Călușul
Männerbund
Ion Ghinoiu says Călușul is an Indo-European horse god. They used to have this “mysteries” around the spring equinox in tune with the horse mating season and stuff. It got pushed later in the calendar to make space for the Resurrection. The ceremonies are spanning over a week and symbolically fast forward through the hole life of the Căluș.
Călușarii are these guys, having a clear hierarchy in their group, enacting these mysteries. Healing dances, a ritual dramatization of fertilization. Their leader is called Vătaful.
He must be a man with exceptional moral qualities and virtues of character, familiarized with all the Mysteries of the Căluș, knowledgeable in incantations, charms and spells which he is not allowed to reveal to anyone, except the future leader. The transmission of the position is done from leader to leader, constituting in itself a form of inheritance. - Gail Kligman, Călușul
They also have a second important character in The Mute. In some regions, he is the de facto leader. He gets to take this role by merit. He is forbidden to speak during the ritual. There are old accounts when he got the death sentence for talking. He is wearing a old-man or goat mask and is brandishing a wooden phallus that is fertilizing childless wives just by touching them. All the paraphernalia and the dance moves of the Călușari is suggesting they are enacting a divine herd. It’s almost all horse related. The Mute has a ‘Flag’ and a ‘Beak’. The flag might be even a branch with fresh leaves, the beak is made by sticking a wooden bird’s beak or animal head on a stick, covered with a rabbit’s fur and healing plants. Sometimes it’s the head of a horse. It can even be a human head. Made of wood, of course. It might be hidden in a sack and not shown to any normies as they can get extremely ill if seeing it. This ‘Beak’ was seen as something devilish, more feared and respected than the Christian cross. At the end of all ceremonies, they bury it in some secret place to retrieve it the next year.
Some sequences of the ritual are performed in secrecy, preserving their mystery. They start secluded from the public, raising the flag — the Oath, and end it with the Beak-breaking. The middle part, the dancing, is set in the village, seen by everybody, in relation with the crowd. On “the biggest Orthodox community in the world” website Ionuț Semuc states that
If we look, however, at the admission into the restricted group of the Căluşari through the lens of the ceremonial sequences that consecrate this fact, the Raising of the Flag and the Oath, we perceive that it is primarily a matter of an initiation of the new members. Before the ceremony the participants are profane. They must change their state. For this, rituals are necessary to introduce them into the sacred world, to begin the immersion of man in the sacred time of the festival, as Mircea Eliade remarks. The profane person is prepared for the sacred act, torn from common life and introduced step by step into the sacred world of the gods.
Performing in liminal spaces and times in order to be clearly distinguished from the other people, they are fighting the domination of the Ielele, the feminine magic group, protecting the village from their chthonic forest spells. They form a band of brothers, a Männerbund, living together, abiding by rules, losing their individuality while the ceremonies are ongoing. Big emphasis on purity and secrecy. there are echoes of worshipping ancient divinities, later associated with the Devil, so being part of this was unacceptable of a Christian priest. But those echoes are fainter and fainter.
The healing aspect is nicely summed up in that orthodox article mentioned above:
The Căluşari did not earn their reputation because they healed many sick people, but they healed many sick people because they are Căluşari.
So we have these men working together using masks, phallic symbols, beaks, rabbits, goats to heal and protect from evil spells. Usually there is a Christian overlay, a saint’s name imposed on some older tradition. Not this time. Instead, I suspect the horse theme is an old overlay obscuring something even older. The Sun and Horse elements came riding and fought local forest spirits. Then they wore their skinsuit, now horse-themed. Kept the healing and dancing, dressed it in the new uniform. A bit puzzling how this ostensibly pagan thing is accepted and praised and not replaced with some saint story by current christians. Might be because it is still in the Platonic frame, even if a little bit older. Some of the really old elements are still there betraying an ancient ‘something else’. The Flag and the Beak are the grandkids of the Thyrsi. Rurik spoke of this:
They are nigh indistinguishable from the staffs that you associate with shamans from all other primordial cultures found around the world that never had a Plato come into their society and ban these sorts of practices ... at least until much later.
Vasile Lovinescu would probably consider the horse layer an Atlantean relic, with the horizontal movement, the Sun, while the older Hyperborean nugget preserves the northern forest elements, the bird’s beak, the trace of vertical movement. Just as the classic Greek gods are still low-key ruling somehow in our Christian world, being mentioned and praised for defeating the Titans a.k.a. the indigenous population divinities, the Devil. We will get to Ielele, the girl band nemesis of the Călușari at the end of this year, in December. All in due time.
In Coliere V1, this is ΠΕΡΙΠΈΤΕΙΑ (Adventure). E(4,11) [x . . x . . x . . x .]. One step and three longer or higher jumps. Ba-Bam! Bam! Bam!
Călușul is an initiation ritual, an adventure from which one profane returns as an initiate. He goes beyond and returns enriched. It entails some jumping around, some cardio maybe. Be the Mute for a week. Make that spring week a microcosm of the whole adventure of life.
Get Born, Jump, Die!
And keep your mouth shut.