The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Eva Pocs

The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. By W. F. Ryan. Stroud: Sutton, 1999. hbk. 504 pp. Illus. 50.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-7509-2110-2

The most thorough and detailed study to date on the magic and divination of Russian and Eastern Slav peoples, this lengthy volume contains the findings of the author's thirty-year research. I think this book reveals a real treasury of an important segment of Russian culture. In it we can find the handwritten and published sources relating to all fields up to its utmost boundaries of learned magic and divination, starting from chronicle references and ecclesiastical texts to canon law texts, adding to it the documents of the Late Antique, Byzantine, Arabian, Jewish and West European influences. The book's unique feature is that it examines the written documents of the elite culture and the data of popular culture together.

Considering the almost century-long isolation of Russian science from Europe, or the impossibility of conducting up-to-date anthropological fieldwork on the area examined--something that the author himself mentions as a forced compromise--the difficulties facing the author while collecting his data were not identical with the two kinds of materials. Naturally, the author used the huge amount of folklore material collected and published until the first half of the twentieth century, which was available in the works of Ralston, Zelenin, Moszynski, Haase and lately Linda Ivanits and others, but we know what difficulties of interpretation one has to face working with databases of out-of-date folklore collections and through the screen of a researching system with a different approach. Ryan manages to avoid the conceptual and terminological traps inherent in second-hand data; he attempts to reduce the excesses of the meta-system of an also second-hand Russian scholarly terminology and the mythological hierarchies based on preconceptions, the "specific Russian features" existing only in this respect, and to accomplish a conceptual and terminological clarification.

The author's perception that "a study of the written tradition alone would produce a distorted picture, in view of the constant interaction of the oral and written traditions in magic and divination" is reflected in the structure of the volume as well. After the introduction, a good overview of the historical background of the sources and certain kinds of written sources, a few chapters (on popular magic, divination, wizards and witches) are devoted exclusively to the oral tradition and the materials from folklore collections on popular magic and divination, while some chapters in the book's second part present textual sources and the methods of divination known from written literature ("Texts as Amulets," "Magic of Letter and Number," "Geomancy"). In accordance with the author's basic aims, the chapters comprising the central part of the book ("Signs, Omens, Auguries, Calendar Predictions," "Predictions from Dreams and the Human Body," "Talismans and Amulets," and finally, "Spells, Curses and Magic Prayers" and "Materia Magica") discuss the intertwined oral and written culture, popular and elite/church practice and sources. The last three chapters are on alchemy and astrology, two peripheral topics compared to the central theme, both of them less significant in the Russian elite culture than in Western Europe.

Above all, the author respects his facts, has no methodological objectives, and he approaches folkloristic facts as a positivist historian. He sets up no researching system, does not "reconstruct," and stresses that the individual chapters depend on the quantity and quality of the available data and not on the system. His textual analysis suits this attitude: after recording the facts, his conclusions are strictly limited to those inherent in the data. Whenever he has parallel materials--in many aspects of divination--he describes everything: the contacts of his literary texts on a textual level, the "history" of the texts, their journey in space and time, their Ancient Eastern, Greek, Byzantine, and later German, Polish and other European connections. This is done with a careful textual philological analysis, relying on the extremely variegated sources of written culture (the Apocrypha, hagiographies, Byzantine and Arab works on astrology, church sources, indexes of prohibited books, etc.).

In this book, the author's primary goal was not to trace down these journeys, i.e. to examine the origins of these phenomena. Yet, he is willing to write about such topics whenever his previous research enables him to do so, and ultimately these chapters providing historical analyses are the most exciting peaks of the volume.

In this work, elite and popular culture make up a virtual whole; the degree of unity changes chapter by chapter. As Ryan's book illustrates with numerous examples, several aspects of popular and elite magic were identical. Certain rites, methods of preventive magic and divination (e.g. magic on Midsummer's Day), which have been considered part of the popular culture, were actually practised almost till now by all social layers up to the Tsar's family members. On the other hand, several branches of divination in the popular culture are often impossible to interpret within the popular system; they seem to be based almost exclusively on elements taken from the elite culture. The second great merit of Ryan's book is its constant attention to the complex contacts and interactions between elite/popular and written/oral traditions. The author is at his best when he has the rich materials of popular culture as well as the literary sources and literary analyses at hand, and he can document the circulation of cultural elements back and forth, as, for instance, in the chapter "Popular Divination," when he writes about the love divinations around Yuletide, or elsewhere about the connections between signs, omens, dreams, oneiromancy and dream-books, and other literary sources.