their songs, dancing bears, and quasi-spiritual authority (minstrels were believed
to ward off evil spirits from wedding processions). Such critiques—paralleled in
Catholic and Protestant efforts against magic and superstition—were continued by
the Zealots of Piety and later the Old Believers in the seventeenth century.
Many of these official critiques might have been formulaically repeated from
canonical Byzantine sources, but there is plenty of contemporary (as well as later
ethnographic) evidence that Muscovite laymen integrated non-Christian belief and
practice into Orthodoxy. Parish service books contain supplicatory prayers said by
clergy and laymen alike on occasions of personal need and daily life (illness, falling
in love, going to court); such prayers deeply intertwine Christian and animist
belief. They prayed to some natural spirits along with Christian figures for
benevolence, while they identified evil in the Devil and in other natural forces.
They combined references to Old Testamentfigures, saints, Jesus, and Mary with
invocations of a“folk otherworld,”in Eve Levin’s phrase. Holy oak trees, mythical
islands and oceans, the light of dawn and sunset intertwined with Christian
spiritual intervention. Local cults of saints attributed miracle-working powers to
relics, saints’bodies and shrines, and their icons in ways that made the official
Church quite anxious.
Muscovites indulged in magic, at all levels of society, including the ruler’s court.
Since the time of Ivan III European doctors had been recruited to Kremlin service,
often bringing with them the typical early modern European doctor’s combination
of antique healing arts, potions and prayers, astrology and astronomy, and science.
Some, such as Ivan IV’s doctor Eliseus Bomel and Aleksei Mikhailovich’s doctor
Daniel von Haden, went to their deaths accused of black magic and heresy; most,
however, thrived in the circle of the“Apothecary Chancery,”established by Aleksei
Mikhailovich to import western medicine, herbal remedies, books on astrology,
and learned experts to Russia. By the seventeenth century rulers and elite were
intrigued by such ideas: Aleksei Mikhailovich and regent Sofiia Alekseevna both
had palace rooms decorated with astronomical symbols; Sofiia’s advisors Sylvestr
Medvedev and Prince V. V. Golitsyn had connections with male witches. Aleksei
Mikhailovich had herbs collected for magic and he and his father Mikhail Romanov
recruited magicians to protect them, even as rulers also constantly feared magical
spells cast against them. Several late seventeenth-century treason trials involve
members of the court elite (stolnikAndrei Bezobrazov, Grigorii Talitskii) patron-
izing people with magical powers.
Laymen turned to magic in their love lives—charms and potions helped women
tofind a good husband, men to entice a woman into sexual dalliance, or couples to
revive marital affection. Often such charms invoked Christian deities along with
magical powers. The primary locus of magical arts was in healing through the use of
spiritually powerful potions, herbs, grasses, and spells, often in the hands of
identified healers. Even Orthodox manuals on healing often combined physical
medicine with magical incantations and rites. Such healing was ubiquitous, but its
practitioners ended up in court accused as witches when someone was harmed.
Others were accused of witchcraft when an inexplicable calamity befell an individ-
ual, family, or community. In Muscovy, those accused as witches were primarily
260 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801