The first edition of the series is authored by Sandis Laime, senior researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia. He has been researching witch-related folklore sources for about 15 years and is the author of several articles and a monograph on the subject.
The new edition reveals the great diversity of witch folklore and unravels the different traditions of witches, fairies and similar mythological entities.
In Europe, witchcraft research became particularly active after the 1960s, when the period of witch-hunting and witch-burning from the 15th to the 18th centuries came under particular focus. The main aim of the research was to find out the deeper causes of this mass psychosis. Historians, anthropologists, theologians, psychologists, legal experts, and other specialists, including folklorists, were involved in the research.
When this wave of research began in Europe, research on the subject had been stalled in Latvia for several decades because it did not conform to the ideology of the Soviet system. Folklorist Kārlis Straubergs had studied the subject in depth in the 1920s and 1930s.
The newly published study by Sandis Laime will now begin to fill the gap. The book is a bilingual edition in Latvian and English, says the author. "Nobody has any data on us because nothing has been published in English. In a way, this study is dedicated to making at least part of that white spot more colorful. The book is basically meant for international research so that comparative studies can be done, but I couldn't not publish it in Latvian as well."
The most common folklore-based view of witches is that they are sorcerers who make a pact with the devil, take part in sabbaths, and fly on brooms, but according to Sandis Laime, this is the most recent view, no older than the 1600s. These are the so-called demonic witches, who fit into the Christian paradigm.
But there are also older layers to the tradition, in which folklorists use the terms night witches and milk witches. Night witches have very little to do with witches in the modern sense; they are supernatural and not human beings, most often the souls of deceased unfortunate women who, for various reasons, do not pass into the afterlife but remain on earth.
"These unfortunate souls are activated at a certain time between sunset and sunrise. They are usually associated with very specific places in nature. Mostly they are places near cemeteries. They only have contact with people if they break the rules and go to these places at the wrong time. In those cases, people are punished. People were afraid of these creatures because they could be killed, led astray, beaten to death, and this is the motive."
Milk witches are a more traditional layer of witches, a person, mostly a woman, but sometimes also a man, who by means of magical acts deprives others of their well-being, increasing their own economic success.
The magical practices are sometimes very peculiar, Sandis Laime notes: "It is particularly well preserved in the tradition of Northern Vidzeme that these people who went on their evil ways did not do it with their bodies but with their souls. So, the body lay down somewhere on the ground, let the soul out for a while, which could turn into a mouse or a fly, or most often a shiny flying creature, and then it was the soul that went out and got the milk. Returning home with the stolen good, the soul returned to the body. This is the old Latvian idea of witches."
Sandis Laime admits that nowadays we can also talk about a fourth layer of witches, which are modern witches. This is something quite different from the previously held ideas, as women sometimes proudly call themselves witches, thus highlighting their creativity, special skills, and abilities.
This has never before been the case in human history, it has always been associated with something negative and bad.
The volume devoted to witches is the first in the series "Index of types and motifs of Latvian tales", the next volumes in the series are "Magicians" and "Werewolves".
