The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

M. D. of Sirbi, Maramures, Rumania,



"One does it with coal. You pour water from a bucket into a clean vase. You have drawn it from a river like this (she makes a gest), in the sense of the running water. You come back home. You take from the stove nine pieces of coal that you put into the vase. One says that if somebody has the evil eye, the coal pieces fall to the bottom, except one that remains at the surface. It is the one that is under a spell. Then, you say the incantation while stirring the water with a knife like this (she shows me), you turn the knife all around. Then you say the incantation nine times while holding the knife in its sheath (see the text of the incantation in 31 verses, in Rumananian and French in the book cited below). While you are making the incantation, there in the water, you trace a cross like this with the knife and you turn around it nine times. Then you come back home with the water, without speaking with anybody on the way (...)".

How not to see under the Rumanian word strigoi a very old Greek word, strigx, gen. striggos, that designates the eagle, this bird of prey with a strident cry known to break the bones of the small game that it eats and whose French name comes from the latin ossifraga, "breaking the bones" ? As for the other word that designates these figures of the next world evoked in the incantation, muroi or moroi, how not to think of another Greek word full of meaning, the moros of Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, the fatal destiny, the bad lot of some heroes fated to die. From a linguistic point of view the strigoi would thus be this figure of the next world whose cries freeze with terror those who hear them by night. And the moroi would be another figure, whose action would consist in bringing this fatal destiny on the one who meets it.