In the company of witches

On the night of October 31 Cézár Abafi will be heading out to the countryside and dancing around an open bonfire with other witches to mark the festival of the dead, the main witches' Sabbat.
He of course looks nothing like the crones we expect witches to look like. A not-too-tall, roundish man with a full, dark beard and an aburt-dance of charm (he kisses every woman's hand in greeting), Cézár is "sacred leader" of the Hungarian Witches Federation (Magyar Boszorkányszövetség, MBSZ). It was in his Budapest apartment that a handful of self-proclaimed witches opened their first studio in 1991. The next yearthey registered ás an official church and since then their organizatiori has grown to 10,000 members, Their history has been marked with a lot of media attention and legal troubles, most recently a charge of tax evasion brought against them by the government. Against wide-spread accusa-tions of finart-cial hocus-pocus and
satanic worship, the Hungarian Witches Federation have stuck to their right to conduct Their privat affairs and rituals as they please. With their combination of New Age philosophy and entrepreneurial and media know-how, they are testing the limits of Hungary's evolving democracy and free-rnar-ket economy.

THE BUNING TIMES

in the growing body of academic literature on European witchcraft, there seems to be one general agreement: there ain't no such thing as a witch. instead scholars trace the origins of magic and witch mythology, through its ancient roots in the astrology practicing magi of Persia, who were known to fifth century Greeks to the common medieval tradition of magic herbs, and onwards. So there were no witches, per se, merely women (and sometimes man) who, because they gathered mushrooms in the forest or because their neighbor didn't like the way they iooked at him one morning, became scapegoats for a society's tensíons. If you've seen Arthur Miller's The Cmcible, you know the deal.
During the upswing on vvilch trials during the latter half of the 15th century, hundreds of people were accused as witches, tor-tured and burned at the stake. Why the majority of them were women is a question that many scholars have tried to answer, with no defini-tive result.

HUNTING IN HUNGARY

had its share of witch hunts, mostly during the 16th-18th cen-turies. for example, Mrs. István Molnár of Szeged was accused in 1731 of bewitching a child. in 1758 Mária Oláh of Hódmezővásárhely con-fessed under torture that she went under the guise of a cat and had taken the side boné out of another woman. Hungarian witches were blamed for everything from sexual molestation to stealing newborns to causing people to dance.A more accepted magician figure in Hungary was the taltos, a "descen-dent of the pre-Christian Hungarian shaman," according to Éva Pécs, associate professor at Janus Pannonius Univ-ersity in Pécs. "A witch is someone who can harm, while a taltos was a very important person in the village for curing people," says Pécs.
With his skills in heal-ing, finding treasure, and counteracting bewitch-ment, the táltos clearly had to walk a fine line to avoid being accused as a witch himself, and some taltoses were charged.