Category Archives: Homeopathic

RESPECT THE FUCKING FOREST – Folk Magic (sympathetic)

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Jose
Performance Date: May 1, 2021
Primary Language: English

Transcript of recorded audio
“Um, it’s funny. Every single adult that I talked to, right before I went to Santa Cruz, told me not to go into the forest at night. But that, like, consensus, isn’t really upheld up by the students at UCSC, mostly because I think the forest is like around us like literally everywhere. Right, there’s no like don’t go into the forest at night, but there are some pretty serious like, respect the forests at night. Obviously there’s a pretty big like Wiccan culture at UCSC, and like I get it, like, when I first went into the forests at night, like you could definitely feel like you’re not alone there. You know, and whether that be like animals or spirits or whatever it’s… it’s noticeable, right? So at UCSC, there’s not this idea of don’t go into the forest at night, but there is this idea of respect the forest, especially at night. Because, you know, like you hear strange shit going on in the forest, you hear laughing and screaming and, just like noises that are very very haunted, but as long as they are reasonably far off, you don’t really have to worry about them, but you do kind of have to be on the top of your game. Right? So like never liter in the forest, never fuck with the forest, always respect the forest and the forest will respect you. Like I said like, cougar attacks happen. People fucking died on campus. Um, so, respect the fucking forest, you know? I guess that’s a legend in it of itself.”

Background
The person telling this story goes to UCSC, and is very into the superstitions and folklore. They’ve provided quite a few examples of legends and magic pertaining to the campus. But what’s interesting is how this story is coming from two separate places: one version from the students and one from the adults. It should also be noted that this same informant has placed a considerable amount of emphasis on how scary the forest is at night in a lot of her other stories.

Context
This story is part of a set of voice memos, sent by a student at UCSC Santa Cruz. Most are ghost stories concerning the campus. For context, Wiccan culture is referencing old pagan traditions. But what’s interesting is that this is the first time I’ve ever heard her mention these traditions on campus. It’s treated as obvious knowledge, but in all honesty, this is the first time I’m really hearing about is specifically.

Thoughts
This story in particular ties together a lot of the notions that have been formulating in my head about Santa Cruz lore. It’s very concerned with nature, specifically with the forest surrounding campus. And in doing so, it’ll often treat nature as a magical entity, one who’s general nature is benevolent, but hold the potential for savagery if the wrong actions are taken. Like with the story about the buddha and the wishing stones, we see what we might expect to be very positive and wholesome rituals take on a more threatening edge. I wonder if this has to do with the idea of ‘nature willing out,’ so to speak. UCSC has a very ecologically conscious environment, so the idea of nature being mostly seen as a force of good, but also as one which can wipe humanity off the face of the earth (say through global warming) doesn’t seem to fall too out of step from these interpretations in their lore.

“Row” the Fish Over

Nationality: China
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Tsingtao, Shandong, China
Performance Date: 5/1/2021
Primary Language: Chinese

Backgrounds:

DerShann is currently a student at USC, majoring in Philoshophy. His family are from Tsingtao, Shandong, China. He likes to play the game League of Legends, and the following folklore is collected during some of the games we played together via the voice chat chanel.

The Mian Piece:

DerShann:”In Tsingtao, when you eat a fish, if you finished eating all the meat on one side and want to turn the fish over to eat the other side, you cannot say ‘翻过来 fan guo lai（turn it over）’, you must say ‘划过来 hua guo lai（row it）’. Tsingtao is a city that is built on the fishing industry, and a lot of people are fishermen, especially those who sell you the fish. Fishermen are afraid that their ship might sink and they might die, (in Chinese it is called 翻船了 chuan fan le（the ship is turned over）. So they really hate the word ‘翻， fan（turn over）’. So we say ‘划过来 hua guo lai（Row it）’. This is like encouraging the fishermen to row their ships back, to have a safe sail, kinda like, row it to the beach. This is something everyone knows in Tsingtao.


Analysis:

This way of saying things reveals that the city Tsingtao is heavily based on the fishing industry. It also shows how people there value their safety during theiir sea sails. This is a custom that’s specific to cities that are close to the sea and relies on fishing, or have rich histories in fishing.

People believe merely saying the word “翻 fan” might cause the ship to really be turned over by waves and wind, which shows how people draw connections between words and actual events.

Sticking Chopsticks into the Rice Bowl

Nationality: China
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Tsingtao, Shandong, China
Performance Date: 5/1/2021
Primary Language: Chinese

Backgrounds:

DerShann is currently a student at USC, majoring in Philoshophy. His family are from Tsingtao, Shandong, China. He likes to play the game League of Legends, and the following folklore is collected during some of the games we played together via the voice chat chanel.



The Main Piece:

DerShann: I’ve got this one super popular belief: you cannot stick your chopsticks into the rice in your bowl.

Me: I’ve heard of it. But why is it?

DerShann: Because that makes the chopsticks look like incense, burned to serve the dead. So sticking the chopsticks into the rice means the rice is for dead people.

Me: So what do you think of it?

DerShann: I kind of believe it. Like, there’s no certain, immediate consequences, nothing happens if you do that. But it might still bring around bad luck, it’s not a good sign. And, I wouldn’t do it because it kinda makes people uncomfortable.

Analysis:

I think this reveals how people are afraid of dying. They feel uncomfortable when they are using things that are similar to things designed for the dead. Or they don’t like to behave like a dead person. I think being afraid of death is a universal sentiment, but only in East Asia do this piece of folklore exist. Our traditional chopsticks has some similarity with incense that are used to serve gods or ghosts or souls.

Most of the people I know are aware of this taboo, and most of them follow it, although a large portion of them don’t really believe in ghosts or superstitious powers of the rice bowl. But people just follow it because this is the tradition, or the cultural norm.

Kaadha: The One-For-All Remedy

Nationality: Indian
Age: 52
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 30/04/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘S’. Translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 52-year-old Punjabi mother, born and raised in North India.

I: Do you have any common notable remedies or medicinal recipes for a fever, maybe a flu?

S: Yeah, for virals! For flus, fever, cough, cold, we call it kaadha (decoction). It’s pretty generic… and everybody calls it kaadha.

I: Are there different recipes of kaadha, depending on where you go, who you ask—

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah! There’ll be different recipes, and I’m not really a master of them, but I used to make a lot of it when my daughter was younger. Now, today, I do not remember really the exact ingredients of what went into it, you know, which was the primary ingredient at which point of the recipe, but there used to be things like… dhaniya (coriander/cilantro) powder was for stomachache, and god-knows-what… no! Dhaniya powder was primarily for fever, but basically you have ginger—again, what goes into it is mostly heat-inducing ingredients, again, so you won’t have the cooling things going in there—so, primarily you’ll have ajwain (carom seeds, a very common ingredient in Indian foods and folk remedies), ginger, you’ll have dhaniya or dhaniya powder, long (cumin), cinnamon, tulsi (holy basil), haldi (turmeric), very importantly… a lot, depending on what the problem is and where you’re from. But, let’s say you take two glasses of water, you put it on to boil with all this stuff in it, all these spices and herbs, you put it to boil, and you allow it to boil till you reduce to quantity to about half on a slow flame, and you let it sit. Kaadha basically means, like, brewing, so you allow it to become a kaadha, like a brew, so you brew it enough to reduce the liquid to about half the quantity that you started with, and… cool it a little and then you add a dash of honey, because it’s very bitter and you give this to children too, and then you serve it. You have it, a few times a day, and it’ll help!

I: Did you learn this recipe from anywhere, that you can remember?

S: No, not really, it was, again, something we all kind of had in our childhoods, through our lives, so I learnt it from my mother. However, actually, there was this homeopathic doctor, Dr. [Name], he’s the one who guided me with some ingredients and varieties of kaadha, he streamlined the one that I would make, catered to my daughter, like, ‘oh, you add this, these are the primaries for fever, these are for stomachache,’ and whatever else. And… I also remember, I remember him telling me that with little ones, with children, when it comes to fever, you don’t give… immediately, like allopathy promotes that you immediately give the Crocin or Calpol when they hit, like, 99 (degrees) or 100, but he stopped me from doing that. He said that fever is very important, because you don’t want to treat the symptom, you want to treat the problem, and fever is your body’s way of fighting the problem. So, your body is heating up so much that the problem is being fought, being killed, but when you bring down the fever, you’re not allowing the body to fight. And, he said, basically, ‘kids can handle high temperatures far better than adults can,’ so he said, ‘no matter the temperature, do not panic, it doesn’t mean the same thing as an adult having the same temperature. You can stick to cold swabs and homeopathic stuff, but you don’t need to use allopathy unless it gets into… an emergency situation.’ It’s always worked for my daughter.

Analysis

Kaadha is a very common remedy in India, and there are many variations of it, depending on the illness, and the person making it and the region they’re from. Kaadha (काढ़ा) essentially means, as the informant states, brew, or literally, decoction, a medicine derived from plants. Here, the plants differ, but the main ingredients always have similar properties: they are heat-inducing. This belief in and use of heat-inducing ingredients can also be seen in, “Lapsi: The Common Cold Cure?” (http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/?p=59861), except this is a very common remedy, and usually makes use of more spices. Where ‘lapsi’ would provide relief and usually taste pleasant due to its fewer spices and bitter herbs, kaadha is known to be bitter and a pure decoction, the ‘pain’ part of ‘no pain, no gain’, and many Indians swear by its effectiveness in helping cure most common illnesses, including stomachaches, fever, the common cold, a cough, a sore throat, etc., even in children. It is a hot drink, had multiple times a day, just as the informant states, and since it is hot and also has spices in it, it would heat the body from the inside out, but it is even used to treat a fever: this is why it is often recommended by homeopathic doctors, and since it uses heat-inducing ingredients to fight off, well, a fever, it can be classified as a homeopathic remedy as well, all while being a classic, Indian folk medicine, that has been used and trusted for decades upon decades.

Nazar Utarna

Nationality: Indian
Age: 70
Residence: India
Performance Date: 3/23/2021
Primary Language: Hindi (urdu)

Context & Background:

The informant is an old lady from Rajasthan (north India) and my late grandfather’s family friend, and she explains the tradition of warding off bad spirits or bad luck from a person.

Performance: (via phone call)

The act of purifying or taking away the bad spirit is called “Nazar Utarna”. Translation: Remove the evil eye. What we do is, we take a piece of cotton that we use for religious ceremonies and dip it in mustard oil. We then have to take an oath of silence until we complete the whole removal process. We take the oil dipped cotton to the person who we are purifying and wave the cotton around them but not touch them. We go around the entire body in a circular motion, vertically from feet to head, 12 times, to take away all the bad spirits around the person. The cotton has now absorbed all the bad spirits and we go and burn the cotton, either in the kitchen sink or anywhere else. The longer the cotton burns, the more bad spirits you had around you, but now they are gone. Once the cotton has burned, the silence oath is over.  

Analysis:

I asked the lady if this was somehow a religious ceremony, and she said no really. This has elements of religiousness and hinduism, like using the cotton that is used in other religions ceremonies, but it isn’t written in any holy book and the priests don’t tell you to do this type of thing. This is purely a tradition that has been passed down for generations. This ceremony was also performed in my house, and I thought it was really weird and didn’t take it seriously at all, but now that I analyze it more, the concepts of the actions make sense. Like the absorption of the spirit and burning it makes more sense than a lot of other superstitions that I have heard like sage or garlic garlands. This can also be considered as magic, contagious magic, as the cotton is somehow associated with the bad spirits around a person and they are being burned, and homeopathic magic, because anyone can replicate this action. You just need to believe in the magic.

For another version see: 

Rgyan Admin, et al. “Easy Ways To Remove Evil Eye (Buri Nazar Nivarak Sujhav).” Rgyan, 26 Mar. 2020, rgyan.com/blogs/easy-ways-to-remove-evil-eye-buri-nazar-nivarak-sujhav/.