Animals

There are sacred object: the bead of a snake looks like an elementary heterophony because the sacrality expresses itself by it. It has mostly beneficent qualities although in the peasant's mind it belongs to another world and it appears in our world only by accident, therefore keeping it asks for much care and it also needs to be hidden from suspicious people. It is not worshiped as a stone or as consolidated foam (neither the peasants nor we can explain its chemical content) but it is worshiped for its quality as heterophony.


	Since any heterophony is also kratophony, an expression of power, the bead of the snake has the terrible power of keeping away the evil whatever its nature is.

That is why when the cow that is milked for the first time after she has brought forth, first the bead of the snake is needed. Thus not only the manna of the milk is safe but even the animal itself. When the bead of the snake is missing, other objects are used: needles of different sizes, silver wedding rings and silver coins. Each substitute has its exact role :one stings, another gathers; another pays ,and all together can do what the bead does.

The frog seems to have become not wanted. Its aspect or places where it lives establish several magic involvements. The witchcrafts related to the frog - as those related so the dead are dangerous .The frog is the very symbol of the curse and the doing ,that's why it is avoided on the road, like the black cat, chased away from the yard and if it has been found in the house, defending measures are immediately taken.
All the references to the frog are negative, with one exception. It is saved just for harming - to separate couples of lovers. The frog is thought to be able to clean the water and the ears of all

impurities and to be the first of all creatures able to cover a charm quarrel; but the frog is also the one who endangers the ears. It is said that you don't hear your name. If it has been uttered , you must spell your ears for them not to tingle.
       The superstitions related to the tingling of the ears are various. When your ears tingle either the devil slapped you or someone is speaking badly of you or you are announced of trouble. If your right ear tingles something bad will happen to you.
       Sometimes the devil shows up as a frog and then any exorcism for disease must be done. Other beliefs say that the frog males are knights of the wraiths and help them steal the manna of cows and the power of the people.
      It is said that the first man who got scab, got it from a frog. That's why the scab must be returned to the place where it has been probably cast and from where the frog took it. Therefore if the child or a grown-up has scab he is lubricated with a sort of mud and then goes to bed or is thrown in cow excrements or in slaked lime saying an exorcism for disease.
   The frog plays a major part in the popular healing practice although our informers are not very fond of this type of curing. If the husband is a drunken you catch the frogs after you have harvested the corn, (only the frogs from the cornfield are good), you wash them carefully and gather the water in a bowl, then you put some of the water in the drinker's meal and will stop him from drinking for good.
    Besides the frogs, on a secondary level there is the groundhog. If the husband drinks, you catch the groundhog from the ground and pour some drops of its blood in his drink or food.
The snake is treated indifferently. It is killed without fear according to the Biblical curse, although there are certain days of chasing away the snakes. Also the bats are displeasing to humans, yet they are useful for obtaining certain magical tools. These creatures have only one thing in common: all of them live in two different environments.
We cannot state the same thing about the mammals: the cat, the dog, the pig, and the horse. The fight between the dog and the cat is seen with negative effects. The dog and the cat must be put in a sack with traces of flour. You let them fight in there and then set them out shaking the sack and then separate them.
      The pig coveys in certain circumstances the dirt and the restlessness. A woman in our village had been beaten to blood by her husband till she said everything that she had done on him, as someone had told him when he was young she set him apart from his first wife, who was young and beautiful. The woman took from their house grains and closed them in a cloth; she threw the cloth knotted to the pigs and said:" Just how the pigs creak/ May their household creak".
    The horse is generally positive. It is respected because it seems to be the most intelligent from all the animals around. The horseshoes are used in magic purpose, as imitating the horse trampling, the evil can be chased away.
     The birds are not forgotten, as taking part in the magic inventory When you were in trouble with somebody you would take a black hen and throw it alive in fire after you had pierced it with needles or nails. Some, more merciful would cut it before, but this it not good for the charm, it is best to be alive.
    Aurel Condrea presents a series of magic remedies even in our district involving the black hen cut alive. Thus it heals wounds, is good against epilepsy, remotes the typhus. Refering to the black colour, the other meanings: "It is good to keep in your householding a black dog or a black cat or a black hen because they protect you from witchcraft. For the same purpose it is good to eat the first egg of black hen."
      Yet the most terrible witchcrafts are related to the hen, more exactly to the effects of the eggs lying. The charm is so dangerous that most of our informers avoid to speak about it.
      About the evil power of this practice Vasile Avram is speaking of in "The Constellation of Magic:" In this
report a more basic statement was offered to us by the talk between two old women in a house lying in the mountain part of the village Salistea de Sus . Laughing at first, urging one another to remember some of the charms they used to do when they were young, they got to serious talk. One of them related to us the way they used to exorcise with chicory and the other told about on neighbour who laid at her armpit for nine days an egg from a black hen, in order to get revenge on a woman who had done some evil charms on him. But she warned us that she was afraid of such things and wasn't too comfortable about telling them. She was speaking in such way as if she had been trying the same feelings as when it had happened. She said that the woman got mad after God knows what got out of the egg. She hadn't found her peace until she died somewhere in the valley of a stern at the margins of the village. The medical treatments were in vain and the preaching of the priest in the church the same. In vain was her staying in the monastery of Rohia from where the monks chased her away because the witchcraft made by Satan was more powerful then their prayers. She wandered on the fields, sheltered in deserted houses, begging to people for mercy,eating whatever she could get until God took her. Her son found afterwards on the bottom of the drawry box a small black box closed hermetically.He took some of the villagers' advice and threw it in the grave, without trying to see what it contained.