Sex/Love/Anti-Love Magic

This chapter focuses on the use of love spells. In the annals of Russian magic, interference in the mysterious workings of attraction more commonly took on far darker and more sinister tones. Passion and attraction had little role in the way spousal relationships were imagined and were greeted with even less sympathy outside of marriage. Any use of “love magic” threatened to upend the carefully crafted social order. When used to seduce a married woman into adultery or an unmarried girl into fornication, spells clearly violated the bonds of holy matrimony and of sanctified sexual unions, and such magic was understood as coercive, even abusive. Even within marriages, when an unhappy wife turned to love charms to calm her husband's violent temper and to “make him love me” — that is, to stop beating her and abusing her — her efforts were viewed as subverting the proper patriarchal hierarchy. In the sampling of cases chosen for the chapter, sex rather than love seems to be the primary issue, although the particular cruelty of the “spells for women” shows that emotional as well as physical subjugation was often the goal of magical incantation. Like most spells, the formulas used in love spells were generic, useful for any occasion.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.