, while also practising massage, bone-setting and hand-healing in the evenings; he referred to her healing as highly efficient.
The question that concerns me in this chapter is the seeming contradiction between the occult character of magical knowledge, and its spread and visibility as a social and economic field in post-perestroika urban Russia. As a segment of the market of goods and services, magic offers alternative means to earn a living to those who could have become victims of the post-socialist transformations. Russian sociologist Oleg Pachenkov (2001), who studied the market of magic in St Petersburg, formulates the same paradox in Weberian terms: he asks how the ‘irrational’ world-view on which magic practices seem to be based is compatible with the very rational methods of marketing and advertising that its proponents employ. As providers of goods and services, magi and healers operate in the conditions of tough competition, and to market their services they must deploy the strategies that work for other kinds of business as well. It may be suggested, however, that the very dissemination of a magical world-view may be seen as a consequence of market mechanisms at work: the ideas on which magic rests are made public through media channels that are the new infrastructures of business and marketing.
This said, it must be added that magic is not like any other sphere of business activity: even though its cultural roots are deep, its legitimacy is utterly contested. The strategies of legitimation that I shall trace in the texts of advertisements are parallel to marketing strategies that are singled out by Pachenkov. However, as I shall try to show, there is more at stake in this self-presentation than mere marketing. What practitioners try to secure is not simply a business niche; they also try to carve out for themselves an acceptable social identity and a worthy place in the moral domain. The strategies of legitimation that are used to these ends are indispensable for practitioners’ self-construction as attractive and desirable, as charismatic individuals, which, as will be argued later, is the main precondition of the effectiveness of their healing.

Magic in Russia as a public field

The magic and healing services are broadly advertised in several specialised newspapers. The number of these newspapers varies depending on the financial conditions of the publishers – two or three such newspapers disappeared after the economic crash of 17 August 1998, the black day for Russian entrepreneurs and the incipient middle class. Other similar newspapers, such as Oracle and Hidden Power (Tainaia vlast’) survived the crisis and circulate in millions of copies, and in addition new ones crop up. These newspapers are a source of information about rediscovered and reinvented folk beliefs and practices, providing advice as to how to behave during fasts or how to use cards or coffee grounds to predict the future or to find a loved one. They also feature articles on the era of Aquarius (known as New Age in the West), astrology, the magic of numbers and names, paranormal and occult phenomena in everyday life, advice on how to acquire inner harmony, outer beauty and material wealth. In much of their content these newspapers recall the same genre in the West, the New Age discourse.
While in the West similar newspapers would advertise courses on inner development, shamanism and crystal healing, Russian newspapers give their pages over to advertisements for magical and healing services offered by diverse specialists. These professional magi and healers might work individually in rented premises or in private homes. Alternatively, they might receive clients in so-called ‘centres’, establishments where several magi work together in a more institutionalised setting.
The field of magic in Russia can be distinguished analytically from that of healing, even though in real life this distinction is often blurred. Healers claim to treat physical health problems and receive patients in clinic-like parlours complete with diagnostic equipment. Such healing clinics offer a complex range of services, including massage, bone-setting, acupuncture, homeopathy and herb medicine, in addition to the laying-on of hands. The latter is known in Russia as ‘bio-field healing’, but is sometimes also referred to as extra-sensorics2, bioenergo-therapy, enio-therapy (enio – the abbreviation for energo-informatsionnyi obmen – means ‘energy-information exchange’), etc.
The scope of diseases that healers promise to cure is indeed vast. Below is the list of disorders mentioned in the newspaper advertisement of a healing centre where I carried out participant observation. ‘Diseases of the gastro-intestinal tract: gastritis, cholecystitis, colitis, stomach ulcers, enuresis, impotence, enteritis, haemorrhoids; Gynecological and urological diseases: nephritis, cystitis, kidney stones; diseases of the endocrinal system, bone diseases, arthritis, ostheochondritis; restoration of hearing and vision. Skin diseases such as psoriasis, eczemas and rashes. Diseases of the reproductive system; infertility, impotence; delayed development and neurocerebral paralysis in children.’ (newspaper advertisement for Nina-S, 1998). Some healers even claim to remove benign tumours such as myomas and adenomas, and also provide general rehabilitation after major surgery and hospital treatment, after heart attacks and strokes. It is easier to say what they do not treat, or at least are always reluctant to treat, or for what they do not promise any results. One such disease is cancer, another is schizophrenia together with other kinds of grave mental disturbances.
Crucially, to open a clinic, a healer must have a medical degree. Many practitioners do have so-called vocational training in nursing schools and specialised medical schools, and some also have degrees from prestigious medical colleges (it should be noted in parenthesis that buying such a degree in Russia is a matter requiring only a little additional effort). Whether their medical diploma is real or bought, healers who work in such healing centres are, by and large, people with biomedical knowledge on the level of a medical professional. Biomedical education leaves many healers equipped not only with a ‘scientific’ paradigm, but also with a good working knowledge of anatomy, pathology and pharmacology. Therefore, they are familiar with medical terminology, so that their diagnoses are presented to patients in conventional biomedical language, in line with (confirming or modifying) those obtained in regular health-care institutions. Such healers need the diagnostic equipment to ‘objectively’ assess, and to have patients witness with their own eyes the results of their healing, when a tumour, for example, gets smaller or disappears from the ultrasound picture.
While healers who work in clinic-like establishments tend to have some background in health care, magi come from a wide variety of groups that span the entire social spectrum. Among full-time or part-time practitioners I knew, or heard about, in Moscow, there was an accountant, an architect, a bank teller, a kindergarten teacher, a housewife, a factory worker and a shop clerk. The rule of thumb is that magi tend to have permanent clients from the same social stratum, although a mark of a good magus is that he or she can efficiently interact with clients across social borders.
Unlike healers, who define both ailments and treatment in biomedical language, magi cater for social, emotional and psychological problems, those of love and family, alcohol and drug addiction. In addition, many magi offer to handle the issues of jobs and business, acting as business consultants or security advisers (for more on business magic in Russia, see Chapter 7, this volume; Lindquist 2000b, 2002a; and Pachenkov 2001).3
While healers present their interventions in purely medical-scientific terms, deritualising their actions to the greatest possible degree, magi deal with the same ontological disturbances in a more ritualised way. The stock of ritual means is idiosyncratic to individual magi, and they are allowed, indeed expected, to display a good deal of personal inventiveness. In Russia, as elsewhere, people tend to distinguish between black and white magic. The former is understood to harm, the latter, to do good. Definitions of good belong to the moral domains of culture; but also, to varying degrees, they are wilfully conceived by individuals, in terms of their perceived understandings of what is fair and just in the contexts of their own lives.
In Soviet times, the moral domain was a muddled ground, since ‘The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism’, as Soviet ideologists referred to morality, was perhaps never taken seriously by the vast majority. Post-perestroika, questions of morality are still being sorted out. The Church is called on to bring clarity to this area, but its teachings do not always sit easily with folk models of morality. For example, in the popular understanding, to bring an errant husband back into the family fold is a moral deed, and to punish the mischief-maker, as well as his promiscuous seducer (a paradigmatic act of black magic), will not necessarily be seen as reprehensible. Russian folk magic has a range of spells and rituals intended to effect punishment and retribution, for example to render ‘the shameless he-goat’ (kozel besstyzhii) impotent with respect to all other women but his own wife. This measure would certainly be considered an act of black magic by the husband and his mistress, while the wife would regard it as a morally defensible act aimed at strengthening the family and restoring a just social order.
Since in human life good and bad are hopelessly entangled, in the popular understanding the distinction between black and white magic tends to be made in terms of efficacy. The results of ‘white magic’ are tacitly expected to be limited by God’s will: the client must accept that if it is not His will, the straying husband will not come back and the son will not be cured of his alcohol addiction. In contrast, black magic is presented by its practitioners as being highly effective. In advertisements, the self-designated ‘black magi’ often promise ‘a 100 percent result guaranteed or money back’. Significantly, these ‘black magi’ often flaunt the fact that they charge high fees, and claim as their sources Haitian voodoo, Brazilian condomblĂ©, Celtic druidism, or Scandinavian rune magic. This connection in the popular imagination between money, potency, otherness/the foreign, and evil/the Devil is far from unique to Russia (see, for example, Taussig 1987).
As far as white magic is concerned, the so-called ‘folk magic’ is based on traditional folk spells and ritual actions, taken by the magi from numerous old and modern, popular and scientific books on Russian folklore. The female magi who practise folk magic call themselves babki or babushki. While bábushka is the Russian for grandmother (a kinship term), babka (and babuska as well) is also a popular term for the old wise women who have always operated in Russian villages, healing humans and cattle and offering magical services to neighbours for a small fee. Modern urban babki can present themselves as wise old women with a veneer of village homeliness and a simple and familial charm (such as baba Niura, also known as Anna-spasitel’nitsa, Anna the Saviouress, mentioned in Pachenkov 2001). But they can also be elegant and successful young women, like a personage who calls herself ‘babka Malan’ia’ whom I briefly met in Moscow. The latter received clients in an up-to-date office with a guard at the door, video-screens and a secretary typing away at a computer. Babka Malan’ia (and a number of people like her) was in the 1990s a frequent guest on television talk shows, where she offered expositions of the folk healing tradition in an elegant wrapping palatable for urban television viewers. This appearance in the media can be considered as another marketing strategy or advertisement channel; but it is also a means of disseminating and ‘normalising’ a world-view that, for the young urban intelligentsia, can still seem unusual, unfamiliar and ‘irrational’.
Understandably, magi who have become public personalities can hardly work alone: on the material on St Petersburg, Pachenkov talks about what he calls ‘entrepreneurial teams’. Such teams, he writes, can comprise the babushka herself; her assistant(s) who deal with what in Russian is called ‘piar’ (coming from PR, or public relations): journalists, clients, law enforcement authorities, etc.; a business director who deals with the financial side, as well as for the marketing and advertisement campaigns to launch the magus as such – the process known in contemporary Russian as raskrutka, literally meaning unleashing or spinning up; and the service personnel such as permanent guards and cleaning ladies (Pachenkov 2001: 106). These ‘village wizards’ are thus very much unlike their rural counterparts evoked by the term ‘babka’ in popular imagination. Taking the name of babka, the modern practitioners position themselves both on the market and in the moral domain, subscribing to a certain strategy of legitimation, as detailed below.
Other magi who do not claim to have village roots, like my friend Katerina, may still make extensive use of the literature on folk spells and rituals. In addition they may also have read Alice Bailey, Aleister Crowley, Aliphas Levy, Henry Papus, and other Western sources of magic, which are abundantly available in translation at Russian bookstores.
Most of the rituals performed by ‘white magi’ are variations on a few specific themes, and these themes lean heavily on church attributes and paraphernalia. Many magi, both those who claim folk or rural descent, and those of the more syncretistic brand, consider themselves pious Russian Orthodox Christians. They go to church regularly, follow church holidays and prescriptions, fast according to the elaborate Orthodox schedule, wear a cross, surround themselves with church candles and icons, regularly acquire water blessed in the church, and make plentiful use of church paraphernalia in their rituals. As a standard part of their treatment of all kinds of complaints, many magi ask their patients to buy a popular brand of mineral water called ‘Holy Spring’ (Svyatoi istochnik) bottled by the Church as a part of its thriving business activities, and blessed by the Patriarch himself (as the bottle label informs the buyer). The magus then charges the water with her own energy and instructs the patient to drink it at certain times of the day, and to wash their hands and face with it. Magi also often serve as church missionaries in their dealings with clients, as many of them prescribe as part of their treatment to go to confession and Communion, to buy tapers and icons, to make a pilgrimage to some holy place, to be baptised if they have not been so, or simply to go to church for a liturgy, a prayer, or the blessing of water.
The Russian Orthodox Church has become a major source of moral guidance and authority in Russia, and magi are not the only people who look towards the Church in their attempts to forge legitimacy for their activities. In her article on home birth in contemporary Russia, anthropologist Ekaterina Belousova (2002) describes transformations in the rhetoric and ideological moorings among the Russian home birth movement. In the end of the 1980s their proponents presented themselves in broad terms of ‘basic spirituality’, familiar from the New Age paradigm, blending Russian Orthodox elements with those of Yoga, Zen Buddhism and transpersonal psychology. In the end of the 1990s, however, the ideologists of the movement were talking about the dangers of ‘alien’ practices, casting it, instead, in the idiom of ‘Russian Orthodox mentality’. The midwives’ use of traditional folk remedies and other elements of folk magic presented for them no contradiction with their Russian Orthodox identity. Just like other areas of health-care practices that reemerged alongside the biomedical ones, home birth had to latch on to the Russian Orthodox Church to wield legitimacy. Later in this book we shall see how clients of magi use the symbols from the Russian Orthodox repertoire to express the perceived positive changes in their lives and selves. While in the case of home birth this reference seems innocuous, the Church itself having no ideological objections to the practice per se, for magi (and their clients) this reliance on the Church can be rather dubious. The Russian Orthodox Church is one single most fierce opponent of all sorts of healing and magic, especially of those couched in terms of ‘spirituality’ rather than ‘science’. Ironically, one of the very few sociological analyses of magic and New Age movements in the Russian-language literature is offered by a Church ideologue, Deacon Andrei Kuraiev, who denounces all varieties of what he calls ‘Occultism in Russian Orthodoxy’ (1998).

The roots of contemporary magic

Magic and healing, which became conspicuous after perestroika, did not spring from nowhere. Strands of magic and healing found in today’s Russia find meaning and legitimacy in the corresponding sociocultural domains ...

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