Magic and Folk Medicine: Incantations in the Ledger of Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios

Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou of the University of Cyprus examines magical symbols and healing incantations written in the personal property ledger that Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios began on New Year's Day 1794. The lecture is given in Greek.

Immediately behind the title page of the ledger, beneath the Christian cross, Hadjigeorgakis recorded a personal talisman composed of cryptic letters, numbers, and symbols such as the pentagram and a triangular amulet, intended to protect himself and his property. Alongside these symbols, he copied in his own hand three healing charms or incantations.

The first incantation is against the bite of the viper (koufi, Vipera mauritanica). Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou compares its incomprehensible words with similar formulas in Cypriot manuscripts, including the codex of the contemporary scholar Petrakis Karydis, and with accounts by foreign travellers and scholars such as Giovanni Mariti and Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. These sources describe hereditary priest-healers in Famagusta and a nearby village who treated snakebites from a distance by reciting formulas over water mixed with earth and giving it to the victim's messenger to drink. She explains that the obscure words in such charms derive from altered Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin divine names and invocations.

The second incantation is directed against fear (written as photia, which she suggests may be a misspelling of phobia) and against the plague. Folk belief in Cyprus held that fear allowed demonic forces to enter the body and caused jaundice, and she notes rituals for curing fear recorded up to 2016 in Akaki. Turning to the plague, she outlines the recurrent epidemics in Ottoman Cyprus, particularly those of 1760 in Nicosia and 1792, and quotes Hadjigeorgakis's correspondence with the Venetian consul Emmanuel Vassalo regarding a plague-infected ship. In addition to the written charm, Hadjigeorgakis sought Christian protection by dedicating an icon of Saint Charalambos with a supplicatory inscription to the parish church of Ayios Antonios.

The third incantation treats fever (thermi), primarily malaria, which was endemic around the marshes of Larnaca and Kition. She describes how the charm was written on paper to be tied to the patient's foot, alongside other folk remedies practiced by Christians and Turks on the island, and cites the folklorist Aglaia Bimbi-Papaspyropoulou on the continuity of written amulets from antiquity.

In the final part of the paper, Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou considers the relationship between magic, the Orthodox Church, and empirical medicine. Although Archbishop Philotheos issued a synodal letter excommunicating magicians in 1754, village priests continued to use magical books and formulas, and the Dragoman's ledger shows that the social elite shared these beliefs. She contrasts the magical snakebite charm in the ledger with the empirical medical treatments, such as ligatures, scarification, cauterisation, and emetics, recommended for viper bites by Archimandrite Kyprianos in his chronological history of Cyprus and by Mitrophanis of Machairas Monastery.