Folk spiritualistic fortune-telling in the 20th century (table-turning and circle with letters)

Abstract

The article investigates transformation of spiritualist rituals that functioned in the 20th century in a heterogeneous social environment: in popular urban culture, in peasant and Cossack communities. The data comes from various sources: diaries, memoirs, autobiographical prose of participants in spiritualist sessions, periodical publications, folklore and ethnographic works, feld research materials from various regions. Spiritualist rituals (conversation with a spirit through table-turning or a circle with letters) are usually used in urban and rural culture as New Year or occasional divination; they become a kind of family tradition. Analysis of the “technical side” of these rites makes it possible to clarify the genesis of some peasant fortune-telling, to reveal the diversity of folk variants of spiritualist divination, to show their “shifts” towards children's “call for spirits”. It appears that rural spiritualist fortune-telling is more variable than urban ones, possibly because of its interaction with various living forms of calendarical, love and occasional divination. Beliefs concerning the magical power of written words and signs, as well as the traditional ways of “communication with spirits” (demons of space) could also be the factors which infuence the adaptation of urban spiritual rites to the peasant tradition.