Romanian Werewolves: Seasons, Ritual, Cycles

FROM Christmas to Epiphany, confederations of young unmarried men parade through Eastern European villages singing ritual hymns (called colinde) and performing dances, accompanied by musicians and others wearing animal masks. The days and weeks before and after Christmas are likewise celebrated in Romania with masquerading, mumming, and folk dramas using masks that represent animals, old people, and devils, in addition to animal costumes. Folk plays called capra, ursu, c'lufu, barza, and camila combine flute playing and dancing with the dramatized bartering, disenchantment from the evil eye, or revival from death of a goat, bear, horse, stork, or camel. Some werewolf legends' attribute enchantment to the conception of the child on the eve of Christmas or Easter, or to birth on Easter. Were-beings appear in the villages on the eve of high religious holidays such as Christmas, New Year's Day and Easter. Christian holidays are likewise the focus of sexual restrictions inscribed in the church canons; that is, one must observe abstinence from sexual relations on the eve of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Failure to do so, and the possible conception of a child will, according to informants, bring deformity and 'animal characteristics' to the infant at birth. The victim will be cursed with 'wolf ears,' for example, or a 'wolf's head,' or will have a harelip, and generally will be 'unlucky' and even malicious. The legends tell of children who, conceived on the eve of Christmas or Easter in violation of the religious canon, or born on Easter, became werewolves and harboured resentment and hostility in their hearts against their parents for the latter's transgression. These stories make explicit what exists virtually in the related village beliefs. The period of concomitant witch or vampire behaviour is said to begin on the eve of Saint Andrew's feast day (30 November), and extends through Christmas and the New Year to Epiphany. According to these legends werewolves and vampires emerge at a specific season of the year. Christmas and the New Year appear to be the primary period, with Easter and Pentecost as a secondary one. Furthermore, the affiliation of werewolves with the moon signifies an accessory set of natural cycles. In Roman Jakobson's view, the Slavic werewolves of Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Czechoslavakia devour the sun and the moon because they love darkness and to proclaim the triumph of the nocturnal element2. Their Romanian cousin, the vircolac, etymologically 'werewolf,' but which has been replaced by pricolici, eats the moon. Related also are the Italian and Sicilian traditions of the future werewolf who was conceived at the new moon, or who slept under a full moon on certain weekdays in summer, or who is stirred to metamorphsis at the full moon, as in numerous European traditions.3 The shepherd and goat or gypsy and bear show was at times a simple amusement with the playing of a shepherd's pipe and the dancing of the animal to receive bacyi (gifts, tips). Other variants added burlesque elements and two new characters, 'old man' and 'old woman.' In its full-fledged form, the actors present a story of the sale,