Spiriduş

At the moment the priest carried the light out of the church and the congregation sang that Christ is risen, a man in Bukovina was supposed to stand among them with an egg warm under his arm and answer, under his breath, that his had risen too. The egg had to be the first one laid by a black pullet. He had carried it against his skin for nine days. Nobody who did this was in any doubt about what was hatching, and the reward was set out plainly by the people who told it: the wealth of the world while he lived, and his soul taken afterwards.

The creature was called a spiriduş, or in Moldavia a spirituş, and further out the word frayed into spirtuş, spărătuş, schiriduş. The Romanian Academy’s dictionaries are cool about it. A supernatural being in the service of witches and of the Devil, says the modern Dicţionarul explicativ; a small devil, lively and mischievous, which takes flesh in various living creatures, said the mid-century academic dictionary before it. Where the word came from is not settled. The Academy’s explanatory dictionary takes it from Latin spiritus and only compares the Polish spirytuşek; Şăineanu in 1929 and Scriban in 1939 both derived the Moldavian form straight from the Polish; the Micul dicţionar academic splits the difference and calls it spirit with a suffix on the end.

Tudor Pamfile, gathering Romanian belief for the Academy and publishing it in 1916, opened his chapter with a definition that has been misread ever since. The spiriduş, he wrote, is a little devil in flesh and bone, or that devil embodied in some creature seen or unseen, which in the house where it settles brings every good fortune in the world for as long as the man lives. Every good fortune. The catastrophe is not in the arrangement. It comes afterwards, and only for one of the parties.

Getting one meant finding the wrong sort of egg. Round Tecuciu they called it a stârpitură, a stunted thing, and round Iaşi they said such an egg came of a hen the Devil had trodden. Nobody broke one carelessly. If you spread a raw one on a plate without crushing it, they said in Vaslui, you would find a snake’s head lying in the white, and the safe thing to do with it was to wrap it in embers. The brooding varied by county the way bread recipes do. Forty days under the arm in Botoşani, and the chick kept afterwards in a new red pot with onion skins. Six weeks in Vâlcea, and out came a chick that was the Devil himself. Nine days and nine nights in Vaslui, in an empty house with no icon and no sign of the cross anywhere in it, and out came something small and black. Some said nine months was enough on its own. Everywhere the instructions were the same in one respect: no washing, no crossing yourself, no thinking about God.

There is a story from Dobrănoţi, near Sadagura, that gets the whole thing across better than any definition. A poor woman with six children hatched an abandoned egg in nine days, and the chick asked her what it should bring. She said money. It brought money all night until she told it to stop, and then she walked to the next village and sold it as a chick, and she was rich. A neighbour tried to copy her, lost her nerve on the eighth day and threw the egg on the dung heap. The following morning a third woman came out with her rubbish, found a chick shivering in the muck, felt sorry for it and took it indoors. At midnight a voice asked her what it should bring. It asked three times. She was not in a mood to be reasonable and told it, in the coarsest terms the collector was willing to print, to bring her nothing worth having. In the morning the house was so full of what she had asked for that she could not get out of the door. The priest came, established that it was no ordinary chick, heaped thorns over it and set them alight. Men stood round the fire with pitchforks to kill anything that came out, down to a fly. Nothing came out. When the ash was raked apart there was a hole in the ground that the longest poles they had could not find the bottom of.

Housed, it was undemanding. Bottles, mostly, or little jugs of marble or white clay, and it was fed on walnut kernel and other good things. In Brăila they gave it a taste of every dish at every meal. In the mountain parts of Vâlcea people explained a neighbour’s sudden money by saying he had fetched his spiriduş from Sibiu, where such things were sold; it lived in his bottle, black and about the length of a finger, and it stayed there as long as he wanted it. An old man from Muscel put it differently and said the Saxons of Braşov hatched them, that the thing was the Devil shrunk down to the size of a grain of maize, and that the man who carried the little bottle at his belt day and night and knew how to feed it would find his money breeding in his purse, his cattle multiplying in front of him, and every bargain at market falling his way.

The Suceava schoolmaster Mihai Lupescu, who sent his notes down to the folklore review Şezătoarea in the winter of 1892, was interested less in the wealth than in the errands. With a spirituş, he wrote, all the charms are made: lovers are brought home through the air riding on poles, the fated partner of a rival is killed off before the match can happen, the yield is taken out of a neighbour’s cows, milk is drawn from the heart of a cart, and the sicknesses that torment people are healed. That last one was a wrestling match rather than a cure. If the devil inside the sick man was the weaker of the two, it promised recovery and left. If it was the stronger, nothing happened, and the sorcerer said so.

Lupescu also collected the scene that stays with you. A shepherd had wearied of an old woman’s daughter and gone off to winter his sheep on the plain where the hay was cheaper. A stranger came to the old woman’s house asking a night’s lodging and was fed and put to sleep on the bench under the icons, and he lay there awake because the woman and her daughter would not stop whispering about somebody. Late on she took a little two-handled jug out of the chest, set it by the fire and began to turn it with a hazel stick, calling a man’s name. The nearer the jug came to the flame the louder she called. Then there was a thumping outside like somebody knocking snow off his boots, and the shepherd walked in.

In Bukovina the same devil could be a coin. Elena Niculiţă-Voronca, collecting there in the 1890s and printing her informants by name and village, was told at Mihalcea by Maria Reus that the coin which steals from other people is called an ancluz, and that a few of the market women had them, made with the devil that came out of the abandoned egg. Neculai Maftei at Bobeşti disagreed about what it does. His ancluz had no power to fetch anybody else’s money and only the power to come home: you spend the leu, you keep the change, and after a while the leu is back in your purse. His account of the making is exact. The witch fetches water from nine wells, drops in a clean unenchanted leu, speaks over it, and hands the buyer both the coin and the unclean spirit that goes with it. The buyer then carries that coin nine days under his heel inside his boot, and for nine days he does not wash, does not cross himself and does not speak to anybody. A woman at Şiret told her about a man who changed money there and tied the silver up with his paper and his copper, and got home to find the copper and paper still in the bundle and every silver piece gone. The women of Mihalcea kept a crumb of the blessed bread in the headscarf they knotted their money in, so that it could not run away from them.

The limits were the limits of a servant. It had to be housed, fed and worked, and in Vaslui they warned that you must keep a cheerful heart with it and never blame it for anything, because it will kill you on a day you are not expecting. It could be beaten by a stronger devil. It could be shut out by a wafer of blessed bread. It could be sold, and the selling had its own etiquette: knot it into a good new headscarf, put the scarf in your pocket with one corner hanging out, and walk about where there are crowds until somebody reaches over and takes it, to his own good luck. What could not be got round was the term. A man who kept one did not go into the church and did not call at the priest’s house, and in Suceava they said that when such men die they die horribly, and in Vâlcea that if you die before you have sold it your soul belongs to the Devil outright.

At Ilişeşti, Voronca was told about a household that had one. The woman of the house could sew as nobody else could sew, a heavy beaded shirt in a day, and cook and carry the food out to the field on top of it. Then it began to interfere. It would not let her son’s wife give birth. It took the shape of the young husband and went to her in that shape, and it threw the old people down out of the hay in the loft. They had made themselves a god of their own, the neighbours said. Both of them went mad.

By 1892 Lupescu was being told that the trade was finished. There used to be a great many old women with spirituşi, his people said, and in those days a spirituş could be bought and sold. Now you hardly find one. The word had already begun its quieter second life and is still living it: in Moldavia a spiriduş is the sparrowhawk that lifts a hen out of the yard, the spiriduş of the fence is the wren, spirtuş is the small hanging thing at the back of the throat, schiriduş is a dry pink flower on a mountainside, and a spiriduş of a child is a bright and unmanageable one. Calistrat Hogaş used it for a woman at cards who guessed without fail whether her opponent held the big card or the little one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a spiriduş in Romanian folklore?

A spiriduş is a small devil kept as a private servant, most often hatched by a person from an abandoned hen’s egg carried under the arm. Romanian Academy dictionaries define it as a supernatural being in the service of witches and of the Devil, which takes flesh in various living creatures. Folklorists recorded the belief across Moldavia, Bukovina, Muntenia and Oltenia between the 1890s and the First World War.

How do you get a spiriduş?

You hatch one from the wrong sort of egg. The tellings differ on the details: forty days under the arm in Botoşani, six weeks in Vâlcea, nine days and nights in an empty house without an icon in Vaslui, and in Bukovina nine days ending at the Easter service, where the hatcher answers the hymn by saying that his has risen too. Every version forbids washing, crossing yourself and thinking about God for the whole period.

What does a spiriduş do for its owner?

It brings money and runs errands that ordinary people cannot run. The Suceava schoolmaster Mihai Lupescu recorded in 1892 that a spirituş carried absent lovers home through the air on poles, killed off the fated partners of rivals, stripped the yield out of a neighbour’s cattle, drew milk from the heart of a cart and could drive the devil out of a sick man if it happened to be the stronger of the two. In Vâlcea and Muscel it was said to multiply the money in its owner’s purse and win him every bargain at market.

What is an ancluz?

An ancluz is the same devil in the form of a coin, recorded in Bukovina by Elena Niculiţă-Voronca in the 1890s. A witch fetches water from nine wells, puts a clean coin in it, speaks over it and sells coin and spirit together; the buyer carries the coin nine days under his heel inside his boot without washing, praying or speaking to anyone. Her informants disagreed about what it does afterwards, some saying it steals other people’s money and others that it only returns to the purse after being spent.

What is the price of keeping a spiriduş?

The soul, unless the spiriduş is sold on first. A man who kept one stayed away from the church and the priest’s house, and in Suceava it was said that such men died in torment; in Vâlcea, that anyone who died before selling his spiriduş belonged to the Devil afterwards. The sale itself was done in public: the owner knotted it into a new headscarf, left one corner showing out of his pocket and walked about in a crowd until somebody took it.

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