Chovihani

Somebody kills a frog in the yard after dark. In the morning a woman in the village is found dead in her bed, and now everyone knows what she was. That is how Roma in Slovakia have explained the death of a neighbour, and the logic runs backwards with perfect confidence: the unclean animal that came to the house at night and the woman who never woke were one and the same, and the killing of the first accounts for the second.

The woman in that story is a čovaxani, which English-speaking Roma in Britain wrote as chovihani. The word is worth pausing on, because Romani has borrowed most of its supernatural vocabulary from whichever people it was living among. Slovak Roma say bosorka, Ursari Roma say vražitoŕa, Arli Roma say veštica, Sepečides Roma say džadija. All four are loans. Čoxani is not. It is the tradition’s own word, carried in the language before any of those borrowings arrived, and its masculine form does not mean a male witch so much as a dead man who has come back. One word covers the woman who works magic and the corpse that will not stay in the ground. Nobody in the tradition seems to find that strange.

What she does is not tidy. She cures. She reads what is coming and gives advice on the strength of it, and the advice is taken seriously because the reading is. She also makes people ill, and the same neighbours who consult her will tell you she can make a person die. There is no separate category of good witch and bad witch waiting to sort this out. The healing and the harm come out of one competence, and the tradition holds both in view at once, the way it holds in view that the dead sometimes come back to protect a family and sometimes come back to sit on a sleeper’s chest.

She comes by it in one of two ways. Some women are simply born with it. Others are handed it, and the handing over happens at the end of a life: a witch who is dying passes her abilities to another woman, and the power moves on rather than dying with the body. That transfer is the closest thing the tradition has to an initiation, and it explains something that comes up again and again in the way Roma talk about witches, which is that they are old. A Rom in Hungary, asked about this in 2008, said that the old women take over the power of witches, and that this is why we are scared of witches; he went on to list what fear of them prevents, which turns out to be walking at night, stealing from a church, and disturbing graves. Then he said that Roma are very afraid of God, and also of witches.

That sentence contains the whole theological problem. Romani belief is monotheistic in its formal shape and dualistic in its working: o Del at one end, o beng at the other, light against dark, and the ordinary person standing between them with very little leverage. Supernatural power belongs to those two. The chovihani takes some of it into a pair of human hands, and the offence is less what she does with it than that she has assumed a right that is not hers to assume. She is feared for trespass as much as for malice.

The trespass has a specific and horrible application to children. Among some Slovak Roma the witch is a woman from another world who comes for unbaptised newborns, takes them, and leaves in the cradle an infant of identical appearance. Nothing about the substitute announces itself. The parents learn what has happened later, when the child will not behave, or begins to sicken for no reason a doctor can name. This is why baptism is not a formality in Romani households and why a priest is fetched for it: among Christian Roma, baptism is held to be the strongest available protection against evil forces, and until the priest has come, a red ribbon knotted round the wrist has to do the work.

Not every witch is understood to be Romani. In several tellings she is a woman from the surrounding population who takes an animal shape at night, and the animal is an unclean one: a frog, a snake, something a household would want out of the house. But Romani women are believed capable of the same things, and the fear is not exported. It sits inside the settlement.

The English-language version of all this needs handling with tongs. Almost every “Romani witch” a reader is likely to have met comes through two nineteenth-century outsiders. Charles Godfrey Leland published *Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling* in 1891, and Leland was a practising occultist as well as a collector, which shows in what he chose to write down. Heinrich von Wlislocki, working in Transylvania in the same decade, supplied most of the fairy queens and fate-women and disease-demons that still circulate as the Romani pantheon, and his material has been suspected of embroidery for a long time. Strip both of them out and what stands is smaller, plainer, and mostly about practice rather than gods: God, the devil, the returning dead, ritual cleanness, and this woman. Leland is still worth reading for the phrases he caught in the language itself. He records a curse, *Jasa tu chovihani*, meaning begone, witch, and a saying that a woman’s hair is as tangled as a chovihani’s, with the note that Romani belief held a witch’s hair to curl at the ends only. He also records, from the Hungarians rather than from the Roma, the flat and useful lie that every Romani woman is one.

Her powers follow from the shape of her life rather than from any myth of origin. She knows herbs and she knows people, she is old enough to have watched three generations make the same mistakes, and in a community where the word itself is held to carry force, where a curse lands and an oath binds, someone who is believed to speak with weight speaks with weight. Her limits follow from the same place. She is mortal, and she has no way to keep her power except to give it to another woman before she dies. She is outranked. When a house is troubled by a mulo that ordinary domestic ritual cannot shift, it is a priest who is sent for, and some priests refuse the job as unchristian. And her whole standing depends on a community that agrees she has it. She holds no office, wears no sign, and can be pointed out only after the fact, in the morning, when someone is found dead and the frog is remembered.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a chovihani?

A chovihani is a Romani woman believed to hold supernatural power, able to heal, to tell the future, and to inflict illness or death. The word is Romani rather than borrowed, unlike most of the witch-words used by Romani communities across Europe, which are loans from the surrounding language. Its masculine form, čovaxano, also means a dead person who returns.

Is the chovihani good or evil?

Neither, and the tradition does not try to split the difference. The same woman cures the sick, reads what is coming, and gives advice that is acted on, while also being credited with the ability to make a person ill or dead. She is feared less for malice than for taking on a control of supernatural forces that Romani belief reserves for God.

How does a woman become a chovihani?

Two ways are described. Some women are held to be born as witches, and others receive the ability from a witch who is dying and passes it on to another woman before her death. The second route is why witches are so often spoken of as old women.

What is the connection between witches and unbaptised babies?

Among some Slovak Roma, witches are believed to steal unbaptised newborns and leave a substitute of identical appearance in the cradle. The substitution is only recognised later, when the child misbehaves or falls ill. Baptism is regarded as the strongest protection against this, and a red ribbon tied round the baby’s wrist serves in the meantime.

Is the “Romani pantheon” of fairy queens and fate-women real?

Most of it traces to a single source, the Hungarian-German folklorist Heinrich von Wlislocki, writing in Transylvania in the 1890s, and his Romani pantheon has long been suspected of invention and embroidery. Charles Godfrey Leland’s *Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling* of 1891 carried a related body of material into English while its author was himself a practising occultist. The securely attested core is much smaller and mostly concerns practice rather than deities: God, the devil, the returning dead, ritual cleanness, and the chovihani.

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