DESIRE MACHINES — A Romanian Love Charms Database
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DESIRE MACHINES — A Romanian Love Charms Database

Love charms are marginalized forms of psychological energizing and healing, which can still be encountered locally in rural Europe. To the postmodern Western intellectual, whose insight is not blurred by exclusive cultural taxonomies, they might appear to be the recessive counterpart of currently dominant psychotherapeutic practices.

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Love charms are marginalized forms of psychological energizing and healing, which can still be encountered locally in rural Europe. To the postmodern Western intellectual, whose insight is not blurred by exclusive cultural taxonomies, they might appear to be the recessive counterpart of currently dominant psychotherapeutic practices. Like psychotherapy, love charming is performed in private sessions, by a legitimate specialist, on behalf of a suffering client, by means of general healing fiction (offered in response to specific complaints and meant to enhance the client’s sense of self-understanding, self-esteem, and power) and certain gestural scenarios, and in accordance with a given dogmatism (or theory). However, in contradistinction to psychotherapy, the charm specialist is almost always a woman, the healing fiction is typically versified, and accompanied by ritualized gestures that act as metaphors of or models for the change aimed at in the charm, and there are no postural scenarios meant to stress the temporary domination of the “expert” over the client or any asymmetric relationship between them.

Sanda Golopenția

Sanda Golopenția
DM-SG
Fișa tehnică
An apariție
2025
ISBN
978-606-8944-94-4
Format
140 x 205 mm
Număr pagini
400
Tip copertă
Cartonată

For outsiders, the performance of a charm is not always easily accessible in terms of watching or recording. As in the case of medical or religious treatment in modern societies, the individual beneficiary’s privacy tends to be protected by keeping the charm (magic) session relatively closed to the public. The positive or negative value that a given community attaches to charm‑performing is also important. Charm‑performances will more easily be open to the public when charming is highly rated among the activities or professions that are currently practiced by the members of the community. If charms come to be rated lower by simply becoming outdated or they are perceived as inefficient (naive, superfluous, ridiculous, etc.) or, even worse, if they are outlawed (both have happened, at different moments, in Western Europe), then charm‑performances will naturally tend to become invisible.

The magic core of the formula is contained in the line “swathed with a cuckoo’s head,” which, while appearing as surrealist poetry to the outsider, seems to hint at the practice of cutting off the head of a cuckoo and secretly wearing it (or cooking and eating it) in order to acquire what we might call phonic preeminence, i.e., to ensure a wide audience and to be eagerly listened to, as are cuckoos when they sing in the spring. The mythological background for this custom helps us understand that, to the insider, the charm we discuss is less innocent than it looks at first sight, inasmuch as the cuckoo is a “holy” bird, believed to sing first at the gates of heaven.

Pelin tare
și mai tare
să-mi aduci lucru vrăjmășesc
în cale.
Ce leg și cu ochii nu văd?

Powerful wormwood
with even more power
bring me harmful works
on my way.
What do I bind that my eyes
can’t see?

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