#72 / Dr Maria Vivod, The Fairy Seers of Eastern Serbia.

Spirit Box

Dr Maria Vivod is an Ethnologist and anthropologist from Serbia, with an interest in Visual Anthropology. Today we discuss the subject of one of her short documentary films and accompanying paper “The Fairy Seers of Eastern Serbia”
The fairy-seers of Southeastern Europe are usually women who fall into trance through dancing on special days in a year and are able to communicate with women-like creatures from the supernatural world. During the process of communication with the fairies the fairy-seers can prophesy future events. The fairy-seers also bring messages to the living from the behalf of their deceased relatives. Similarly, they can give advice about how to heal an ill individual or they can proceed to the treatment of the ill individual after consulting the fairies. These illnesses are usually a form of a fairy-illness – a disorder which has its origins in a curse or a spell of the human-offended fairies.
The subject of the film we discuss is Ivanka, she is a Vlach woman from eastern Serbia. She sees her ‘sisters’ since her early twenties and is able to communicate with them on three exact days of the Christian orthodox calendar: Epiphany, Palm Sunday, St.Peter's Day. This trance was Ivanka's last. You can find a link to the film in the show notes.
In the Patreon Plus show we discuss Dr Vivod’s own remarkable consultation with the Fairy Seer and the funeral rites of the Vlach people and the views of the relationship with spirits of the dead. Dr Vivod explains the process of curse removal through a process called ‘melting fear’ and an extraordinary rite called a ‘Black Wedding’ wherein the young who have passed before their time are symbolically married so they can wed on the other side.

Show Notes:
https://independent.academia.edu/MariaVivod
https://www.academia.edu/video/lg4Vrk

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Music by Obliqka

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