‘I love gathering stories,’ Kadrié said. ‘Stories and plants. The crazier, the better. Cos life is crazy.’

  Life is crazy and almost anything is tolerable, except saying goodbye to those you love.

  ‘The day our daughter got married,’ Kadrié said, ‘her father carried her from our house to the bottom of the street where her sweetheart waited. That’s the tradition.’

  He put his daughter down next to her fiancé and said: ‘Stay with us another day, darling.’

  Kadrié’s tears fell again. ‘And she said: Daddy, I have to go. It’s time.’

  Kadrié began to sing an old song to stop herself crying:

  ‘Don’t cry, mother, don’t weep, father.

  My time has come to give my heart away.

  My sweetheart leads the dance.’

  The thing about giving away a daughter is that she will live in another’s house. Whereas, the son stays with you and you can control him for evermore. That’s why the archaic gelina ritual in Ribnovo is celebration and mourning in one, and only women participate. Because Demeter loses control of her daughter Persephone and has to face herself for the first time.

  ‘We have two daughters. You know from the start that you’ll be left with nothing,’ Kadrié said.

  The liquid sloshed in the jar. Her daughter lived next door and she saw her every day, but it wasn’t about that. It was about her own entrapment – she too had walked from her parents’ door to her sweetheart’s door in a straight line. Or worse, been carried by her father. Up and down the same village street, when she had a voice and a heart that contained the world.

  Almost all the women I met in The Birches were taking tranquilisers or anti-depressants, or both. There were a lot of lonely women. And men. Healing and ailing were a major channel of self-expression because other channels were severed.

  A girl from The Birches married in Kornitsa down the road and as soon as she gave birth, her mother and grandmother fell gravely ill. Driven by guilt, the girl left her husband and returned with the baby. The two women recovered at once. Stories like these were common. Illness as communication is involuntary magic. To become ill and force change on your environment is even more remarkable than making someone else ill. You don’t need a ball of hair or a spell. All you need is to harness the desperate base material of your own unconscious. It is the power of the powerless.

  This hobbling of the wild woman is part of the Pomak trauma. No: of all human trauma. It is our shared illness. It’s just that for the Pomaks, it had gone on longer. People here had experienced total loss at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, only a generation later, they were stripped of their land and animals and of the right to feed themselves. Then their millennial forests were cut down and they were made to work the tobacco fields and bombed with poison. Then they were stripped of their names and their clothes. No wonder they held on to their children and slowly strangled them. It’s all they could do to survive.

  I thought of my two grandmothers. They were very different, but they shared one thing: They were vital, wildishly creative women not suited to a life of conformity, yet that was the only life available to them. They were most alive outdoors and when writing poems, songs, plays and letters, and when being immersed in their inner ecologies. My Danubian grandmother, a German language teacher, was terrific at cards, the accordion, singing, rhyming couplets and backgammon. My Macedonian grandmother, a radio journalist, was a talented writer and a great cook. I sensed that they were gasping for air in the pressure cooker of their marriages and duties. My maternal grandmother expressed her injuries through terminal illness and early death, and my paternal one – through chronic illness relieved by two mercies: valerian and widowhood.

  When I see that my house is full of drying nettles, that my spare bed is covered in rose petals, my cupboards full of dark jars with tinctures and syrups, and my garden full of garlic, I see my paternal grandmother’s house. She would take an Easter egg dyed red and draw the cross over my front, for health, with it. She was an everyday herbalist, a self-soother in whose veins ran the grape juice of her ancestors and something of that was passed on to me. It could not be taken away when all else was.

  Another day in The Birches, I visited an old woman known as Auntie Salé. She looked staggeringly like a witch. A charming witch with a hooked nose and wily eyes. She had a more cryptic style than Kadrié’s mother.

  ‘The water’s from you. You turn it on, you turn it off,’ she said, and poured water into a clay bowl.

  My fate was up to me.

  ‘Once the water’s in the dish, you must be quiet,’ she said.

  She began to circle me with the egg, mouthing silent prayers until I felt sleepy. Her clay dish had a greenish glaze. This was the real deal. The green tinge of the bowl is a classic in nature magic.

  In Ireland, green is a nod to the ‘little body’ fairy leprechaun. Here, green stood for samodiva, the wood nymph. And just as the little fairy out on the moor can suddenly turn out to be a giant, there is nothing sweet about the samodiva. She is a shapeshifter.

  Ancient writers of the Mediterranean invoke ‘Thrake the nymph’ who could heal with one hand and injure with the other. In her chthonic guise, she holds serpent-whips and makes people go insane with love or fear. In her luminous guise, she is a healer and protector of wild animals. In Thracian votive plates she is Artemis with deer and eagles. Her name and her knowledge was passed on to those early south-eastern Europeans, the Thracians. In votive images and coins, Thracian divinities are shown holding a flowering branch. I was stunned to see a second-century coin where Rodopi the Artemisian goddess-priestess holds a sprig of immortal flower. Our friend the silivryak again.

  The samodiva is invoked in healing spells as ‘mother samodiva’ or ‘sister samodiva’ and needs to be sweetened with honey and elf bread like Kadrié’s. The samodivas are dormant in winter and enter the human world on spring equinox. They cover their heads with a veil called syanka (shadow), because they are mistresses of shadow. And mistresses of wilderness. Their solitude is sacred, it’s explicit, no excuses for trespassers. Samo-diva means ‘lone wild woman’.

  Shepherds and luckless men like Actaeon who stumble into a samodiva circle become enchanted, then confused, then die in a freak accident. Rarely, a samodiva and a mortal man can have a relationship and even a child, but the child invariably dies.

  All women magi, priestesses, witches, folk healers, mystics and hermits are heiresses of Thrake the samodiva. The first wildish woman. And just as the samodivas had their territory, so the healers of The Birches had theirs. People went to some healers and not others.

  I found Auntie Salé on a bench outside her house with two other women who were knitting. Three fates spin the yarn of life … Auntie Salé wore loud red shalvars with bold flowers and a matching apron. She instantly knew I had come ‘on business’ and rose to open the gate. The other women knew it too.

  ‘Come,’ she said and led me into the twilight of her kitchen. She sat on the bed made up with a furry blanket and I sat next to her. This is where she cooked and slept, next to the iron stove, though there were other rooms. But the witch likes her kitchen best.

  She broke the egg in the dish and put a thread from my scarf in it, rolled it into a small ball and mouthed mantras over the bowl without a sound.

  She used a special book of 360 prayers from the Koran, published in Bulgarian by a regional foundation for Islamic enlightenment. A book that would be good to have at hand.

  Afterwards, I learned that she had seen the death first of her granddaughter, then of her daughter through illness. She had nursed them both and walked with their bodies wrapped in linen up the cemetery hill, steep like a Golgotha.

  ‘You have a nice road ahead of you,’ she said. ‘With small obstacles only.’

  I stared at the bowl. The thread bobbed around the egg. The egg shone like a sun in the sea of life.

  I found the egg in alchemical drawings. In Hermetic Androgyne, a famous sixteenth-century painting by an unknown artist, the winged hermaphrodite undergoing the work that will purify them holds a mirror in one hand and an egg in the other. The egg has been with us for so long, it practically hatched us. Magi saw the egg as the totem of life itself, containing all four elements: earth (shell); air (membrane); fire (yolk) and water (the white). The egg is the chalice. If you do the work, the philosopher’s egg is transmuted into the philosopher’s stone. Or you can just enjoy a session with Auntie Salé.

  But she’ll make you sip from the slimy egg water three times. From different parts of the rim.

  Because they had lived embedded in nature, the people of the valley had remained close to nature’s self-generating myths. Where everything is alive, the human being has no more agency than other beings. This is why illness and other problems are seen as coming from without, not within. But that is because no clear line is drawn between the two. And there is no clear line except in our heads.

  The Greek-derived word esoteric means inner, something understood by the few. Exoteric is outer, something understood by all. The esoteric becomes exoteric through what we call events. Auntie Salé took her job seriously. She knew that the esoteric is always here, while the exoteric is only briefly here. She knew that she dealt in eternity.

  She dealt in the art of turning the inside out and bringing the outside in without waiting for events. Circling, the evil eye, curses, contamination – they were all caused by other people or by djinns or samodivas. In short, ‘outers’. The outer is an archaic concept that goes back to the spirits known as εξωτικός, exotic ones – ‘from the outside’. But there was a deeper insight here: illness and trouble was seen as environmental and this is why these women diagnosed it and treated it like that – environmentally.

  Theosophists perceived demons, phantoms and spectres as ‘energetic detritus’ from the astral bodies of humans. According to Rudolf Steiner, we live with them on Earth because we have produced them ourselves over the millennia, through ugly speech, thought and action.

  Auntie Salé poured the water carefully into a jar, and added sugar and twelve dried ‘herbies’ from some crates under her bed. I was to anoint myself with it for three days. What were the herbies?

  She shook her head. ‘No.’ They were a secret, and after I threw out the liquid, I spent some time drying them to identify them. Some were picked wild, others in her garden.

  I asked who came to see her.

  ‘Everybody,’ she said simply.

  Or rather those who didn’t go to the competition, like Kadrié’s mother. People came to them for sterility, stress, family problems, love problems, illness diagnosed and undiagnosed, money and neighbour issues. In short, everything.

  ‘But you’ll not hear a squeak from me,’ she added.

  She had not taken the Hippocratic Oath, but her trade was older than Hippocrates. Silence had value in nature healing. You must keep silent when you ‘sweeten’ yourself and the demons. You must walk in silence to the plant you need. There is ‘unspoken water’ – water taken from one, three, seven or nine springs, placed in a vessel and anointed for your ritual, keeping silent all the way. Science is now studying how water reacts to its environment and especially how music and speech change its composition. It’s astonishing to know that the same water in your glass can be in different cellular states, depending on its ambience. The natural mind has known this for some time.

  Going further, there is ‘undrunk water’ – water from a spring that no mortal has drunk from before. Only animals and samodivi.

  The problem with magic is not that it doesn’t work. It is that power games are an integral part of it and that its belief system is biased. Medicine emerged from alchemy’s noble attempt to marry the subjective and the objective, matter and mind, inner and outer, and in this way, to lift humanity out of superstition and senseless pain.

  ‘The aim of all true Adepts is to help relieve a suffering mankind in its physical and spiritual misery,’ wrote an American alchemist in the 1970s.

  But like magic, the bias of modern medicine went too far in the opposite direction. Like magic, it assumes too much and has many blind spots. These blind spots come from its many uncouplings, one of which is the uncoupling of psyche from soma, the soul-spirit from the body. Another is the uncoupling of one organ system from another, and another is the uncoupling of the human being from her environment. A human being is eighty per cent water, held by the vessel of the body, but still highly mutable. After a visit to the GP, who can’t afford to take meaningful note either of your mind or your body, let alone the connection between them, because she is stressed by the need to tick boxes in the allotted time, you take a pill and hope for the best until next time. In the same way, you take the jar with the egg and hope for the best. But you have no idea, you are a child sent home by the teacher and you have learned nothing.

  One way or another, you gave some of your power to the witch with the greenish bowl, to the specialist in the white surgical mask.

  Folk medicine and Western medicine are at extreme ends of the human-environmental spectrum. Scientific materialism has no soul and magic has no science. Both of them discourage you from taking ownership of your well-being through knowledge. Both of them keep you dumb and dependent. Western medicine does it like a squeamish patriarch with a mask on, and magic medicine does it like a manipulative matriarch, breathing down your neck. I’ve heard that the shamans of the Amazon are locked at all times in terrific territorial wars with one another through mind games, poisons, plants, psychic attacks, even murders. Magic pulled you into a personal power ring with side effects as unpleasant as those of antibiotics. Although, at least antibiotics are impersonal when they wipe out your stomach flora.

  In his monumental study of cosmos and psyche, Carl Jung demonstrated scientifically that the symbols with which the human psyche spontaneously engages are autonomous entities. That is, they exist outside the psyche. The four-part mandala of which the cross is a product, and so is the rosette and the eight-petalled flower and the twelve zodiacs of the astro-wheel, the snake, the spiral, the egg-sphere, and the triangle. These symbols are the basic keys to what Chinese alchemy calls the holographic universe. And here we are, in Auntie Salé’s kitchen, with an egg yolk floating in a bowl. The egg is a microcosm, so am I, so is her kitchen, so is this mountain, this Earth and this galaxy.

  ‘I know people’s little soul and will take it with me to the grave,’ said Auntie Salé in conclusion and rose to see me off, jar in hand.

  Vessel in hand, she will keep seeing off her children till there is nobody left to see.

  ‘This is a true story about a bear and a girl,’ said Kadrié just before we reached the bridge. ‘Told to me by my neighbour baba Maria who remembered it clearly.’

  It happened in threshing season. That’s when the wheat was beaten from the chaff with the help of horses. Families climbed into the fields above the Ranger to bivouac for a few weeks. While they slept under the stars, a bear dragged a girl away. They looked for her in vain until a few months later, they found a cave whose entrance was closed with a rock. They moved the rock and inside the cave was the girl. Naked and pregnant.

  ‘Without a single scratch on her body.’

  A few months later, she gave birth.

  ‘To a bear cub,’ said Kadrié. ‘Then a second one. When she looked down and saw the second one, it was too much. Her heart burst.’

  ‘And what of the bear cubs?’

  ‘The bear cubs ran into the woods. But the girl’s heart did burst!’

  ‘It’s a great story,’ I said.

  ‘Not just a great story, a true story. Baba Maria remembered it clearly.’

  This is a take on the samodiva loving a mortal man. Except here, the bear cubs survive and reclaim their forest. But the feral cannot survive. The girl is rejected by the collective because she is no longer one of them. And neither will they let her go back to the forest. So they kill her.

  Like Gyulten, Kadrié was a wildish woman who had been squeezed into a doll’s house, given a little shoe that didn’t fit and caused constant pain, but she grinned through it all and that was part of her greatness. These women’s talents had been sacrificed to the unconscious collective hunger – a beast that lived above the village and took its young people generation after generation.

  Kadrié had first served the needs of her parents, then of her children and for the past twenty years, her husband had worked as a builder in France. She was like a widow but without the freedom. She cleaned her in-laws’ sewing factory after hours, this woman who could have been an obstetrician or a professional singer.

  Though she hadn’t escaped, she’d found an outlet – in song. She was part of the revival of the female voices of The Birches. One voice led to two or three others, weaving a flying carpet of sound and story on which you could briefly escape. She started singing while stringing tobacco, which is how all folk art is born – out of threshing, sewing, harvesting, stringing, shepherding, milking and picking plants. Physical work that made people want to sing for the soul.

  It is the soul that must remain wild, like those bear cubs.

  We reached the bridge. There was rubbish on the river banks. If the djinns fed on refuse, they surely thrived here. Kadrié held the jar above the railing and said with steely intent, pointing a finger at the river as she spoke:

  Little water

  Little sister

  You that come

  From mountains

  From hilltops

  Where the samodivi gather

  Where the samodivi eat

  And feast

  You take all

  You wash all

  Take the evil eye

  The bad spell

  The envy

  The catastrophe