Avestița

In a Romanian cradle, under the baby’s pillow or sewn into a little bag at its neck, there used to be a folded paper. It was not a prayer, exactly. It was a confession, written down on behalf of a demon who had been beaten into making it, and its working parts were names. Nineteen of them, give or take a few, in an order that varied from copy to copy: Vestița, Navadaria, Avezuha, Tiha, Miha, Samca and the rest. Wherever those names were written, the paper promised, she could not come near.

The story on the paper is short. The Archangel Michael comes down from the Mount of Olives and meets on the road a creature dreadful to look at. The hair of her head hangs to the ground. Her eyes are like stars, her hands are iron, the nails of her hands and feet are like sickles, and fire comes out of her mouth. He asks where she is going. To Bethlehem, she says, because Jesus Christ is about to be born of the Virgin Mary and she means to harm the mother. Michael takes her by the hair, fastens an iron chain round her, drives his sword into her side and beats her until she gives up her secrets. That is the version a Romanian peasant recited to collectors in the late nineteenth century, and Moses Gaster printed it in English in the journal Folk-Lore in 1900.

What she confesses is a list of disguises. She turns herself into a dog, a cat, a fly, a spider, a raven or an evil-looking girl, and in those shapes she walks into people’s houses, hurts the women, brings trouble on the children and leaves changelings. The manuscript copies stretch the list until it reads like an inventory of the whole visible world: hound, cat, rooster, hen, turkey, duck, hare, goat, horse, cow, buffalo, hind, fly, flea, ant, beetle, locust, mosquito, butterfly, caterpillar, crow, jackdaw, frog, mouse, snake, steam, smoke, fire, fog, wind, storm, light, shadow, heat, frost, ice, a lion, a book, a cinder, a cart, a road, a hillock, a stone, a grain of millet and a terrible arrow. Folk belief added one mercy. She cannot appear as a sheep, a calf or a dove, the ethnographer Simion Florea Marian recorded, because those creatures stand for innocence.

A woman alone in the house in her last weeks sees a cat in the doorway, or a hen where no hen should be, or something small and quick running along the floor. It stares at her with a bad look, makes a sound that is not quite right, and is gone. In the belief recorded across Moldavia and Bucovina, that fright is how it starts. The illness that follows takes her name, samcă: sleeping babies jerk awake, tremble through their whole bodies, sigh and waste away, and in the worst cases their arms, legs and jaws twist and stay twisted for life if the child survives at all. Mothers who were struck as girls were said to fear her most when they were pregnant themselves. A woman named Anca Poiată told the folklorist Ștefania Cristescu how her son was taken that way: put to bed healthy, and in the night he lay there trembling as if he would die. She ran to the healer, Vera, and had a little book made for him.

The little book is the heart of the matter. Avestița lives mostly on paper, and the paper has a traceable history. The legend is an apocryphal text that came into Romanian from a Slavonic translation of a Greek original, part of a family of charms in which a female demon who kills newborns loses her power once her names are known. In the Greek copies she is Gylou, in the Hebrew Lilith, in an Ethiopian synaxarium Uerzelia, and in the Slavonic Veštica. The Romanian name comes from that Slavic word, věštica, meaning a witch. Samca, the name most used in Bucovina, has been derived by the philologist I.-A. Candrea from Bulgarian sěnka, a shadow or phantom.

Gaster owned fourteen Romanian manuscripts of the charm and believed they reached back to the sixteenth century. The philologist Marius Mazilu, surveying the Romanian Academy Library in 2013, found something more modest and more striking. The earliest securely dated Romanian copy was written in 1752 at the end of a Slavonic psalter by a boy from a hilltop skete who signed himself Neculae. Another may date from 1706. But the Academy holds sixty-one versions of it, against twenty of the longer legend of Saint Sisoe, its close relative, because a short text that reads like a prayer is easy to carry as an amulet. Some copies bring Saint Sisoe in as a witness, coming down the mountain to watch the archangel at work. Copyists were also obliged to fill gaps. A single missing name made the amulet useless, so where an exemplar was illegible the scribe wrote something, and every copy added new names to the demon’s roll.

The pictures grew alongside the names. A copy made in 1831 by the nun Theodosiia at Neamț Monastery gives Avestița hair to her heels, breasts hanging to her knees, hands and feet of iron, the mouth of a lion, the eyes of an ox, a tongue of fire and a dragon’s tail raised over her back and coiled round her throat. Another manuscript gives her arms a fathom long and a newborn in her hands, broken and scratched by her nails. One copy says the protection is stronger if her portrait is drawn on the paper beside her names. She was not choosy only about infants, either. A version quoted by Mazilu has her confess that she comes most readily to those who steal the milk-luck of other people’s cattle, to sorceresses, to women who divine with wax, bread, lead, a sieve or beans, and to those unfaithful to their spouses.

Her power is the power of the hidden name, and so is her weakness. Written on the wall of the house, as was done in Bucovina, or carried by the mother until the birth and then hung at the child’s neck or laid in the trough that served as a cradle, her names hold her off by a distance that varies wildly from copy to copy: one mile, three thousand steps, seven miles, a hundred, seven million. Reading the psalm “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered” to the end, one copy says, makes the demons flee. A priest blessing a house was told to read the paper aloud and sing the troparion of Saint Michael. Where the paper failed, the village healer took over. One pricked the sickness with a sewing needle in the mother’s milk, another bound a straw from the church broom with red thread, a third swept the illness up and sent it over nine seas, and one ritual began on a Tuesday and was repeated every evening for nine days. Candrea recorded that only sorcerers who know how to drive off vampires, and people born on a Saturday, can see her at all, and that the Saturday-born can kill her.

The church officially condemned all this as superstition, and the copies kept multiplying anyway. Scholars have looked for her ancestry further back, Valeriu Bologa in 1939 tracing her to the Mesopotamian Lamashtu, Petru Adrian Danciu in 2018 proposing a lost bear goddess on the strength of her sickle nails, but those are readings of the descriptions, not documents. The documents end where the story ends: the archangel tells her to go to the desolate mountains where no one lives, or down to the bottom of hell until the Last Judgement, and the paper goes back into the cradle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Avestița in Romanian folklore?

Avestița is a female demon of Romanian folk belief who attacks pregnant women, new mothers and infants. She is called “the wing of Satan” and is also known as Samca, Avezuha and, in Wallachia, Baba Coaja. The childhood illness samcă, with its trembling, wasting and twisted limbs, is named after her.

What are the nineteen names of Avestița?

In the Romanian charm she confesses nineteen names, and wherever they are written she cannot approach. One oral version printed by Moses Gaster in 1900 lists Vestitza, Novadaria, Valnomia, Sina, Nicozda, Avezuha, Scorcoila, Tiha, Miha, Grompa, Slalo, Necausa, Hatav, Hulila, Huva, Ghiana, Gluviana, Prava and Samca. The names change from copy to copy, because scribes filled in any illegible name rather than leave a gap that would make the amulet useless.

How did people protect themselves from Avestița?

Romanian households used a written copy of the Avestița legend and her names as an amulet. The mother carried it until the birth, and afterwards it was hung in a bag at the baby’s neck, placed under the pillow or laid in the cradle, and in Bucovina the names were written on the walls of the house. Village healers also spoke charms against the illness samcă, using a sewing needle, the mother’s milk and a straw from a church broom.

Who defeated Avestița?

The Archangel Michael defeats Avestița in the Romanian legend. He meets her coming down from the Mount of Olives as she heads to Bethlehem to harm the Virgin Mary, chains her, wounds her with his sword and forces her to reveal her disguises and her names. Some versions add Saint Sisoe as a witness to the encounter.

Is Avestița the same as Lilith or Gello?

Avestița belongs to the same family of child-killing demons whose power is broken by learning their names. The Romanian legend was translated from Slavonic and goes back to a Greek original, where the demon is Gylou, the Byzantine form of Gello, while Hebrew versions of the charm name Lilith. The Romanian Avestița has her own long manuscript tradition, with more than sixty copies in the Romanian Academy Library alone.

Related Entries

Gello, Michael, Satan, Strigoi, Moroi, Muma Pădurii, Iele, Zburator, Lilith, Lamashtu (Labartu), Lamia, Al, Basty, Changeling