by Oana Cristina Verdier
The witch–plant relationship has always represented a subject of interest in the Romanian—and universal—magical and religious imaginary. In folk tradition, the knowledgeable woman masters an archaic vegetal language through which she can heal, bind or unbind, influencing the balance between life and death. This relationship of coexistence has its origins in Prehistory, when the human relationship with the surrounding environment was one of direct interdependence, survival depending profoundly on the knowledge of nature’s rhythms. In this context, the woman—often responsible for gathering, cooking and caring for the sick—became the keeper of an empirical knowledge of the vegetal world, which gradually acquired symbolic and ritual valences. In medieval Christian tradition, the figure of the woman who preserved archaic knowledge became demonized, the witch being thus depicted as a woman subject to the devil; by extension, herbs and nature itself became heresy.
The archetype of the witch and magical thinking in the traditional community
The image of the witch in the mentality of the Romanian village appears under the archetype of the initiated woman, healer and dangerous one, respected and feared, whose wisdom perpetuates the remedies and magical practices transmitted orally. In a world in which the magical worldview stands at the center of the Romanian peasant’s universe, it becomes vital to existence, as Gh. Pavelescu states:
“Magic and human activity become (…) inseparable elements (…).” It is regarded as “an everyday weapon that accompanies man from birth to death, protecting him against misfortune, bad luck and demonic spirits. (…) It refers to the most diverse human activities, but first and foremost it appears in connection with the means and procedures that serve to ensure vegetative existence: occupations and medicine.” (Gh. Pavelescu, Research on Magic among Romanians from the Apuseni Mountains, p. 44/116)
Magic thus represented a “technique” for supporting biological life, being necessary for rich harvests, healthy and fertile animals, vigorous infants, and a protected household:
“The practical orientation in the life of the Romanian peasant is closely tied to the magical worldview. (…) Superstitions, beliefs, and magical customs are living elements that fit into an organized whole which we call the magical worldview, without which they cannot be understood and appreciated at their true value.” (Op. Cit. Gh. Pavelescu, p. 10–11)
In this whole landscape, the witch, the charmer or the healer-woman represented a mediator between humans and the mysteries of life here and beyond, plants functioning as means of communication between the two worlds. She acquires the language of herbs, an esoteric knowledge of the meaning of the world inscribed in leaves, flowers, and roots, as Anamaria Răchișan notes:
“(Re)discovering the universe of plants, we find that the vegetal kingdom possesses a language accessible to initiates. In folk belief, the uninitiated can decipher the language of plants only if, for example, they feed on white snake meat (Butură 1992: 220).”
Delia-Anamaria Răchișan, “Healing Plants between the Sacred and the Profane,” Proceedings of ICONN 4, 2017, p. 990.
Loredana Jumara recounts in this regard:
“One of the common people’s explanations for the vast knowledge of witches was that the plants themselves are those that tell witches to pick them and what they are good for.”
(Loredana Jumara, Magic and Witchcraft, p. 58)
We thus observe an animistic perspective of the world, in which plants have an unknown substratum—an energy which, through the uttering of the ritual word (incantation), animates vegetal matter and activates its healing power, both in the physical plane and in subtler ones. In this sense, Irina Nemeti notes:
“Popular religion organically unites the biological, cosmic and astral worlds. Upon plants was exercised a transfer of human and religious identity, they being anthropomorphized and sacralized. Plants have their own active, well-defined place in a complex system that includes divine and mythical characters, whose names they sometimes bear.” (Irina Nemeti, “The Spatial Regime of Magic Herbs in Romanian Folk Beliefs,” p. 197)
And Aurel Candrea notes the fundamental idea of Romanian magical medicine: the activating power of the word:
“In our villages, old women know many herbal remedies. They know when the herb must be picked and what word must be spoken over it. The remedy does not work without the word; the incantation gives it life, for without the word the herb is dead.”
(A. Candrea, Romanian Medical Folklore Compared, Bucharest, 1944, p. 71)
In addition to knowing specific formulas, the witch correlated the magical act with sacred time. She possessed an understanding of cosmic rhythms, knowing that plants cannot be harvested at any time, but only at propitious moments when their “forces” are alive and receptive. Writing about the well-known witch Nancsi, Bilțiu notes:
“Like other witches, she performed magical practices in correlation with magical time. She preferred midnight, the optimal magical time, after the roosters’ crow, when malevolent spirits can no longer act, then at sunset and at sunrise. The days she considered optimal for performing these spells were Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, the ‘sweet’ days. Being superstitious, Nancsi preferred Thursday, because she believed Tuesday had three bad hours.”
(Bilțiu, “The Witch Nancsi and Her Magical Heritage,” p. 30)
Thus we see that propitious time, the incantation (the power of the word), and the plant form a unitary system, and that only by respecting these conditions can the magical and therapeutic power of the plant be activated.
Healing plants and magical plants
In the beliefs of the traditional village, plants have a dual nature—they have both healing and magical functions. Anamaria Răchișan asserts:
“Every plant is dual. We discern, as previously mentioned, a dialectic of harmonized opposites: sacred–profane; good–evil; medicine–poison; benign–malign. Through a process of anthropomorphization or ‘passage’ into legends, plants may undergo metamorphoses, through which they either become sacralized or suffer desacralization.”
(Delia-Anamaria Răchișan, “Healing Plants between the Sacred and the Profane,” p. 1001)
Although the keepers of this secret knowledge were the initiated women, ordinary women also used herbs, both as remedies and in small magical practices. We may therefore state that plants lie at the foundation of feminine magic, forming a natural and organic symbiosis with life and with the liminal moments of existence: harvest, wedding, birth, illness, death. This relationship between woman and vegetal universe materializes concretely in numerous daily practices, where plants fulfill both therapeutic and magical roles.
One such example is Basil (Ocimum basilicum), holy, “God’s own,” a common healing plant also found in protection or fate-determining rituals. Thus, basil placed on embers was used for fumigations against colds and headaches, but also for driving away animal plague from the household:
“Basil from the priest’s cross is put in the water that the chickens drink. The herb called bear’s grass is chopped, then mixed with bran, which is given to the cattle in food.”
(Bujorean, “Illnesses, Remedies and Healing Plants Known by the Romanian Peasantry,” p. 330)
At the opposite pole from Basil stands Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), “the devil’s herb,” “the witch’s flower,” “the love herb,” associated with dangerous charms and potions, yet surprisingly also used “for any illness that finds no remedy,” for it seems to reach the depths of the sick person’s being, offering deliverance—one way or another:
“Mandrake is given, after which the sick person first goes mad, and when he comes back to his senses, he wakes up healthy. If not even mandrake can defeat it, the sick one dies and is freed from toil.”
(Bujorean, Illnesses, Remedies and Healing Plants Known by the Romanian Peasantry, p. 48)
The witch is perceived as a mediator between the “good” intra muros spaces of the village and the “evil” extra muros spaces (the forest, the boundary, the night, the water). Plants originating from such extra muros spaces (mandrake, henbane, devil’s thistle) are sites of ritual gathering. This idea of the potency of liminal space is emphasized by Loredana Jumara, who states that the boundary becomes a privileged place for magical actions, where both the plant and the witch become agents of ritual practice:
“The boundary is also a point of passage between the known world of the village (symbolically, this world) and the external, unknown world (symbolically, the other world); for this reason, numerous incantations, as well as spells and charms, are performed here.” (Loredana Jumara, “Magia și vrăjitoria,” p. 58)
Liminal spaces thus appeared both intra muros and extra muros. Bilțiu provides as an example the places where the old woman Nancsi carried out her activity: “The places where the witch performed magical practices are those widely attested in Romanian magic: at the boundary line, in the cemetery, at crossroads, at the hearth oven, at the mouth of the stove, at flowing waters, sometimes where the water turns backward (whirlpools or eddies), in the attic of the house.” (Bilțiu, “Vrăjitoarea Nancsi și patrimoniul ei magic,” p. 30)
For the same reasons, some rituals were performed on the doorstep, at the threshold of the house. The witch thus became a bridge of passage between the sacred and the profane, where “good” or “evil” plants were not only remedies but also partners in a dialogue with the unseen.
Christian Imaginary and the Demonization of Botanical Knowledge
In her work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici emphasizes that the persecution of witches was, beyond a religious campaign, also a political process of censoring the female body and knowledge:
“Witch-hunting was a deliberate strategy used by authorities to instill terror, destroy collective resistance, silence entire communities, and turn their members against one another. (…) It was also a strategy of censorship and control, which, depending on the context, could mean censoring land, bodies, or social relations.” (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, p. 220)
Thus, the woman who mastered the secrets of herbs and childbirth shifted from the status of healing witch to that of heretical witch. Ioan and Ștefana Pop-Curșeu point in the same direction. They show that in post-Byzantine church painting, the image of the witch appears consistently in the infernal register of the Last Judgment, where plant knowledge is visually represented through symbols that take on negative—witch-like—connotations: weeds, cups, pots, cauldrons, ointments.
Women who drank herbs to avoid having children are therefore condemned iconographically:
“Summarizing all these descriptions of the torments reserved for the sin of witchcraft, a few extremely significant traits emerge. Most often, those guilty of it are women—either those who sought to get rid of unwanted children, or prostitutes, but also priestesses or nuns. Men are not absent, yet they are mentioned far more rarely (Ungureni 1857). The range of activities attributed to them also seems very broad: taking away the manna and ‘virtue,’ abortion through poisoning with herbs or through magical means, incantations, intercourse with devils, etc. The punishments are generally very painful and harsh, and we are even told—in two manuscripts—that those guilty of this sin are the only beings judged already at the particular judgment and will not even rise from the dead at the Last Judgment.” (Pop-Curșeu & Pop-Curșeu, Iconografia vrăjitoriei, p. 52)
“The cup of remedies, of herbs, of brews or potions” (Pop-Curșeu & Pop-Curșeu, Op. Cit., p. 317) is invested with demonic attributes. These no longer heal but condemn the souls seeking comfort outside the Church; we observe that the same material is now placed under the sign of sin.
What was once a healing practice becomes, in religious understanding, a sign of impurity. Plants are demonized, and the woman who uses them is condemned to the hell depicted on the walls. Thus, plants come to be “devilish,” and uncontrolled feminine nature is perceived as frightening and blameworthy. The alliance between woman and plant is an almost inexhaustible subject, bringing together the most diverse theories and reaching the most complex dimensions. One thing, however, is certain: this relationship manifests, above all, in the most subtle and delicate realms of the sacred feminine, being one that does not admit separation.
Bibliography:
George Bujorean, Boli, leacuri și plante de leac cunoscute de țăranimea română, Popular Library of the “Astra” Association, Dacia Traiană Printing House, Sibiu, 1930.
Pamfil Bilțiu, “Vrăjitoarea Nancsi și patrimoniul ei magic,” Memoria Ethnologica, no. 64–65, July–December 2017, Baia Mare.
Delia-Anamaria Răchișan, Plante de leac între sacru și profan, in Proceedings of ICONN 4, Mega Publishing, Cluj-Napoca, 2017.
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Aurel Candrea, Folclorul medical român comparat, Romanian Academy Publishing, Bucharest, 1944.
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