The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia

by W. F. Ryan vii + 504 pp.

The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia. By W. F. Ryan. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 504. Index, bibliography, illustrations. $65.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In The Bathhouse at Midnight, the most recent volume of the series Magic in History, W. F. Ryan presents the most extensive examination and description of Russian magical belief published to date in English. He takes the whole of Russian history as his timeframe, and thus his book presents the sources and practices for Russian magical and supernatural belief from the earliest sources in Kievan Rus' to current trends in post-Soviet Russia. But, even though he ranges widely in his description of Russian magic, Ryan tends to focus on the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the period for which, because of the work of Russian folklorists, the greatest number of source materials exist for study.

A sense of the breadth of Ryan's coverage can be gleaned from his chapter titles. After a brief "Outline History," he moves on to cover "Popular Magic," "Wizards and Witches," "Popular Divination," "Signs, Omens, Auguries, Calendar Predictions," "Predictions from Dreams and the Human Body," "Spells, Curses and Magic Prayers," "Talismans and Amulets," "Materia Magica," "Texts as Amulets," "Magic of Letter and Number," "Geomancy," "Alchemy and the Virtue of Stones," "Astrology--The Byzantine Tradition," and "Astrology--Post Byzantine Influences." After these fourteen chapters, Ryan closes the book with a survey of "Magic, the Church, the Law, and the State," in which he describes the attitudes of Russian political and religious cultural institutions toward popular and folk versions of magic.

Ryan's approach to his material is historical and descriptive--there is little theorizing about the nature of the materials he is studying. He does not separate learned, popular, and folk traditions of magic, recognizing rightly that there is an interaction of these traditions that must be attended to if the supernatural and magical aspects of a tradition are to be understood. This leads him to consider texts from a variety of sources--literary, historical, and folkloric--as well as from different classes in Russian society (for, as Ryan understands, folk traditions can be found in all aspects of society). In addition to showing the commonalities of belief among the various classes and periods in Russia, Ryan's attention to the historical roots of Russian magical and supernatural beliefs--including their relation to broader European traditions--allows him to demonstrate the movement of ideas about magic from many cultures. For example, investigating the influence of Byzantine, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic traditions, for instance, permits Ryan to demonstrate continuity between Russian beliefs (often thought of as different from those of the rest of Europe) and other European beliefs about magic and the supernatural.

The Bathhouse at Midnight (the title comes from a Russian belief that this is the best time and place for magic) is an excellent study and sourcebook of Russian supernatural and magical beliefs that should be read by anyone working with Russian supernatural belief, with the comparative study of belief--whether Slavic, European, or Indo-European--or with Christian folk religion.

David E. Gay
Indiana University, Bloomington