The fairy seers of Eastern Serbia: seeing fairies—speaking through trance
Abstract
"The fairy-seers are called numerous names in various languages across southeastern
Europe. The semantic field of these varying designations is far from identical: sometimes the
seers need not enter into a trance to see them, sometimes they fight (nocturnal) battles in the sky
to ensure good crops for their region, where they live and work as any normal human being. But
there is one common denominator to all of them: they undergo a process of initiation (prompted
by these creatures) and the invisible creatures with whom they communicate are females. I
choose to use this term in an attempt to cover and to depict a vast range of more or less similar
phenomena across the Balkans with an English term, with the goal of creating an “umbrella
term” in the English language (nowadays a lingua franca) for working purposes."--Page 53.
Citation
Oral Tradition, 32/1 (2018):53-70
Rights
OpenAccess.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.