The Fairy Seers of eastern Serbia: Seeing Fairies—Speaking through Trance

The fairy-seers of southeastern Europe are (mostly) women who are able to communicate with women-like creatures from the supernatural world. Sometimes the fairy-seers induce a trance state in order to establish communication with these creatures. During their communication with the fairies the fairy-seers can prophesy about future events. The fairy-seers can also deliver messages to the living on behalf of their deceased relatives. Similarly, they advise about how to heal an ill individual or the treatment of that individual can proceed after consulting the fairies. These illnesses are usually a form of so called “fairy-illness”—a disorder that has its origins in a curse or a spell wrought by fairies offended by that individual. In the narratives of fairy-seers, fairies are described as three young, beautiful longhaired women, dressed either in white or in black. The women who can see and speak to the fairies have been chosen by them early on, usually in their childhood or adolescence. By dancing and singing on special days of the orthodox Christian calendar, these women fall into a trance state and then communicate with “their sisters,” as these invisible creatures are called by these women. The fairy-seers are called numerous names in various languages across southeastern Europe. The semantic field of these varying designations is far from identical: sometimes the seers need not enter into a trance to see them, sometimes they fight (nocturnal) battles in the sky to ensure good crops for their region, where they live and work as any normal human being. But there is one common denominator to all of them: they undergo a process of initiation (prompted by these creatures) and the invisible creatures with whom they communicate are females. I choose to use this term in an attempt to cover and to depict a vast range of more or less similar phenomena across the Balkans with an English term, with the goal of creating an “umbrella term” in the English language (nowadays a lingua franca) for working purposes.