Witches in Slavic Belief. Part 4: The South Slavic Veshtitsa

The South Slavic Witch

It combines the properties of a real woman and a demon, but to a much greater extent than a common witch, it reveals its demonic nature, drawing close to such mythological figures as the nightmare spirit, the night-hag, the wood nymph, and the vampire.

Names and appellations to some extent reflect individual properties of the character, for example, terms associated with verbs like "to bewitch," "to know," "to lure," "to take away," "to snatch," or with the definition of the witch's external features, her functions, and the names of other demons: Serbian names include a witch, a sorceress, a witch-woman, a hag, a night-hag, a nightmare spirit, a hairy-faced one, a sipper, a horseshoe-wearer, and others; Bulgarian names include a witch, a sorceress, an enchantress, a lurer, an enticer, a wanderer, a spell-caster, a plunderer, a cunning witch, a charmer, a diviner, a wood nymph, and others.

Appearance. Primarily an old woman, grey-haired, hunched, shaggy, with hairy legs, noticeable whiskers, unibrow, often cross-eyed or with deep-set eyes, a malevolent gaze, and a long nose. The presence of a tail or wings under the armpits is often noted.

Genesis. A whole complex of beliefs concerning the witch's origin is characteristic. According to Serbian data: a woman possessed by a "devilish spirit" or one who made a pact with the devil, selling her soul; a girl conceived by her parents at an inauspicious time, on the eve of a major holiday, became a witch upon reaching maturity; or one born in a blood-colored caul; or one born during the last phase of the moon; according to Western Serbian beliefs, a maiden possessed by a nightmare spirit became a witch after marriage, and after her death, she would transform into a vampire. According to Bulgarian data: an old woman who had lost the ability to bear children (occasionally younger women if they were childless) could become a witch; she acquired magical power with the help of enchanted herbs or with the assistance of an evil spirit, the devil; an unclean spirit in the form of a black butterfly with red spots, having entered a woman's body, made her a witch; if, when attempting to revive a stillborn girl, she was blown upon, she would become a witch upon reaching maturity.

Shape-shifting. Compared to a common witch, the witch less frequently uses her shape-shifting abilities, and her range of metamorphoses is less diverse. Most often, she assumed the form of a night moth, butterfly, or bird (hens, turkeys, geese, black birds), less frequently she transformed into a toad, cat, dog, or wolf; her manifestations could also include sparks, fire, or glowing bodies. The typical manifestation of the witch as a butterfly, which in folk consciousness is perceived as the embodiment and symbol of the soul (of an evil spirit, or the soul of a deceased ancestor), aligns with widespread notions of dual-souled beings. By virtue of her pronounced dual-souled nature, the witch belongs to the category of semi-demonic characters in the Carpatho-Balkan tradition, whose demonic soul leaves the body during sleep and, in the form of an insect or bird, harms people or controls clouds (cf. beliefs from Brač about witches' spirits controlling hail clouds while they sleep, fighting each other to protect their village's crops from hail). The connection of dual-souled characters with beliefs about the butterfly as a form of the soul is evident in the "demonological" names for butterflies in Slavic languages and dialects: Russian – enemy-spirit, soul, little soul; Ukrainian – witch, sorceress, night-hag; Bulgarian – witch, sorceress, lurer; Serbian – witch; Slovenian – night moth, night moth; Czech – sorceress, night-hag, evil spirit; Polish – witch, sorceress, aunt, nightmare spirit; Lower Sorbian – witch.

Time of activation. Like a common witch, the witch shows a connection with certain holidays and calendar periods. Among the South Slavs, Saint George's Day ranks first, followed by Christmas, Saint Eudokia's Day (March 1), the eve of Saint John's Day, Friday or Saturday of Holy Week, "wolf days," and some others.

Malicious actions. As with other characters in the analyzed series, a core function of the witch is to take milk from cows and sheep (to do this, she collects dew or, stripping naked and straddling the warp beam of a loom, she rubs herself against it; she marks cattle pens by encircling them with red threads, which she then buries in the ground). In northeastern Bulgaria, witches and enchantresses were also attributed the ability to take away grain harvests (for which they would cut one ear of grain from each of the four corners of a field and transfer them to their own plot; they would collect dew from someone else's grain field, knead dough with it, and place the baked bread in their own barn). Sending curses was also considered a typical function of the witch. Serbs believed that she could cause illnesses in people, bring pestilence upon livestock, attack people, frighten them, cause quarrels among them, and could kill with a single glance. But the most dangerous trait of the Serbian witch was her vampirism: it was believed that she devoured infants and human hearts (with a miraculous stick, rod, or branch, the witch would touch the chest of a sleeping person, extract the heart, eat it, and the chest would heal); people whose hearts were eaten by witches inevitably perished later (e.g., under a fallen tree, from a lightning strike). They were particularly active in harming pregnant women, could remove the fetus from the mother's womb, eat it, drink the blood of children and animals, and feed on carrion. In Montenegro, it was believed that a woman wishing to become a witch first had to eat her own child, and only then could she devour other people's children; about a child who died suddenly without previous illness, people would say: "...the cursed witches drank his heart." The vampiric properties of the Bulgarian witch, less pronounced compared to the Serbian one, manifest in her tendency to strangle sleeping people, drink the blood of children and animals, and become a vampire after her death. The terminological convergence of these characters is indicative, noted in beliefs that large night butterflies are vampires that come to drink human blood; in Panagyurishte, they were called sorceresses.

In South Slavic beliefs, the motif associated with the witch's ability to control the elements (clouds, hail, winds) and her connection to celestial bodies (throwing the moon to the ground, transforming into a star, into a comet) is more actively present. According to folk tales from northwestern Bulgaria, the witch uses a magic sieve to make the moon descend from the sky (she "catches" the moon with a sieve), which is how lunar eclipses occur. In western Bulgaria, it was told that the witch transforms the moon into a cow and milks it.

In addition to the functions listed, Bulgarian witches and enchantresses were attributed the ability to inflict and simultaneously cure all diseases; to deprive people singing at night of their voices; to steal the honey-bearing capacity of bees; to transform young men into stags and young women into does; to unite and separate people, and many others.

The motif of flights to joint gatherings is quite thoroughly developed in Serbo-Croatian demonology. It was believed that these gatherings occurred annually (or three, five times a year) on Christmas Eve, Saint George's Day, Saint Eudokia's Day, or on other dates. Traditional locations for such meetings included tall trees (especially often walnuts, wild pear trees, oaks, hollow olive trees), the bases of shady trees, juniper thickets, crossroads, and abandoned buildings. Late at night, the witches would anoint their bodies with a magical ointment (made, as believed in Samobor, from deceased unbaptized children), utter a spell, and fly out through the chimney on brooms, spindles, or riding on a person. Their flight was accompanied by roaring, whistling, wind, and a fiery tail trailed behind them. At these gatherings, a chief witch was elected, and they feasted on the hearts of infants; each newcomer to the gathering had to sacrifice her own child or closest relative.

In the Bulgarian tradition, the motif of joint revelries and feasts is less pronounced in the complex of beliefs about the witch and is more strongly associated with wood nymphs, who on certain days gathered under large trees, in rosehip or blackberry thickets, in unclean places (dumps, ash heaps, garbage piles, near manure pits), where they played, danced in round dances, frolicked, and feasted. Afterwards, burned circles remained in these places, many mushrooms grew, and among the people, these places were called "playing ground" or "wood nymph's dancing ground."

Methods and magical actions for identifying a witch are widely represented in the Serbo-Croatian area. Alongside standard methods (maiming a shape-shifted animal, identification during church service), specific techniques are also known: a butterfly or bird that flew into the house at night would be covered with a vessel, and people would wait to see who would come in the morning asking for its release; roof tiles on a church would be turned over, awaiting the appearance of a witch begging to be freed; a whole series of similar methods of symbolically harming the witch were used, supposedly forcing her to come and reveal herself. The abundance of such techniques was explained by the belief that once exposed, a witch lost her magical power and became an ordinary woman. Therefore, she was compelled to confess in church or publicly admit that she was a witch, and then she became merely a folk healer, capable of treating illnesses and removing curses. Instead of a church confession or public repentance, she could confess privately to the earth or her hearth: she would dig a small hole and, bending towards it, say:

"I confess to you, black earth and green grass, that until now I have been a witch, and I swear to you that I no longer want to be one. Forgive me, God, and black earth, and green grass!"

— L. N. Vinogradova, “The General and the Specific in Slavic Beliefs about the Witch,” 1992.