Vâlva
Not your ordinary völva
This is part of a yearlong series on the second edition of Colière, the Euclidian Non-Isochronous Rhythms card deck. Each card is a pretext to gloss over one item of Romanian mythology, anthropomorphize it, all aimed at easier visualizing and audiating one particular rhythm.
Today it’s about “Vâlva”.
According to the belief of Romanians preserved from ancestors, all things have a vâlvă. The field has her vâlvă, and the forest, and the waters, and the great wisdom has its own vâlvă.
— Maria Botiș Ciobanu, Crăiasa Codrului
"Vâlvă" is a folkloric term in Romanian tradition referring to a guardian spirit, protective essence, or spiritual guardian of things—each being, place, or concept is believed to have its own spiritual guardian or animating force.
Not quite the same, but this made me think of pneuma:
So, if pagan Pneuma is found in spirits and mountains and in the human body itself and naturally, without recourse to prayer or to theology, well then the “Holy Spirit” is recast as a boon of theurgy, the result of petitioning their deity for intervention. It is akin to banning people from collecting their own rainwater and then selling them bottled Coca-Cola of your own as a substitute, basically.
— Aristotle conspiracy III from the Primordial Truth series
Skipping over the supposed pneuma connection, the word Vâlva comes down from Old Church Slavonic влъхвъ, same root that gave us the völva. It signals a wizard, a sage, maybe a fortune teller. Besides these old meanings it ended up also naming a swindler or a crook in Bulgarian. Backing up, the word came down from yet another old Church Slavonic one meaning “to stutter”. Full circle with the Romanian word “Bâlbă”.
But Vâlva is not just a wizard or a sage, a fraud or a stutterer. It might well be all of them and more. It came to be a blanket term for most of the things I describe during this year-long trip through Romanian mythology.
Știma Apelor is alternatively called Vâlva Apelor. The accounts are similar, the stories are the same. Also the water-girls, Fetele de Apă are under the same umbrella.
Păstorul Lupilor is sometimes referred as Vâlva Lupilor. Including the story about the one guy snooping on him from the treetop ending up eaten by the wolves.
Muma Pădurii, the Mother of the Forest, is also known as, you guessed it, Vâlva Pădurii. Standard witch-type you might say.
Frequently there is mentioned one particular instance of Vâlva, connected to mining, underground treasure, gold. She is Vâlva Băii. Sometimes there is also one responsible for stone quarries, named Vâlva Pietrei.
The crops, the fields, food itself has its own Vâlva Bucatelor, akin to Drăgaica or Sânzienele. Any and all of these various Vâlve can be embodied by a beautiful woman, as well as by an old man, a dwarf, a hag or a child. They can appear as a cat, a hare, a lamb as well as a bird or a snake or dragon.
It is said that Vâlva can be black (bad) or white (good). Classic.
All of them are ultimately having to be dealt with by the people living in villages, when in constant relationship with nature, wilderness, the unknown. Vâlva is sometimes hungry, she askes for some attention, she is maybe guarding her home. The common thread is that she personifies those “other things”. This way people have a way to address that which is otherwise abstract. As hard it is to describe a concept like pneuma, it gets quite easy to grasp if illustrated. It is the equivalent of a picture book. The downside and the danger and probably what indeed happened is that with time we got stuck with multitudes of copies and interpretations of the pictures in that book, disconnected of their original meaning. That’s a witch or a werewolf or a vampire or a mermaid. Things that seem ancient but they are just wrappers of some real thing that got buried under layers and layers of illustrations. The territory got buried under the maps.
That’s when William S. Burroughs type collages attempted to pierce through all the layers to get to some solid ground. That’s when stuttering might come in handy. Glitching, randomizing, bringing chaos back to cut through the ever so thick crust of fossilized meaning we are couched in. Maybe that’s why stuttering is related with sages. Or am I romanticizing it as a former stuttering kid?
Vâlva is the Force. The animating spirit dwelling in everything. It’s interesting that leaving behind this old meaning, the word ended up designating “an uproar”, “tumult” or even “fame” in modern Romanian. It went the opposite direction than the Bulgarian one. And I think it still hides its original meaning. More than this, it might represent the lost Pneuma, the one ditched by Aristotle when he kept just the Body (Soma) and the Soul (Psyche).
Anyway, for now all we have is those old used candy wrappers found deep in the trash heap, we can smell them, try licking them in the hope we can get a taste of what was there.
One might think there is a connection with the word “vulva” as it sounds basically the same. But it’s just a false cognate. Vulva comes from Latin, meaning womb, envelope, covering. Its PIE root is *wel- / *welHu- ("to turn, roll, or wrap"). So again some kind of meta situation. No connection whatsoever, yet this word might end up wrapping the meaning of the other one, among the many other wrappers thrown over it.
Maria Ioniță’s book Cartea Vâlvelor is gathering lots of accounts of stories featuring vâlve still doing the rounds in the Romanian villages during the 1970’s. I could go on and translate a few, but it’s hard to pick and choose so I’ll stop it here. Here it is one that makes up for a good ending:
Regarding Vâlva… It was very long ago when there was talk about these things, and they were real. It’s very bad that now they start disappearing. Especially the youth can’t believe there once was a Vâlva Pădurii that made great miracles. Now they say it was the Devil, or whatnot…
— Marinca Ioan a lui Velicuț, 56 years old, from Muntele Rece, recorded on Jan. 20th 1979
(extract from Cartea Vâlvelor by Maria Ioniță, 1981, p.91)
It is ΚΥ͂ΜΑ in the other deck. This means Wave. E(4,9). Just as Vâlva, waves are in everything. We make waves. We radiate waves. We are waves. We wave. Coliere V2 could be named Vâlve. Even though the word “revolve” comes from the cognate family of “vulva”, it fits the looping, and the circles, and also the spirit side of this second deck. This is how we muddy the waters.
Four thumps and one breath.
Vâl-va, vâl-va!
or if you don’t know what to do about that “â”…
Mul-va, mul-va!
1-2-3-4!