Vještica

Her name is vještica in Croatia and Bosnia, veštica in Serbia, vištica in Otok in Slavonia, višćica in Poljica, viška on Krk, and vistica on the Dalmatian coast in the Düringsfelds’ spelling. Bulgarian has vješčirica. The Düringsfelds traced the Dalmatian form back to the root vest, meaning skilled, experienced. The vještica is, literally, the woman who knows. Friedrich Krauss gave the same etymology a generation later from the dictionaries: the word first meant the knowing one, a wise woman. The name is Slavic, and the Poljica statute of the late 14th century already threatens the višćica with the lash and the fire. Other names came from outside. On the Croatian coast the Italian štriga pushed vještica out, and among the Slovenes and the Kaj-Croats the German Zauberin became coprnica. Krauss thought the South Slavs had borrowed many elements of their witch belief from German and Italian lore as well.

Appearance

By daylight she is a woman of the village, almost always an old one. “No young and beautiful woman,” Vuk Karadžić wrote, “is said to be a vještica, but only old hags.” The marks are small and require local knowledge to read. A caul at birth was a common sign, and in many places a red or bloody one marked a girl for the craft. In Kuči the mother hid her daughter’s red caul and handed it over when the girl came of age. In the Borghi of Split, a child born with the caul was lucky, but if the membrane it had to carry for life was reddish, the child ran the risk of growing into a witch.

At night the body she wears can change. A demonic spirit lives in her, Vuk wrote, and leaves her at night as a butterfly, a hen or a turkey. Krauss adds the fly and the crow and says she likes the toad best, and a wolf when she means serious harm. In Praputnjak she went out as a cat. The horse belongs to her victim. Krauss writes that witches ride on people they have turned into horses with a Zauberhalfter, a magic halter. On the Dalmatian coast the Düringsfelds heard that she rides a broom or one of her enemies, and that the man carries something of that ride for the rest of his life.

Origins and Initiation

A girl could be born to it, or she could learn it. In Nevesinje and Gacko a vještica was a woman conceived in an evil hour, or on the eve of a great feast, or one who had learned the “devil’s craft” from an old vještica. For the flight she needed an ointment. In Kuči, on Krk and in Poljica she kept it in a small pot under the hearth or the fire dog. In Herzegovina she stripped naked and rubbed it over her whole body. Krauss heard that the fat was made from mare’s butter.

Krauss noted that the devil is rare in Slavic witchcraft compared to the western European forms. In the German and Italian trials the witch swears herself to the devil with set oaths. “Of this there is no mention in South Slavic witch belief,” he wrote. When the devil does appear in one of his tales, he is a calf spitting fire. The witches kiss its hindquarters, and it orders a visiting priest to sign his name in blood in a black book. The dance of the witches is the Vražje kolo, the Devil’s round dance.

Klek and the Sabbath

The Düringsfelds named Klek as the main meeting place of all witches. Klek is the mountain above Ogulin in inland Croatia. The witches met there on every Friday and every Sunday of the new moon; Krauss’s tale names the new-moon Friday, the mladi petak. Krauss places the witches of Croatia on Klek near Ogulin, after Vuk and a report by M. Kombola, parish priest of Selac, in the Arkiv. A formula for the flight was recorded in Lovreć in Dalmatia and spoken after the witch had rubbed herself with the ointment: “Neither against tree nor against stone, but to Apulia under the walnut trees,” u Pulju pod oraje. Krauss rendered it “to Naples.” The walnut tree marks the other meeting places too: above Molovin in Srem, in Vidovo Polje in Herzegovina, at Slatine near Split. Krauss quotes Grimm that the witches of Naples gathered under a walnut tree near Benevento.

At Klek, in Krauss’s tale, the witches first danced all together in a ring and then each one alone around her pot. At their meetings they feasted as well, and their vessels were horse hooves and eggshells. The weather was part of their work. Krauss records that hail was laid at the witches’ door, and that thunder and hail broke out whenever a witch was carried to her grave. In the Borghi of Split, the Düringsfelds wrote, the men took up their guns whenever a storm threatened, “to hunt the witches.” They loaded them with small pellets of blessed wax and shot at the lightning. Each man believed every shot had hit a witch. If an old woman suspected of witchcraft fell ill or died soon after, they credited their own aim. They were most eager in the storms before the harvest, when they hoped to turn the hail away.

The Innkeeper’s Wife

Krauss recorded a Klek tale from Kreuz in Croatia about an innkeeper whose wife was a witch. The innkeeper was thin and his wife was fat. A Gypsy woman told him why: his wife was a witch, and on every new-moon Friday she threw a magic halter over his head while he slept, turned him into a horse and rode him up Klek to the Devil’s round dance. On the next Friday he pretended to sleep. When she came to him with the halter, he jumped up and threw it over her head. She stood before him as a mare, and he rode her to Klek in an instant. He tied her to a tree and watched the dance. An old witch, his godmother, flew up and warned him to run before the others saw him. He rode home and put the mare in the stable. In the morning he had a smith come and shoe her on all four hooves. Then he fetched a commission from the court, told the judges what he had seen, and took the bridle off. The mare turned back into his wife, with horseshoes on her hands and feet. The judges had her thrown into a pit of quicklime, where she burned to death.

The husband does not pray or call a priest. He turns the witch’s own halter against her and then hands her to the judges. Read that way, the defense is symmetric to the offense.

Behavior

A vještica did three kinds of harm. She brought hail over the fields, which is why the shooting in Split was fiercest before the harvest. She drank the blood of children and ate their hearts. The Düringsfelds describe what followed on the Dalmatian coast: when a baby fell sick or wasted away, the mother searched her memory for a day when a spiteful old woman had looked at the child in her arms. If she remembered one, she was sure that no remedy could keep the child alive. The third harm was the ride. “Jaše ga vještice,” runs a saying Krauss collected: the witches are riding him. On the coast, the enemy she rode was said to carry something of that ride for life.

Krauss’s Klek tale ends with the eggshells. The pots the witches danced around were eggshells, and since then, he writes, people crush every eggshell so that witches cannot make pots from them. In Slavonia they throw the shells straight into the fire, together with nail clippings and combed-out hair. When witches cross the sea, they use eggshells as boats. In Njegoš’s Gorski vijenac the old witch says it herself: “our boat is an eggshell.” Krauss found the same custom in Germany, in the Netherlands, and in Portugal, where the shells were crushed so the witches could not sail in them to India.

Vile and Vještice

Krauss treats the witches and the vile, the mountain spirits, in a single chapter. He had a reason. In his reading, the old belief in the vile turned step by step into the belief in evil witches, and in some districts people no longer kept the words vještica and vila apart. The usual threefold division of the vile, he writes, was carried over almost whole to the witches: zračne vile (air-vile), pozemne vile (earth-vile), and povodne vile (water-vile). In Vidovec in Croatia the air-witches were said to be very wicked. They frightened people at night and confused them until they lost their wits. The earth-witches were gentle, gave wise advice, and liked best to herd cattle. The water-witches were friendly on land but pulled anyone they caught in the water round and round until he drowned.

The bestiary entry Mora sits next door to this one. In Herzegovina the two were mother and daughter. A girl born to a witch was a Mora during her unmarried years and became a full vještica the day the bridal wreath went on her head. On Korčula and the other islands, Krauss was told the opposite: there were married and unmarried Moras, and a Mora could never become a witch. On Brač people told the two apart by the face, the Mora by scratches and the witch by heat blisters and pimples. The system is local. The pattern is regional.

How to Spot Her

The vještica left signs. Her footprint had four toes and no big toe, and the print she left in dust or sand on a dirt path was the same shape a wild goose, a swan or a wild duck would leave. The peasant knew those birds’ tracks, Krauss wrote, and believed at the same time that witches took their shape. For him the two beliefs sat side by side.

The neatest test is in Vuk’s dictionary, and Đorđević found it again in many regions. Catch a butterfly or a moth in the house at night and singe it a little on the candle, then let it go with a set phrase:

If a woman stood at the door the next morning asking for salt, and she carried burn marks, the village had its answer.

Inside the chest of her sleeping victim she worked in a single recorded gesture. With her zauberrütlein, the small magic switch, she struck the man over his left nipple. The chest opened. She tore out the heart, ate it, and the chest wound closed again over the empty space. Some of the eviscerated died on the spot. Others lived for the period the witch had decided to allow them, and she also chose the manner of death. A man who could find his stolen heart and eat it himself would have it returned to its place.

Her meeting was at fixed times of year. Witches gathered on St. John’s Eve, on St. George’s Eve, at Christmas, and at Pentecost, on broad open plains and at crossroads, where they brewed their potions. The peasant of Vinica who chanced on a meeting was given a precise rescue protocol. Cover the head at once, make the sign of the cross, take three steps backward, and then a fourth step forward. Do this and the witches cannot harm you. Forget any step and you fall straight into the witches’ bowl.

Protection

The apotropaic calendar is built around the same feast nights. On St. George’s Eve old women around Warasdin cut thistle branches and fixed them to the doors of the courtyard and the stable. They drew crosses in cow dung on those same doors. In Vinica the thistle was cut before sunrise. People laid the branches on each other’s heads, on the fences, the windows and the doors, and hung them as a wreath around the neck of every cow. Some used iron nails in the stable door instead, but thistle was held to be the stronger guard. In Vidovec a man who refused to put thistle out had his cows milked by witches every evening for a whole year.

To watch the witches without being watched, the Warasdin tradition gave a stranger procedure. Before sunrise on St. George’s Day, walk to the cow pasture. Strip naked. Turn every garment inside out and put it back on. Cut a piece of green sod from the ground and lay it on the head. A second Warasdin version needs only the sod: stand or crouch behind the stable door with it on your head at the moment the cows are let out. The witches will think the watcher is below ground and will pass without seeing.

The defenses against the vještica are the defenses of the working village, not of the church. Garlic on the body. In Ragusa people believed a witch could be found out by laying a sewing needle under the church threshold with the eye outward. On Hvar, fires were lit on the eves of Saint John and Saint Peter to drive the witches away. Near Ragusa, when the Saint John fires were lit, an old man of the village had to leap the flames first and curse the witches before the younger people dared to follow. And in the Split suburbs, pellets of blessed wax were fired at the lightning during the storm.

In Slavonia people sewed blackthorn into their clothes against witches and fixed it to the doors and windows of houses with small children. Whitethorn turns up on the vampire side. Near Ragusa the corpse of a curser or a miser was pierced with a whitethorn stake so it would not rise as a vukodlak or an Orko. Krauss recorded a curse added whenever a vampire was named: “Na putu mu broč i glogovo trnje,” “may madder and whitethorn thicket lie in his path.”

The defense most often forgotten is the proverb. Among the sayings about the witch that Krauss collected, one is a defense in itself: biži ko vištica od biloga luka, “she runs like a witch from garlic.” Garlic drives witches away, he adds. Many peasants rubbed their chests, the soles of their feet and their armpits with it at Christmas and at carnival. In Slavonia men and women alike carried a piece of garlic as an amulet.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The vještica is not the same as the witch of the western trials, even though Krauss thought the South Slavs had taken many elements from German and Italian lore. In the western trials the witch swears herself to the devil. The vještica is born to her craft in a caul, or learns it from an older woman. The western witch was tried and burned in Styria, Istria and Croatia, where German influence was strong, Krauss writes, while the law books of the Serbian kings say nothing about witches. In the tales he collected, the vještica who is caught ends in fire, in quicklime, torn apart on horses’ tails, or on the gallows.

The closer parallels run east and south. The Roman Strix is older than the vještica, and on the Croatian coast the witch took her Italian name, štriga. In southern Bulgaria, Krauss notes, the Mora is also called lamia, a word borrowed from Greek. The witches of Naples met under the walnut tree at Benevento; the Dalmatian witch flew “to Apulia under the walnut trees.” The nightmare-pressing Mora is her younger sister or her unmarried form. The Hungarian boszorkány is a Magyar word for the same kind of woman doing the same kind of work in the next valley north. On Brač the male counterpart carried his own name, the štrigun, and a štrigun’s son was a višćun. In Herzegovina, when a witch died, the tendons of her heels and behind her knees were cut with a black-hafted knife so that she would not come home from the grave.

Weather is her particular burden in these sources. Krauss derived the weather-witch from the cloud vile, the spirits who gathered and scattered rain. In Zagorje a witch who wanted revenge stirred spring water with a cooking spoon behind the stove until it hailed, and then the hail flattened everything for nine parishes around. In a peasant economy that was the loss of a year. Krauss notes that witches were burned in Croatia deep into the 18th century. In the Düringsfelds’ book of 1879, the men of the Split suburbs were still loading their guns with wax and firing at the lightning. The burnings had stopped, but the belief was on the same hillside as the wheat, and the wheat was the thing the storm came for.

Sources

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Leipzig, 1908), chapter on Hexen und Vile and chapter on Vampire
• Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and Ida von Düringsfeld, Ethnographische Curiositäten (1879), chapter Aberglauben der Küsten- und Inselbewohner Dalmatiens
• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, 1852)
• Tihomir Đorđević, Veštica i vila u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju