Ragana

Somewhere past the last fence of a north Latvian village, at the hour when the frogs go quiet, a young woman is beating linen against a stone in a pond nobody washes in. Her feet are bare in the cold mud. Her hair is loose and yellow, which no living woman’s hair would be out of doors, because wives covered theirs and girls wore it plaited. Anyone who stops to watch her will be walking until dawn.

She is a ragana, and the word does not mean what four centuries of borrowing have made it mean.

The most careful account of her comes from Sandis Laime of the Archives of Latvian Folklore, whose 2011 doctoral work on witchcraft traditions in north-eastern Latvia became a monograph on night witches published by the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art. Laime went looking for cult places and kept running into places that belonged to witches, and the witches in those records did not behave like witches. They were not village women with a talent for spite. They were not human at all. They were the souls of women who had not been allowed to finish: dead in childbirth, dead unmarried, dead with a great sin on them, in some tellings the killing of their own child. Such a soul does not go on to the afterworld. It stays near the ground it died on, and it washes.

The laundering is the detail nobody forgets. Night after night the raganas beat and rinse linen at ponds and river bends, and the collectors who wrote the stories down could not say what the washing was for. Laime reads it as purification, a soul scrubbing at itself in the only way a story knows how to show. The storytellers themselves just called them demons.

They keep to their own ground. The map still carries the record: hills, boulders and bogs across northern Vidzeme and northern Latgale hold the word *ragana* in their names, and at Viļaka in Latgale there is a Raganu kalns, a Witch Hill, where people were still telling Laime in living memory about a shining thing seen over the pond. Regional habits differ. In Latgale a ragana will tickle a person to death. In Vidzeme she will not kill the man who disturbs her washing; she will only see to it that he walks in circles until it gets light.

Further south the being tilts toward the barn. Lithuanian tradition hands the ragana the whole repertoire of the milk-thief: she sours what is in the pail, dries the cow, thins the yield of a field, and puts on animal shapes to do it. Norbertas Vėlius, working through the Lithuanian mythological legends, lists the cat, the pig, certain fish and birds. Northern Vidzeme keeps a stranger version of the same crime. The woman lies down and her body stays where it fell, empty and cooling, while the soul goes over the hedge as a mouse, or a fly, or most often as a small bright travelling light. It milks the neighbour’s cow, comes home, and climbs back in.

On certain nights they gather. In Samogitia the destination is Šatrija, a steep conical hill above Telšiai that was a hillfort and, earlier, a place of worship, and the legends send the raganos there at midsummer to dance and feast. The hill turns up in the witchcraft trials of the Grand Duchy as well, in confessions that borrow their scenery straight from the legends. What the trial clerks actually wrote, though, was *czarownica*, the Polish word. Gliwa went through the Lithuanian witch-trial papers and found that *ragana* does not appear in them, and that translators who supply it are putting a word into the court’s mouth.

The name is where most retellings go wrong. The familiar story is that *ragana* comes from *regėti*, to see, and therefore means a seeress; Ernst Fraenkel’s Lithuanian etymological dictionary gives it, and it has been repeated ever since. Gliwa took it apart in *Onomasiology Online* in 2003 and it has not recovered. The word formation is wrong for an agent noun, the Slavic parallel it leans on does not hold, and, as A. J. Greimas had already pointed out, nothing in Baltic folklore or ethnography supports it. Nothing at all. Gliwa’s own proposal runs the other way: a Baltic verb *rag-, to rise or be raised up, giving a ragana who is what has been raised from the grave and therefore seen, most often in a dream. He declines to settle it, and offers a second possibility that is stranger still, asking whether the word might belong with Latin *regina* and Sanskrit *rājñī*, and mean a queen.

The seeress reading did not die of being wrong. It rehabilitated her instead. Lithuanian healers now take *ragana* and *raganius* as titles, and a witches’ association exists under the name. Laime is blunt about the cost: there is no evidence anywhere in Latvian folklore that raganas told fortunes, and in traditional Latvian society a woman who healed was never called one. The language had at least ten other words for her, among them *pūšļotājs*, *zavētājs* and *vārdotājs*, sorted by what she actually did.

As a term for a living human being, *ragana* is late. It first appears in a Latvian witch protocol of the sixteenth century, and in the first Latvian dictionary in 1638. Gliwa concludes that using it of an actual woman is unlikely to predate the seventeenth century, which puts the demonology first and the accusation after it. Marija Gimbutas read the figure the other way round entirely, making the ragana a pre-Indo-European goddess of death and regeneration who was pushed down into a witch when the sky gods arrived. That is Gimbutas arguing rather than the record reporting, and her wider Goddess theories are contested. The throne is a reconstruction. The washerwoman is evidence.

She does not stay tidily separate from her neighbours either. In Lithuanian tales the *laumė*, a fairy tied to childbirth, flax and changelings, stands in for the ragana so often that the two are sometimes named as one, *laumė-ragana*. Konstantīns Karulis observed that in Latvian the lines between *lauma*, *ragana*, *spīgana* and the ordinary female ghost have simply gone. The countryside kept all of them anyway, in the names of things: *raganos šluota* for the dense broom of twigs in a birch crown, *raganos spjaudalai* for wet fungus on a beam, *raganos papas* for a belemnite turned up in a field, *raganos taukai* for snow when it glitters.

One Lithuanian legend, held in the folklore manuscript archive, tells how a girl came at night to pinch a man in his bed. When the old man worked out who was doing it, he took two others to the cemetery, dug up her body, burned it, and scattered the ashes. The trouble stopped. It is the logic of the whole being in a few lines: something buried badly gets up, and the remedy is at the grave, not at the door.

Her powers follow from that. She can leave her body and travel without it. She can wear a cat, a pig, a fish, a bird, or a light no bigger than a spark. She takes milk, fat, yield and increase, the things a farm counts, and she can hold a man in the dark until sunrise. What she cannot do is much of anything beyond her own ground, and she can be turned aside by acts that cost nothing. The wolf is the oldest defence: saying that the wolf eats witches, or simply howling like one, is enough to send her off, since the dead are held to fear being torn apart if they stray. A man who drops his belt is safe too, because everything supernatural is reckoned to be frightened of nakedness, and because the trousers come down. Thistles set around the house and a scythe laid across the byre threshold keep her from the cattle. The Lord’s Prayer was added later, by a church with its own reasons. None of it helps a man already standing in her water at midnight, watching her wash.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a ragana?

A ragana is the night witch of Latvian and Lithuanian folklore. In the older Baltic record she is not a living woman with magical powers but a supernatural being, the soul of a woman who died in childbirth, died unmarried, or died with a great sin on her and so never passed into the afterworld. She stays near the place she died, washing linen at ponds by night and taking whoever walks into her ground.

Is a ragana a witch or a ghost?

Closer to a ghost. The folklorist Sandis Laime found that the raganas of north-eastern Latvia are spirits rather than people, living in graveyards, lakes and cracks in rocks, and that the word only came to mean an accusable human woman late, under the influence of imported demonology. In traditional Latvian society a woman who healed was never called a ragana; there were at least ten other words for her.

What does the name ragana mean?

The popular answer, that it comes from Lithuanian *regėti*, “to see”, and means a seeress, was rejected by the linguist Bernd Gliwa in 2003. He argued that the word formation is wrong and that nothing in Baltic folklore supports it, deriving *ragana* instead from a Baltic verb meaning “to rise, be raised up”, so that a ragana is one raised from the grave and therefore seen. Gliwa also raised, without deciding, a possible link to Latin *regina*, “queen”.

How did people protect themselves from a ragana?

By small, deliberate acts rather than elaborate ritual. Mentioning the wolf, or howling like one, drove her off, because the dead were held to fear being torn apart; dropping one’s belt worked because supernatural beings were reckoned to fear nakedness. Thistles set around a house and a scythe laid across the threshold of the cattle-shed protected the livestock, and the Lord’s Prayer was added to the list later by the church.

Where do raganas gather?

Lithuanian legend sends them to Šatrija, a steep conical hill above Telšiai in Samogitia that had earlier been a hillfort and a place of worship, where they fly at midsummer to dance and feast. The same hill appears in Grand Duchy witchcraft trial confessions, which take their scenery from the legends. In Latvia the equivalent sites are local: hills, rocks and marshes whose names still carry the word *ragana*, such as the Raganu kalns at Viļaka in Latgale.

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