One month after the most contested elections in Romania’s post-communist history ended with the incumbent president winning a second term, Romanian mass-media has been invaded by serious witchcraft accusations with profound implications for those involved and with far-reaching consequences. Many of us interested in witchcraft already know that it is not important if these accusations are based on facts or not. What really matters is the power of these rumors and how people incorporate such allegations in their lives and actions. With Mary Douglas’ famous quote in mind – “People believe because collectively they want to believe” – I turn a critical eye to a phenomenon that is dismissed and contested by most analysts covering the topic, despite the fact that these discourses are indicative of the internal turmoil that much of the Romanian society has been going through lately.
In December 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, Viorel Hrebenciuc, the main political strategist of the losing team, made a series of statements which many of us treated with skepticism at the time but it is not creating a true hysteria in Romania. He claimed that he did not agree with the final presidential debate to be broadcast on a Thursday because that is when the purple flame hits its strongest moment. And that Traian Basescu, the man who won a second term in office, was clearly favored by the purple flame.
Mystico.com defines the purple flame invoked by the Social Democrats as:
one of the blessings that God granted to the humanity. It is the ideal tool to help us in the physical, material, emotional and spiritual problems. Also called flame of the Pardon and of the Mercy, the PURPLE FLAME represents the vibration of the Holy Spirit. When invoked, its cosmic action is complete, transforming our karma healing our body, spirit and soul, elevating our conscience.
To make things even more complicated, around the time of the presidential elections, most of Basescu’s staff was in fact seen wearing purple ties, shirts, coats or sweaters and the same happened with some of the notable social democrats leaders. Basescu later dismissed the accusations and stated that purple is the color of the year which technically raised more questions than solved the issue.
One month after the presidential elections were over, the wife of Mircea Geoana accused the purple flame of making his husband lose the presidential elections. On January the 16th she said that: “I think that [during the last presidential debate] he [Mircea Geoana] was energetically attacked a great deal. The people who were causing those attacks were in the room that day. […] It wasn’t like that all the time. It just happened in the critical moments which made the attacks decisive. […]. I want to say that this is something I also felt at a personal level. I felt tired, I couldn’t do things, I couldn’t focus, I wasn’t myself.”
As that was not enough, key party leaders from all over the Romanian political spectrum endorsed the possibility that various rituals and negative esoteric forces can affect politicians’ lives. In the meantime, a book on the purple flame was published in Romania, various “esoteric experts” are offering seminars on the purple flame, and some of the witchdoctors openly practicing the “white magic” are adapting to what appears to be a growing demand for “purple flame services.”
This purple flame hysteria has to some extent taken astronomical proportions involving the president, the prime-minister, the leader of the main opposition party and various other politicians. The only political figure who openly dismissed the purple flame theory is former president Ion Iliescu who had this to say: “Are we going back to Nostradamus? We’re in the 21st century for the Christ’s sake.” Whereas other people appear to share that view with him, many of his colleagues have started wearing purple ties and shirts.
The Romanian witchcraft accusations might appear as an anomaly but they are not. The connection between politics and witchcraft accusations is a well-established dichotomy all over Africa. One year to the day, in South Africa, one African National Congress (ANC) official attacked the Congress of the People (COPE) for “parading ‘old women’ on TV, using them as witchcraft to attract support” in a rally in Eastern Cape. Tokyo Sexwale, a known anti-apartheid activist, political prisoner, politician, businessman and now Minister of Human Settlements in South Africa had this to say at the time:
“Our mothers are taken, house to house, they are also paraded on TV, these people are performing witchcraft with our mothers … They are liars. You can’t have respect for people who use older people in that fashion.”
This not only suggests the intimate connection between politics and witchcraft but also that witchcraft practices and rituals are not isolated phenomena specific to only one geographic region of the world (namely Africa).
In Romania, witchcraft practices have not constituted the subject of a serious academic investigation which means that any consistent analysis of this phenomenon cannot be inclusive. But some general trends appear to be clear. First, there is a general obsession with the terminology used. Some of the words I heard in the past few days I honestly did not know they exist: “psychotronics,” “extrasensorial capacities,” “neurotronycs” and so on. In the past, when looking at the scientification of witchcraft rituals, I argued that this was caused by witchdoctors’ attempt to sell witchcraft practices as a real science, thus making the necessary link and in some cases transition between tradition and modernity. This wise marketing strategy employed by witchdoctors also gave them access to a wider audience. All this applies to Romania as well, but I would go further down the line and link this scientific vocabulary to the legacy of communism in Romania. Before 1989, all religious gatherings were legally banned and there was clearly an attempt to take a profoundly scientific approach to every aspect of one subject’s life. Even if things have somewhat changed, the scientific vocabulary still resonates with most people and gives them the illusion of precision and efficiency. Also, based on my interactions with elder people in my community, I found that witchcraft did not play such a significant role in their life before the fall of communism. But the revival of witchcraft occurred at the same time with the spread of the orthodox religion, and I don’t think the two are completely separate phenomena. It is my feeling that witchcraft discourses in Romania are intimately connected to orthodox rituals and daily routines, but until I study it further I would not be able to say it with certainty.
Moreover, I was rather surprised to notice that some of the defenders of the “purple flame” publicly made the exact same argument that I made about the Albino killings in Tanzania. Since 2007, I have been arguing that one of the reasons why the albino medicine in Tanzania is so prevalent was the fact that the ideology behind it provided the first coherent strategy for people to cope with the economic crisis that brutally hit their country. Again, I was not concerned with whether those witchcraft practices worked or not, but with what people thought the medicine could bring about. I expressed my dissatisfaction with the fact that the Tanzanian government did not go public and explained the general issues behind the global economic crisis. By not doing it, I argued, it allowed for the Albino Medicine discourse to spread all over the country and win more and more followers every day. Last night one of the members of the Romanian government had this to say : “In times of economic uncertainties it is normal to use the purple flame because it will bring luck to me and help me be successful”. “Snap duuuuude” was what I had in mind that very second with the revelation that at a discursive level – i.e. how these ideologies are socially constructed and presented to a wider audience – there IS ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ALBINO MEDICINE AND THE PURPLE FLAME ideologies. Everything I heard in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza about personal anxieties, the search for a solution, the desire to become successful by bypassing the economic shortcomings of the time, all these matters are also part of the purple flame theory. Now this is not an attempt to simplify Romanian witchcraft ideologies, but to say the least, this is a hell of a coincidence.
And this is not the only coincidence. I became more and more intrigued about this phenomenon so I used my connections in Romanian mass-media to reach out to one of the famous witchdoctor in my region who claims she is “the number one expert in Romania on white magic and esoteric forces.” I will not go into details with respect to what she told me. Our discussion lasted one hour when she suddenly told me she had to leave. I cautiously asked her if she has to visit a patient. She told me exactly who she was to see, a very important politician in the region where I was born, who was suspected of having contracted the swine flu. Again, cautiously, I asked her if she didn’t think that the doctors will do a good job. She said “he’ll fix the body, I’ll fix the soul.” That reminded me of a strikingly similar story from South Africa told to me by Professor Jean Comaroff. Her father, a white Jewish South African, returned to his native country after working as a doctor in the Second World War and settled in Port Elizabeth (what Jean sometimes calls the Detroit of South Africa). He would visit his patients and when walking into a house he would either see the sangoma (local healer) sneaking out through the back door or see various objects used in witchcraft rituals. 50 years later the story repeats itself, this time, in Eastern Europe.
The fact that the purple flame theory is gaining more and more supporters (an exasperated former teacher of mine told me that 24 out of 28 of his pupils were wearing purples ties or shirts last week) should not surprise anyone. This new theory has in fact old roots. It practically builds on a history of witchcraft rituals which even if not formally recognized have been practiced for many generations in the country in some limited ways. In today’s Romania the purple flame is the justification for an unforeseen political failure of Mircea Geoana. It is also the entity that will make many people endorse it times when the state is clearly failing to perform its expected functions. It is an explanation and a solution, something that could bring hope to millions of Romanians affected by the economic crisis. To look at it from a different perspective, it is also a very lucrative business. The president’s expert on occult forces is worth more than ten million euros based on his wealth declaration (15 million dollars) and I’m sure he also knows there’s plenty more money where that came from.
As retired people are told their pensions will remain frozen this year despite rampant inflation, young men are told no jobs are available to them, and many others are about to be laid off in February, it appears that occult forces and the occult economy as a whole (Jean and John Comaroff, 1999) are likely to play a more and more active role in people’s lives than ever before. Will witchcraft provide the safety net desperately needed by millions of people disillusioned by the lack of a prospect for a better future? Will the purple flame theory provide an answer to a fundamental question that many people across the globe are asking: why do bad things happen to good people? Could there be more pragmatic alternatives that would play the same role as the purple flame in an attempt to improve one’s personal and economic status?
All these questions need detailed analyses which can hardly be made without actual field research. However, as it stands right now, one thing is for sure. As the folks from the World Bank were to discover after 30 years of denying the significance of witchcraft in Africans’ social lives, a subculture will not cease to exist if you just ignore its presence. Maybe Romanian policy-makers, strategists and politicians could at least understand that much instead of denying a form of sociality which has slowly, but effectively become a part of the everyday life in Romania.
