Tag Archives: homeopathic magic

Pan de Muerto

Context: the informant, A.F., is a 21 year old USC student. Her family is Mexican, when asked about rituals or festivals, she brought up Dia de Los Muertos. Before she explained her family customs, she did give me a small disclaimer, saying that a lot of this feels normal to her, and so she wasn’t sure what would/wouldn’t matter.

Text: The informant explained that when her family celebrates Dia de Los Muertos, they always buys a specific bread, known as “pan de muerto”. She described pan de muerto as a round sweet bread with a cross on top; along with this, she explained that her family also makes the favorite foods of their loved ones who have passed. When asked if she leaves some out for ancestors, she told me that they do that alongside eating it. Her family puts up an altar in their house with photos of loved ones who have passed, decorating it with their favorite foods, candles, and a vibrant flower that her family calls “cempasuchil.” She told me she wasn’t sure what flower it was exactly, but she thought it was a marigold. To offer the bread and food to them, her family places it on the altar.

Analysis: Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is a typical part of Dia de los Muertos festivities, as is creating an altar for the living to offer things to their dead loved ones. The act of placing food on the altar for them seems like an idea based in homeopathic sympathetic magic, in that items given to photos of loved ones will also be given to their spirits in the afterlife. As the photo looks like the person, affecting it in some way will also affect the person, even once they’ve passed. The bread itself, to the informant, is essentially just a normal sweet bread, but the intent behind offering it is what matters, rather than anything special about the bread.

Fortune Keeping

Context:

A is a Pre-med biology major at USC, currently a freshman. A is a Vietnamese American who grew up in Vancouver, Washington a short drive from Portland, Oregon. 

Text:

A: Okay, so I’ve learned this at a very young age, but my family has told me that fortunes come true. Like, the fortune in the fortune cookies. I keep the slip of paper in my pocket like, as a way to make it come true. Keeping it with me helps make sure the fortune will come true, but if I don’t want this fortune to come true, I won’t keep it. 

Me: Do you ever lose them?

A: I keep them for as long as I think I need the fortune. Like, if I think it came true, then I’ll throw it away. 

Analysis:

The fortune tellers A is talking about are finely printed words, usually in a vague phrase or arrangement, that come from restaurant complementary cookies. As fortune telling is a way of predicting or controlling the future, I think what A experiences reading a fortune teller is something along the lines of superstition and homeopathic magic. Fortune tellers are usually signs, a specific message from the universe or time or fate telling you something important will happen. A believes this sign and wants this future to be his, so fortune tellers encourage some change in behavior to bring about that important thing. To bring fortune into reality, it is important for A to keep evidence of the future (the fortune paper) with him, as if to constantly be summoning it into his reality. Through this “like produces like,” A believes the paper in his possession (representing good fortune) will eventually produce what is predicted on the paper (actual good fortune). For A, he associates the paper with telling the future and keeps the fortune with him to invite the future to happen. He chooses to indulge in a sense of control or a kind of understanding over the world, where there is usually something wholly unpredictable. 

乖乖 the Taiwanese Snacks

Background:
The informant is a 21-year-old woman who lives in Taiwan. When asked about some folk beliefs that she knows, she told the collector about a superstition regarding a brand of Taiwanese snacks and machines.

Text:
Collector: Do you know any folk beliefs?

Informant: Oh yeah. This happened couple days ago in the office where I’m interning for. There was this copy machine that was always jammed and apparently the manager tried to fix it many times already. The machine was jammed again and after the manager fixed it, he asked me to grab a bag of 乖乖 (kuai kuai) from convenience store.

Collector: Can you describe what 乖乖 is and why did he ask you to do so?

Informant: 乖乖 is this snack made out of corn i think. It has many different flavors and it’s really popular in Taiwan. As of why he told me to do that, it’s because the brand name 乖乖 means to be obedient. He put the 乖乖 on top of the copy machine to tell the machine to behave. I know a lot of other occupations do the same thing. I’ve seen bus drivers, scientists, and some stores on top of their cash registers.

Analysis:
The Taiwanese folk belief regarding the snack 乖乖 and machines is a form of homeopathic magic. By putting something that literally says “behave” on top of something that is not behaving, the performer of the magic attempts to change the current status of a machine according to his or her want, which is for the machine to stop malfunctioning. Besides magic, reception theory proposed by Stuart Hall can be utilized to further analyze the popular superstition in Taiwan. 乖乖 is a snack that is meant to be eaten; however, the consumers of the snack give a new meaning towards the product that the producer never intended for it to be. For more information and picture reference, please read this BBC article.

German Wart Treatment

Nationality: German
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Westergellersen, Germany
Performance Date: 4/10/22
Primary Language: German

Context:

HH is a retired former housewife who lives in Westergellersen, a small village in northern Germany.

Main Piece:

“Knüpfe soviele Knoten in ein Band wie du Warzen hast. Dann vergrabe das Band bei Mondschein unter einem Stein. Wenn der Faden zersetzt (verfault) ist werden die Warzen verschwunden sein.”

Translation:

Tie as many knots into some string as you have warts. Then bury the string under a rock by moonlight. When the string has decomposed, the warts will have disappeared.

Analysis:

This practice is a folk magic ritual that utilizes the Homeopathic principle. The knots on the string represent the warts, and the decomposition of the string metaphorically decomposes the warts along with it. An interesting note here is the need to perform the burying part of the ritual under moonlight. The moon is a highly magical and superstitious symbol in many societies, and is widely associated with magic, and especially women’s magic (though the moon is a masculine noun in the German language).

The rock under which the string must be buried does not seem to bring anything specifically auspicious or magical, but could serve multiple other purposes. First, placing the string beneath a rock would help speed up the decomposition process, as it creates an environment where organisms can more easily break down the string than if it was in an open space. Next, the rock weighs down the string and keeps it in place. If the string is anchored beneath a heavy object, it’s less likely to move around due to environmental factors like weather, or be taken and moved by an animal. Finally, placing the string beneath a certain rock makes the burial site easy to identify, which is helpful for tracking the decomposition of the string.

Mexican Curses and Eggs

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

CONTEXT/BACKGROUND:
The interlocutor (JG) has many relatives living in Mexico and is a first-generation Mexican American themself. The following describes one example of Mexican superstitions regarding witchcraft and curses, along with the use of eggs in magic.

DESCRIPTION: (told over the phone)
(JG):”One more–I’m so sorry! Okay, so I think like, 10 years ago? My uncles, they work in like, construction stuff, they were remodeling my grandma’s house and cleaning up her basement, uh… and as they were looking around, they found another little charm! But this one was directed at my grandfather, and it had a little coin which is a sign for a money curse. Someone cursed my grandfather, basically. And that curse, we believe, went down to my dad as well. I’m not sure if to my aunt. But-But my dad…something about male inheritance? I don’t know. So someone cursed my grandfather. Somehow that charm got into my grandma’s backyard, which is weird.

But basically, it was while we were living here [their current home], it was a few months ago. It was after we discovered…because all of this stuff, we were talking about a few months ago, like specifically my dad being cursed…I forgot… Oh! It was because my grandfather passed away. So we started talking about things relating to him and somehow the curse came up.

We realized there was a possibility that my dad could also be cursed. My dad, no, my mom did this thing with an egg. So eggs are like, symbolic of purity, I don’t know. Eggs can see the bad stuff. Eggs can tell the energy. So like, when I was younger I used to have a lot of nightmares, so my grandma blessed me with an egg and it cured my nightmares, that type of stuff. So my mom did this thing with an egg to my dad, just to see if he was cursed, to see if there was bad energy surrounding him because of what happened. So she did that.

She meant to put the egg under the bed and he was supposed to sleep over it and in the morning she’d crack the egg and the color of the yolk would say something. So in the morning, she cracked the egg and the yolk came out black. Like, blackish-reddish. Like the egg was completely dark. So that was added evidence for why my family thinks my dad is cursed.”

FINAL THOUGHTS/OBSERVATIONS:
I definitely think that this specific curse falls under the category of homeopathic magic since the coin is representative of a money curse. I find it interesting how people turn to magic to gain some sense of power over others, putting their faith in something bad happening to their target even if the effect they want never comes. It’s difficult to wrap my head around feeling so powerless and desperate that one would need to turn to wish pain and misfortune onto others to feel better about their own circumstances.

I also liked JG’s explanation of the egg! It reminded me a lot of one of the discussions we had during the lecture, in which we talked about the meaning of eggs in many different cultural practices. In this case, JG’s explanation of the egg’s ability to detect dark energy fit perfectly under what we had discussed in class since eggs mean purity and life (among other things) across many different traditions.