The British Library pos\em!

s a formidable
collection ofRLmian printed book~. abom .\
thIrd of the two hundred or 50 Cyrillic codices
in Llntall1. ,1Ild an extensIVe collectIon of
m.lnmCflpt RmslCa.
Many good Sl,lvol11c speClalim among the
library stan- have worked on the acquisIrlon
and c;ltaloguing of these collections. lllost
lIotabl} the leJflIl'd but father cccentric
JSSlsunr llbranan Wilha11l Ralston (I x28-8y).
who was encouraged to learn R.USS1.t11 by Sir
Anthony 1',11IIZZI. the eponym of this kcrllfe
senes. R.alston was also a writer, scholar and
storyteller and anI.' of the founders of the
Folklore' Soclery in 1 X7N; hiS c'XtCnslve com,lcts
With the SCientific Jnd literary worlds of
Llritalll and RUSSia and hiS blbliogr;\phical
cOlllll1alld of RUs\lan scholarly liter;1ture
enablcd hll11 to \\Iflte t\\'O influential books on
RlIssi,111 folklore and folksont"l). which ll1c1l1ded
d1\! first descriptive outline of Russian ll1aglt'
,lilt! popular beltef 111 English
The fiN of thl'se lectures ,\Sses<;es [tal,toll '5
contnbu[Jon LO fi)lklol"e sChOI.lfShip and the'
history of R.lI\SI.ln magic and divination. The'
second le('(un: beglll\ \\,Ith ,I lhSCU'i'iiOll of tWO
RU\SI,lIl manuscripts In [he 13rimh l.ibr.lrv 'Ind
thell eX,lIl1l111:<; their 5Iglllfic.lnct' for the ImLOry
of rtmsiall llIaglc. The thIrd lecture eX<lll1llll'S
the .IlTOunts ofRu'\I.11l magIc cllld popul.lr
lX'hef WII ttl' II by Llrltlsh trJvelkrs to RUSSIa
from the Sixteenth to the eightel'l1th ct'IHlIrV,
WIth p.lrllnd,lI rl'icrl'llce to Brttish J Ibrary
RusslcJ.
THE PANIZZI LECTURES
2005
Previously published Panizzi Lectures
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF TEXTS
by D. F. McKenzie (1985)

ENGLISH MONARCHS AND THEIR BOOKS

byT. A. Birrell (1986)

A NATIONAL LIBRARY IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE

by K. W. Humphreys (1987)

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE:

TilE MARKETS AND METAMORPHOSES OF AN UNKNOWN BESTSELLER
by Giles Barber (1988)

THE DUTCH AND THEIR BOOKS IN THE MANUSCRIPT AGE

by J. P. Gumbert (1989)

ERASMUS, COLET AND MORE:

THE EARLY TUDOR HUMANISTS AND THEIR BOOKS
by J. B. Trapp (1990)

THE ENGLISH BOOK IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

by Bernhard Fallian (1991)

I IEBREW MANUSCRIPTS OF EAST AND WFST:

TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE CODICOLOGY
by Malachi Beit-Arie (1992)

TI IE MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY OF SIR ROBERT CorroN

by Colin Tite (1993)

MUSIC, PRINT AND CULTUllE IN EARLY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

by lain Fenlon (1994)

MAPS AS PRINTS IN 'I'm: ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

by David Woodward (1995)

TilE INTRODUCTION OF ARAJIIC LEARNING INTO ENGLAND

by Charles Burnett (1996) .

Tm: HISTORY OF BOOKBINDING As A MIRROR OF SOCIETY

by Mirjam M. Foot (1997)

PUIILlSIIlNG DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

by Roger Chartier (1998)

LOST BOOKS OF MEDIEVAL CIIINA

by Glen Dudbridge (1999)

BREAKING TI IE MOULD: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF LITIIOGRAPI IY

by Michael Twyman (2000)

DECISIONS AND REVISIONS IN T. S. ELIOT

by Christopher Ricks (2002)

PRINTS FOR BOOKS: BOOK ILLUSTRATION IN FRANCE 1760-1800

by Antony Griffiths (2003)

THE POLlSI JED CORN~:RSTONE OF THF. TEMPLE

by Marfa Luisa L6pez-Vidriero (2004)
 THE PANIZZI LECTURES
2005

Russian Magic at the British Library

Books, Manuscripts, Scholars, Travellers

W.F.RYAN

THE BRITISH LIBRARY

 © 2006 W. F. Ryan

First publisbed 2006 by

The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NWI2DB

Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this title is
available from The British Library

ISBN-lO: 0 7123 49839

ISBN-13: 978 0 7123 4983 3

Typeset by W. F. Ryan
and printed in England
by Henry Ling Ltd, Dorchester
 Contents

Introduction VB

I William Ralston: Russian Magic

and Folklore in England 1

II Ivan the Terrible, the Stoglav,

and Russian Magic 41

III Travellers' Tales and Russian Magic 69

 Introduction

\\!hen I was first asked to give this series of Panizzi lectures on a

Russian theme I was sufficiently flattered to agree before giving
much thought to what I would actually talk about. \Vhen I did
think about it I began to wonder if I had been entirely wise. The
Russian theme was not a problem, nor the bibliographical aspect
- it is what I have always worked on in my academic life, and the
background to most of my publications. However, as a former
librarian, and at one time a member of the Selection Council of the
Panizzi Foundation, I felt that courtesy, if nothing more, required
me to find also a British Library dimension to my lectures.
Most people, if they make any connection between Russia and
the British Library at all, may vaguely remember that Vladimir
Il'ich Lenin, under the name ofJacob Richter, once studied in the
Reading Room at the old library in the British Museum, and that
Soviet delegations, after their pilgrimage to Highgate cemetery,
used to make ritual visits to the place where Marx and Lenin once
studied. In fact the 'History of the British Library' section of the
official website of the British Library quotes Lenin to the effect
that its predecessor, the British Museum Library, had a more
comprehensive collection of Russian books than libraries in
Moscow and St Petersburg. Publicity material on official websites,
vii
however, is rarely a source of accurate information, and in fact,
since the rate of book accession in the early 1900s was in the region
of 50,000 volumes per annum in the Imperial Public Library in St
Petersburg alone, I think we can consign Lenin's opinion on this
point to the 'dustbin of history', to use the rather inadequately
translated expression of Leon Trotsky, who was another famous
Russian user and admirer of the library.
The situation could, in fact, easily have been reversed: there
was a story current in the early years of the reign of King George
IV, and revived in Notes and Queries in 1851, that the King's
Library, given to the nation in 1823, had very nearly been sold by
the King to Tsar Nicolas I. If that had happened we would, of
course, have been deprived of the very elegant decorative feature
in the centre of the modern British Library, and I might have
been talking about the priceless English collection in the Russian
National Library.
But whatever the truth of such anecdotes, those with a need to
consult Russian books, or books about Russia, do, of course, know
that the British Library has extremely rich Russian collections in
most fields, perhaps the best in Europe outside Russia, and that at
least since the 1840s it has been very enlightened in both collecting
Russian material and appointing specialist staff to deal with it.
The history of the acquisition of Russian materials by the
British Library in the nineteenth century and in particular in the
Panizzi era, has been published by Christine Thomas, until recent-
ly head of Russian and East European section of the library, and
Bob Henderson, a Russian specialist formerly in British Library
reader services. l It is a history of a considerable achievement and
a tribute to the long-term vision and tenacity of the library staff
over the decades, in the face of perennial attacks of politicians,

1 Christine Thomas, Bob Henderson, 'Watts, Panizzi and Asher: The Develop-
ment of the Russian Collections, 1837-1869', The British Library Journal, 23, 2,
1997, pp. 154-75.
viii
administrators and the popular press about wasting money on
foreign cultures and books which few can read.
The extent of the Russian material in the British Library as a
proportion of national holdings can be fairly easily seen - we are
fortunate that British scholars have been very active in document-
ing our Russian treasures. In 1987 Janet Hartley published an
extensive SOO-page guide to British archives containing Russian
material or material relating to Russia - the summary list of British
Library holdings covers some 500 entries, with a further 60 entries
in the India Office Library collection. 2 A year later, in 1988, the
union catalogue of Cyrillic manuscripts in British and Irish
collections was published. This contains the detailed description
of 204 Cyrillic MSS, mostly Russian, of which 70 are in the British
Library.l This was almost entirely the work of Ralph Cleminson,
who went on to join Christine Thomas in the editorial team which
compiled the union catalogue of Cyrillic early printed books which
was published in 2000. 4 This shows a similar picture, with the
British Library holding 88 of the 262 copies in Britain and Ireland.
A union list of eighteenth-century Russian books in Great Britain
was published by Charles Drage in 1984/ and reveals a similar
preponderance in the British Library.
All this admirable work by British scholars means that Britain is
unique in having published surveys of all its manuscript, archival,
early printed, and eighteenth-century Russian holdings. It also

2 Janet M. Hartley, Guide to Doruments and Manuscripts in the United Kingdom

Relating to RW'sia and the Soviet Union, London and New York, 1987.
3 A Union Catalogue o/Cyrillic Manuscripts in British and Irish Collections, compiled
by Ralph Cleminson, general editors Veronica Du Feu and W. F. Ryan, London,
1988.
4 Ralph Cleminson, Christine Thomas, Diy-ana Rodoslavova, Andrej VOZl1esenskij,
Cyrillic Books printed before 170 I in British and Irish Collections. A Union Catalogue,
The British Library, 2000.
S C. L. Drage, Russian and Church Slavonic Books, 1701-1800 in United Kingdom
Libraries, London (privately published), 1984.
ix
means that the more obviously bibliographical topics involving
both the British Library and Russia which I might have chosen for
these lectures were denied to me.
Eventually I decided that in fact my current main field of
research, the history of early science, magic, and divination in
Russia, as well as my work in the two learned societies which I
serve in one capacity or another (the Folklore Society, whose
purpose is self-evident, and the Hakluyt Society, which has
published narratives of travel and explora tion for over 15 0 years),
have modest but real and interlocking associations both with
book history and with the British Library collections - so that is
going to be the linking, if occasionally tenuous theme of these
lectures.

The lectures are published here are more or less in the form they
were delivered at the British Library in November 2005, except for
the addition of explanatory and bibliographical notes and the
deletion of many of the accompanying illustrations.
The first lecture in this series will examine the contribution to
the study of Russian folkl.ore and magic made by William Ralston,
an assistant librarian at the British Museum Library in the second
half of the nineteenth century, who was encouraged into the
study of Russian by Sir Anthony Panizzi, the eponym of these
lectures.
The topic of the second lecture arises from the perhaps
surprising presence in the British Library of two complete manu-
scripts of the Stoglav, the record of the proceedings of a crucially
important synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1551, in the
reign ofIvan the Terrible, which attempted to deal with perceived
abuses within the Russian Church, and not least with superstition,
magic and divination.
x
 The third lecture will examine the role of travel literature and
other foreign accounts of Russian life in the history of Russian
popular belief, magic and witchcraft. This will also draw on
manuscript material in the British Library.

xi
 LECTURE I
William Ralston: Russian Magic
and Folklore in England
 L, I

Fig. 1. Russian po rtrait of Ralsto n, from a ph otograph, 1875.

 William Ralston: Russian Magic
and Folklore in England

Before coming to the actual magic of the title I have to outline the
general biography of Ralston, his work at the British Museum
Library, his links with Russia, and most of all his folklore interests,
in order to give a comprehensible context. This is because
Ralston's description of Russian magic is largely dispersed within
his writing on Russian folk songs and folk tales, and his attitude to
it is dependent on his general understanding of folklore theory at
the time and his relationship to British and Russian folklorists in
the formative period of their discipline.
Fortunately I can keep this biographical preamble reasonably
brief, since Ralston has been the subject of an excellent article in
the new Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography written by Patrick
Waddington,! who has also published studies on Ralston's links
with Russian writers, in particular Turgenev, and a bibliography

1 Patrick Waddington, 'Ralston, William Ralston Shedden-(1828-1889)', Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, s.v. This article replaced the piece in the
old DNB, written 'from personal knowledge' by Professor Sir Robert Kennaway
Douglas, (1838-1913), sinologist of the British Museum and later Keeper of
Oriental Books and Manuscripts.
1
listing the 192 known items published by Ralston. 2 There is also a
substantial book, in Russian, exhaustively annotated, on Ralston's
role as popularizer of Russian literature and folklore abroad, by
two eminent Russian literary historians, the late Academician M.
P. Alekseev and lurii Levin. 3 There was even a German doctoral
thesis on Ralston written by Werner Lauter in 1962.4 The
American library historian Barbara McCrimmon wrote an
informative and amusing article on Ralston's years in the British
Museum entitled 'W. R. S. Ralston (1828-89): Scholarship and
Scandal in the British Museum',s and there are briefer references
in other works, most prominently in Richard Dorson's knowledge-
able and positive assessment of Ralston as a folklorist in his book
The British Folklorists which was published in 1968.6

William Ralston Shedden Ralston was born in 1828. His father was
a successful merchant in the India trade, whose fortune was largely
dissipated in unsuccessful litigation to establish a legitimate claim
to a Scottish estate. In 1850 Ralston graduated from Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he had read mathematics and also
developed an interest in law. The financial collapse of the family,
however, obliged Ralston to find a regular income immediately, and

2 P. Waddington, 'A Bihliographyofthe Writings ofW. R. S. Ralston, 1828-89',

M'W Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1, 1980, pp. 1-15.
3 M. P. Alekseev, Iu. D. Levin, Vil'iam Rol'ston - propagandi;t russkoi literatury i
fol'k/ora, St Petershurg, 1994.
4 Werner Lauter, Die Bedeutung von W. R. S. Ralston als Vermittler russischer
Uterntur nach England, Marburg, 1962.
5 Barbara McCrimmon, OW. R. S. Ralston (1828-89): Scholarship and Scandal in
the British Museum', The British Library Journal, 14,2, 1988, pp. 178-98.
6 In particular Richard M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History, Chicago and
London, 1968, pp. 387-91. This gives a positive assessment of Ralston's work
as a folklorist. See also Philip Tilney, 'Slavic Folklore Smdies in Nineteenth-
Cenmry Britain', Canadian Slavonic Studies, 18, 1976, pp. 312-26, esp. 313-20.
2
perhaps surprisingly he sought and obtained, in 1853, a post in the
British Museum Library as a library assistant in the Department of
Printed Books, where he eventually rose to a fairly senior position.
Given the salaries paid to librarians, this was not perhaps the most
obvious way to repair the family fortunes, but although he was called
to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1861, he did not take the opportu-
nity to pursue a probably more remunerative career in law.
Once in the Department of Printed Books, with the encourage-
ment of the British Mueum's dynamic and outward-looking
librarian Anthony Panizzi, RaIson developed an interest in Russian,
which he allegedly learned by memorizing the pages of a Russian
dictionary. This last detail, though it sounds a little improbable,
comes from the quite sympathetic article on Ralston in the original
Dictionary ofNational Biography, which was written by his colleague
Professor Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas, the sinologist of the
British Museum and later Keeper of Oriental Books and Manu-
scripts and Professor of Chinese at King's College, London, who
tactfully omitted the unhappy details of Ralston's eventual depart-
ure from the British Museum, of which more later.
It is quite clear from his written work that Ralston was gifted
linguistically and was widely read in many areas of literature and
scholarship. Exactly which languages he was really familiar with
is unknown, but he certainly cited foreign books fairly freely, and
reviewed books published in French, German and Italian, and his
duties as cataloguer, and then reviser of the British Museum
Library catalogue when the printed version was being prepared,
indicates at least some competence in several. He does appear to
have known German fairly well - the Tibetan Tales of the Esto-
nian orientalist and member of the St Petersburg Academy of
Sciences Franz Anton von Schiefner (1817-1879), published in
English in 1882, was, according the title page, 'done into English
from the German, with an introduction, by W. R. S. Ralston',
This 'introduction' was in fact a heavily annotated essay sixty-five
3
 Fig. 2. Ra lston in the British Museum Library Reading Room.

pages 10ng. 7 And in hi s own books Ralston refers frequently to the

works of t he brothers Grimm, and at one point to the Finniscbe
Mytbologie of the Fi nni sh schol a r Matthias Alexander Castrcn. 8
This was publi shed in St Petersburg and was not perhaps the most
widely known of books, but it had been trans lated from Swed ish
into German by Castn!n's friend, th e sa me orientali st Franz Anto n
von Schiefner whose Tibetrf11 Tales Ra Iston had tra nslated and with
whom he corresponded.
Ra lston became we ll known in li terary, artistic and in te ll ectua l
circles, and was on fri endl y, or at least correspo ndin g, terms with
Dicke ns, D ante Gabrie l Rossetti, W il kie Co llin s, Tenn yson,
Carlyle, Ru skin , George E li ot, Darwin - in fact he knew most of
the ' bi g trees in the forest of letters', to use Ral ston 's own phra se.')

7 F. Anton von Schi cfncr, Tibettlll 'lidcs t/erivl'lljiwll llldiali SOllrecs; Tmllsla/I·dJi"Olll
(be TibcI1I1I ofllJl" Kllb-gYllr, London, I H82 . Sti ll avai lahle as a reprint with the
ritl e Tbe /Jib//' ofT'ibel: Tibe/aliTalcs FroUl Ilit/illll .)'om·res.
8 In fact puhlished under the tide or M. Illexf/ll!ler ClIs/reo's VmkSlIlIgI'lI iiber !Iii'
jiollisrbc Mytbologie, St Pet:ershurg, 1853.
9 Ra lston to Oncgi n, Feh. I , I !-lS I , sec Alekscev, Levin, Vi!'itllli !?O/'.,.,OO (n. 3
ahove), p. 245.

4
A cartoon in Punch in 1885 [Fig. 2] shows the now fossilized
Reading Room in the British Museum with a few of these 'big
trees'. In the centre stands Ralston, holding his Russian Folk Tales.
He is talking to Leslie Stephen, who is holding his Dictionary of
National Biography, both of them head and shoulders above
William Lecky, with his History of European Morals from Augustus
to Charlemagne (1869), Swinburne with a book of his own poems,
the 'sweet poetess' Mary Robinson with her slim volume of verses
entitled A Handful ofHoneysuckle, and Dean Farrar, whom Ralston
had attacked in an article in The Athenaeum for having expressed in
his book Families ofSpeech (1870) the asinine opinion that there was
no Slavonic literature except perhaps in Polish and Serbian.
Ralston's knowledge of Russian became sufficiently expert that
he was able to publish good translations of works by the fabulist
Krylov, to the poet Lermontov, and the novelist Turgenev. The
latter was impressed by Ralston's translation of the novel Dvorian-
skoe gnezdo and perhaps even more by Ralston's judicious decision
to give it the English title of Liza,1I rather than the grotesque
translation of the Russian title as A Nest of Hereditary Legislat01"S,
under which it appeared in a later rival translation in 1913. Ralston
soon became a personal friend of Turgenev and was invited to
Russia to stay on his estate at Spasskoe in 1868. Here Ralston was
able to meet real peasants in real huts, and a peasant festival was
arranged for him, which reportedly ended in drunken disorder.
Ralston's preconceived romantic view of Russian village life,
may have been slightly dimmed by this, although his vision of the
English rural dwelling was clearly not. In the introduction to
chapter 1 of his book Russian Folk-Tales he writes (p. 7): 'We pass

10 W. R. S. Ralston, Krilofrwd his Fables, London, 1869 and three later editions.
This is in fact a memoir on Krylov with translations of some fables included.
(See Waddington bibliography (n. 2 above), nos 7, 20, 36.)
II First published in IH69 with frequent re-editions and reprint~, in particular in
the Everyman's Library. Last publisbed in 2003 in the USA and still in print.

5
along the single street of the village, and glance at its wooden barn-
like huts, so different from the ideal English cottage with its
windows set deep in ivy and its porch smiling with roses'. He adds
in a rather wistful footnote: 'I speak only of what I have seen. In
some districts of Russia, if one may judge from pictures, the
peasants occupy ornamental and ornamented dwellings.'
It was during this visit that Ralston's interest in folklore seems to
have been aroused. Ralston's first published work, an article on the
Polish insurrection against Russian rule in 1863, appeared in the
Fortnightly Review in 1865, and none of the other four pieces on
Russian topics published before 1868 was concerned with folklore.
Then, in December 1868, after his trip to Turgenev's estate, he
published in the worthy journal Good Words an article entitled
'Glimpses of Russian Village Life', and thereafter there is a gradually
increasing number of articles and reviews on Russian folklore,
legends and folk tales, and later, as his confidence grew, on folklore
and folk tales in general. The other trigger to Ralston's interest in
folklore may have been his meeting with Aleksandr Manas'ev.
Afanas'ev (1826-71) was the giant of Russian nineteenth-century
folklore and the most outstanding of the Russian mythological
school. He has been called variously the Russian Grimm and the
Russian Frazer. The publisher'S preface to the 2002 re-edition of
Afanas'ev's work! 2 compared him favourably with both Grimm and
Frazer, and also claimed that Afanas'ev had developed a theory
linking myth with linguistic change long before any Western
scholars, despite the fact that Afanas'ev himself quotes Max Muller
on this point only a few pages later, and was one of the few major
scholars of mythology of that period who had not at some time
dabbled in Sanskrit. Afanas'ev's works were Ralston's main source.
We shall meet him again later.

12 A1eksandr Afanas'ev, l'rlijj, paver'in i .11u'Ve'/7in s/livilln: PoetiL'heskie vozre1liio .11l1villn

no prirodu, Eksmo: Moscow, and Terra Fantastica: St Petersburg, 2002, p. 5.
6
 Turgenev's introduction of Ralston to a rather contrived
specimen of Russian folk life at Spasskoe was perhaps less impor-
tant than the introduction of Ralston to a number of leading
figures in Russian literary and intellectual life, so that he very soon
acquired a good many Russian correspondents. Most of these are
now well known in the history of Russian scholarship, but literary
figures such as Tolstoy and Fet are also among them.
Unfortunately, most of what we know of their relations depends
on letters from Ralston surviving in Russian archives and chance
references in the papers or memoirs of other scholars.13 This is
because Ralston burned most of his letters a short time before his
death, with the exception of the Turgenev letters which he gave to
an intimate friend, the Russian emigre litterateur Aleksandr Otto-
Onegin (a curious figure, a foundling who claimed he had been
discovered at the foot of the statue of Push kin, and whose Pushkin-
ian name was a legalized affectation).14
Among the scholars Ralston certainly corresponded with was
Academician Iakov Karlovich Grot (1812-1893), an outstanding
scholar of Russian language and literature, who also wrote on
Scandinavian and Finnish folklore and mythology, sttldied Sanskrit
and Greek and was interested in Oriental studies. Their letters
Cover over twenty years from 1868, when Ralston was first in St
Petersburg. Grot appears to have been Ralston's main contact with
Russian scholars in the field of Russian popular culture such as
Vladimir Dal', the unsurpassed Russian lexicographer and recorder
of Russian folk life, proverbs and popular beliefs, for whom
Ralston wrote an obituary in The Athenaeum in 1872. 15 Grot was

13 Apart from the Russhm archive material thtre are also nine letters to Joel
Sumner Smith in the Y,lle University Lihrary, Manuscript Record Group 461.
Smith was one of the first American Slavic librarians and collectors of Slavic
books. Ralston had been asked for advice on Smith's translation ofNekrasov's
poem Mo1"OZ Krasnyi Nos.
14 Alekseev, Levin, Vil'ia," Rol:rton (n. 3 above), pp. 243-4.
15 'Mr Vladimir Dahl', The Athenaeum, 19 October 1872, pp. 498-9.

7
also the man who successfully promoted Ralston's election to the
Russian Academy of Sciences in 1885.
Returning to England after his visit to Russia Ralston became an
enthusiastic proponent of Russian culture and a sympathizer with
Russian social and political reformers, whose views coincided with
his own rather leftish liberal and philanthropic views (Ralston had
written articles on the condition of the poor in Paris and Prague).
Ralston wrote and reviewed extensively, especially on Russian
history, literature, and current affairs, published obituaries of
Russian scholars and writers in the serious journals, contributed to
the Encyclopaedia Britannica (e.g. the article on Gogol'), and was in
demand as a lecturer and storyteller. In particular he was one of the
first to champion Tolstoy in the English press. In a letter to Prince
Petr Viazemskii in 1879 he reports that he has prepared a twenty-
five-page summary of War and Peace for publication in the journal
The Nineteenth Century. 16 This duly appeared in the same year - I
am not sure what this initiative can have done for Tolstoy's
reputation, but it bears comparison with 'reduced Shakespeare',
and the Hundred-minute Bible.
Ralston lectured on Russian topics at the Royal Institution and
at the University of Oxford, where in 1871 he was appointed to
give the second of the annual series of Ilchester Lecttlres. These
were lectures at the Taylorian Institution, funded by a bequest of
£1000 from William Fox Strangways, fourth earl of Ilchester, to
promote the study of Polish and other Slavonic languages in the
University of Oxford. Ralston delivered three lectures with the
overall title 'On the Songs and Stories of the Russian People', and
the material used for the lectures was published as a book in
January of the following year as Songs of the Russian People as
illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Sodal Life. 17 The

16 It appeared in the 1879 April issue, pp. 650-69.

17 W. R. S. Ralston, Songs of the RllSsilln People liS illllsh"fuive ofSIt/vonic Mythology
8
 lectures were evidently well received and Ralston was invited back
in 1874 to give another set ofIlchester lectures, this time 'On Early
Russian History'. These were also published as a book. IS
Ralston was both in distinguished company and in the spirit of
the age; in 1870 the first Ilchester lectures had been given by
William Richard Morfill (1834-1909), later to become the first
Professor of Slavonic Studies at Oxford. Morfill had lectured on
the 'Ethnology, Early History and Popular Traditions of the
Slavonic Nations'. In 1886 the Ilchester lectures were given by Dr
Moses Gaster (1856-1939), the leader of the Sephardic Jewish
community in England, a Zionist, folklorist, and distinguished
scholar of very wide and curious interests - his Ilchester lectures
were devoted to 'Greeko-Slavonic Literature and its Relation to
the Folk-lore of Europe during the Middle Ages,.19 In 1891 a
friend of Ralston's, the influential Russian sociologist and legal
historian Maksim Kovalevskii, gave as his first lecture 'The
Matrimonial Customs and Usages of the Russian People'. In other
words Slavonic studies in general and Slavonic folklore in particu-
lar were given a high profile at Oxford long before either had
entered any university syllabus.
In his other public persona, that ofstoryteller, mostly of Russian
tales, Ralston was also much in demand - he performed by royal
request at Buckingham Palace and at Marlborough House, and,
unpaid, for the benefit of working mens' and working women's
institutes. Ralston was very tall, six and a half feet, and had a long
beard down to his waist, and when he was not in the grip of the
illness and lethargic depression which afflicted him on and off for
most of his working life, and particularly affected him in his later

alld Rlmian Socilll Lift, 1st and 2nd edns, London, 1872.
18 W. R. S. Ralston, Early Russillll History: Four Lutm'es delivered at Oxford,
London, 1874.
19 Greeko-Slavonic: Ikhe.11er LeC/:1l1"fS on Greeko-Sltlvonic Litertlture lind its Rellltioll
to the Folk-lo1'e of Eumpe dll1"ing the Middle Ages, London, 1887.
9
years, we are told that he was an impressive figure who had a lively
and animated manner. His only known' portrait, apart from the
cartoon in Punch, is an engraving in the Russian journal Pchela in
1875, done from a photograph supplied by Ralston himself, after
he had modified some unflattering detail with a pencil [Fig. 1].20
It is not, I think, expected of the staff of the British Library
today that they should write and lecture on the same scale as
Ralston, or socialize in the same circles that Ralston evidently
frequented. And even in his day, when such a prominent scholar as
Friedrich Max Muller could twice be invited to take up a post in
the British Museum Library, and even contemplate accepting
them, and before the demands of modern management and
information technology had become paramount, the everyday
chores of library routine still had to be performed. In Ralston's
case library work meant almost exclusively cataloguing, and
although in his day cataloguers were higher up the library career
ladder than they are in most of today's automated libraries, Ralston
evidently felt oppressed by the work and resented it and felt that he
was destined for something higher. He complained in letters that,
despite his superior knowledge of Russian and his extensive
Russian connections, he was not even allowed to be involved in
Russian book selection.
In 1869, the Keeper of Printed Books, Thomas Watts, who had
played an outstanding role in building the library's Russian col-
lection/I died. Although not the most senior member of the
department, Ralston applied to Panizzi for the job of Keeper, and
was sharply rebuffed. The post was given instead to William

20 A1ekseev, Levin, Vil'inm Rol'ston (n. 3 above), pp. 210-11: letter of 28 April
1875 to the first Russian professional bibliographer V. I. Mczhov, who wrote
an article about Ralston in the journal Pcheln (t. I, no. 37,1875, p. 445) in the
engraved portrait appeared.
21 See Christine Thomas, Bob Henderson, 'Watt~, Panizzi and A~her (Introduction,
n. 1 above).
10
Brenchley Rye, of whom Barbara McCrimmon writes, in a dis-
paraging remark which, as series editor of the Hakluyt Society, I
find regrettable: 'He was not much of a writer, having as his
publications only some works edited for the Hakluyt Society'. 22 In
fact twenty-four of the one hundred travel texts published by the
Hakluyt Society in the nineteenth century were edited by scholars
from the British Museum, notably the redoubtable R. H. Major,
Keeper of the Department of Maps and Charts - so Rye was in
good company.
After this reversal Ralston became depressed, in his letters
complained frequently of exhaustion, and began to neglect his
duties. His general malaise and his disenchantment with the library
led him to a serious lapse of judgment: he become involved, bravely
but foolishly, in a public dispute involving the senior library
management (not the first or last such event), after which, in 1875,
he was obliged to resign his post, officially for health reasons, and
on a small pension. It seems this did not entirely displease him. In
1876 in a letter to his friend Aleksandr Kovalevskii, the palae-
ontologist and Russian translator of Darwin, he wrote, with his not
infrequent note of wounded self-esteem:

As to the Museum - I have little wish to go back. My life was not a

pleasant one there, for I was under inferior men who were neither
gentlemen nor scholars, and who disliked me because I was a
reformer and independent. 2l

Ralston's perception of himself as a scholar and a gentleman was

not, alas, accompanied by a commensurate income, and it appears
that his ambitions in the world of great libraries did not disappear

22 In fact only one: The Discovery alld Conquest of Terra Florida ... Edited, with
Notes and an Introduction and a Trtllls/ation ofa Narrative ofthe Expedition by Luis
Hmumdez de Hiedma, by William 8. Rye, ofthe HI'itish Mllfcmn, Hakluyt Society
1st series 9, London, 1851.
23 Alekseev, Levin, Vii'imn Roi'ston (n. 3 above), p. 218
II
altogether - we know that in 1881 he had put his name forward for
the post of Bodley's Librarian. 24 As a former head of a library
myself I have to sympathize a little with Panizzi - Ralston was
obviously a difficult subordinate who often treated his post as a
sinecure, a man in the wrong job, a man for whom the right job, as
a research fellow in an undemanding university, did not at that
time exist. The American folklorist Jeremiah Curtin, who was to
make the next substantial English-language contribution to
Russian folklore studies in 1890 with his Myths and Folk Tales ofthe
Russians, Western Slavs and Mag;yars,25 was perhaps thinking as
much of his own lack of success as of Ralston's when he wrote that
'[Ralston] had labored in the British Museum many years; his
literary toils and achievements had met, as such toils so often do in
England, with scant recognition'.26
After leaving the Museum in 1875 Ralston seems not to have
sought any other post but devoted himself entirely to writing,
much of it journalism of the higher kind in the heavy literary
journals, notably The Athenaeum, The Academy, The New Quarterly
and The Nineteenth Century. He wrote mostly, but not exclusively,
on Russian themes, both social and literary.

Ralston was one of the founders of Folklore Society in 1878, and

was either its vice-president or a Council member until his death.27
His fellow founders were: Henry Charles Coote (1815-1885), a
lawyer and historian; Edward Solly (1819-1886), FRS, chemist,

24 Ihid., p. 192, letter to Mme Novikov.

25 Jeremiah Curtin, MYfhs oud Folk Tilles of the RIt.I:\'itms, Westem Slavs ond
MII"ryllrs, Boston, UNO.
26 Jeremiah Curtin, !vlemoirsojJeremillh Curtin, Madison, Wisconsin, 1940, p. 245.
27 The number present at the foundation meeting is not certain, but Ralston was
cC:!rtainly one: see Allan GOll1me, Presidential address to the Folklore Society,
1952, 'The Folklore Society: Whence and Whither', Folklore, 63, I, 1952, p. 5.
12
agronomist, and antiquary; Henry Benjamin VVheatley (1838-
1917), the distinguished bibliographer and eponym of the Library
Association's VVheatley Medal for indexing; Sir (George) Laurence
Gom me (1853-1916), folklorist and public servant prominent in
the early years of the London County Council; his wife and
collaborator Alice Gomme (1853-1938), a prolific writer on
folklore topics, and William John Thoms (1803-1885), antiquar-
ian, first secretary of the Camden Society, and founder editor of
Notes and Queries. It was Thoms who had coined the term 'folk-
lore,z8 in an article in the Athenaeum in 1846 (26 Aug) as a suitably
good 'Saxon' term, as he called it, for popular antiquities and
popular literature.
Thoms's success in introducing this 'Saxon' term had one
unfortunate consequence. The word 'folklore', denoting the study
of popular culture and literature, has now entered most European
languages, including, at least by 1899, Russian,29 and several non-
European languages as well, and whole academic institutes are to
be found devoted to it, in particular in northern and eastern
Europe and the Balkans. In Britain in the twentieth century,
however, it has often been treated with some disdain in the

28 See also his note 'Success to the Folklore Society' in Notes and Queries, V, ser.
6, 1212, 1876.
29 The word 'fol'klor' is not in the second edition of the great dictionary of Russian
by V. Dal', Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velik(f/7/..\)·kogo iflzyka, 2nd edn, Moscow-St
Petersburg, 1880-82. Since Dal' was himself one of the foremost contributors to
Russian folklore studies, and corresponded with Ralston, one In. 34 cont'dl has
to assume that the word was not in use in Russian in 1882. For the most part
folklore was classified as ethnography, folk song or popular Iitemture. The only
Russian etymological dictionary to offer a date for the first appearance of the
word fll'klor in Russian (P. la. Chernykh, b·toriko-etimologicheskii siovil/" S01lre-
mennogo r/LI:l'kogo iflzyka, Moscow, 1993, s.v.) refers to the title of a book
published in 1901. However, t11ere is at least one earlier article title which
includes the word - V. V. Lesevich, 'Fol'klor i ego izuchenie', in Pam;flt; V. G.
Belinskogo, Moscow, 1899, pp. 343-9, and another book title in 1900. The
appearance of the word in book titles from 1900 onwards might suggest that the
word had already come into use among scholars mther earlier.
13
academic world, perhaps because it has acquired the wrong
associations and now sounds quaint and redolent of maypoles and
Merry England, and has not got an '-ology' on the end, perhaps
because it has pejorative connotations - as when things are
dismissed as 'mere folklore' - or perhaps because it interests too
many people who believe in fairies and cannot easily be herded into
the groves of academe.
In Ralston's day English university education outside the uni-
versities of Oxford and Cambridge was still a rarity, the subjects
which could be studied were limited, and research even within
those universities was, and perhaps still is, regarded by many dons
as a regrettable innovation imported from Germany and the
United States. Private scholars on the other hand were numerous,
and learned societies, and philosophical and literary societies with
a fairly broad membership were quite common.
None of the founders of the Folklore Society was an academic,
though several of them, including Ralston, had graduated from
universities, but all published books or research papers, or
collected folklore materials. Many of the early members, who
numbered well over four hundred within a few years, were also
Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, or Fellows of the Society of
Arts; some were even Fellows of the Royal Society. Others were
military men who had devefoped an interest in whatever part of the
British Empire they had been sent to civilize; and not a few
members of the Society, from its earliest days, were women. One
distinguished lady folklorist, Charlotte Burne, became a member
of Council as early as 1887 and went on to become President of the
Society in 1910, perhaps the first lady to preside over a learned
society, apart from the anglophile Princess Dashkova, who in the
eighteenth century directed the Russian Academy of Sciences. 3o

30 See Gordon Ashman and Gillian Bennett, 'Charlotte Sophie Burne .. .',
Folklm'e, 111,2000, pp. 1-21.
 Besides the founder members already mentioned, the Council
of the Folklore Society, as listed in the first number of the Folk-lore
Record in 1878, contained Andrew Lang, Friedrich Max Muller and
Edward Tylor, and these were later joined by J. G. Frazer, author
of The Golden Bough, Captain Richard Carnac Temple (the Soci-
ety's representative in India), SirJohn Lubbock, Lt.-Gen. Augustus
Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, and Dr Moses Gaster, some of the
key figures in folklore, anthropology and ethnography of the
period.
Ralston shared the vice-presidency for several years with
Andrew Lang, the folklorist and folk-tale expert. Later he shared
it with Edward Tylor, who became professor of anthropology at
Oxford and wrote Primitive Culture, first published in 1871. This
was a seminal work in its day, and one which in later editions cites
Ralston's lectures and adds information from Ralston's first book
Songs ofthe Russian People about the mythical island ofBuian which
appears in Russian folk tales and magic charnls. 31 Tylor also
reviewed this book, and wrote: 'Ralston has used his literary
knowledge skilfully which has brought him a clear success in a field
in which an ignorant approach could have brought complete
disaster',32 while Lang in the introduction to his influential Custom
and Myth expressly thanked both Tylor and Ralston for their
help.l3
It is clear that all these scholars, both outside and inside the
university world, however much they may have argued among
themselves, and Lang, Tylor and Muller certainly had very signi-
ficant differences of opinion, nevertheless they were to some extent

31 Tylor, Primitive Cultures, 1871, I, p. 342 (5th edn, 1913) quotes a lecUlre of
Ralston to the Folklore Society on the Tale of Vasil iss a the Fair, and vol. 2, p.
245, quotes Songs of the Russilln People on the island of Buian.
32 ~pectlltor, April 6, 1872.
33 Andrew Lang, Custom 11l1dMyth, London, 1884: 'To Mr E. B. Tylor and Mr.
W. R. S. Ralston I must express my gratitude for the kindness with which they
have always helped me in all diftlculties.'
15
a mutually supportive group, if only because they were all well
acquainted with each other in the Council of the Folklore Society.
When Ralston died in 1889 the annual report of the Folklore
Society recorded, a little cryptically:

The year is marked by a very heavy loss in the death of one of the
founders of the Society, Mr W. R. S. Ralston, Vice-President. Mr
Ralston's services to the Society in the early years of its existence
were invaluable, and members will not easily forget those occasions
when he presided over the meetings. J4

I have told this story at some length to demonstrate that folk-

lore, whatever its later vicissitudes, in Ralston's time was a serious
branch of scientific scholarship, and socially aware scholarship at
that, which engaged some of the foremost scholars of the period,
that the Folklore Society was its focus in Britain, and that Ralston,
though little remembered today, was highly regarded by contem-
poraries who are now much more famous than he is.

In 1878, in the very first number of the Folklore Society's journal,

Ralston published an article entitled 'Notes on Folk-Tales'.35 It is
a theoretical piece, Ralston's only attempt at a theoretical state-
ment in fact, calling for a generally accepted system of classifica-
tion of folk tales and it foreshadows the later development of motif
indexes. In particular, it offers a scheme for classifying Grimm's
tales into mythological and non-mythological with sub-categories
according to what Ralston regarded as 'primal notions'. I mention
it here, out of chronological order, because it shows that, however
cautious he may have been in his earlier books on Russian folklore,

34 Folk-loreJou17Inl, 7, 5,1889, pp. 371-2.

35 The Folk-lore Rec01'd, 1, 1878, pp. 71-98.
16
which I shall discuss next, by 1878 Ralston had moved fairly
definitely into the mythological camp, seeing the distant origins of
folk tales in ancient eastern mythology. In this he, like many of his
fellow members, was influenced by the implications of the
discovery of Sanskrit by western scholars, which underpinned both
new linguistic and new cultural and racial theory and offered the
eXciting prospect that a whole Indo-European cultural archaeology
could be constructed in the same way that the modern historical
typology of language was emerging.
The Western study of Sanskrit had begun in the eighteenth
century with Sir William Jones but received a new impetus in
Britain from Max Muller's work, in particular his translation of
the Rig-Veda and the series Sacred Books of the East which he
edited. Some members of the Folklore Society were also aware,
of course, of the cultural inferences which might be drawn from
Darwin's Origin of Species, which had been published in 1859.
This tendency was no doubt fostered by the active membership
in the Folklore Society of Edward Tylor, who did indeed draw
Cultural inferences from Darwin, and Friedrich Max Muller
himself, successively Professor of Modern Languages, and
Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. And we may note
that the main non-Russian source quoted by Ralston in his
Russian books is Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie of 1844,
which was fundamental to the Aryan theory.
Not everyone approved of Ralston's theoretical inclinations.
Aleksandr Veselovskii, one of the most erudite Russian literary
scholars of the nineteenth century and himself a comparativist,
although of a different kind, and the only Russian at the first
international congress of folklorists in 1889,36 complained about

36 Veselovskii was one of the members of the Comite de Patronage of the

Congres des Traditions Populaires at the Paris Exposition Universelle of
1889. Two otber mcmbers of the committee, however, also gave Russian
addresses: Jcan Fleury (a French folklorist and teacher of French in St
Ralston in a letter to L. N. Maikov, the head of the Ethnographic
section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and member
of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to both of which Ralston was
to be elected a corresponding member. He wrote, 'We have to
expose this Englishman who entertains the English public with
comparisons between the comedies of Ostrovskii and Indian
dramas, and suchlike rubbish'.37
Joseph Jacobs, sometime editor of Folk-Lore, also had some
misgivings about Ralston's Indian enthusiasms; in the General
Notes in his Indian Fairy Tales (1912)38 he remarked condescend-
ingly: 'Miss Stokes in her Indian Fairy Tales, ... took down her tales
from two ayahs and a Khitmatgar, all of them Bengalese - the
ayahs Hindus, and the man a Mohammedan. Mr. Ralston intro-
duced the volume with some remarks which dealt too much with
sun-myths for present-day taste'. The last comment is an un-
founded sneer - Ralston's introduction makes comparisons with
folk tales from other lands but says nothing about solar myths.
In fact Jacobs's remark is very misleading as a summary of
Ralston's attitude to folklore. Ralston seems not to have been a
combative man and rarely criticizes. He pays his respects to the
various current theories, of which he was well aware both from his
reading and from the differences of opinion expressed within the
Folklore Society; he clearly takes Jacob Grimm as an unquestioned
authority, and was certainly strongly influenced by Max Miiller,
both in respect of solar mythology and in considering folk tales as
a decay of ancient Aryan myths and language, and by Afanas'ev's
mythological views, which were based on a nature-worship
pantheon. But although a considerable number ofitems are indeed
identified in his books as solar symbols - in those pre-Freudian

Petersburg) and Baltazar (Baldo) Bogisic (Croatian jurist and legal anthro-
pologist, professor in Odessa, later Minister of Justice of Montenegro).
37 A1ckseev, Levin, Vil'iam Rol'ston, p. 75
38 Joseph Jacohs, Indian Fairy Tales, London and New York, 1912.
18
 times almost anything vaguely circular could be called a solar
symbol- he never really nailed his colours to the mast in matters
of theory and was often at pains to present alternative views to
Afanas'ev's, usually those of his colleague on the Folklore Society
Council, Edward Tylor, to whom he always referred with respect.
On the whole Ralston seems to have taken as his role the
relatively modest, if honourable one of describer, translator and
explicator. Indeed, in the preface to the second edition of his Songs
of the Russian People, he expressly states 'I have generally confined
myself to stating, without criticizing, the opinions of the Russian
Mythologists whom I have quoted.' In fact, Ralston is unlikely to
have had much to say in criticism of Manas'ev, whose theoretical
approach derives from the mythological school of Grimm, and
Indo-European comparative philology, and who employs Max
Muller's notion of the 'decay oflanguage' on the very first page of
his book, and quotes him at length on the significance of Sanskrit.
Buslaev and Orest Miller also belonged to this Russian mythologi-
cal school, with which Ralston seems to identify most closely. In
fact the entry 'mythology' is by far the largest entry, at three
quarters of a page, in his rather brief index. Ralston acknowledges
these scholars in his preface. On the other hand he also acknowl-
edges Russian scholars in the rival diffusionist school of thought.
Ralston was in personal contact with Veselovskii, the most
accomplished scholar of that persuasion, whose criticism of
Ralston I have already quoted, and must certainly have known of
the tensions between these schools of thought in Russia, which
sometimes became quite personal.
There is a brief, guarded, unreferenced and non-technical dis-
cussion of the various approaches to folk tales in the Introduction
to Chapter one of Ralston's Russian Folk-Tales, but little suggestion
of his own preference in the matter. Perhaps Ralston felt that, by
comparison with such giants as Tylor and Mi.iller he was inade-
quately equipped academically to intervene in this debate, and this
19
was probably true. Or perhaps he decided that to present in a
single volume the great mass of Russian folklore to a British public
which was totally ignorant of it, and at the same time explain the
intricacies of the disagreements within the Russian academic
world, was a task beyond him, and probably futile anyway. And
that would also have been true.
The difficulty of defining exactly what was Ralston's own
theoretical position is exemplified by the late eminent folklore
scholar Alan Dundes, in his book Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook,
published in 1982,39 which discerned a distinct 'English anthro-
pological evolutionary approach' which he thought he observed in
Ralston's work, and included Ralston's essay on Cinderella as
representative of the comparative school of folklore. Richard
Dorson, in his history of British folklorists perhaps came closest
when he remarked: 'In place of Muller's disease of language,
Ralston in effect suggested a disease of religious understanding'.40
An interesting point in Ralston's article on the classification of
folk tales is that he begins it by lamenting the backwardness of
English folk tale collecting and contrasts it in particular with the
collecting and publishing work of Manas'ev, the great Russian
scholar of folk tales and Slav mythology whose work was much ad-
mired by Ralston. He points out that Manas'ev had published some
332 stories and variants in an edition of over 3000 pages.
It is indeed a fact that although the Folklore Society appears to
have been the first such society in the world, and its journal the
first to have 'folklore' in its title, in terms of folklore scholarship
much of the British writing was rather amateur by comparison with
the work done in Germany, in particular by the Grimms and their
successors, and in Russia, which was at that time experiencing a
golden age of scholarship, and where a significant number of

39 Alan Dundes, Cinderella: A Casebook, 2nd edn, New York, 1982, p. 31.
40 DOTson, The British Folk/ori.11S, p. 391.
20
serious scholars were involved in the collecting, publishing and
theoretical interpretation of folklore material. A good deal of this
work was done under the auspices of the Ethnographic Section of
the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, to which Ralston had
been elected. Ralston had met some of these scholars and corre-
sponded with others.

Ralston's contribution to the study of Russian folklore is to be

found in the two books I have mentioned. The first, the Songs of
the Russian People as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian
Social Life, was published in January 1872, and was followed by a
second edition in April. This second edition included a second
preface in which Ralston says that he has just read Bernhard
Schmidt's Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das hellenische
Alterthum and was struck by the extreme similarity of modern
Greek and Slavonic folklore, which he then outlines, and finally
remarks that he would have quoted it extensively if only it had
been published a little earlier. He also draws attention to the very
recent account by Aleksandr Gilferding of an expedition to
collect byliny, a kind of oral historical folk verse sometimes
classified as epic fragments.
The fact that Ralston indulged in a second edition of his book
only three months after the first, simply to provide his readers with
these two pieces of information in a new preface, not only suggests
that he was probably paying for the publication himself, but also
underlines the fact that Ralston was most perceptive in recognizing
the extreme importance of the discovery of the survival of byliny as
a live tradition. His account of them may well have been the first
in a West European language, and precedes Rambaud's in 1876

21
and Wollner's in 1879. 41 Certainly the eminent American folklorist
Richard Dorson considered it sufficiently important to republish
it in his Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British
Folklorists in 1968 (at pp. 599-607).
Ralston seems at this time to have been in a fever of compo-
sition. The following year, 1873, he published Russian Folk Tales,
which appeared in America in the same year under the title of
Russian Fairy Tales. A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-Lore.
Several other American editions with various titles were to follow,
and there was a French edition, Contes populaires de la Russie,
published in 1874, and translated by the French folklorist Loys
Brueyre. The latter was a colleague of Ralston on the Council of
the Folklore Society (and also a member of the American Folk-lore
Society), and one of the founders, with Paul Sebillot, of the
monthly Mother Goose Dinners, from which the French folklore
society, the Societe des Traditions Populaires, later emerged.
Russian Folk-Tales was dedicated to the memory of Aleksandr
Manas'ev, who had died two years before, and for whom Ralston
wrote an obituary and reminiscences in The Academy in 1871.
Quite apart from the enormous importance of Manas'ev's work,
which was recognized by Ralston, I think it is very possible that
Ralston felt a special affinity with a man who had also been driven
into poverty from his official post as archivist in the Ministry of
Foreign Mfairs by intrigue, albeit political in Manas'ev's case. 42

41 Alfred Rambaud, La Russie cpiql~e, Paris, 1876, 'etude sur lcs chansons heroi'ques
de la Russie traduites ou analysees pour la premiere fois par Alfred Rambaud';
Wilhelm Wollner, Untm-uchengen iiber die Volksepik der Gros,fT/Jj:ren, Leipzig,
1879. There were, however, earlier translations of parts of the Kirsha Danilov
collection: Les Anciennes Pocsies ru,l:res, 1804 and Carl Heinrich von Busse, Fiirjt
Wladimirund dessen Taft/runde: alt-russische Heldenlieder, Leipzig, 1819, and a few
in Talvi (Edward Rohinson), Hi,ltorical View ofthe Languages and Literature ofthe
Slavic Notions: with A Sketch of their Popular Poetry, New York, 1850.
42 For an accessible account in English of Afanas'ev see James Riordan, 'Russian
Fairy Tales and their Collectors', in A Companion to the Fairy Tole, ed. Hilda
Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri, Woodbridge, 2003 pp. 217-25 (221-40).
22
 Incidentally, in the preface to Russian Folk-Tales, Ralston also
mentions Manas'ev's collection of 'indecent' folk tales published
anonymously in Geneva in the previous year. He observes primly:
'upon its contents I have not found it necessary to draw'. But the
fact that he mentions it at all is interesting - Manas'ev's book of
Russian legends had been banned by the Russian censor for fatuous
reasons and his Geneva publication may be considered a kind of
revenge, as Ralston must have known.
Ralston planned a third book in this folklore series. It was to be
about the Russian byliny, already mentioned and which will appear
again below. But, like several other of Ralston's projects, it came to
nothing; the trip to Russia to study the material did not take place,
and the book was never written.

Both of Ralston's Russian folklore books have slightly misleading

titles, each reflecting Ralston's apparent, though unstated belief
that folklore is both poetic and rural. The first, and most impor-
tant from the point of view of Russian magic, is the Songs of the
Russian People, as Illustrative ofSlavonic Mythology and Russian Social
Life. It is 450 pages long and it is indeed largely about songs, but,
although it includes the translated texts of many songs, without
their music, it is far more a study of Russian folk beliefs and
Customs, loosely organized here and there according to seasonal or
functional song types.
In the preface of the first edition Ralston lists the Russian authors
whose works he had used. The most important of these he names as
Aleksandr Manas'ev, for his great collection Russian Folk Tales, and
for his three-volume work The Poetic Views of the Ancient Slavs on
Nature, which may seem a little odd as a title but does tell us exactly
what Manas'ev believed, that folklore is poetic and expresses a view
of natural phenomena - it is a theoretical statement on the origins of
23
myth and a kind of encyclopaedia of Slavonic popular culture
organized in such a way as to support the theoretical statement, in
which respect it does resemble Frazer's later Golden Bough.
The second name was Vladimir Dal', for his dictionary of the
spoken Russian language and his collection of Russian proverbs,
both of which are still essential to Russian folklorists. Ralston also
lists Kotliarevskii for ancient funeral customs, Sakharov and Shein
as the main source for the texts of the songs he quotes, Snegirev
and Tereshchenko as the source for customs and manners, Orest
Miller on ritual and mythic songs, Rybnikov and Kireevskii for
byliny, and the critical works of Buslaev, Bezsonov, Maikov, Stasov,
Schiefner - in fact most of the great names of the period.
Ralston was also aware of the pioneering work of Aleksandr
Fedorovich Gilferding, who, with Rybnikov, was largely responsi-
ble for the rediscovery of the live oral epic tradition of the by/ina in
the remoter parts of the Russian north. Ralston even remarks on
the latter's new method of arranging bylina texts according to the
reciter rather than by subject, though not on Gilferding's other
innovation, the preservation of dialect, accentuation and variant
forms of the poems exactly as recited, with no attempt to standard-
ize them or convert them into polite literature. Ralston had
corresponded with Gilferding and obtained from him an advance
proof copy of his ground-breaking article on the byliny of the
Olonets province in north-west Russia, and even dreamed of
visiting these pristine northern villages to hear recitations at first
hand. Alas, Gilferding contracted typhus and died during his
second expedition to collect more material from the Onega region.
The new collection was published posthumously in 1873,43 and

43 A1ek~andr Fedorovich Gilfcrding (1831-1872), Slavist, historian, folklorist,

Sanskritist, member of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Chairman of the
Ethnobrraphy section of the Imperial Russian C..eographical Society. The article was
'Olonetskaia gubemiia i ee narodnye mpsody', Vestnik Evropy, 1872, kn. 3, and the
posthumous book was Onezhskie by/iny, 1873, which contained 318 by/inn texts.
24
 reviewed by Ralston in two issues of the Saturday Review in
November of the same year.
Most of the Russian sources used by Ralston are large multi-
volume classics which are still in use. The sheer range of material
he managed to read and absorb, and then mention in his own
books is remarkable. He gave his Ilchester lectures in 1871, and the
first of the two books based on them appeared in January of 1872,
and the second a year later. The main defects of Songs ofthe Russian
People were almost inevitable in such circumstances: there is a great
deal of abbreviation, little or no localization, very little citation of
sources and an often chaotic presentation of small pieces of
information which grows worse towards the end. Ralston does at
least give us an appendix in which he lists the titles of twenty-eight
Russian works and a further six relating to non-Russian Slavs, and
a few more references in the prefaces. There is no list of the non-
Slavonic books to which he occasionally refers in footnotes in the
laconic Victorian fashion, which assumes prior familiarity with the
literature. We are expected to know that Deutsche Sagen is the
classic 1816 work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Deutsche
Mythologie or even just DM are references to Jacob Grimm's great
1835 work of that name.
Ralston does in fact state in his preface that he would not be
citing many books in western languages since his main task was to
present Russian material which, as he puts it, 'has not been
hitherto rendered into generally intelligible speech'. Such refer-
ences as there are do at least show us that he was entirely familiar
with the mythological, linguistic and folklore literature in English,
Russian and German. There are no references to works in the
Romance languages, but we know from his reviews of French
books that he was familiar with work in that language.
In Songs of the Russian People, Ralston could not squeeze all his
folklore material into the arbitrary framework of song types, and
some had to be accommodated rather awkwardly. The second
25
Fig. 3. Yu letide divination. Popul ar print, 19th c.

chapter of the book is devoted to Slavic myth o logy and demon -

o logy, and the sixth chapter is d voted to so rcery and witchcraft.
Di scussion of Russ ian ma gical beli efs is to be found in parti cular
in those two chapte rs, but there a re pl enty of in cid ental refe rences
elsewhere. 1 he introductory para graph of chapter 1 te ll s us a great
dea l about Ral sto n 's attitude to folklore and magic. I-I e wri tes of

' ... th e mo re jmp o rt~ nt features o f th e poetica l fo lkl ore o f Russi~ -

the reli cs of mythi c and ritual song, th e re m~in s of ,1 wides pread
system of sorcery which have drifted down to o ll r da ys in the fo rm
o frrun cated spells, exorcisms ~ nd inca ntations, and the fragmentary
epics or metrica l romances ca ll ed blli lin ~s ... ' .

In fact Ral ston was not th e first to reco rd , in E nglish, d tails of

Russian magic, as yo u ma y hea r in my t hircll ecture, but he was the
first to di scuss th em in Engli sh in a scholarly co ntext.
In ch. 2 of his Songs oftbe Russian People, Ralston describes th e
ancient Slavic panth eon, with rath e r more assurance than most
scholars would today, and passes on to later popular demonology
and a profusion of superstitions, which he presents in a breathless
rush, with many learned etymologies and Indo-European parallels
and sweeping references to the spirits of the dead and ancestor
worship. The house demon, the domovoi, the water demons, rusatki
and vodianye, and the forest demon, the leshii, are prominent here.
In the middle of this he stops to describes in some detail the
magical procedure for seizing a fern flower when it blossoms on
Easter Eve, and using it to gain magical access to hidden knowl-
edge and treasure. 44 Frazer quotes this passage in the Golden Bough.
Fairly typically, Ralston is .more concerned with the possible
mythic origins of this belief in the cult of the Slav god of thunder
and lightning Perun, and analogues in Germanic and Finnic
sources, than with its possible use in contemporary magic or
treasure-hunting.
Ralston's desire to fit all his material into a folk song context leads
him to include divination into his discussion of the Kolyada or
Christmas season songs. It is true that the twelve days of Christmas
in Russia have specific seasonal songs, and also that the second six
days are the prime time for divination and charms in the Russian folk
calendar, but they are not the only times when such divinations were
performed, nor are they necessarily linked in any other way, any
more than Christmas carols and turkey are in England.
The main type of divination had the purpose of determining
marital prospects, and was mostly practised by young women, for
whom marriage was a social and economic imperative in Russian
villages. Most of these methods of divination have no song
component, or even, in many cases, any verbal content. In the
space of two pages Ralston describes accurately four common
methods of marital divination, which have no connection with
songs, and then goes on to describe in some detail the so-called

44 Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, pp. 98-9.

Fi g. 4 . Yul etid e divin ati o n. P o pulflr print, 19th c.

'und er- th e-di sh divin ati o n', comm o n in mfl ny parts o f Russia,
whi ch is acco mpani ed by so ngs. Thi s in vo lves all present puttin g
fl token such as rin g into a covered bowl. As each to ken is drawn
out at rand o m , t he song whi ch is bein g sun g at th at mo ment is
inte rpreted fo r o m ens abo ut the fate o f th e ow ne r o f th e o bject.
F igs 3 and 4 are nin etee nt h-century po pul ar prints o f so me o f
th e co mm o nest o f th ese di vinati o ns. The first sho ws ' und er- th e-
di sh' di vin ati o n, a chi c ken o racl e, fl nd th e mirro r and candl e rinl al
fo r conjurin g u p th e im age o f a fUnJre spou se. T he second shows
a mo re elabo rate versio n o f t he chi c ken o racl e.
T hese fo rm s o f divinati o n, whi ch fl re described in Pushkin 's
Ellgene Onegin, were o ften perfo rm ed in th e bania, th e vill age
commun fl l bathh o use, fl pl ace with all sorts o ffea rful supe rstiti o ns
attached to it. T his was t he prim e locatio n fo r perfo rmin g mflgic
in Ru ssia, but surpri sin gly thi s W,l S no t discussed by Ralsto n .
C hapte r six o f Songs oftbe Rllssian People is entitl ed 'So rcery and
W itc hcra ft'. I Iere Rfl lsto n o nce aga in asserts hi s beli ef th ,lt modern
supe rstiti o ns are fragme nts o f fl ncie nt be li efs in necro mflll cy,
28
influenced by the Finnic peoples, who, he assures us, in an echo of
an age-old tradition, are 'of all the European peoples the most
addicted to conjuring'. This may be compared with the broader
but similar opinion of the Breslau professor of comparative
linguistics Otto Schrader in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,
published between 1909 and 1920,45 that 'In no other quarter of
Europe has magic, in all the various forms assumed by it from the
dawn of history to the present day, exercised so great a sway as in
the Balto-Slavic countries'.
Ralston immediately followed his comment on the Finns (pp.
345-6) with a more curious statement; he wrote:

Nor is it unintelligible - the isolation of villages, and the dearth of

education being taken into account - why their descendants, the
peasants who now till the soil of Russia, should be as prone to
superstition, as responsive to the influence of the imagination, as
obedient to the impulse of a morbid fancy, as those benighted
Orientals of whom Mr. Tylor tells us, who still believe in spirit-
rappings, and planchette-writings, and wizard-elongations.

This uncharacteristic outburst suggests that Ralston had in

mind not so much Russians, or orientals, benighted or otherwise,
but rather the spiritualists of his own day in London, and in
particular Darwin's collaborator, the naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace, who had defended spiritualism and was in dispute with
Tylor after criticizing the latter's rationalistic explanations of
superstition in a review ofTylor's book in The Academy in 1872. 46
This became a matter of controversy between an influential part of
the Folklore Society and the Society for Psychical Research for
decades to come, and came to a head with the rationalist Edward

45 Encyclopaedia ofReligion lind Ethics, ed.]. Hastings, Edinburgh and New York,
1908-20.
46 The Academy, 15 Febmary 1872, pp. 69-71.
29
Clodd's presidential address to the Society in 1894 which both
attacked Wallace and offended conservative Christians.47 Glad-
stone and several others resigned in protest, while Andrew Lang
attempted, as a self-confessed 'psycho-folklorist' to find some
middle ground in his book Cock Lane and Common-Sense, and an
article in Folklore in 1895.48
Ralston still insists in this chapter on his organizing principle of
'songs' but, not entirely surprisingly, is hard put to find any which
are directly relevant. He therefore has to rely heavily on riddles,
which are only connected with magic if you think they are, and
magic charms which, he insists, on rather dubious grounds, always
contain rhythmic elements and sometimes rhyme, and are thus in
a sense quasi-songs.
Ralston's belief that modern magic is simply corrupted frag-
ments of ancient religion sometimes leads him into misstatements.
He claims that charms were the peculiar property of a small body
of sorcerers who watched over them with jealous care, and also
repeats the common belief that spells had to be repeated exactly or
else they would lose their force. Even a casual reading of the most
important published collection of Russian spells of that period,
which its author Maikov had sent to Ralston, should have shown
him that neither contention was supportable. He further states that
before the modernizing Peter the Great at the beginning of the
eighteenth century the bulk of written spell manuscripts were
burned along with their owners. In fact, although witches had
occasionally been burned in Russia, it was precisely the 'modern'
Peter the Great who introduced the first law code in which death

47 On tl1is dispute see Peter Pels, 'Spirits of Modernity: Alfi'ed Wallace, Edward
Tylor, and me Visual Politi(.'S of Fact' in Mllgii' ond Mod£rllity. Illf£"rylces ofRevellitiOll
olld COIIceo/11Imt, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, Stanford, 2003, pp. 241-71.
48 Andrew Lang, COi'k LOlle olld Commoll-Sense, London and New York, 1894,
and idem, 'Protest of a Psycho-Folklorist', Fa/klare, 6, 3,1895, pp. 236-48.
The latter was written in answer to Edward C1odd.

30
by burning was specified as the punishment for witchcraft, and
spell books continued to be burned by order of the law courts up
to the end of the reign of the enlightened Catherine the Great, if
not longer. 49
Ralston is little concerned to dispute the reality of witchcraft, or
to give it a sociological or psychological explanation, or to discuss
theological or legal attitudes towards it. He sees it entirely as a
survival of the ancient mythology and primeval religion of the
Slavs, a survival in which songs are the prime medium. He does
cautiously mention that Tylor and Manas'ev have different views
on the origin and nature of witchcraft, and if his own comments
are on the whole more sympathetic to the mythological explana-
tion of Manas'ev, he often seems inclined to embrace elements of
survivalism, and nods loyally in the direction of his colleague
Tylor. For some inexplicable reason, the history of magic and
witchcraft in Russian society in the period for which there are
written records is hardly mentioned anywhere in the book until the
very end of this last chapter, where it is dealt with hastily, though
admittedly not incompetently.
Nevertheless, with all its omissions, to which one must add
Ralston's failure to discuss the attitudes of the Orthodox Church
to magic and the whole subject of wonder-working icons, the
picture of Russian folk belief painted by Ralston is recognizable
and the characteristics of Russian charms, and the texts of some of
them, are given in some detail. Ralston admits that he relies largely
on Afanas'ev for his information, although he expresses scepticism
about Manas'ev's more extreme mythical interpretations (p. 367).
He supplies his own comparative material from Jacob Grimm and
Avestan texts. He discusses at some length, and with detailed
etymological commentary, two common elements of Russian

49 See W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey ofMagi<' and

Divination in Russia, Stroud and University Park, Pa., 1999, pp. 415-8.
31
F ig. 5. T he 'daug hte rs o f H erod ' fever demo ns punished by St
Sisinniu s, St Mi chael and th e four eva ngeli sts. Teon . 19th c.

magic charm s, th e magica l isle o f Buian , and th e ' burnin g white

sto ne' call ed Alatyr', whi ch are usuall y in th e introdu cto ry part of
th e bistorio/a o f charms, and are also Founcl in som e Ru ssian fo lk
tales. T hese elements fit very well with Ralsto n's poeti c vi ew o f
fo lkl o re and hi s descripti o n o f th em attra cted th e atte nti on of
Tylo r, who referred to th e isle o f Buian in hlter editions o f hi s
P1'i17litive ClIltlt1·e.
Ralsto n g'oes on to chara cteri ze Russian vi ll age witches and
wizards, whi ch, he says, most vill ages had as a matter o f course.
T he inform ation, th ough all ta ken fro m Russ ian fo lklorist works,
is presented in an undocum ented welter o f detail , with littl e
di stincti o n made between rea l- life wi tches and witches in stori es.
On ce aga in Ralston is good on th e etym o log ies of nam es fo r th ese

32
Fig. 6. The ritual of opakbivanie.
magica l practitioners and their attributes, not least of which is their
ability to counteract the evi l actions of other witches, in parti cu lar
at weddin gs, and illn esses personified as demons, such as t he 'fever
sisters' known as the 'da ughters of Herod' (pp. 393 and 397).
Fig. 5 shows an ico n used for protection from the twelve fever
sisters, or rri{(savitsy, which means li terally 'the shakers'. T hese
were widely aV~lil ab l e in the nin eteenth cennuy but few seem to
have survi ved . It shows the four evangelists, St SisinJliu s, the
legend ary sa int usuall y invoked agai nst the fever sisters, St Michael
the Archangel, also comm only invoked for thi s purpose, and here
shown diving down from heaven ho ldin g sticks to chastise the evil
sisters, and the sisters themselves, sca ntily dressed and with
unbound hair to denote their demonic stanis.
Ralsto n was particularly intri gued by the rinlal known as
opakbiv(l11ie, li tera ll y 'p lou ghin g around '. T hi s is a practice, found
also in the Balkans, in which a circl e is ploughed round a villa ge at
times of plague or oth er ep id emi cs to provide magica l protection
from plagu e demons. There are many versio ns ofthis, some details
o f whi ch are give n by Ra lston. Typica ll y it involved the wo men of

33
the village (virgins were usually specified) going out with unbound
hair and without belts, in white shifts or even completely naked, at
midnight (sometimes dawn) to drag a plough round the village
anti clockwise so that the furrow would keep out the epidemic; a
pregnant woman had to walk between the handles of the plough
and an old maid had to steer it. If an animal is encountered it is
thought to be the pestilence personified and must immediately be
kilIed. Unfortunately the only picture I have is a little disap-
pointing - it was obviously posed, and taken in day time. The
participants are all fulIy clothed and their status as virgins, widows,
or expectant mothers is not immediately obvious. [Fig. 6].
The remaining substantial topics in this chapter are werewolves
and vampires. Elsewhere in Europe these are not necessarily
related to magic or witchcraft, but among the Slavs, as Ralston
quite rightly recognized, they certainly are.
Russian witches, male and female, are generally regarded in
popular belief and to some extent in folk tales, as shape-shifters,
able to transform themselves into wolves or other animals or even
into inanimate objects; they have demonic powers and it is believed
that they become revenant vampires after their death if they are
not prevented by magic rituals; the word eretik, literalIy a heretic,
but often meaning a male witch, in some areas may be applied to
both vampires and to wi~ards.
Hostile witches were also thought to be able to blight weddings,
in particular by turning the guests into werewolves, and it is
precisely for this reason that the local village koldun played an
important role in weddings. Many of the recorded Russian spelIs,
and also plants thought to have magical properties, are employed
to protect people or places from witches, the various domestic and
forest sprites of Slavic popular demonology, and werewolves and
vampires. Once again Ralston feels obliged to quote Tylor's
opinion, in this case that vampires are invented to account for the
real-life facts of wasting disease, and once again it is clear that he
34
prefers the explanations of Manas'ev and the mythological school.
Ralston's description of Slavonic vampires, and his etymological
analysis of words for vampire, was used by Montague Summers in
his 1929 book The Vampire in Europe.
Ralston's account of Russian magic is essentially of village
beliefs and practices and in that area it is fairly full. But there is no
reference to textual traditions, or to magic at court, or to legal and
ecclesiastical attitudes to magic and witchcraft, and very little on
amulets.

Ralston's second book, which I have already mentioned in passing,

came out in 1873, a year after Songs of the Russian People. It was
called Russian Folk-Tales, and it was dedicated to Ralston's most
admired Russian authority Aleksandr Afanas'ev. Perhaps because
it deals with a narrower topic than Ralston's first book and is not
distorted by an attempt to force the material into an inadequate
framework, it is more confident and satisfying.
The title of this book is less misleading than that of its predeces-
sor, but the book is still not quite what one might expect. It is in
fact a mixture of a monograph and a collection of fifty-one folk tale
texts, mostly taken from Manas'ev, with commentary and general
discussion freely interspersed with the texts in a sometimes
disconcerting way. It is more heavily annotated than Ralston's first
book, and the annotations are primarily references to parallels in
folk tales from other parts of the world, and are drawn from a wide
range of literature in a variety of languages. Indian parallels
particularly interest him, and once again Ralston likes to give
linguistic or etymological notes, usually quite accurately.
Needless to say, the tales are full of magical events, and often
contain witches and wizards, but these are essentially demonic
characters, often cannibalistic, and relate only incidentally to other
35
Fig. 7. S aba Yaga cblllcin g with an old man. PopuItlI' print. 19th c.
popu lar m,Jgica l be liefs and rea l- Ii fe Ru ss ian ma gic and witchcraft.
The figure of the S aba Yaga, th e witch-demoness, for exa mp le, is
es entially a mythica l c hara cter with an ancient lin eage, but ma y
occasionally be id entifi ed as a rea l person. Ral ston gives te n pa ges
and so me lea rn ed d iscuss ion to thi s. A we ll - known popu lar print,
howeve r, shows a nlthcr concrcte bflbf( yflgfl d'lncin g with an o ld
man. IFig. 71A rea l- life male witch or ko/dun was an essentia l in
m ost villages and not necessa ril y any more frightening than a
doctor, for whom he was often a substiulte.
T sho u ld observe he re that Ra lston rare ly refe rs to visua l or
materia l evi dence in hi s di scussion s, and does not includ e ill us-
trations in hi s books, partl y beca use not mu ch was ava ilabl e but
perhaps also because, as he exp lained in letters to hi s Russ ian
corresponde nts, he was as hamed of the ridi cu lous pi cUl res of
imagin ed Russ ian Ii fe which th e publishe r of his tran slation of til e

36
fables of Krylov had included without consulting him. 50 The
pictures were indeed ridiculous and Ralston adopted the unusual
device of placing an apology, in Russian, to any Russian who might
look into the book, and a denial of responsibility for them. This
occupied a full page after the title page.
Ralston's book is divided into four essential sections: tales which
he regards as mythological; magic and witchcraft; ghost stories;
legends. The distinctions are not always easy for Ralston to maintain;
for example, the chapter on magic and witchcraft includes discussion
of such magical or supernatural motifs as seven-league boots, the
water oflife and the water of death, magic horses that fly, vampires
and werewolves, but apart from occasional comments, it does not
discuss real-life magic or witchcraft. One point of contact between
the mythical characters of Russian folk tales, together with the minor
figures of Russian folk demonology such as the leshii or forest
demon, or the domovoi or house demon, is that they may also appear
in magic charms together with witches and illnesses as the evil power
against which the chann is directed. The comments on magic in this
book therefore complement the discussion of magical practices in
Ralston's first book, Songs ofthe Russian People, in offering a fairly full
picture of Russian popular belief.
It seems clear that writing this book prompted Ralston to think
more about the classification of folk tales and was the impulse
behind his article five years later on this subject in The Folk-Lore
Reco1'd, which I have already discussed.

One should bear in mind that when Ralston was writing about
Russian magic and witchcraft, he was working before the appear-
ance of the extensive literature on the subject, either cultish or

50 Alekseev, Levin, Vil'ill7n Rol'ston (n. 3 above), p. 23

37
scholarly, which has flourished with increasing vigour since the end
of the nineteenth century and on into our own time. Perceptions
of the subject were quite different. In fact, although the topic was
of interest to members of the Folklore Society of Ralston's time,
they were more interested in mythology, cultural origins, folk tales,
legends, local superstitions and fairy lore.
In this period, although spiritualism was flourishing, the modem
magical occultist movements in continental Europe and Britain were
only just beginning, the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn was
founded in 1887, that curious American folklorist and humorist
Charles Godfrey Leland, who founded the Gypsy-Lore Society in
1882, and wrote the Hans Breitman ballads, had yet to publish his
Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches or the Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune
Telling (1891), which contains a good deal of information, and
misinformation, on South Slav magic in the Balkans; Montague
Summers was not yet writing, although he would in due course
quote Ralston on werewolves;51 Aleister Crowley had not yet visited
Russia or been pilloried as 'the wicked est man in the world';52
Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner had yet to lead the Folklore
Society astray, not to mention the general public and a few historians
who should have known better; Wiccans, Druids, neo-pagans and
suchlike were not yet aspiring to the status of official religions;
Hollywood had not yet'invented the occult horror film, and
anthropologists were not yet teaching university courses on Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, and it would be almost a century before Hugh
Trevor-Roper sparked the modem fascination with the witch trials

51 Montllbrue Summers, The Werewolf, London, 1933. Fora recent assessment of

Summers and Murray see Juliette Wood, 'The Reality of Witch Cults
Reasserted: Fertility and Satanism', in Pa/grave Guide to Wiuh,nrjt Ilistori-
ography, ed.Jonathan Barry & Owen Davies (forthcoming).
52 On Crowley in Russia see W. F. Ryan, 'The Great Beast in Russia: Aleister
Crowley's Theatrical Tour to Moscow in 1913 and his Beastly Writings on
Russia', in Symbo/i.1771 and After. Essays on Russian Poetry in Honour ofGe07'gette
Donchin, Bristol, 1992, pp. 137-61.
38
of early modern Europe which has largely dominated serious
Western historical writing on magic and witchcraft ever since. 53
In late nineteenth-century England the works of Ralston were
the first to deal with Russian folklore, the first to describe in any
systematic way the magical beliefs of Russia, and to a lesser extent
the other Slav peoples, in the light of current folklore and anthro-
pological theory, the first to use the fruits of the research of the
great Russian scholars in the field, in particular of Afanas'ev and
the Russian mythological school, and to put that material into a
comparative context. Ralston's work was taken seriously by other
serious scholars who could not read Russian, which was most of
them; three of his publications, The Songs of the Russian People,
Russian Folk-Tales, and the introduction to von Schiefner's Tibetan
Tales, are listed in the bibliography of Frazer's The Golden Bough,
and he is regularly quoted there. Most other folklorists and anthro-
pologists of the end of the nineteenth century who were working
on world-wide topics quoted him when they were seeking Russian
parallels; works as different as T. F. Thistelton Dyer's The Folk-lore
of Plants (London, 1889) and A. F. Chamberlain's The Child and
Childhood in Folk-thought (London and New York, 1896) cited him,
and he continues to be quoted occasionally right up to the present
time.
The collection and interpretation of folklore, and in particular
research into oral literature and popular religion, have moved on
a great deal since Ralston gave his IIchester lectures and wrote his
two books, but he did a good, if cautious and slightly chaotic job
by the standards of his time, his books are still useful, and his
observations were usually erudite, frequently shrewd, and often
still valid. He deserves to be remembered.

53 H. Trevor-Roper, 'The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries',

first published in Religion, the Rt-jorllllltion lI11d Socilll Chal/ge, London, 1967.

39
 LECTURE II

Ivan the Terrible, the Stoglav,

and Russian Magic
[' ig. l. Iva n the Terrible. Ge rrmn print, 16th c.
 Ivan the Terrible, the Stoglav,
and Russian Magic

This is the second of three lectures on aspects of Russian magic

which have some connection with the British Library. In this
lecture I am going to talk about magic in Muscovy in the time of
Tsar Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, who reigned from 1547
to 1584. Since there are several distinct issues here let me first
explain the stntcture of the lecture.
In the first section I shall talk about two manuscripts in the
British Library which provide the starting point for this lecture.
In the second section I shall talk about the text which the two
manuscripts contain.
In the third section I shall explain why this text is relevant to the
history of magic in Russia in general, which leads into a specific
discussion of magic in Muscovite Russia under Ivan the Terrible,
and his personal involvement.
Finally I shall turn to the history of the Russian Church after Ivan
the Terrible to suggest reasons why the two manuscripts discussed
at the beginning of the lecnlre are now in the British Library.

43
The British Library contains seventy of the 204 Cyrillic manu-
scripts, mostly Russian, preserved in British collections. Two of
them are relevant to the history of magic in Russia and are the
starting point for today's lecture. They are Additional MSS 28507
and 57915.
The first of these, Additional MS 28,507, is datable from water-
mark evidence to the late eighteenth century. It is written in a
fairly crude version of poluustav, a hand which is by convention
translated as 'semi-uncial', with some elements of skoropis', which
is by convention translated as 'cursive'. The text is in Russian
Church Slavonic, the written language of the Russian Orthodox
Church and of most written literary texts before the end of the
seventeenth century, but with frequent errors and an obvious
influence of vernacular Russian. An amusing apologetic note at the
end of the manuscript says that if the reader notices that the index
of chapter headings does not give the correct number of the folios
this is because the index was copied together with the text from
another manuscript. The volume contains only one work, conven-
tionally known as the Stog/av, and is leather bound. l
The second manuscript, AdditionalMS 57,915, is datable to the
early nineteenth century, again from watermark evidence. Like the
first manuscript it is written in semi-uncials in Russian Church
Slavonic with strong ver~acular Russian elements. It has coloured
ornamental headpieces and initials. Again it is leather bound, and
again it includes just one text, the Stog/av, although in a different
Moscow redaction. 2
I mention that these are single-text volumes because it does
indicate that some importance was attached to the manuscripts by

1 Inside the front cover of Add. MS 28,507 there is the trade plate of Benjamin
Duprat, academic bookseller and publisher in Paris who specialized in oriental
subject~.l!e died in 1867. On f. [iii] there is the note 'Purchased of A. A. Burt
Esq. 20 July 1870'.
2 Presented to the BL in 1970. Library stamp on p. [xi] 'Bih!. Acadcm. Dorpatens'.

44
 their scribes and/or those who commissioned them, since a fair
proportion of Russian manuscript codices are not single-text vol-
umes but contain several works or are miscellanies or lectionaries.
Neither of these two manuscripts is mentioned in the standard
edition of the Stoglav by Emchenko which was published in
Moscow in 2000,3 even though the manuscripts had been described
in some detail by Cleminson in his 1988 union list of Slavonic MSS
in Great Britain. 4 Emchenko has some excuse however - there are
some 180 other known manuscript copies of the complete work
recorded in Russia, written between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and any number of extracts in manuscript miscellanies.
In the world of Russian manuscripts this is a very high survival
figure for a non-liturgical or non-scriptural text, and something of
a nightmare for an editor.
The text contained in these two manuscripts, as I have mentioned,
is called Stoglav, although in neither manuscript does this conven-
tional title actually appear. Stoglav is usually translated as 'The
Hundred Chapters', but the 'chapters' are in fact simply the heads of
discussion at a crucial council of the Russian Orthodox Church in
Moscow in 1551, which is commonly known as the Stoglav Council.
This was summoned by the Makarii, the Metropolitan of Moscow,
apparently at the behest ofIvan the Terrible, the first Grand Prince
of Muscovy to be crowned with the imperial title of Tsar, and it
included a number of important lay figures - princes, boyars, and
military leaders. It was the most important of a series of church
councils and it followed the promulgation in 1550 ofIvan's law code,
the Sudelmik, which dealt with civil and criminal law. This was
submitted to the Stoglav Council for further approval as part of a
wide-ranging reform programme. It is noteworthy that this Sudelmik

3 E. B. Emchenko, Stoglllv. 11'..-ledovanie i tekst, Moscow, 2000.

4 A Union Catalogue ofCyrillic All11lUscripts in Blitish and Irish Collectiom, compiled
by Ralph Cleminson, general editors Veronica Du Feu and W. F. Ryan, London,
1988, nos. 64 and 89.

45
contains no mention of witches, magic or superstitious practices. A
later version issued in 1589 in the reign ofTsar Fedor Ivanovich does
mention witches (female) but only in the context of specifying levels
of compensation for offences against the honour of the various
categories of citizen, for which purpose witches came at the bottom
of the list with prostitutes!s
The purpose of the Stoglav Council was to address problems of
canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction (and it should be noted
here that I shall be using the term canon law for convenience
although strictly speaking Russian ecclesiastical law was never
codified in the same way as Latin canon law). The Stoglav Council
dealt with Church-state relations, land-holding by the Church, the
social role of the Church, abuses within the Church such as bribery
and simony, and the elimination of disorderly behaviour, and, most
importantly for this lecture, superstitions, magic and witchcraft
and deviant sexual practices in Russia. It also tried to standardize
liturgical practice.
These matters were listed, in rather haphazard order, in a series
of questions, some of them supposedly drawn up by Ivan himself,
together with the collective answers of the fathers of the council.
The exact status of the text of the Stoglav is not entirely clear - it
is not a verbatim record, and there is no official authoritative copy,
although the decisions of the council were cited in a number of
court cases. The text exists in several slightly differing versions.

Now let us look at the title page of Add. MS 57,915, which was
written in the early nineteenth century despite its appearance of
antiquity [Fig. IJ. Note the hand, and the presentation on the page
made to look like an early Russian printed book.

5 Sudebniki XV-XVI vekov, ed. B. D. Grekov, Moscow-Leningrad, 1952, p. 9.

46
 f

mlti SH~'1flUf II\fddK~ATl ;:J!.J1?f,<.

C;',l l\:np6r,"~.H~Ii.rT-l, AfU~,?>lf wplA'H'flflJ
_ _ U,pl\'O&flM ~ 1!~6PX •
TiIJb.tI.A •
r'ptC#, A1OCI{'[{;f" K'A
nOAd;'''J'K" W&AhH{r['~lfA
If C.Af·OKwtH'fdHtfLi"(\ ~~A H
1
, ~" ,
f{£AH I{'tfr(\ I(,H'?, A. If Jlfd
I , • ., , ,,..
CUAL.6KH'fd KCU r't'fH CAAfWf~

F ig. I . First page o f Stag/avoBL Add . MS 57,915. Ea rly 19t h C.

Parad oxica ll y, whi le most ea rl y Cyril lic fo nts in th e sixt eenth

and ea rl y seventeent h cennIri es were designed to loo k like m anu -
script semiun cia ls, th e m anu script books fro m the seventeenth
cennIry o nwards were o ften d es ign ed to loo k like printed books.
Semiun cial fro m th e fifteenth cennlry o nwa rds ca n be very hard to

47
date. Even eminent Russian palaeographers have been known to
make mistakes of two hundred years or more. I have sometimes
been asked by collectors or booksellers to examine manuscripts
which have been offered as seventeenth-century products on the
evidence of a dated colophon or style of hand, but on closer exam-
ination turn out to have been written on mould-dated paper made
in the late nineteenth century. I have even seen manuscripts in this
hand which have been written on squared paper in Soviet school
exercise books. These are not fakes, they are not even pastiche -
they are manuscripts written by scribes who belong to the group
of dissident sects collectively known as the Old Believers, who
broke away from the official Church in the seventeenth century. I
shall be returning to them in more detail later. The Old Believer
scribes wrote, and some still do write, quite naturally in an archaic
style, with colophons which may be dated to before the schism-
these features send signals of authenticity to their fellow sectarian
readers.
Note also the three-barred Cross, with the spear of Longinus
and spear with the sponge of vinegar, and the skull of Adam
beneath. Although the three-barred Cross is the commonest form
of Orthodox Cross in Russia, it has a problematic history for Old
Believers and its appearance in this form at the head of a manu-
script of the Stoglav can' only mean that this is indeed an Old
Believer manuscript.
It is probably simply chance that there are two such manuscripts
in England. The newer of the two manuscripts was presented to
the British Museum in 1973, but the older was acquired by the
library in 1870, ten years after the publication of the very first
printed edition of the Stog/av. This 1860 editio princeps even more
unexpectedly was printed in London, by the publishing house of
Triibner in association with the emigre revolutionary Free Russian
Press (Vol'naia russkaia tipografiia), founded by the pioneer
Russian socialist Alexander Herzen. This improbable and rare first
48
edition was apparently part of a campaign by one of the revolution-
aries, Vasilii Ivanovich Kel'siev (1835-72), to rally to their cause
the Old Believers, who already thought that the Tsar was the
Antichrist. The preface to the book, written by Andrei Gonchar-
enko (real name Andrei Onufrievich Gumnitskii), a renegade
Orthodox priest who worked for a while as a typesetter for the
press, is addressed to 'every patriot and guardian of the ancient
faith of the fatherland' and points out that the abuses highlighted
in the text had never been put right, and in the three hundred years
since it was written had become even worse. 6 The book was
circulated as subversive literature among Old Believers in Russia
and elsewhere. One might wonder at the appearance of the
manuscript in London at about the same time as the text first
appeared in print there, although in fact the two versions are
clearly different.

\Vhy is this Stoglav text important for the history of magic in

Russia, and in particular for the Russia ofIvan The Terrible?
For that I need to give a brief historical overview.
In matters of witchcraft and magic the teaching of the Orthodox
Church before the schism with Rome was essentially the same as
that of the Latin Church. Insofar as there was an official ecclesias-
tical attitude, it derived from the opinions of the early Church
Fathers and acts of the various early councils and synods, which
tended to equate witchcraft with paganism and heresy. However,
the Churches have always had found difficulty in ensuring that
their official view of the matter prevailed against local custom, not

6 Kel'sicv also published ObshL"hee vuhe, with the same London publishers, as a
supplcment (1862-4) to lIerzen's famous journal Ko/ako/, but aimed at Old
Belicvers, as was his anthology of official documents relating to persecution of
the Old Believers, Sbornik pravitel'stvennykh svedenii 0 raskol'nikilkh (1860-62).

49
least because some of those who practised magic and divination,
from the earliest times up to the present, were themselves members
of the clergy. and because at least some forms of magic and
divination, for example the interpreting of dreams and the
performance of miracles, are reported in Scripture, hagiographic
and patristic writing, not to mention medieval and post-medieval
works, by otherwise fairly orthodox Christian writers, as normal
and legitimate activities. Scriptural references range from the
outright condemnation of Exodus 22: 17/18: 'Thou shalt not suffer
a witch to live' as it is given in the King James version, and the
'abominations' listed in Deuteronomy 18: 10-14, to the frequent
references to dreams or the practice of magic and belief in their
efficacy.
One might note here as a matter of interest, since most judicial
executions and other punishments for witchcraft in Russia were
inflicted on men, that in the passage 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live', which was occasionally used to justify the execution of,
more usually, female witches in many other European countries,
the Church Slavonic version of the Bible, like the Septuagint, the
Vulgate, and Catholic vernacular translations of the Vulgate, has
a male sorcerer, while the Luther version and more recent English
Bibles have the female Zauberin and 'sorceress' respectively. The
new post-Second Vatican Council Vulgate is now closer to the
Lutheran reading of this tricky point of translation from Hebrew
but goes one further and has 'maleficae', 'sorceresses' in the plural
at this point. This may be something for feminist historians and
theologians to ponder.
This passage was known very early at the highest level in Kiev
- it appears in a passage in a florilegium compiled in 1076 for
Sviatoslav, the Grand Prince of Kiev, which also contains condem-
nations of divination, witchcraft and poisoning abstracted from the

50
fourth-century Constitutiones Apostolorum.7 A list of canonical
answers by the Metropolitan of Kiev, Ioann II, written in the 1080s
condemns in strong terms those men and women who practise
Witchcraft and enchantments, but adds that they should not be
killed. 8 A twelfth-century list of canonical questions and answers
(the Voproshanie Kirika) which continued to circulate, more or less
modified, as a kind of penitential at least until the seventeenth
century, stipulates six weeks penance for taking a child to a wizard.~
Other penitentials also link magic, devil-worship, and deviant sex:
a penitential of the fourteenth-fifteenth century condemns the
consultation of wizards and prescribes four years penance; 10 a mid- .
fifteenth-century Russian text, The Rules of the Holy Apostles
(evidently based on the Constitutiones Apostolorum mentioned
above), condemns bestiality, unapproved positions in coitus,
seeking the help of devils, and going to wizards for fortune-telling
or amulets. I I Another sixteenth-century list of sins condemns the
Use of herbs or potions for murder, procuring abortions, or
conceiving a child, also believing in dreams, fortune-telling, or
praying to Satan.
As in Western medieval penitentials and other texts which
catalogue sins, many of the items listed in Orthodox texts are
simply survivals from, or even specific references to, more ancient
councils and synods. The commonest sources in Russia, although
not usually cited explicitly before the Stoglav, appears to have been
the acts of the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, also known as

7 For a translation of the text see The Ed!fkntory Prose ofKievnn RIIS', ed. William
R. Veder and Anatolij T urilov, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature:
English Translations 6, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, pp. 33-4, 81, 87-8.
8 V. N. Beneshevich, Pa7l1intniki d,-evne-russkogo kanonicheskogo prnvn (Russkaia
istoricheskaia biblioteka, t. 6), St Petersburg, 1908, col. 4, art. 7.
9 S. I. Smirnov, 'Materialy dlia istorii drevne-russkoi pokaiannoi distsipliny',
Chteniin v Obshchestve ist017i i d,-evnostei rossiiskikh, 242, kn. 3, 1912.
10 Ibid., p. 41.
11 Ibid., p. 65.
the Second and Third Councils of Constantinople, which took
place in 680-681, and the work of which was finally completed at
the Trullan Synod of 692 (a synod which was not accepted by
Rome). Among other things these acts lay down rules for marriage
and sexual behaviour; forbid association with Jews; forbid mixed
bathing, going to horse-races, mimes, animal shows, theatrical.
dancing, consulting diviners, sorcerers, cloud-chasers, purveyors
of amulets; forbid celebrating the Calends, Vota and Brumalia,
wearing comic, satyric or tragic masks, and jumping over fires at
the beginning of the month.
Interestingly enough, although the enactments of the Stoglav
Council were rescinded and disparaged at the Church Council of
1666-7, when Peter, the next Russian ruler to have imperial
ambitions, wanted to reform his Church, in his Spiritual Regulation
(1720) he had recourse to exactly the same theological sources as
the Stoglav, that is, the pronouncements of the Ecumenical
Councils and the Trullan Synod, made a little more sophisticated
by the commentary of the twelfth-century Greek Orthodox
canonist Balsamon.

This is enough, I hope, to show that the Orthodox Church had a

long-standing objection to magic and divination derived from
much the same sources as were quoted by the Western Church,
with the exception of Augustine, who was not well known among
the Orthodox. But it was all rather vague - there was no new
theological or canon law writing in Russia before the Stoglav, and
the Stoglav itself contains little debate or interpretation, simply a
reiteration of ancient pronouncements.
Now let me summarize the relevant passages on magic in Ivan
the Terrible's Stoglav:
Chapter 5, Question 11. Concerning the women who bake the
)2
 communion bread. They have been selling the bread to credulous
people who wish to pray for the dead or for their own health; they
made spells over the bread with the names of the beneficiary 'like
the Chud' magicians' (the Chud' were Finnic peoples noted for
their magic throughout Europe). The answer of the Council, in
chapter 8, is that the women who prepare the communion bread
should make only a cross on the bread and say only the Jesus
Prayer. Everything else is strictly forbidden, and these women
should have no access to the altar. Chapter 12 repeats this and
insists that nothing should be placed on the altar except the cross,
Gospels, and consecrated vessels and other appropriate conse-
crated objects.
Chapter 36. The Council's advice on the instruction of children
quotes St Paul, 1 Corinthians 6: 10, on those who will not enter the
kingdom of Heaven. The list is expanded from Paul's original
catalogue of sexual deviants, drunkards and thieves to include
sorcerers.
Chapter 41, Question and answer 2. Some of the common
people bring cauls of newborn infants to the priest and ask that
they be allowed to lie on the altar for six weeks. (This is a practice
with analogues in most of Europe). The answer is that the priest is
forbidden to do this under pain of ecclesiastical ban.
Chapter 41, Question and answer 3. People bring soap to the
consecration of a church and ask for it to be left on the altar for six
weeks. This too is forbidden. (Note that belief in the magical
power of soap as an antidote to malefic magic, and in particular
soap which has been used in the ritual bride bath, or the ritual
washing of a corpse, was still well attested in nineteenth-century
Russia.)
Chapter 41, Question and answer 17. Ivan writes: 'In our
kingdom Orthodox Christians are in conflict and kiss the cross or
icons in false witness, and resort to judicial combat, and at these
times wizards and sorcerers (volkhvy, cha1'odet) aid them with magic,
53
and consult the Gates ofAristotle and the Rafti, and observe the stars
and planets, and the days and hours. They rely on these magical
aids and as a result do not become reconciled but meet in combat
and kill each other'. The fathers of the Council reply that these
devilish Hellenic practices and heresies must be totally condemned
and stamped out, and the Tsar must proclaim this as law in all the
towns of his realm and punish transgressors severely, while the
Church must excommunicate them.
This juridical objection to magic gives an unusual twist to the
anti-magic argument of theologians but evidently it was a matter
of concern to Ivan; in fact judicial combat by rival litigants or their
hired surrogates was normal in Muscovite Russia of this period and
had been so since at least the Sudebnik law code (1497) of Ivan's
grandfather, Grand Prince Ivan III, which specified the fees to be
taken by the officials supervising the duel.
Despite his moralizing, Ivan did not in fact end the use of trial
by duel and lot, different forms of what was known as the 'Judg-
ment of God'. Henry Lane's 'The Manner of Justice by Lots in
Russia' in 1560 records these practices as still in use. Lane, the
Muscovy Company's agent in Moscow, was himself one of the
litigants in a trial by lot in the presence ofIvan himselfY
The assertion by Ivan that magical assistance was invoked in
court, an assertion ear1ie~ made by Maxim the Greek,13 is the only
evidence we have so far of the application in real life of the two
divinatory texts mentioned. The Gates of Aristotle is in fact the
Russian version of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum,
which contains an onomantic table for predicting the outcome of

12 In Richard JIakluyt, The Principal Navigftfions, Voyages, Trllffiques find

Discoveries of the English Nlltion [15891, 16 vo\s, Edinhurgh, 1885-90, IV, pp.
191-2.
13 '". the plaintiff seeks a magician and fortune teller who might by means of
satanic action help his warriors':]. V. Haney, From Itilly to Must"Ovy. Tbe Life
lind Works ofMflxim the Greek (Munich, 1973), p. 178, citing Maksim Grek,
Sochineniia prepodllbnogo Mllksimll Grekll, Kazan', 1859-62, II, p. 202.
54
 1-1'
gp4mJo flrtH~f'i., eftA"" tA BroftA~;;" . G'ftA"'tA~"mj·tA.1.
8.,4. .,4. • .., r.-8r'{'
", ·4 · ""
tA .. I · I\ · ~ . /I · 11 • f". <I · >i '

", . ~ . ~ 6·~ · 9· ""~ 'r

8," . . . r..,. ~ .
*
9M"
do ' S . 'i .
", . E . ~ .
...
~"''''
6·q . ~.
?Mi: r.~I

'" J. .,; . 8.~ ....... -r.Frr

""""4 '
,
B · f"( · J r'. r
"' ... . .,. e· 11 ' •

·
r' Ig.
2. The onOlllantlc tab le III th e Russ Ian versIon of the
which predi cts the outcome of battl es.
Secretl/1I/ .recreto1'llUl
Oxford , Bod leian Library, MS Laud Misc. 45, p. 48.

55
single combat by adding up the numerical values of the antagonists
names and doing calculations on them [Fig. 2], while the Rajli was
an elaborate astrological and geomantic text which could also
predict life and death outcomes. This is also the first evidence we
have of the practical application of astrology in Russia.
Chapter 41 question 21. Ivan asks for the condemnation of false
prophets and magicians, male and female who wander around with
unbound hair (an attribute of demons and witches), and promote
the cults of Saint Friday and Saint Sunday, and interpret dreams.
Chapter 41, Question 22. This lists as 'evil heresies' a number
of magical or divinatory works and practices: Rafti, Shestokryl,
Crow-Cawing, Astronomy, Signs of the Zodiac, Almanac, Star
gazer, Gates ofAristotle and other works and 'heretical wisdoms and
devilish prognostications'. The fathers of the Council reply again
that the Tsar must condemn and punish these in all parts of his
realm and that the Church must apply its severest condemnation.
The texts mentioned here are in fact quite important - apart
from the obvious astrological texts which have not been definitively
identified, they include a geomancy, the Secretum secretorum, both
of which have magical applications, and the calendrical tables
called the Six Wings of Emmanuel Bonfils of Tarascon. All these
texts were translated from Hebrew and are usually attributed to a
still slightly mysterious heretical sect ofJudaizers who flourished
in Lithuania, Novgorod and Moscow at the end of the fifteenth
cenhlry and into the sixteenth. The 'crow-cawing' and other
practices mentioned are in fact a garbled reference to a book of
omens called the Book of the Wizard, probably translated from
Latin. 14
Once again the association of heresy, magic, paganism, and the
Devil is explicit. Neither here nor in the other articles is the death

14 On this text see W. F. Ryan, 'What was the Volkhovnik? New Light on a
Banned Book', The Slavonic and Ea.ff ElI1"IJpean Review, 68, 4, 1991, pp. 718-23.
 penalty mentioned, but as before the State is invited to apply force
to deal with matters within canon law jurisdiction.
Chapter 41, Question and answer 23. On Trinity Saturday
people gather at cemeteries and lament, and entertainers dance and
sing satanic songs. This is condemned.
Chapter 41, Question and answer 24. On the eves of Stjohn,
Christmas Day and the Epiphany people gather at night and dance
and sing satanic songs and bathe in the river. The fathers of the
Council recommend that the Tsar should send an order to all
priests in every town and village to instruct their flocks to desist
from these ancient Hellenic devilries.
Chapter 41, Question and answer 26. On Thursday of Passion
Week people bum straw and call up the dead, and ignorant priest'>
put salt under the altar, which they then keep until the seventh
Thursday after Easter, when it becomes a cure for sick men or
beasts. The Council replies that this is a Hellenic seduction and
heresy and any priest involved is to be excluded from the priesthood.
In fact this problem of people wishing to place non-liturgical
objects on the altar for magical purposes, mentioned in three
questions in the Stog/av, is one which goes back to the early
Church: it is forbidden in the fourth-century Apostolic Canons, 3.
Chapter 63. This repeats the text, more or less, of the law code
of Grand Prince Vladimir (end of the tenth century), which
establishes the area of jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts to be
marriage law and domestic disputes, sexual deviance, magical
practices, blasphemy, sacrilege, offences against the Church.
Chapter 93. Refers to Rules 61 and 62 of the Sixth Ecumenical
Council (III Constantinople, AD 680-81) forbidding the consul-
tation of magicians and condemning the pagan customs of the
Greeks. The commentary extends this to condemn bear-leading,
horoscopes, and games in general. The chapter finishes with the
statement that all sorcery is forbidden by God because it entails
serving the Devil.
57
 Several general points emerge here. There is a strong emphasis
on the demonic element, the existence of which in Russia is often
denied by Western historians of witchcraft when they mention
Russia; there is a strong anti-Hellenistic sentiment; there is a
persistent suggestion that the clergy are involved in magic; only
ecclesiastical penalties are imposed and there is no call for corporal
or capital punishment, although the encouragement to the secular
power to take sterner measures is explicit, and we shall see at the
end of this lecture what that could entail.
With all their reliance on the Stog/av, still being copied in the
nineteenth century by Old Believers, as our British Library manu-
scripts testify, were the Old Believers free from belief in magic and
related superstitions? Alas, no. There is no lack of charms and magic
books written by Old Believers, and now that they have the Internet,
that great re-cycler of conspiracy theories and renovator of discred-
ited ideas, who knows what may yet emerge.

What can have prompted this sudden jump from the vaguer and
milder preoccupations of earlier ecclesiastical and secular pro-
nouncements on magic and witchcraft to the specific and severe
prescriptions of the Stoglav?
The period immediately preceding Ivan the Terrible had seen
a number of cultural innovations and influences from the West.
Both the metropolitan Makarii and Ivan were aware of what was
happening in the West - and of the dangers of the Reformation to
Russia.
Ivan's grandfather, Ivan III, also known as Ivan the Great,
employed the German astrologer and physician Nicolaus Billow of
Lilbeck, who was probably the author of the first astrological
almanac in Muscovy, a translation of the Almanach nova of
Johannes Staffler (Venice, 1518) -this, we may suppose, is the one
58
which has just been condemned in the Stoglav. After Ivan III, all
the rulers of Muscovy for the next two centuries up to Peter the
Great seem to have had, or were accused of having, some interest
in magic, alchemy or astrology or all three. Most of the physicians
who came to Moscow in this period were expected to be expert in
alchemy and astrology, and despite the unpleasant end which many
of them suffered, either at the hands of dissatisfied employers or
from mobs convinced that they were magicians, they continued to
come, often no more than adventurers but sometimes serious
scientists.

Let us now turn to Ivan specifically. Ivan, like other Renaissance

princes such as his contemporaries the Emperor Rudolph II and
James I in England, was certainly drawn to the magic arts, even if
fearful of them. In fact there is more evidence that Ivan was inter-
ested than there is for any other tsar. Prince Andrei Kurbskii, one of
Ivan's leading generals, who later fled to Lithuania to avoid being
purged, and certainly believed in witchcraft and demonic magic, in
one of his diatribes against Ivan the Terrible, the History ofthe Grand
Prince ofMuscovy, denounces Ivan as having been conceived by the
magic of Karelian witches summoned by his father, and of himself
employing both them and various kinds of magic charmer and magic
whisperer who commune with the Devil. He states specifically:
'Magic, as everyone knows, cannot be performed without renouncing
God and making a pact with the Devil'.15
Kurbskii further protested in his first epistle to Ivan that he,
Ivan, had 'falsely accused the good Orthodox men of treason and
magic and other abuses'. In reply Ivan declared: 'Ali for your
mentioning "treason and magic" - well, such dogs are executed in

15 J. L. 1. Fennell, Kurhsky's History of Ivan IV, Cambridge, 1965, pp. 202-3.

59
all countries'.16 Magic was indeed known and feared in Ivan's
Russia, both at court and among the people. In 1547, after a great
fire in Moscow and subsequent riots, Princess Anna Glinskaia,
Ivan's grandmother, was accused by the people of Moscow of
starting the fire by wi tchcraft and barely esca ped dea th at the hands
of the mob. This surely left its mark on Ivan.
Kurbskii also claimed that the Devil had corrupted the rulers of
Russia through their sorcerous wives (i.e. Sofia Palaeologa and
Elena Glinskaia, the wives ofIvan III and Vassilii III, respectively
the grandfather and father ofIvan IV), and that Ivan himself drank
toasts to the Devil and danced in masks. 17
The latter charge is part of the blasphemous parody of religion
of which Ivan is accused in other sources. In his strange alternative
kingdom, the oprichnina (lit. the 'outside' or 'other place'), his
officers dressed in what seems to have been quasi-monastic habits.
Ivan is also reputed to have danced with young monks to the music
of the Creed. IS The very existence of the oprichnina, Ivan's separate
jurisdiction from which he exterminated his real and imagined foes,
while leaving the rest of Russia under the ostensible rule of a
puppet tsar, is capable of a magical interpretation.
Isabel de Madariaga, in her biography ofIvan, draws attention
to the possibility that Ivan's Cambridge-trained physician and
magus Elisaeus Bomelius had made an astrological prediction of
the death of a Muscovite Grand Prince. 19 The literary parallels for
princes to avoid their fate by a faked abdication would have been
known to Ivan, as would the Russian magical stratagem of having
a public and a private name to deceive death or demons. Bomelius

16 J. L. 1. Fennell, The Corre.lpondence betweCll Prince A. M. Kllrbsky and Tsar Ivan

IV, Cambridge, 1955, pp. 2-3, 68-9.
17 Fennell, KlIrbsky's History oflvrll/ IV, pp. 2-3,180-81.
18 For some discussion see A. M. Panchenko, Russkilia klll'tttra v kamm
petrovskikh reJonll, Leningrad, 1984, p. 84.
19 Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of RW)'ia, New llaven and
London, 2005, p. 300.
60
himself tried to escape from Russia but was captured and died after
being racked, hoisted on the strappado, and then roasted on a spit,
which encouraged him to denounce a number of highly placed
persons, including Leonid, Archbishop of Novgo rod. Leonid was
accused of running a coven of fifteen witches; he was found guilty
and disgraced, and the witches were burned. This episode prompt-
ed the writer of the Third Pskovian Chronicle, sub anna 1570, to
state that Russians are 'deceivers and prone to witchcraft'.
Quite apart from the accusations of Prince Kurbskii, there is no
doubt that Ivan, while presenting himself as the scourge of supersti-
tion in the Stoglav Council, was both very superstitious himself and
knowledgeable in occult matters. He believed, for example, that it
was an evil omen if anyone crossed his path as he was setting out,
and, it is alleged, went so far as to kill anyone who did SO.20 He is
apparently quoting the physiognomy in the Secretum secretormn when
he warns against trusting men with blue eyes.21 That text, which was
mentioned in the Stoglav and purported to be the secret advice of
Aristotle to Alexander the Great, was available to Ivan in a translation
from the Hebrew version. It would also have told him that not only
physiognomy, but also astrology, alchemy, amulets and poisons were
essential to a great king, and also provided him with the table [Fig.
2] for calculating the outcome of battles by calculating the numerical
values of the opposing generals names.
The same text has a description of the magical properties of
precious stones which a king should possess. On this last topic Ivan
claimed to be an expert. Sir Jerome Horsey, the English merchant
diplomat who was witness to Ivan's last hours, wrote a fairly long

20 Hugh Graham, 'A Brief Account of the Character and Bmtal Rule of
Vasil'evich, Tyrant of Muscovy (Albert Schlichting on Ivan Groznyi)"
Canadian-A1I1erimn Slavic Studies, IX, 2, 1975, pp. 204-72 (266).
21 See W. F. Ryan, 'The Secretum secretormn and the Muscovite Autocracy', in
Pseudo-Aristotle: The Secret of Secrets: Sources aud lujluencfs, ed. W. F. Ryan
and Charles B. Schmitt, Warburg Institute Surveys IX, London, 1982, p. 119.
61
report on this in a mixture of direct quotation and comment. I
quote only a small part here:

[Ivan says:] This fair coral and this fair turquoise you see; take it in
your hand; of his nature are orient colours; put them on my hand and
arm. I am poisoned with disease; you see they show their virtue by the
change of their pure colour into pall; [this] declares my death. Reach
out my staff royal, an unicorn's hom garnished with very fair dia-
monds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and other precious stones that are
rich in value, [and] cost seventy thousand marks sterling of David
Gower from the folkers of Augsburg. Seek out for some spiders.'
[Horsey comments:] Caused his physician, Johan Eilof, to scrape a
circle thereof upon the table; put within it one spider and so one
another and died, and some other without that ran alive apace from it.
[Then Ivan says:] It is too late, it will not preserve me. Behold these
precious stones. This diamond is the orient's richest and most
precious of all other. I have never affected it; it restrains fury and
luxury and abstinacy and chastity; the least parcel of it in powder will
poison a horse given to drink, much more a man. [Ivan then goes
through each stone in tum describing its medical virtues.f2

Horsey was a man of dubious integrity and wrote some time

after the event; and at least some of this passage is dramatic
embellishment, but there. seems to be no reason why he should lie
in the essentials. Certainly the so-called unicorn horn staff with the
precious stones was real. Unicorn horn was a much prized item in
the magical pharmacopoeia from the middle ages to the seven-
teenth century. Usually it was narwhal horn, but it could have been
Siberian mammoth ivory which was known as a magical trade good
from the twelfth century.
Ivan's preoccupation with death which appears in Horsey's
account which I have just quoted, and at other times in his life,

22 As published in L. E. Berry, and R. O. Cmmmey, Rude nnd Barbarous Kingdom.

Russin in theAccountsofSixteenth-Centllry English Vtryagers, Madison etc., 1968,
pp.304-6.
perhaps explains why, according to contemporary accounts he
summoned in 1584 sixty wizards and witches both male and female
to foretell the time of his death.23 These were perhaps the same
Karelian sorcerers who, according to Kurbskii, had facilitated
Ivan's conception. Horsey was clearly just as superstitious as Ivan;
he tells us that the 'strongest planets of heaven' are against the tsar
and describes how Ivan attempted in his last hours to set up a chess
board, but the king 'he could not make stand in his place'.

To return now to the Stoglav manuscripts in the British Library,

and the Old Believers. Why were there were so many manuscript
copies of the Stoglav? At first sight it does not seem to have large
popular appeal, even if its importance for historians is enormous.
And why in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long
after the introduction of printing in Russia in the sixteenth
century, should anyone wish to make a leather-bound manuscript
copy, even a fairly expensive illuminated copy, of the record of a
sixteenth-century Church synod which in any case had been
repudiated by the Church a century later?
The answer is that religious dissidents, and their many hidden
sympathizers in the official Church, were very numerous from the
seventeenth century onwards. The Stoglav represented for them in
effect the last official doctrinal statement of the old Church before
it fell, as they saw it, into apostasy. This work had been the record of
the first policy-making council of the Russian Church, and a
necessary step after Moscow had become an autocephalous metro-
politanate in 1448 with ambitions for patriarchal status (this was
declared in 1589), and it encapsulated the beliefs and practices of the

23 See R. A. Simonov, 'Russkie pridvornye «matematiki» XVI-XVII vekov',

Voprosy istorii, 1986, 1, pp. 76-83 (79-80).
63
Church at a time of heightened national awareness. Indeed, it goes
further and asserts the superiority of the Russian Church over all
other Orthodox Churches. This attitude was to be important in the
following century, when the ambitious Patriarch Nikon, conscious
that Muscovite Russia was the only substantial independent Ortho-
dox state, but also conscious of its backwardness, tried reform the
Russian Church to bring it into line with Greek and other Orthodox
practice and Greek texts. This caused enormous resentment in
Russia, and led to a schism between the official Church, which
included all but one of the bishops, and which enforced most of
Nikon's reforms although he himself was disgraced, and a group of
conservative dissidents who soon separated into a variety of sects
now known collectively as Old Believers. Patriarch Nikon was seen
by them as an apostate, heretic, even the Antichrist.
The Old Believers'main general objections to the changes
brought in by Nikon, all supported by apocalyptic and apocryphal
texts, were that the Greek Church which Nikon wished to emulate
had been punished for its corruption by the fall of Byzantium to
the Turks in 1453, that the later Greek Church had allowed Latin
influence to creep in. They remembered the Council of Florence
in 1439, at which as they saw it, the Byzantine emperor and
patriarch and all the Orthodox bishops had sold out to the Latins
and signed a document re-unifying the eastern and western
Churches. They remembered too the more recent attempts to
revise the Church Slavonic translations of Greek Church texts by
the born-again Greek humanist Michael Trivolis, later known in
religion as Maxim, and in Russia as Maxim the Greek. The
genuinely learned Maxim was a little incautious and not fully
attuned to local sensitivities. Although he was a staunch defender
of independent Orthodoxy in most respects he had aroused great
suspicion among the more conservative and nationalistic clergy in
Russia, for whom he was a dangerous intellectual. lie had to face
accusations not only that he was a perverter of scripture but also
64
that he was a Turkish spy and a malefic sorcerer. He was impris-
oned in a monastery for most of the rest of his life.
All this had happened against a background of sporadic out-
breaks of millenarian thinking since the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, which was the end of the seventh millenium in the Russian
Orthodox calendar, and according to one apocalyptic text, the
eighth millennium was to be the age of the Antichrist. Russia had
also been for a while under the rule of pretenders with the military
support of the heretic Catholic Poles at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. Everything conspired to create a xenophobic
fundamentalism, in particular among the common people and
many of the parish clergy.
Many of the specific objections of the Old Believers were more
matters of traditional practice and pious custom than of doctrine
and can seem ridiculous in a modern secular society. The Old
Believers objected to being forced to make the sign of the cross
with three fingers rather than two, to singing alleluia three times
instead of twice, to a change in the spelling of the name Jesus, to
the adoption of the Latin-style cross instead of the three-barred
cross. \\'hen the Russian Church held an allegedly ecumenical
council in 1666 which confirmed many of the hated reforms,
anathematized the Old Believers and even condemned the
pronouncements ofIvan's Stoglav Council as nonsense and heresy,
they immediately saw in the last three numbers of the year 1666
the Number of the Beast, and both the Patriarch and the Tsar,
Aleksei Mikhailovich, and all subsequent tsars, were variously or
collectively identified as the Antichrist. 24 And when Aleksei's son,
Peter the Great, went even further, abolished the patriarchate, and
made them shave their beards, abandon their belted Russian

24 For a convenient English summary ofAntichrist heliefs in Russia see the first part
ofW. F. Ryan, 'The Great Beast in Russia: Aleister Crowley's Theatrical Tour
to Moscow in 1913 and his Beastly Writings on Russia', in Symboli>711 and After.
E,)wys on Russian Poetry in Honour ofGeorgette Dom'hill, Bristol, 1992, pp. 13 7-61.
65
costume and adopt western manners and western dress, which they
regarded as both comic and indecent, who among them could
remain un convinced that they were living in the last days before
the Second Coming?
The repudiation of the Stoglav Council at the 1666 Council
gave it an enormous doctrinal significance for the Old Believers. It
was in the record of the Stoglav Council that they found the
authority for their traditional beliefs, their iconography, their
liturgy and even their lifestyle - for the Stoglav expressly forbade
shaving off beards, or wearing western clothes, or discarding belts,
which many people believed were a protection against demons,
witches and malefic magic, and for these things many of them were
prepared to suffer persecution, torture, or even death by self-
immolation rather than submit to the new dispensation.
It is ironical that the condemnations of magic and witchcraft in
the Stoglav were in fact reinforced most strongly at the beginning
of the eighteenth century by the one ruler whom the Old Believers
hated most, and believed to be the Antichrist, the modernizing and
Westernizing Peter the Great. His Military Law of 1716, which
was based on Western models, was the first law code in Russia
which specifically outlawed, in its first article, all forms of magic
and witchcraft, which it associated with devil-worship, and fixed
the punishment as death by burning.
The Old Believers, perhaps surprisingly, did not all oppose
printing, indeed from the eighteenth century onwards they ran
several printing presses, and nowadays they also have websites. But
they did not for some reason print the Stoglav. Russia was a
country in which from the introduction of printing until our own
day official control and censorship have been the norm rather than
the exception. Samizdat has always flourished and the Old
Believers were notable for maintaining an extensive manuscript
culture which survives to this day, with scrip tori a in the remoter
parts of Russia. In their icons, manuscripts, broadsheets and books
66
Fig. 3. Disputatious Old Believers with the Patriarch, Peter the
Great and the Stog/((v. Lithograph. 1863.

cewlin features can often be found whi ch served as a gmlrantee to

the reader that wh<1t they were seeing or re,lding was good o ld -
style religion from before the days of the apostate Patri::lrch Nikon.
These signs, quite ap<1rt from the nature of the texts being copied,
whi c h were ofte n apocalyptic o r polemic, can contain details sLlch
as a style of writin g hard ly distinguishable from that of sixteenth-
century Imllluscripts, co lo ph o ns dated before J 650 in an obvio usly
later manuscript, pictures of sa ints making the sig n of the c ross
67
with two fingers, a particular archaic spelling of the name Jesus, the
triple-barred cross, and so on.
Fig. 3 is a from a lithograph showing militant Old Believers.
bearded, belted, and in traditional Russian costume, berating the
Patriarch in the presence of the young, beardless, tsar - Peter the
Great. The central figure holds up two fingers and points to the
relevant text in what must surely be the Stoglav. The date of the
lithograph is 1863, just after the London editio princeps of the Stoglav
(1860) and the imperial decree emancipating the serfs in 1861.
Clearly the Stoglav was still a potent text and symbol of dissent.

68
 LECTURE III

Travellers' Tales and Russian Magic

Fig. I. A Ru ssia n fo rtun e-te ll e r. D eta il from a pl ate of Ru ss i,ln
costu mes in Thomas Bankes, A Ne'lv ... System oJ Universal
Ceograpby, London, c. 1790.
 ~ III ~

Travellers' Tales and Russian Magic

In this se ri es of Pani zzi lectures I have tri ed to keep th e British

Library dim ension well in view. In my first lecture I talked about
W illiam Ralston , ass istant librari ,lI1 in th e D epartm ent of Printed
Boo ks in th e old British Museum Library from 1853 to 1875 and
his serious co ntributi on to British kn owledge of Russ ian folklo re
and magic. In my seco nd lecture I talked about two Ru ssian manu -
scripts in th e British L ibrary and their signifi ca nce in th e hi sto ry
of Ru ssian magic. Tn my third lecture I shall be harkin g back at
sevenll points to th ese ea rli er lectures, bu t I hope J shall be
forgiven if the British L ibrary element is sli ghtly less promin ent.
It is tru e th at M,ltthew G uthri e's 1795 manu sc ript work Noct cs
1'oJsiCffe in th e Bri tish Library is th e first schoJ(l rl y wo rk in English
to di scuss Ru ssian magic, but th e magic(l l clements ,I re a relati ve ly
small part of the whole wo rk and hardly wo rth a whole lecture to
themselves. I sha II ind eed be ta Iking about G uthri e, but onl y in the
wid er co ntex t offoreign accounts of Ru ss i,I whi ch th ro w some li ght
on Ru ss ian magic. In evitabl y th e info rm ation whi ch can be found
in such so urces is fragmentary and un systemati c, and rarel y has it
been recorded by anyone with expert knowledge - it is a matter of
some regret that the only two British professional magicians to
have spent any time in Russia, Elisaeus Bomel in the sixteenth
century, and Aleister Crowley in 1899 and 1913, failed to record
anything about Russian magic.) But before I plunge into this welter
of traveller's notes, anecdotes and obiter dicta, there are a few other
relevant British Library connections which I feel I should touch on
briefly.
I mentioned in my first lecture that in 1869 William Ralston, the
British Museum Library's best-qualified Russian expert and all-
round man of letters, was passed over, not entirely surprisingly, for
the Keepership of Printed Books in favour of William Brenchley
Rye. This prompted the author of a biographical article about
Ralston to observe that by comparison with Ralston '[Rye] was not
much of a writer, having as his publications only some works edited
for the Hakluyt Society'. 2 In fact the scholarly prestige of the editions
of the Hakluyt Society was very high, and no fewer than twenty-six
of the hundred travel texts published by the Hakluyt Society in the
nineteenth century, including all the volumes relating to Russia, were
edited by members of the British Museum staff. The Council of the
Society always has at least one member from the British Library staff,
and the Map Room of the British Library is still the official corre-
spondence address of the Society.

1 BOInd (Bomclius), the court physician of Ivan the Terrible, was tortured to
death before he could write any memoirs - see Lecture II, pp. 60-61. Crowley
visited Russia in 1913 as the manager of a troupe of dancing girls. He wrote a
number of pieces on Russian themes, and also some 'magick' rintals, but nothing
on Russian magic. On this episode see W. F. Ryan, 'The Great Beast in Russia:
Aleister Crowley'S Theatrical Tour in 1913 and his Beastly Writings on Russia'
in Symboli;m and After. Rrsl~'Y.f on RlISsilln Poetry in IlonourofGeorgette Donrhin, ed.
Arnold McMillin, Bristol, 1992, pp. 137-61.
2 In fact only one: The Discovery and Conquest of Terra Florida ... 'Edited, with
Notes and an Introduction and a Translation of a Narrative of the Expedition
by Luis Hernandez de Biedma, Factor to the same, by William B. Rye, of the
British Museum', IIakluyt Society, 1st ser., 9, London, 1851.
 The redoubtable R. H. Major, the first and only Keeper of Maps
and Charts, Honorary Secretary of both the Hakluyt Society and
the Royal Geographical Society, and also a stalwart of the Society
of Antiquaries, edited many of the early volumes of the Hakluyt
Society, including a two-volume translation in 1851 of Sigismund
von Herberstein's fundamental 1549 work on Russia, the Rerum
Moscoviticarum commentarii, 3 and a collection of texts on early travel
to India including the account of the Russian merchant Afanasii
Nikitin who went to India in 1466-72, i.e. before Vasco da Gama. 4
Edward Bond, at that time Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts,
later Keeper of Manuscripts and eventually Principal Librarian at
the British Museum, published in 1856 two important contem-
porary accounts of sixteenth-century Russia: 'The Travels of Sir
Jerome Horsey' and Giles Fletcher's 'Of the Russe Common
Wealth'S - both of which contain comments on Russian magical
beliefs.
Another map expert in the Museum was Charles Henry Coote,
who in 1886 published in two volumes the manuscript writings of

3 Notes upon Rw:..ia: Being a Trallslation ofthe em'liest Account ofthat Country, entitled
Renlm l'vlw"COviticanl1n commentarii, by the Bllron Sigimnmd von He1'berstein,
Ambassador from the COllrt ofGermany to the Grand Prince Vasi/cy Ivanovkh, in the
years 1517 and 1526, 'Translated and Edited, with Notes and an Introduction,
by R. H. M'ljor .. .', 2 vols, Hnkluyt Society, 1st ser., 10 and 12, London, 1851.
The only study of Major is Tony Campbell, 'R. H. Major and the British
Museum', in Compa,l)'ing the Vaste Globe of the Earthe: Studies in the History of the
HII/.:/l~yt Society 1846-1996, ed. R. C. Bridges and P. E. H. Hnir, Hakluyt Society,
2nd ser., 183, London, 1996, pp. 81-140.
4 India in the Fifteenth Century. Being a Collection ofNllrmtives of Voyages to Illdia ill
tbe Centmy preceding the P011uguese Discovery ofthe Cllpe ofGood Ilope;from Latill,
Persilln, Russiall, and Itillilln Sources, nfYW jirst Transillted i1lto English, 'Edited, with
an Introduction, by R. H. Mnjor, Esq., F.S.A.', Hnkluyt Society, 1st ser., 22,
London, 1857 (1858).
5 Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century. Comprising tbe Treatise "Of tbe RU,I)'e
Common Weilltb, .. by Dr Giles Fletcher; lind The Travels ofSir Jt'rome Horsey, Knt.,
nfYW for the jim time printed entire from his (rum MIlIlltfcript, 'Edited by Edward A.
Bond, Assistant Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum', Hakluyt
Society, 1st ser. 20, London, 1856.

73
Anthony Jenkinson and other agents of the Muscovy Company
(the London monopoly which dominated Russian foreign trade in
the second half of the sixteenth century and most of the seven-
teenth), together with the correspondence between Queen Eliza-
beth I and Ivan IV (the Terrible).6
Almost all these texts will be referred to later in this lecture in
magical contexts, so their editors, all members of the former
departments of the British Museum which now make up the
British Library, can be credited with at least a small and vicarious
contribution to the study of Russian magic in Britain.
Richard Hakluyt, the eponym of The Hakluyt Society, had
himself, of course, published a great deal about Russia in his great
compendium of travel accounts, The Principall, Navigations, Voiages
and Discoveries of the English Nation ... , published in 1589, with a
much expanded edition in 1598-1600. More was to come in the
various editions of the compendium of his successor, Samuel
Purchas, entitled, originally, Purchas his Pi/grimes, first published
in 1625.7 From these books we can glean a good deal about Russia
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries which is not
available from Russian sources, and this includes its popular beliefs.

6 Enrly Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and other
Engli.,·hrncn. With some Aft'olint ofthe First Intercourse ofthe English with RW)'ill and
Central Asia by Way of the Caspian Sea, 'Edited by Edward Delmar Morgan,
member of tbe Hakluyt Society, and Charles Henry Coote, of the British
Museum', 2 vols, Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., 72 and 73, London, 1886.
7 On Russia as seen through the publishing activity of Richard Hakluyt and
Samuel Purchas see the essays hy J. S. G. Simmons in The lIakJllyt Hll1Idbook, 2
vols, ed. D. B. Quinn, vol. I, I Iakluyt Society 2nd ser., 144, London, 1974, pp.
161-7 and S. II. Baron in The Purchas Handbook, 2 vols, ed. L. E. Pennington,
IIakluyt Society, vol. I, 2nd ser., 185, London, 1997, pp. 278-91. For a
comparative table of Mosc0 vi tic a in the various editions ofHakluyt and Purchas,
as well as a survey of the whole field of foreign descriptions of Muscovy see
Marshall Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Mu.\·covy: An Anillytical Bibliography of
Primllry and Secondary Sources, Columbus, Ohio, 1995. The same autbor has now
published the texts of most early accounts of Russia: Etlrly Exploration of Russia,
12 vols, London and New York, 2003.

74
 Almost all of the early English accounts of Russia which I shall
quote were published in the compendia of Hakluyt and Purchas,
and together with Herberstein, from which some of their stories
were derived, they provide the source material for many of the
later writers. There were, of course, plenty of accounts of Muscovy
in other European languages, but the English sources are particu-
larly useful because they were anthologized in this way. In this
lecture I shall be referring to some material in Hakluyt but con-
centrating on three writers who came after Hakluyt: two from
either end of the seventeenth century, Richard James and Samuel
Collins, and one from the end of the eighteenth century, Matthew
Guthrie, with occasional leaps backwards or forwards in time
where the topic requires comparison.
I must offer a few modest apologies at this point. First, I have
stretched the meaning of'travellers' tales' in the title of this lecture
to include almost anything written by foreigners who have visited
Russia and written about it, even if, as in the case of Milton, or
J odocus Krull, or Paolo Giovio, they had not in fact been there, or,
as in Guthrie's case, had actually settled there permanently.
Second, there is a good deal of modish jargon attached by some
to travel literature nowadays, but for the most part I am going to
ignore it; words such as discourse and intertextuality will not be
employed.
Third, I have not so far offered a definition of magic in these
lectures, and shall not do so now - it is a task that has defeated
greater men than me. In my defence I should like to quote the first
forensic speech on the subject of magic, the clever and amusing
work known as the Apologia, or Defence, of Apuleius, the neo-
Platonist philosopher and author of The Golden Ass, c. 158 AD. He
was accused in court of having inveigled a rich widow into
marriage by means of witchcraft. Here is a short passage from his
defence, a nice piece of witty casuistry:

75
 The whole accusation was fixed by Aemilianus on this single point,
that I am a 'magician'. Therefore I would like to ask his most learned
lawyers what a magician [mngus] really is. For, if what I read in most
authors is correct, that 'magician is the Persian word for our 'priest',
what crime is involved in it? Can it be wrong to be a priest, to have
proper knowledge, competence, and experience of ceremonial rules,
sacred rituals and religious laws? This at least is how Plato interprets
'magic', when he examines the branches of study in which, among
the Persians, a young heir to the throne is educated. 8

Some 1600 years after Apuleius, a sad Russian peasant found

himself accused of the same crime and offered a similar if less
sophisticated defence. In a court case in 1759 he was accused of
obtaining a magic charm to win the affection of a widow: he had to
write down certain words and then breathe them into a bottle from
which he would persuade the widow to drink. His defence was
simply that he did not know that this was magic. He was sentenced
to be flogged, which was a relatively mild punishment at that time,
though often lethal. 9
What is and what is not magic has given rise to a very consid-
erable body of literature but has eluded a generally acceptable
definition. One man's magic is another man's religion, and the
more truculent variety of atheist sees no difference anyway.
One irony-proof reviewer of my book on the history of Russian
magic, The Bathhouse at Midnight, took me to task for quoting
'uncritically' the hostile jibes of ignorant English Protestant
merchants in Russia on the subject of wonder-working Orthodox
icons. The Muscovy merchants and other English visitors to Russia
were indeed prone to make rude remarks about what they regarded
as Russian superstition. But it is precisely the traveller's encounter

8 Apuleius, Rhetorical Works, transl. and annotated by Stephen Harrison, John

Hilton, and Vincent IIunink, Oxford, 2002, p. 50.
9 Opistmie dokumcntov i del, khraniashchikhsia v arkhive sv. PI'. Sinoda, ddo 169 (71)
(1759), t. 50, St Petersburg, 1770, col. 220.

76
with what is to him unfamiliar and alien, even repulsive, that may
make his story interesting and useful, and it is the task of the later
reader of that story, and the responsibility of the historian, to
disentangle the threads, to assess the trustworthiness of the story,
to take into account the beliefs, gullibility, and preconceptions of
the traveller, his competence as an observer, his knowledge oflocal
language and custom, and the reliability of his informants. He
must ask himself what did the traveller actually see; what did he not
see; what did he think he saw, and why; what was he expecting to
see, and why; how did he interpret it, and why; how did he describe
it in writing; for whom was he describing it, and why; and how far
was he matching his account to the expectations or requirements
of his audience or patron.
Let me give just two quick examples in the area of Russian
history. First, the Russian abbot Daniil, who travelled toJerusalem
in 1106, tells us in his account of his journey, after a good deal of
verifiable, or at least plausible factual detail, that on the night of
Good Friday the lamps of the pious Orthodox, which had been
placed in the Holy Sepulchre, were lit miraculously (or magically
if you prefer) by the holy light, but the lamps of the Franks would
not bum. 'Of this', wrote Daniil, 'I will speak as I truly saw it.'10
Was the holy abbot lying, or deluded, befuddled by fasting, candles
and incense, or the victim of a deception, or simply rehearsing a
commonplace of pious belief which he knew his audience would
expect? It is just such a detail which needs interpretation - most
will discount the factual accuracy of the story, but the fact that it
is told at all is still historically interesting at several levels.
A second example, this time to demonstrate that the line
between the travel account and the pseudo-travel account is
sometimes very thin. This example I shall discuss in a little more

10 My translation: Jemrnlem Pilgrimage 1099-1185, ed. by John Wilkinson with

Joyce Hill and W. F. Ryan, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 167, London, 1988, p.
166.

77
detail because it originates in travel accounts of Russia which are
also the source of information about magic. It is the story which
was widely repeated in West European literature, both Latin and
vernacular, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, that
Russian wives do not believe that their husbands love them unless
the husbands beat them regularly. Interestingly enough the story
occurs both in the accounts of writers who had first-hand experi-
ence of Russia, and in the accounts of those who had not, the
second category including both historians and satirical commenta-
tors on the contemporary scene. It probably derives from the first
serious foreign travel account of sixteenth-century Russia, Herber-
stein's Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii. This was a substantial
book by a Habsburg diplomat and was first published Latin in
1549 in Vienna, thereafter in translation in all the major languages
of Europe.
Among other curiosities Herberstein includes in his book the
text of a twelfth-century Russian list of canonical questions and
answers (the Voproshanie Kirika) which continued to circulate as a
kind of guide to confessors at least until the seventeenth century.
This forbade, among other things, going to a witch in order to
conceive a child by magical intervention. This is the first evidence
we have that this was ever a practice in Russia. This text also
insisted that icons should be turned to face the wall during love-
making, a detail not missed by later foreign writers.
Herberstein also noted that the Russian bishops in his time were
much exercised with cases of witchcraft, poisoning and heresy
(significantly grouped together as associated evils), and the
spoliation of tombs or removal of portions of images or crucifixes
for the purposes of magic. I I Again, this is the first textual evidence
of such practices in Russia apart from the partially overlapping list

11 English translation in Description ofMo.l'caw and Mllscovy 1557. ed. B. Picard,

trans!'). B. C. Grundy, London, 1969, p. 52.

78
of magical practices condemned at the Stoglav Church Council in
1551, which I discussed in my last lecture.
The Latin version of Herberstein was certainly known in
England very soon after publication, and was of particular interest
to the merchant venturers of the Muscovy Company, for whom it
was an important source of intelligence. It was probably known to
Richard Chancellor, and is referred to as the authoritative source
on Russia in one of George Turberville's ribald verse letters from
Russia written in 1568 and duly published by Hakiuyt.12
The wife-beating story in Herberstein concerns a German
blacksmith in Moscow called Jordan. He had a Russian wife, who
complained that he did not love her because he did not beat her.
She eventually died as the result of his excessive attempts to rectify
his earlier neglect. This story occurs in the account of one of the
earliest English visitors to Russia, Anthony Jenkinson in 1557.13 It
appears again in the Icon animorum of the Scottish satirist John
Barclay, published in 1614. Petrus Petreius de Erlesunda, in his
book, Regni moschowitici sciographica, published in Stockholm in
1615 tells, as fact, Barclay's version of the story but changes the
blacksmith Jordan from a German to an Italian! Barclay is also
quoted by the German Adam Olearius in the various versions of his
widely read account of an embassy from Holstein-Gottorp to
Russia and Persia in the middle of the seventeenth century.14 The
story is in Milton's Brief History of Moscovia of 1682 - he took it
from Herberstein or Hakiuyt, together with the detail of the gift
of a whip to the bride - and in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, with
the extra detail that the newly married wife was so ashamed that

12 On this suhject see Samuel H. Baron, 'The Influence in Sixteenth-Century

England of Herberstein 's Rerum moscovitifarllm f01II1I1entarii', in his Explorations
in Muscovite History, London, 1991.
13 Elldy Voyages and Trnve/s to Russill lind Persia (see n. 6 above), II, p. 375.
14 See VOYllges lind Trnve/s of the AmbasslIdor, London, 1669, pp. 56-73,88-98,
100-108.

79
she had never been beaten that she used to go the window and
scream, pretending to the neighbours that her husband had in fact
beaten her. In fact, by the time the story had made its way into that
curious work called The Turkish Spy,15 what started as a kind of
urban legend in a travel account had become one of the standard
humorous stories about Russia. It crops up particularly in the
pseudo-oriental letter genre of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, such as the Lettres persanes already mentioned, the Lettres
chinoises and the Lettres juives of the Marquis d'Argens, and Oliver
Goldsmith's Citizen of the World.
In fact Herberstein himselfhad almost certainly copied the story
from someone else - it is clear that not all of his account is his own
work - and had himself already commented on the significance of
the whip in Russian wedding ceremonies, a true detail which may
well have given rise to the story.
I have discussed this particular story not only because some of
the same texts also mention magical practices, but also because it
does highlight some of the stereotypes of travel accounts of
Muscovite Russia, and the conventions of writing in this period by
which writers felt quite free to recycle and adapt information and
anecdotes, with or without attribution to their source. I could have
given a similar history of jocular references to Russian ba thhouses,
or Russian women using make-up, or bedbugs. The compositional
devices of the age have to be borne in mind when assessing the
information which such stories provide. For western Europeans in
general, Russia was perceived as barbarous or oriental or both. It
was backward, exotic, tyrannical and brutal, and its religion was

15 Giovanni Paolo Marana, L'R.ploratore turco. In the third volume of the English
version (eightvols 1687-94, translated from French version, L 'R.pion du Grand
Seigneur, of 1684-6, continued by Defoe in 1718) it is stated that the spy knew,
among other languages, 'Sclavonian': The Third Volume of Letters written by Il
TlI1'kish Spy, London, 1691, preface.
80
primitive and idolatrous. It could also sometimes be regarded as
pretentious and even comic.
For the English, who came to know Muscovy fairly well through
the activities of the Muscovy Company, these attitudes were
tempered in some accounts by an anxiety to please, or at least not
to offend a rich and powerful but capricious client who controlled
a vast potential market. From the time of Edward the Sixth until
the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English were desper-
ately concerned either to obtain or to regain exclusive trading
privileges for the Muscovy Company merchants. Accordingly, one
may find in some English accounts descriptions of the tsars as
mighty princes ruling over vast domains - in such cases one knows
that the account is either destined for public consumption or
expected to be read by the tsar's officials. English private commu-
nications or works written by those with no commercial axe to
grind usually display a more hostile attitude to Russia. English
accounts of Russia are almost all written by Protestants, only
occasionally by men who know much Russian, and this is reflected
in their general disdain for Russian religion, which they usually
regard as superstitious and corrupt, perhaps even worse than
Popery. Before the eighteenth century all these accounts were
written by men, often professional men such as clergymen,
physicians, or merchants. And, like most travel writers before and
since, they usually succumbed to the temptation to dress up their
stories with amusing anecdote.
Given all the possible distorting prisms which I have outlined,
can travel accounts provide us with any sound information about
Russian magic and popular beliefs? Certainly they can, provided
that one gives due attention to the source, and particularly if the
information is corroborated by Russian sources, or known beliefs
and practices from later periods. The main value of the earlier
English accounts of Russia is that they often contain the first
written evidence in any language of those beliefs and practices, and
that in itself is valuable.
Some accounts are straightforward reportage of things which
were of diplomatic or commercial importance. For example, the
method of deciding legal disputes by the procedure known as 'sud
bozhii', or 'Judgment of God', which was usually single combat
between the litigants, or by drawing lots, was essentially binary
divination, and one which was by no means confined to Russia.
Ivan the Terrible condemned the practice in 1551 at the Stoglav
Council (see Lecture II, pp. 53-4), partly because the litigants
often employed magicians to help them. Nevertheless, according
to the testimony of English merchants, Ivan actually presided over
such courts personally.
Clement Adams account of Chancellor's voyage of 1553, only
two years after the Stoglav Council, and Henry Lane's 'The
Manner of Justice by Lots in Russia' written in 1560, were both
published by Hakluyt. Adams, who did not visit Russia but
recorded Chancellor's account of the voyage, states that profes-
sional fighters armed with iron axes and spears could be hired for
trial by combat, and Lane, the Muscovy Company's agent in
Moscow, was himself one of the litigants in a trial by lot in the
presence ofIvan the Terrible. 16
Another English merchant in Muscovy was the rather shifty Sir
Jerome Horsey, who was often in the confidence of Ivan the
Terrible and wrote the description of Ivan's final hours which I
quoted in my last lecture. Even if partly invented, or at least
embellished, as some have suggested, it still tells us about Ivan
consulting Karelian witches and about his royal staff made of
unicorn horn, and his knowledge of the magical precious stones
mounted on it, all of which are mentioned in other sources.

16 Adams is recorded in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations (1589), and

Lane in The Principal Navigations (1598-60).
82
 Some of the foreigners who recorded magical beliefs were men
of considerable education, and their scientific outlook, together
with the satirical tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth century
English and Scottish literature is also a factor to be considered in
assessing their contribution.
Sometimes their evidence may come in the form not of anecdote
but of lexicography.
In 1619 Richard James, the chaplain at the English factory near
Archangel in the White Sea, wrote in his manuscript dictionary of
Russian: 'Zaixa aliter pisda [i.e. a Russian word, now only vulgar,
for the female pudenda, presumably from some fancied similarity
in appearance], a fish with a head which they drie and sell in the
market to hange on their neckes whoe have agues with opinion that
it will so be driven away.'l7 This is the saika, an arctic fish with a
large ugly head. There is no other record of its use as an amulet.
James also records the use of garlic for magic, and an affliction
caused by magic: 'khila, the disease of the stones bewicht into an
exceedinge swellinge bignesse'. This had already been recorded in
1599 in another manuscript dictionary of Russian by Dr Mark
Ridley, court physician in Moscow - he has: 'Kila, a swelling of the
privie parts by witchcraft'.l8 This was precisely the case ofIvan the
Terrible, according to Sir Jerome Horsey a few years earlier,
although Horsey attributes the condition to the thousand virgins
whom Ivan boasted of deflowering. None of the very few Russian
texts to employ this word carries any suggestion that the illness was
thought to be caused by witchcraft.
James describes the use of icons as protective amulets; he writes
' ... when the Emperor goes into the field [of battle] the icon of the

17 B. A. Larin, Russko-angliiskii slovar'-dnevnik Richarda Dzbem.l'a 1618-1619,

Leningrad, 1959, p. 185.
18 A Diaionflrie o/the Vulgar RIISse Tongue, attributed to Mark Ridley, ed. G. Stone,
Bausteine zur slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte, Reihe B: Editionen,
Neue Folge, Bd 8, Cologne etc, 1996, p. 174.
83
Saviour is carried before him' .19 Not all will consider this a magical
practice, but other evidence from Russia, as elsewhere, shows that
the direct intervention of specific icons as objects, rather than the
intercession of the subject they depicted, was widely believed in by
Russians; this is a point I shall return to shortly.
RichardJames describes three kinds of Russian divination when
he lists Gostinets idet, which means a guest is corning, Ropotuka and
Vorota ('Gates'), with the observation that they are all practised on
the last day of the twelve days of Christmas. 2o These have never
been explained but all are types of marital divination widely
practh;ed, mostly by unmarried young ladies: the first of these is
the first recorded reference to the belief that the first passerby will
be your future husband or at least have the same name; ropotukha,
a word not listed in any dictionary, means a method of divination
by observing the behaviour of boiling water to discover what your
mother-in-law will be like,21 and vorota (,gates')is most probably
one of the several known forms of divination involving the gate
into the farmyard which indicate the direction from which your
future husband would corne (it is also just possible, though
improbable, that the reference is to the geomantic text The Gates
ofAristotle, mentioned in my second lecture as one of the forms of
divination condemned at the Stoglav Council). RichardJames was
also the first, by well over a century, to write down the text of
Russian folk songs.
Not the least informative aspect of these early English vocabu-
laries is that their information is taken from Russian informants
using vernacular Russian, at a time when all literature in Russia was
written in a form of Church Slavonic. Consequently some of the
words or meanings given, like the objects or practices they

19 RIJj)'ko-angliiskii slovar'-dnevnik (n. 17 above), p. 189.

20 RlIssko-angliiskii slovar'-dllevllik (n. 17 above) p. 153.
21 See website http://www.komisc.ru/illilfolklmytb/indcx.htm:N. D. Konakov,
'Gadaitchom', in 'Mifologiia Komi'.
describe, are often being recorded for the first time. Ridley, for
example gives eretichestva, literally 'heresy', as meaning 'superstition',
and zvezdy chitati, literally 'to read or count stars' with the meaning
'to prognosticate'.
After RichardJames the next British physician to make observa-
tions on Russian magic was Samuel Collins (1619-1670), who was
invited to Moscow in 1660 to serve as the personal physician of the
Russian Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, a tsar known to have had some
interest in popular magic. He remained there until 166 7. The book
bearing his name, which was published after his death in 1671, The
Present State of Russia,22 appears to have been compiled by its
publisher from a series ofletters written by Collins to his acquain-
tance the British scientist Robert Boyle, himself no stranger to the
occult sciences. Collins in his letters to Boyle made no secret of his
contempt for Russian backwardness and superstition, although he
expresses some admiration for the Tsar. His familiarity with Russia
seems not to have extended beyond court circles.
Collins gives us several pieces of information about magical
beliefs in Russia. One is the information that belts and girdles must
never be removed (p. 66): 'None, neither male nor female, must go
ungirt for fear of being unblest', a belief given canonical authority
in the Staglav, as I mentioned in my last lecture, and one also
referred to by IIerberstein. This was to become entwined with all
sorts of other beliefs about magical protection from demons or the
performance of magic or charms in which the removal of belts and
the unbinding of hair signified that you were in fact about to
engage in illicit magic or divination.
More importantly, Collins also tells us that witchcraft is
commonplace at weddings in Russia, and remarks that the
marriage of the tsar to the present tsaritsa was conducted privately

22 The Present State of Rw:ria: in a letter to aJrie11d at London writte11 by an eminent

person residing at the gretlt CZtlrs court at MosL"O for the Sptlfe ofnine yem> , London,
1671.
'for fear of Witch-craft which is here common at Nuptials'. In
what he claims is an eyewitness account of a bewitchment he says
(pp. 10-11):

Seldom a Wedding passes without some Witch-craft (if people of

quality marry) chiefly acted as tis thought by Nuns, whose prime
devotion tends that way. I saw a fellow coming out of the Bride-
chamber, tearing his hair as though he had been mad, and being
demanded the reason why he did so, he cry'd out: I am undone: I am
bewitch'd: The remedy they use, is to address themselves to a white
Witch, who for money will unveil the Charm, and untie the
Codpiece-point, which was this young mans case; it seems some old
Woman had tyed up his Codpiece-point.

It seems unlikely that Collins did indeed witness such a scene,

but the detail of the knot causing impotence is convincing since it
is an ancient and widespread magical belief that knots hinder
conception, and is found elsewhere in Russian malefic magic
(porcha, lit. 'spoiling').
Collins's allegation about the preoccupation of Russian nuns is
supported by relatively little evidence but it is clear from other
sources that the lesser members of the Orthodox Church were
often involved in popular magic, and the presence of both monks
and nuns at weddings was thought to be unlucky. No doubt
celibacy is associated with infertility in these beliefs.
The reference to a 'white witch' is also interesting. The distinc-
tion of white and black magic seems not to have been made in
Russia before the nineteenth century, and then as a literary
importation from the West. Collins is here making a Western
distinction, and it is a great pity that he does not tell us which of
the many Russian words for witch he felt needed to be translated
in this way. Even in English the term 'white witch' would appear
to be fairly new - the Oxford English Dictionary gives its first occur-
rence in Burton's Anatomy ofMelancholy, first published in 1621.

86
 Collins's reference to witches and weddings appears to be the
first reference anywhere to the many and varied beliefs recorded
later about witchcraft and weddings in Russia, which in fact persist
to the present day. Indeed, although the persistence of magic and
witchcraft in Russia, not to mention religion, was almost com-
pletely ignored in Soviet folklore studies, it is quite clear from the
pre-Soviet literature and more recent post-Soviet work that most
villages had at least one koldun or male witch, and that one of his
main functions was to participate in weddings to ward off demons,
the evil eye and the magic of hostile witches. Hostile magic at this
important liminal moment was thought to be able to prevent the
horses of the wedding party from moving, to turn the wedding
guests into werewolves, and most terrible of all, at a crucial
moment in the wedding ceremony, to cause the bride to break
wind.
The importance of the local wizard at a wedding is also reported
in the eighteenth-century account of the French astronomer the
Abbe Chappe d'Auteroche. He was on his way to Siberia to
observe the transit of Venus in 1761, but also included in the
published account of his expedition some other scientific observa-
tions, including a celebrated visit to a Russian bathhouse, illus-
trated in the book with an engraving by the pioneer ethnographic
illustrator Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, which drew a furious rebuttal
in print from the Empress Catherine the Great herself. In Siberia
Chappe d'Auteroche described what was evidently a fairly large
urban wedding at the capital Tobol'sk at which, he notes, the
koldlln was in attendance to counteract any possible hostile magic
from other magicians.
Collins made a number of other observations, the accuracy of
which is confirmed by later local evidence. On the Russian beliefs
in the Evil Eye he says (p. 13):
 Only Relations may see young children among the Russians, for they
will seldom permit any Strangers to look upon them, for fear they
should cast some ill aspect upon them.

The earliest specific reference to Russian belief in the Evil Eye

appears to be in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft (first
published London, 1584), where the belief is imputed to the Irish,
Muscovites and West Indians. I do not know where Scott got his
information but have to assume that it is from another Western
travel account. Russian textual references to the Evil Eye are rare.
The earliest, as far as I can discover, is in a sixteenth-century
prayer against 'zlo sretenie i lukavo oko' ('evil encounter and evil
eye,).23 The main magic protection from the Evil Eye, and it
survives today, was spitting three times. This magical expectora-
tion even penetrated Russian Orthodox liturgy: Captain John
Perry in his account of Russia in 1716 describes the ceremony of
re-baptism of foreigners wishing to join the Russian Orthodox
Church. This required the man to spit three times over his left
shoulder and then repeat after the priest: 'Cursed are my parents
that brought me up in the religion that I have been taught, I spit
upon them.'24
A further interesting passage in Collins is to a specific form of
wonder-working icon. He says (p. 25):

They will hold their Gods to the fire, trusting they can help them,
if they will. A fellow, thinking to have staid the fire by that means,
held his Mikola [i. e. icon of St Nicholas] so long, that he had like to
have been burnt himself, and seeing he did him no good, he threw
him into the midst of the fire, with this curse: Neo chert, i. e. The
Devil take thee'.

23 SlovlIr' drevnemsskogo illz~kll (XI-XIV vv), Moscow, 1975-, s.v. oka.

24 J. Perry, The Stllte ofRIlSSill under tbe P"ese1lt CZIIr, London, 1716, pp. 152-3.
88
Fig. 2. N. S. Matveev. 'Pozhar'. 189 J

T hi s sto ry, tru e or not, was prob~lbl y borrowed by Collins and

beco mes a standard anecdote - a later Scot in Russian service,
P eter H enry Bruce, in a passage describin g a g rea t fire in Moscow
in 17 / 3, te ll s it as follows:

O n t hi s occasion a poor superstitious man , see ing the fire advancing

to co nsume his all , took a pi cture o f St N icho las and ho lding it
between him and th e fire, prayed ferventl y for th at s,l int's protec-
tion , but in va in for clle fl ames soon seized his house, for which he
became so en rnged at the sa int, thal he threw him in to the fire,
s,lyin g, sin ce he wo uld not save him , he might now save himself: this
comin g to the ea rs of the clergy, the poor man was sentenced to be
burnt ali ve.!1

25 lI /eUloinof'PI'ter //elll), 8r11n', London, 1782, reprinted London , 1970, p. 97.

89
Collins's reference to icons as 'gods' is accurate - they could
indeed be referred to in that way, and the further reference to St
Nicol~s is entirely plausible since St Nicholas the Wonderworker
had a special status in Russian popular belief, almost that of a
pagan god. This anecdote is in fact not fanciful. Icons of any kind
in Russia were thought to be fire-resistant: Prince Kurbskii in the
sixteenth century recounted two incidents in his History ofIvan IV
in which icons of the Virgin survived major fires unscathed. 26 A
painting by N. S. Matveev called 'Pozhar' ('The Fire') (1891)
shows a peasant woman in front of her wooden hut holding an icon
of the Virgin of the Burning Bush as a protection against the fire
[Fig. 2]. The association of ideas is obvious.
Since I have just mentioned St Nicholas, I shall digress chronolog-
ically for a moment on another popular belief involving him which
caught the imagination of generations of writers on Russia. This was
the letter to him, or sometimes to St Peter, usually described as a
passport, which was placed in the right hand of corpses before burial
to ensure their passage into heaven. It contained assurances from the
bishop. This was a pious practice of some antiquity and was probably
originally simply a prayer, as it is now. It was part of the Russian
burial service approved by the Church, and it has parallels in the
West. But the letters were certainly regarded as a kind of magical
amulet by simple people and were almost invariably seen by foreign,
not only English, visitors as an example of Russian superstition.
Richard Chancellor, who wrote an account of his voyage to Muscovy
in 1553 (first published in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigtltions in
1589), notes that:

... when any man dieth amongst them, they take the dead body and
put it in a coffin or chest, and in the hand of the corpse they put a
little scroll, and in the same there are these words written, that the
man died a Russe of Russes, having received the faith and died in

26 J. L. I. Fennell, Km'bsky's History ofIvan IV, Camhridge, pp. 110-11, 114-15.

90
 the same. The writing or letter they say they send to St Peter, who,
receiving it as they affirm, reads it and by and by admits him into
heaven .... 27

Giles Fletcher, writing a little later, in his Of the Russe Common

Wealth (London, 1591), asserts:

About their burials also they have many superstitious and profane
ceremonies: as putting within the finger of the corpse a letter to
Saint Nicholas, whom they make their chief mediator, and as it were,
the porter of heaven gates, as the papists do their Peter.

It was no doubt on these sources that the poet John Milton

relied when he included the same story in his Brief History of
Muscovia in 1682. Richard James, whose dictionary I have already
mentioned, also records this story with the variant details that it is
a favour granted only to the clergy, and that the letter is addressed
to SS. Peter and Paul.
Adam Olearius, the diplomat from Holstein in the 1630s and 40s
quotes a full text of the letter. Other travel writers I have men-
tioned include this story: Samuel Collins, Peter Henry Bruce,John
Perry, and it is in two French accounts: one by the Netherlander
Jan Struys in 1681,28 and the other ascribed to the FrenchJansenist
clericJacquesJube. 29 By 1733 the practice was recorded pictorially
in an engraving by Bernard Picart in the CirCtllonies et coutumes
religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam, 1733).

27 Quoted in the edition ofL. E. Berry and R. O. Crummey, Rude and Barbarous
Kingdom: Russia in the AL"L"Oll11tS ofSixteemh-Cent1l1Y English VOyllgers, Madison
etc., 1968, p. 38.
28 Jean Struys, Les Voyages de Jam Struys en MW"fOvie ... , Amsterdam, 1681, p.
138.
29 Jacques Jube, LII Religion, les lItoeurs et les uSllges des IHosL"Ovites, ed. Michel
Mervaud, Oxford, 1992, pp. 84, 161 (from a manuscript ascribed to Jube, a
Jansenist cleric, d. 1745).
 ..J ;.. } { ' .F. R . II 1.1 .1'; S d", II ( . S " J:.' .

Fi g. 2. Russian buri al and th e 'pa sspo rt to heaven '. From Bernard

Pi ca rt, Ceremonies et cOlltm7!eS 1·eligiw.I'es de tOilS les pellples dll m omle,
Amste rd am , 1733.

By th e late eighteenth cenmry th ese lette rs were bein g printed ,

with a bl a nk space left for th e name o f th e deceased. On e su ch was
o btain ed in 178 1 as a curi o by Th o mas Dimsdal e, th e Quaker
doctor who becam e physician to Ca th erin e th e Grea t, a nd survives
in th e Dimsdale famil y co ll ecti o n.
Th e custom was followed at all levels o f society including th e
no bili ty and th e tsa r himself. But even if t he custo m o f pl acin g a
peni tential prayer in th e ri ght hand o f a co rpse was, and is, part o f
t he Russian Orth odox buri al ceremo ny, th e notio n th at it was a
' pass po rt to heaven ' is too regu larl y no ted by fo reign ers to be just
a travell e r's talc, and in any case th e terms P1'OPIISk (a pass) and
poc/oroz /mnitl (an o ffi cial ord er fo r post- ho rses), pOpuhlr1 y appli ed
to it in Ru ss ian , shows th at it ce rtainl y acquired an un can o ni ca l
co lourin g. Eventually it fo und its w,ly into Tb e Tll1'kisb Spy (see

92
above, p. 80) together with the story about Russian wife-beating,
as one of the stock anecdotes about Russia.

There is one last text which comes at the very end of the eigh-
teenth century which I should like to discuss, and it serves to bring
us back to the British Library. This is Matthew Guthrie's unpub-
lished 1795 manuscript work Nones Rossicae or Russian Evening
Recreations (Add. MS 14,390) in the Department of Manuscripts.
This is the first serious scholarly attempt to describe Russian
popular culture in English.
Guthrie was a Scot born probably in Edinburgh in 1743. 30 He had
good social and intellectual connections and after various ups and
downs he eventually qualified as an MD and went off to seek his
fortune in Russia. He served first in the Russian navy and then in the
army during the Turkish War of 1769-1774. He served in Moldavia
and WaIIachia and travelled extensively in the northern coastal areas
of the Black Sea. In 1776 he returned to St Petersburg where he
became Chief Medical Officer to the Army Corps ofNoble Cadets,
where he was eventually raised to the rank of Counsellor of State,
which made him a member of the Russian nobility.
Guthrie became friendly with many of the important men at court
and in intellectual and scientific circles and also conducted corres-
pondence with important foreign scientists such as Joseph Priestley
and Joseph Black. He was elected to the prestigious Free Economic
Society in St Petersburg and later to the Royal Society in London,
and to both the London and Edinburgh Societies of Antiquaries.
He published scientific articles on a variety of topics, and informa-
tive pieces about Russian history, culture and superstitions, notably

30 On Guthrie see K. A. Papmchl, 'Matthew Guthrie - the Forgotten Student of

18th Century Russia', Canadian Slavonic Papers, XI, 1969, pp. 167-82.

93
in the Edinburgh journal The Bee under the pseudonym of
Arcticus. 31 He was a great admirer of Catherine the Great and of
smallpox vaccination, and vehemently hostile to the French
Revolution and Napoleon.
His attitude to Russia was quite different from that of most of
his British predecessors. He was genuinely interested in the
Russian peasants and saw in them, and their culture, not the slavish
and barbarous orientals of earlier stereotypes but the 'true Rus-
sians', heirs to the classical culture of the Greeks, unadulterated by
Western manners. In fact he became interested in what would now
be called folklore. Recalling my first lecture I can say that Guthrie
anticipated Ralston's preference for the Jacob Grimm and Max
Muller school of thought in folklore by some seventy years when
he wrote: 'We perfectly agree with the learned Sir William Jones
that all our European superstitions and pagan rites come originally
from the East'.32 Sir WiIliamJones was the extraordinary oriental-
ist and jurist who laid the foundations ofIndo-European compara-
tive philology, and was writing at the same time as Guthrie,
although they do not appear to have corresponded. He was two
years younger than Guthrie, and the latter was clearly very quick
to pick up on new currents of thought back in Britain. Guthrie's
almost Romantic view of the Russian peasant and his way of life,
which was later to be echoed by Ralston, appealed to the Empress
Catherine II, if only because its Greek emphasis chimed well with

31 A. G. Cross, 'Arcticus and The Bee (1792-4): An Episode in Anglo-Russian

Cultural Relations', Oxford Slavonic Pflpers, XI, 1969, pp. 172-81.
32 'We' is either Guthrie, or his wife Maria, or both. The passage occurs in BL
Add. MS 14,388: 'A Supplementary Tour through the Countries on the Black
Sea Conquered by Russia from the Turks, with drawings, etc.', 1804-5. This
was written to supplement Maria Guthrie's book A Tour, peifo17lted in the yearos
1795-6, through the Tallrida, or Crimea ... and all the othercOll11t7'ies on the north
shore of the ElIXine, ceded to Russia by the Peace of Ktlinm'dgi and ]assy; by M1'.I·. M.
G.... Described in a series ofletten to her husband, the editor, !vlf1tthew Guthrie ...
Illustrated by a map ... with engravings of ... coins, etc., London, 1802.
94
her territorial ambitions in the south at the expense of Turkey. At
her suggestion he published a first version of the first five books of
Noctes Rossicae in French at St Petersburg in 1795 under the less
classically pretentious title of Dissertations sur les antiquites de Russie.
Like Ralston, Guthrie was fascinated by the music, folk song and
folk dance of the rural Russians. Four of his first six chapters are
devoted primarily to these topics. Chapter three, however, is devoted
to the 'Ancient Russian Mythology, rites, sacred games or ludi,
oracles, modes of Divination &c'. This is not quite as illuminating as
it promises to be, and it shows no familiarity with the Russian
literature on these subjects which was already beginning to appear,
notably the small encyclopedias of Russian superstitions and customs
published by Mikhail Chulkov, his Siovar' russkikh sueverii (Moscow,
1772), and Abevega ruskikh sueverii (Moscow, 1786). On the other
hand, at least part of what Guthrie has to say is based on first-hand
observation and does try to put things into a comparative perspec-
tive. In his preface Guthrie emphasizes that everything he says has
been vouched for as correct by Russian litterati, and adds 'if the
litterati of Russia begin to examine their villages in the point of view
which we have done, they must still find very many curious usages
which might very naturally escape a foreigner'. This plea for
anthropological fieldwork is a relative novelty. In fact at least some
of Guthrie's observations on ancient Russian customs found there
way into later Russian scholarship on the subject - according to A
N. Pypin, the Noctes Rossicae was used as a source by the nineteenth-
century historian, ethnographer and folklorist Ivan Mikhailovich
Snegirev (1793-1868), a pioneer scholar of Russian folk belief -
Snegirev appears to be have been the translator of a later version of
Maria Guthrie's book published in Russian and French: Lettres sur la
Cri?nee, Odessa et la mer d'Azoj(Moscow, 1810; cf. n. 32 above).33

33 A. N. Pypin, /st01-iia nm-koi etnograjii, I, St Petershurg, 1890, p. 324. Snegirev

published widely on many sllbject~, and a collection of his works appeared
posthumously as Sttlrilla 17/£..koi ze1llii in 1871.

95
 Some of Guthrie's observations on Russian magic are not found
elsewhere. He describes for example 'bands or frontlets of parch-
ment' containing some sentence as an antidote or charm and worn
on the forehead. I do not know exactly what he is referring to here
- amulets in Russia were in fact almost always worn round the neck
with the cross. Other observations are much more detailed and
specific: he records that on St George's Day, when by tradition in
north Russia the cows were first taken out to the spring pasture, a
priest would perform a ceremony to protect the livestock from the
malicious leshii, the demon of the forest. This he describes as
follows (f. SOv):

A branch of Palm preserved for the purpose from Palm Sunday, with
a lighted Taper, a Pot of Barsly and two Eggs (one for the Cowherd,
the other for a Beggar) are placed before the family image or Saint,
and then carried thrice around the Group of Cattle, together with
a Cross, sprinkling them each time with the Palm dipt in holy
Water, after which they are driven over a hatchet buried under the
threshold, by the same consecrated Palm, and from thence to
pasture; after which they may defy, in the opinion of the Rustics, all
the Spells and Witchery of Satan and his Imps, but to secure the
matter stillmore the holy Palm must be either thrown into running
Water, or stuck into an anthill, and the Barsly sown on the field.

This interesting and elaborate mixture of pious custom and pagan

magic actually performed by an Orthodox priest might well have
been omitted by a more circumspect Russian writer. Unfortunately
there is little else of this kind in the book. Guthrie is more
concerned with divination than with other kinds of magic, perhaps
because he found it easier to find Greek parallels.
The divinatory practice of the podbliudnye pesni, the 'under-the-
bowl' songs which I described in my first lecture as having
attracted the attention of Ralston, is described by Guthrie in some

96
detail, but typically, and probably correctly, he adds that it is
almost identical to the midsummer divination called ho kledonas in
the Greek world, 'which' he says 'must surely be its origin'. A
similar Yuletide game with a divinatory element is Khoronite zoloto
'Bury the gold'. This was described by Guthrie (ff. 99v-lOO) as
follows: the girls form a ring; the leader goes round and hides a
gold ring in the clothes of one of them; the others then take turns
to guess where it is; the one who guesses is crowned with flowers
and then must go out and ask the name of a passer-by; this will
then be interpreted by the others. Guthrie's description, complete
with a Greek parallel, is certainly accurate and I am not aware that
a description of this game had appeared anywhere before in any
Russian source.
Guthrie also describes the ancient practice of koski no maney, or
sieve divination (f. 84), which is widely reported in Russia, and
condemned by the Church as a pagan practice. This was normally
used for detecting thieves: the diviner would suspend a sieve, and
after a while it would turn to point to a thief or anyone mentioning
his name. There are many varieties of this in many parts of Europe
including Britain. The detail of suspending the sieve from a fork I
have found only in Guthrie.
Regrettably, Guthrie has nothing to say about village witches or
wizards, although he has a few words about the evil eye, cauls, and
the various demons of popular belief such as the rusalka and the
baba yaga, and one has the impression that despite his protestations
of scholarly rigour he had not actually taken much interest in
anything which did not support his thesis of the ancient Greek
roots of Russian peasant culture.
There are of course many other accounts of Russia which
contain information about Russian popular beliefs and customs,
but no others, that I know of, record them for the first time, or can
be used to fix the date of a belief, practice, or word in the way that
is done by most of the texts I have quoted here.

97
Will Ryan bas worked as a dictionary editor
for the Clarendon Press. assistant curator at
the Muscum of the History of Science in
Oxford, and lecturer in Russian at the chool
of Slavonic and East European Studies in
London. For tv.renty-seven years until his
retiremem in 2002 he was Academic Librarian
of the Warburg Instit1.lte. I-Je is Emeritus
Professor of Russian Studies in the Un.iversity
of London and a Fellow of the l3ritish
Academy. He has written extensively ill the
fields of Russian lexicography, and the bistory
of scientific and magical texts in medieval and
early modern Russia. His encyclopaedic study
of R.ussian magic and divination, Tile Batililollse
al .\lidll(~/II:AII Historical SlIfI'l')' of;\Jagic al1d
DiI,illtltioll ill Rllssi,), was published in I Y99.
and a revised Russian editioll has JUSl been
published ill Moscow (Belllia I' floilloeil', 2006).
He is currently Presidem of thc Folkl re
Society and Series Editor of the Haklllyt
S cicty.

.over illtmmtion: A Russi,ln forlUill'-teller.

Detail fi'0111 J plate ofl-l...u"ian COSlLIl11CS in
Thoillas l3.1Ilkes, A N1'II' S)'SII'II/ (f ( 'lIil'clsal
G(,(~~/'<Ipil)'. London, c. '790.
ISBN 07[2349839