Until now, in the Suzdal Territory, disputes over the reality of history that occurred in the middle of the 18th century with the Bishop of Suzdal and Yuryev, Porfiry, do not subside.
In 1754, at another sermon, Porfiry pointed to a certain Anisya Soldatova as the first witch in the village who was engaged in paganism and collected demons in her house. The bishop urged all his parishioners to stop communicating with the aforementioned Anisya, who was greatly offended by Porfiry.
The next night, Anisya, dressed all in white, appeared to Father Porfiry in a dream and promised to bring him down at all costs. After such words, the holy father only spat after the witch and crossed himself. When in the morning he went out onto the porch of the house, he suddenly felt how the earth gradually began to leave from under his feet. A few minutes later, he fell dead to the ground.
For four long months, the priest lay in a fever, on the verge between life and death. But his kind and caring parishioners came out. When he woke up, Father Porfiry told that all the time he was in oblivion, Anisya's green eyes haunted him, saying: “I will live it out and that's it! Before the people, he made him blame …”.
But, apparently, having replaced anger with mercy, the witch then took pity on Bishop Porfiry. The priest began to gradually recover, and after a few months he began to get out of bed, and then completely recovered.
Having recovered from a severe illness, Father Porfiry sent a petition to the Holy Government Synod for his transfer to another diocese. He motivated his unwillingness to remain in the Suzdal and Yuryevsky parishes by the evil caused by the witch Anisya, who wished to kill the holy father. The bishop's petition was not ignored. In the same year he was transferred to the Moscow diocese.
All documents that reveal the secrets of the mysterious stories about witches are kept in the court archives, and the most secret ones are in the Seventh Fund of the State Archives. Here is the very first document on witchcraft. It is dated 1654. In the same year, the tsar of all Russia issued the first decree, on the basis of which people endowed with state power could punish villagers who were engaged in devilry.
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Peter I was more loyal to sorcerers and witches than his predecessor. Only once was he forced to take severe measures against them. The soldiers who did not want to serve in the army persuaded their wives to turn to sorcerers. They had to start talking their guns so that they would not shoot, and pikes so they would not stab. The women complied with the request of their husbands. The tsar, having learned about such tricks, severely punished the perpetrators, as they said then, in a crime committed against the state.
Another story belongs to the same time. Once, one of the wealthy inhabitants of the city of Tomsk turned to the local governor with a complaint that someone had jinxed him: things were going badly, the son began to drink "bitter", his wife was squeezing out of the light with her grunts and reproaches. The governor only grinned at this in his mustache.
Not having received a proper answer from the governor, the townsman hired a spy-spy (a private investigator, as we would say now). It was he who had to find the person who sent damage to the layman. But he himself did not stay away from the case: he caught several suspects and began to torture them with his own hand. The city dweller beat and burned living people with fire only in order to find out who sent evil to his house.
The voivode, who did not tolerate any lawlessness in his city, stopped the lynching. But as soon as he intervened, he was suddenly struck by a serious illness, and such that for several months the governor could not even get out of bed. After recovering, he immediately sent a letter to the capital asking for help in sorting out such a difficult and confusing matter.
The answer to the letter of the governor was the arrival of the judges. However, they were also unable to resist the dark force. Immediately upon arrival in the city, all the judges collapsed in a violent fever. After a successful outcome of the disease, they randomly selected several people from the inhabitants of the city and declared them sorcerers. Then, having previously completed the procession, they ordered to flog the unfortunate, innocent people in front of all honest people. That was the end of it.
In the same Seventh Fund of the State Archives, you can find another story. Once, wanting to test the power of witchcraft, the clerk of the temporary worker Biron asked the village witch to bewitch her boss to the courtyard girl.
Lukerya, hired by a clerk to do household chores in the house, was far from beautiful, with pock marks on her face, and besides, she did not shine with intelligence. This is the kind of girl Biron had to fall in love with. The sorceress took the clerk's joke seriously and very soon Biron really felt a strange attraction to the ugly and stupid courtyard girl Lukerye.
However, the system of state investigation that was working then worked well. The detectives quickly found the culprit in that mysterious story. As a result, the joker-clerk was removed from office and put in prison. And the authorities decided to execute the sorceress, so that from now on she could not influence the life of the powerful of this world through demons.
An arsenal of various conspiracies of sorcerers and sorcerers was once represented by hundreds of texts. Currently, some of them have been restored, some came along with works of folklore, and some were lost forever. In addition to the conspiracies themselves, the witches had at their disposal medical recipes that helped people with various diseases, as well as whole ritual acts.
For example, in order to bring evil or death to an enemy, you need to take a gun and aim in the direction where the offender should be at that moment in time, and then pronounce the text of the conspiracy.
The sorcerer Yashka, well-known in Russia in the 18th century, told during interrogation that he sent evil to the enemy in this way: when he saw a person walking by whom he wished to lime, he lit a candle prepared in advance from special components (wax, a lizard's tail, a lock of victim's hair and earth from a trace bear).
Then he held the candle so that its flame seemed to burn the figure of the offender. If for some reason it was impossible to do this, then the sorcerer directed the smoke from a lighted candle at the person.
Yashka used a different ritual to heal a sick person. At night, when the nascent moon was visible in the sky, he poured water into a silver vessel. When the moon became full, the sorcerer caught her reflection in a vessel and drank all the water. It was believed that a person absorbed lunar energy, and therefore became strong.
Subsequently, already in the middle of the 20th century, it was possible to find out that this way to heal from an illness and get incredible strength was not invented by Russian healers. A similar ritual was performed in Ancient Babylon three thousand years ago.
However, those who argue that witchcraft were brought to medieval Russia by foreigners are wrong. As a refutation of such a hypothesis, one can only recall the text of "The Lay of Igor's Host", in which the author speaks of Prince Svyatoslav, who possessed witchcraft.
The prince-sorcerer was able to move from Kiev to Tmutarakan in just a day. But the distance is considerable - 900 kilometers! An ordinary mortal could hardly ever overcome such a path in one day.
The existence of sorcerers in Russia is also confirmed by other written monuments, primarily chronicles. It was they who told the descendants of the ancient Russians about several uprisings of pagan priests against the first Christians that took place in Novgorod, Kostroma and Vladimir.
There are cases when sorcerers, wishing to lure as many people as possible to their side, raised the dead from the land, and also healed the insane, that is, they cast out demons, as they said at that time.
In addition, the legend about the battle between the Polovtsian and Russian sorcerers still wanders across Russia. They say that the Polovtsian witches by the power of spells forced the dead to rise. The latter rode on invisible horses for several days, instilling fear and horror in the hearts of the Russian people.
However, after the Polotsk sorcerers intervened, the Polovtsian witches had to retire. Since then, they have never again appeared on Russian soil.
