Marika Moisseeff

Psychiatrist and anthropologist, Director of research at CNRS, France

WHAT THE BEWITCHING OF MY GRANDPARENTS’ COWS TAUGHT ME ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TRADITIONAL FRENCH PEASANTS AND OTHER-THAN-HUMANS

In this essay, Marika Moisseeff describes her childhood experience on a farm in France’s Limousine region and embarks on an anthropological reflection that challenges us to re-think the relationships between human and other-than-human beings in the context of peasant life.
Marika Moisseeff’s approach, which is the result of a long and varied itinerary including fieldwork in Australian Aboriginal communities, cross-cultural research on the constitution of personal and collective identities, and topics like puberty rites, mortuary practices and mythological accounts, significantly differs from the spiritualist perspective of New Age, and her writing, despite the presence of a strong subjective component, is free from any kind of nature romanticism.

This article attempts to describe and analyze the relationship between my peasant grandparents, and the animals with whom they shared their life.¹ In order to do so, I will pay special attention to their daily occupations in the rural center of France (Limousin region) since the beginning of the 20th century. This analysis of the bewitching of their cows during World War II will allow me to provide a more comprehensive understanding of their relationships both with people and with other-than-humans. This tragic episode illustrates the importance for traditional peasants of maintaining boundaries between themselves and the entities that make up their environment, boundaries that guarantee the balance of exchanges between what they take from their environment and what they give back through their labor. In preamble and for the sake of honesty, I must point out that I am not a specialist of rural life-worlds, and even less so in the relationship between farmers and their animals. As an anthropologist, I have done extensive fieldwork in Australia with Aboriginal people, whose culture is upheld by an ethos that belongs, not to the world of farmers, but to that of hunter-gatherers, peoples who entertain very different relationships with animals, and more generally, with their territory². Two main reasons triggered my desire to write about my childhood experience of my maternal grand-parents’ relationship with their environment. Firstly, a 2018 colloquium on the theme Evolution, are we evolving?, a paper by Philippe Le Guern³, made me realize the extent to which the relations between farmers using advanced technology and their cows no longer had anything in common with those my Limousin grandparents maintained with theirs, and that I might have something to say about it.

The second reason, not unrelated to the first, is the opportunity this gave me to try and analyze my instinctive, highly unscientific aversion towards the enthusiasm for reconnecting with nature exhibited by a number of contemporary city dwellers. Indeed, as part of the New Forms of Relational Mediation Workshop, which I have been co-organizing with Michael Houseman at the Sorbonne for the last ten years, collaborations with colleagues working on newly created rituals – New Age, neopagan, or personal development practices – have led me to wonder about the striking difference between, on the one hand, the way in which the middle-class urbanites involved in these practices view their relationship with nature and animals, and on the other hand, the way in which people with a long-standing peasant tradition rooted in the land, such as my grandparents, view their relationship with nature and animals.

Those I call urban people use various ritualized practices to establish an intimate ‘connection’, that is, a special bond, with non-human entities in the natural environment – plants, animals, minerals, water, the Earth – and through these entities, with Nature as an all-encompassing whole. They believe that contemporary lifestyles have alienated them from this natural environment, and that several of the ills that affect them are the consequence of this. The new rituals they engage in enable them to experience a fusion with ‘Nature’ and/or absorption of ‘Nature’ within themselves. By feeling their bodies unified with the environment, others and ‘the Universe’, they are able to reach a higher level of consciousness and recover the ‘energy’ they have lost.⁴

This healing connection-fusion is depicted, not without humor, in Michel Devaux’s paintings, such as Sylvothérapie (2022)⁵ and L’étreinte, (2007). The first shows the artist’s signature potato-characters in a forest enthusiastically hugging the trees and lifting a small sapling skywards in a gesture of benediction, while the second depicts a solitary figure, seen from the back, lovingly embracing a single tree. The latter painting echoes the well-known photograph of a woman awarded the Guinness World Record in 2014 for the longest tree hug: eight hours straight, without moving, eating, or going to the bathroom.⁶

While ‘nature’ is idealized or even exoticized by urban-dwellers, for farmers with a centuries-old tradition who, like my grandparents, maintain close and continuous relationships of commensality with it, their day-to-day preoccupation is to impose limits on it, or risk suffering harmful consequences. And one of these harmful consequences is witchcraft attacks that can decimate a herd of cattle. This was the case with the cows of my grandmother, Marguerite Delage, born in 1903 at Bois-au-Bœuf (Ox-Wood). The ethos regarding ‘nature’ passed on to me by my peasant grandparents, who seem to have belonged to a time other than our own, is undoubtedly at the root of my near-instinctive rejection of contemporary rites of reconnection with nature. This peasant ethos encourages us, on the contrary, to maintain a well-tempered distance between the domestic universe and the ‘natural’ environment immediately adjacent to it; it requires us to be constantly on the lookout for signs heralding disasters that we must strive to counter.

This is what I am going to talk about in describing the relationship my grandparents had with their cows, and the bewitching of these cows. In order for this first-person story to take on wider significance, it is essential to draw on other sources to present the socio-cultural and temporo-spatial context in which it takes place.

Oxen, cows and saints: mediators between nature and the supernatural

I have in my possession a photograph taken in the early 1940s that sets the scene for the drama to come. Marguerite, known as ‘la Ritou’, stands while her only child, my mother, then in her early teens, is sitting next to her. They, with their dog, are tending cows in a meadow at Bois-au-Bœuf, a locality in the commune of Saint-Junien. This bucolic scene stands in clear contrast to the images of tree-hugging. It shows a landscape which, if not cultivated, has at least been ‘worked’ and cleared, generation after generation, so as to transform its original nature of woods and forests, so dear to the urban dwellers I mentioned earlier, into a domesticated space where livestock can graze.

The name of this locality, Ox-Wood, underlines the importance of cows in this cattle-breeding region, which has supplied the leather industry since the Middle Ages (Saint-Junien is known as the capital of luxury gloves). To reach Bois-au-Bœuf from Saint-Junien means walking a couple of kilometers. On leaving the town, one climbs a steep hill: on either side of the roadway, one can see abundant woods all around. Arriving with relief at the top of the climb, while beginning to smell the odor of cow dung, we finally come to the few small meadows of Bois-au-Bœuf. A little further on, the hamlet of my grandparents’ house comes into view. My grandmother’s father had it built in 1905. He and his wife, along with their eldest son’s family, lived in the house opposite, and my grandmother’s sister, ‘la Marie’, settled with her husband at the far end of the hamlet. At the time, the hamlet consisted of five houses arranged in a horseshoe pattern on either side of the carriage road perpendicular to the main road.

Bois-au-Bœuf belongs to the commune of Saint-Junien:

“This town, as explained on its website, was founded around 1000 AD, built around the Abbey dedicated to Junien, a hermit to whom various miracles were attributed 500 years earlier. Today, every seven years, the relics of Junien and Amand, the town’s other founding saint, are presented during the Ostensions (‘Showings’).⁷ This procession of some 1500 biblical and historical figures, brings tens of thousands of visitors to the town center. The route taken, and many of the streets, are filled with flowers and foliage symbolizing the Comodoliac forest to which the saints arrived in the early Middle Ages, while various stations and chapels reproduce scenes from their lives. The whole town is decked out, believers and non-believers alike, make it a point of honor to take part in the festivities.”⁸

It is worth noting that these saints’ celebrations are organized in a city whose mayors have been Communist since 1920. Yet no one takes offence, because all the inhabitants of the region, as well as the descendants of natives who have left, such as myself, remain attached to this age-old custom. Odile Vincent, who has worked on these celebrations, points out that participants express personal concerns in a more or less veiled way, notably through their costumes or accessories, while paradoxically experiencing a strong sense of belonging to this local community. Odile Vincent suggests that, in this region, which is said to be one of the least religiously observant in France,

“by conceiving their community in territorial terms, through the subjection of this territory to a transcendent entity, the patron saint, the community develops and maintains the idea of their autonomous existence vis-à-vis the outside decision-makers of the here below world. It is by instituting an absolute exteriority of control over places that Ostension rituals affirm the inalienable social sovereignty of the local communities that implement them.”⁹

The demonstration of an attachment to the land through the veneration of the relics of local saints recalls the data gathered by anthropologist Gianfranco Spitilli on religious ceremonies that give pride of place to cattle in southern and central Europe.¹⁰ In both the Saint-Junien Ostensions, and the celebration of Saint Zopito at Loreto (Abruzzo) studied by Spitilli, it is the procession of representations, relics or statues of the town’s patron saints, that reactivates the territorial dimension of these communities’ identity by mediating a relationship between their present living space and a higher realm upon which it depends.

At Loreto, an ox plays an essential role alongside the local saint in the procession. While this is not the case in present-day Limousin, the name Bois-au-Bœuf (Ox-Wood) of my grandparents’ hamlet, a locality directly adjoined to Saint-Junien, where the region’s most prestigious Ostensions take place, leads one to wonder whether the name ‘The Ox of the Wood’ is not, in fact, significant. By singling out an ox, as the representative of all cattle, it may be that this designation emphasizes, here again, as was the general rule in many parts of Europe, the privileged link between these animals and humankind. Indeed, in Abruzzo, as in the Limousin region, because cattle have for so long been so important in terms of livestock breeding and subsistence practices, relying on intercessors such as saints to attract the favor of extra-human authorities to protect them seems all the more necessary.

During religious festivals in European and Mediterranean societies, cattle play a mediating role between the here below human world and the supernatural realm. They are the tangible embodiment of the ideal of exemplarity and perfection prescribed by legendary tales.

Thus, there may well have been an earlier relationship, lost over time, similar to that established at Loreto, between the local ox and the celebrations of the founding miracle saints of Saint-Junien. Arbellot notes, for example, that in Limousin and neighboring provinces, in addition to the numerous references to forests in place names¹¹, a number of the latter “end with the word bœuf: Bois-au-Bœuf (Saint-Junien), Sauvebœuf, Cardebœuf, Montembœuf, Monfrebœuf”¹². For Arbellot, however, while “it doesn’t seem certain that the ox plays a role in all these words”, it’s because “the old form of some [of these names], Montfrebuo, Sauvebuo, Montembuo seems to mean wood as well as ox”¹³.

In this light, the link between wood and ox could just as well refer to the original presence of cattle in the forests of this region. Indeed, one of the preferred habitats of the ancestor of today’s domestic cattle breeds, the aurochs or ‘wild ox’, frequently depicted in Upper Paleolithic cave art in this region (Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume), was the forest.¹⁴

In the same vein, for Spitilli, drawing on extensive research in anthropology, ethnoarchaeology and the history of religions,

“the symbolic order [would have] preceded and, in a certain sense, stimulated the process of domestication and the use of animals in productive activities, rather than the other way round; […] domestication, in other words, [would not] have been dictated solely by material necessities, but […] the greater part of the products and services rendered by animals [would be] the result, not the cause, of domestication (Digard & Vialles, 2005, pp. 782-783). Saverno Di Lernia [thus] emphasizes that, among the hunter-gatherer peoples of the first Holocene in North Africa, the [deference] that human groups have [towards] animals of prey must be considered as an element capable of generating, also on an ideological and symbolic level, ‘a radical change in cultural habits through the progressive affirmation of a preferential relationship with a specific animal’ (Di Lernia, 1999, p. 16).”¹⁵

Spitilli’s own work seems to confirm this, highlighting the correlation between, on the one hand, the omnipresence of cattle in hagiographies and foundation legends and, on the other, the central role attributed to these animals in ritual mediations with the extra-human:

“The attention that European and Mediterranean societies have paid to the bovine since prehistoric times, giving it a privileged position in the religious sphere and qualifying it as the animal of preference in mythological speculation and ritual construction, to the point of making it the focus of an exclusive relationship in everyday life, is attested in modern and contemporary Europe by its widespread use in festive and ceremonial forms, even where the use of animals in agricultural work and transport gradually disappeared in the course of the twentieth century.”¹⁶

If, during religious festivals, cattle play a mediating role between the here below human world and the supernatural realm, then, according to Spitilli, they are the tangible embodiment of the ideal of exemplarity and perfection prescribed by legendary tales. Thus, in Loreto, during the processions that form the high points of the complex Pentecost ritual dedicated to Saint Zopito, a richly ornamented ox kneels before the town’s churches and the bust of this patron saint of the region. The ox and the saint are, according to Spitilli, the distinct yet complementary protagonists of the same ceremonial, redefining the relationship “between the culture of the city and that of the region’s inhabitants, between popular culture and the symbolic and ritual universe governed by Catholicism” ¹⁷. As we have seen, the same process of redefining these relationships is at work during the Limousin Ostensions. However, in the context of a southern Italian commune such as Loreto, the conflicts between the ecclesiastical authorities and the local population are far more marked than in a French region known for its secular resistance to christianization:

“Since 1949, the ox has not entered the church […]; since 1977, it has not even led the procession, which until then had been marked by its slow step […]. The Sunday procession and the solemn procession on Pentecost Monday were therefore – and to some extent still are today – an imposing representation of conflict and power.”¹⁸

In peasant popular culture, for the ox to be able to play the role of intercessor with patron saints, the animal must first be culturalized, that is, human culture must be applied to its non-human nature. As two of Spitilli’s informants told him: “You have to know how to make the ox, how to cultivate it. For an ox to be able to ‘interpret’ correctly the role it plays with the saint during the celebration, it needs to acquire ‘a certain culture, a certain knowledge’”.¹⁹ The ethnologist was rather surprised:

“I would never have imagined […] that an animal could be cultivated. […] Cultivating an animal such as an ox represents […] a cultural action that synthesizes the exceptional helping function exercised by this category of animal regarding subsistence activities […] and its quality as an essential point of reference in the development of man’s faculties of perception, interpretation and action, the inexhaustible source of his aesthetic and emotional universe.”²⁰

The peasant animal tamers thus revealed to this sophisticated urban colleague how essential it was to perfect the process of domesticating the chosen animal so that it can play its ceremonial role. It is a prerequisite for the animal to be able to assume, in concert with the saint, its role as intermediary between the forces of good and evil in rituals, whose propitiatory purpose is to protect against misfortune and afflictions of all kinds: demonic possession, crop loss and, of course, those affecting animals. For,

“In the same way as agricultural products, the animal was an essential primary good, and [during the festivals in which it was consecrated] the ox [became the focus of] the system of protections that peasants projected onto a precious animal, necessary for subsistence, and the frequent object of threats and risks perceived as uncontrollable.”²¹

As Jean-Marc Moriceau has pointed out, while for peasants “there is no wealth but beasts”²², it was very difficult to protect them from human calamities (raids during wars) and natural disasters (climatic catastrophes with consequences for the ability to feed them, diseases, even epizootics, sterility). The latter, as anthropologists know, are most often interpreted as consecutive to the transgression of certain prohibitions²³, or to malevolent human intentions linked to witchcraft. Spitilli describes one such misfortune:

“Magical practices with cattle are still in effect […]. In June 2008, during a visit to [a] farmer […] a few minutes after a cow had given birth to a dead calf, I noticed the use of magic signs (a cross on the wound drawn by the vets themselves); the owner then wondered whether a curse had been cast on his animals, announcing that he intended to ward off the evil eye […] to protect his barn and the many cattle in it.”²⁴

‘Nature’, in this rural context, is both the source of what is given, and that which can take back what has been given. Just as is required for the consecration of the ox dedicated to Saint Zopito on the feast day of Loreto, the process of domesticating an originally wild environment must be constantly renewed lest it becomes wild again. This is put into effect by the staging, every seven years, during the Ostensions at Saint-Junien, of the Comodoliac forest where the city’s founding saints settled. The earth-born forces that continue to animate ‘tamed’, cultured spaces beyond, because they are both good and evil, require that both the work of humankind, and the alliance with this higher realm be constantly renewed through the intermediary of sacralized, local founders. Indeed, if one is not careful, this primitive, wild nature can take back what has been acquired through what I will call ‘human predation’.

This predation, understood as the taking of resources from an environment that peasants can never be sure of being the definite masters and owners of, must remain well-tempered: we take and we must give back. Over-exploitation of the land ends up sterilizing it. The same holds true for livestock: excessive use of their labor force, or their ability to produce milk or calves can kill them, or lead to their milk drying up, or affect their ability to sire viable offspring. If ‘nature’ is to continue to be a source of life, enabling farmers to secure their livelihoods, it must be cared for. However, it is equally important to impose limits upon it. I will come back to this.

It is worth noting that the all-encompassing term ‘nature’, as we know it today, was not part of my grandparents’ vocabulary. They were more apt to refer to the different components of their immediate environment: the soil, the crops, various animals, the sky, and so on. For them, the battle between the forces of good and evil associated respectively with, on one hand, God²⁵ and his saints and, on the other hand, the devil and his minions, the sorcerers, was the most all-encompassing reference in their daily universe.

Roughness towards animals often conceals great tenderness

Establishing boundaries between oneself and others that may invade one’s intimate, private space, be they fellow humans, animals or visible or invisible non-human beings, is seen as a necessity. One tries to preserve one’s autonomy and avoid unfortunate encounters, such as the evil eye, which can wipe out a lifetime’s work in one fell swoop. This necessity goes hand in hand with the harshness that peasants often show towards their animals, including those they name, and to whom they often show special attention, and even respect. This daily care, an intimacy that results in a reciprocal attachment, is not devoid of affection. However, such affections, particularly towards cows, but also towards other dependents such as children and cats or dogs, must be restrained. This is part of a certain peasant etiquette: as far as possible, and except in certain special circumstances (funerals, festive activities), publicly displaying one’s inner feelings – especially when one is a man and love is involved – exposes one to mockery. In addition, the cow you’ve taken care of is destined for the slaughterhouse, something you have to learn to live with. The autobiography of Franz Felder, Scenes from my Life²⁶, corroborates this idea.

Franz Felder was born in 1839 in Vorarlberg, Austria’s poorest region at the time. It was only long after his untimely death in 1869 that his exceptional talent as a writer was recognized outside the small circle of German-language specialists who knew him. The 1987 preface by Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to his autobiography, Scenes from my Life, undoubtedly played a part in this. In this work, more than a century later, Handke rediscovered the remarkably rendered description of the crucial elements of his own rural childhood.

Felder beautifully describes the need to learn to suppress the deep grief he felt when a beloved cow was sold:

“I still remember the bitter tears I shed the day my father told me we’d have to sell our yellow-coated, white-legged cow at the next cattle fair. The brave beast had given us her succulent milk all summer long. And when she was grazing behind the house, at the foot of the fir-covered mountain, tinkling her cowbell, all I had to do was call her and she’d leap out of the herd and join me […]. And now that she was giving us less milk and no longer carrying a little calf, we were going to sell her as a thank-you? ‘No, Franz Michael, naive as you are’, my father told me, ‘we are not going to sell your White Paws at the fair as a thank-you; for that, I’ve been giving her good forage all summer’.

– ‘The grass grows by itself’, I grumbled.

– ‘But I have to pay the lease, taxes and royalties that you have no idea about, so that she can enjoy the pasture’. […]

Shortly afterwards, a handkerchief full of pears – a rarity around here – and a new hat were brought back from the fair, and I was completely fulfilled. […] But […] after a few days, […] I began to feel what I must call my first pangs of conscience. It was unfair that, while I was enjoying myself, I should have coldly forgotten the faithful beast to whom I owed it […]. For weeks, this problem preoccupied me […].”²⁷

Franz finally opened up to his aunt who smiled when she heard:

“[I] so excelled in saying so much good about the unfortunate animal, and the unjust fate that had befallen it so oppressed my soul, that my aunt’s smile […] brought tears to my eyes. […] ‘My dear child! [Franz’s aunt said] We’ve all been there. I remember very well the day when Jakob, your father, went to the cattle market for the first time with his favorite cow, which had grown up next to him. He was so pale and trembling that he could barely guide the unruly beast’.

‘And why did he take her, then?’

‘Oh my God! It was because our father was ill, and the proceeds from the sale were to pay the doctor, and for me and my brothers and sisters, warm clothes for the winter’.”²⁸

This first-person account by a farmer testifies to the learning process required to inhibit, at least from the outside, the emotions resulting from the peasants’ attachment to their animals, such as their cows, which they will, sooner or later, have to part with one day. The harshness peasants exhibit is not innate, but acquired at the price of many sorrows and sacrifices. More often than not, it is a necessity for survival in a particularly harsh environment such as the one in which Felder lived.

The English writer John Berger, in his short story Memories of a calf has also given voice to what is most often unspoken in the farming world, namely the painful experience of the farmer when selling a calf he has cared for tenderly since its birth. He describes in ethnographic detail the current life of the Haute-Savoie herders among whom he lived with his family for many years. Here, the strategy used to reduce one’s attachment to a cherished animal – but whose effectiveness is by no means guaranteed – is not to name it: “It didn’t have a name, because Marie didn’t give names to the calves they weren’t going to keep”.²⁹ In many societies, public naming rites also take place at a distance from birth, when a child has become sufficiently autonomous from its mother’s body and the risks of its dying have become fewer.

The day-to-day relationship between cows and humans at Bois-au-Bœuf

Let me now put my maternal grandparents’ relationship with their animals into context by describing, in a general way, their daily life as my brother and I took part in it during summer vacations until our adolescence. My grandmother, the daughter of a small landowner, was a farmer and a glove-maker working at home. My grandfather, born in 1902, came from a large family of very poor tenant farmers. With no property and no vocational training, his future in-laws demanded that he first have at least one trade before getting married. So, he became a stake worker in a tannery at Saint-Junien. His job was to smooth and soften hides with a palisson, an instrument fitted with a semicircular iron blade that was dangerous to handle because, when the hides were too dry, the worker ran the risk of disemboweling himself. However, he never stopped working on the small plots of land inherited from my grandmother, nor did he stop looking after the cows. Going to the fields was a real passion for him, as was mushroom picking, and as soon as he had the chance, he left the tannery to devote himself entirely to these tasks, which gave him far more satisfaction than working in a factory under someone else’s orders. Thereafter, gloves made by my grandmother, and the sale of milk, calves and eggs provided the couple’s meager means.

The harshness peasants exhibit is not innate, but acquired at the price of many sorrows and sacrifices. More often than not, it is a necessity for survival in a particularly harsh environment.

My grandfather, apart from his military service in Germany and the five years he also spent there as a prisoner of war (where he was employed on farms), never travelled. He never even went to Paris, where his only daughter lived with her family. While the distance between them was heartbreaking for my grandparents, partly offset by the fact that we, her children, were sent to visit them regularly, they couldn’t leave their animals: the chickens and the rabbits, but above all the cows (they had no pigs, as raising them would have been too costly). Indeed, caring for their four to eight cows, no more, was at the heart of their daily lives.

Every morning, well before seven o’clock, the cows were brought out of the cowshed. They were taken to drink ‘at the pump’, that is, at a stone trough located in the middle of the hamlet. They were then taken to the meadow to graze. The cowshed, of course, had to be emptied of its soiled bedding, which was then replaced. The cows were brought back at midday, given another drink, and returned to their barn, where they rested until 4pm. Then, they were again led to the trough to drink before being taken back to the meadow where they grazed until around 6 – 6.30pm. Lastly, they were again brought back, given a drink at the pump, and returned to their cowshed for the night. My grandparents were frugal, and kept the heating to a minimum, which is probably why we didn’t go to stay in their house in winter. When I asked my mother how the cows were cared for during the winter season, she explained that they stayed in the stable and that my grandmother carried dozens of buckets of water a day for them to drink.

It was explained to me that the cows had to be kept out of the neighbor’s clover fields at all costs, as the swelling that would result could cause them to succumb. I would sometimes go with my grandmother to look after them in the afternoons. I remember once accompanying my grandfather to the farrier to reshoe a cow whose shoe had come loose. However, I never attended calving, which probably took place when I wasn’t staying at Bois-au-Bœuf. My grandparents used to sell their calves to the butcher after weighing them on a special scale, on which I in turn was weighed at the end of vacations. While I despaired of my growing weight, an inevitable result of my grandmother’s efforts to satisfy my tastes and gluttony, she was delighted by it.

I spent many evenings watching the various tasks my grandmother performed before going to bed. These included the evening milking, and the different operations to turn milk into cheese. She would leave the milk to rest overnight in the ‘pantry’, a room built of cement in the shed next to the house itself, in which, thanks to its coolness, meat and dairy products could be preserved. The next morning, she would remove the thick, yellowish cream from the milk, which would be used instead of butter in making cakes or for spreading on my breakfast toast. I could never resist its succulent taste, something which probably contributed to my seasonal gaining of weight…

Toilets were installed in the shed in the late 70s, around the same time as the telephone and television. The outhouse at the end of the garden – a hole in the cemented floor of a small brick shed – was available during the day (it remained in use until the house was sold in the mid-90s). At night, however, each of the two bedrooms had a plastic toilet bucket. There was no bathroom, apart from a tiny room in which my grandparents had installed a clawfoot tub, a concession to my father who couldn’t imagine living without a daily shower. But my grandparents never used either the bathroom or the tub. They washed up in the kitchen, using the stone sink built into the wall and a plastic bucket filled with water drawn from the fountain in one of my grandmother’s sister’s meadows at the far end of the hamlet. On top of the bucket was a long-spouted plastic dipper used to draw water for hand-washing. The used water then flowed directly outside through a hole in the wall. For a long time, my great-aunt was the only one in the hamlet to own a television, which her son, an engineer in Limoges, the capital of Limousin, had given her. The inhabitants of the hamlet would gather at her home to watch certain programs. In particular, I remember the broadcasts of wrestling matches, which made for very lively evenings, and which, as a child, I greatly enjoyed.

To make telephone calls, we used the public telephone operated by Madame Souris, who lived in another hamlet of Bois-au-Bœuf, a little further up the main road. On set days, the baker came by in a truck to deliver bread, the butcher meat, and the grocer general groceries. My grandparents went ‘into town’, usually on foot, only for occasional shopping, or for funerals or doctor’s appointments. They also took the opportunity to visit relatives living there. Although they had never owned a car or a bicycle, it was only very rarely that they agreed to be transported by others. Saying that they didn’t want to bother anyone, they concealed, in fact, their fear of being in debt to those who didn’t belong to their close circle of relatives and neighbors whom they felt they could trust, precisely because of the services they rendered each other in everyday life.

Apart from occasional commercial relations or recourse to specialists such as doctors, veterinarians and craftsmen, exchanges of services or of small gifts – surplus fruit and vegetables, homemade cakes, newspapers that circulated from home to home – took place between immediate neighbors, the majority of whom had been living at Bois-au-Bœuf for a long time, some of whom were also members of the same kin group. Most social interactions were thus based on belonging to the same small territory, where people moved around on foot and left only on rare occasions. The inhabitants were wary of tourists, considered disrespectful, and were, more generally, wary of people from the capital, or other big cities, considered responsible for the unjust laws peasants were subjected to. In short, they distrusted anyone they did not know wandering on their territory.

Commensality can be described not only as the sharing of meals or products, but also as the small services exchanged daily, which together created a feeling of sharing, of a common peasant identity, as evidenced by speaking the local patois, or dialect, amongst themselves. On the other hand, apart from a few words in patois, they spoke French to their son-in-law and to us, their grandchildren in Paris, as well as to people they didn’t know or who no longer belonged to the strictly rural world of peasants like themselves. They knew full well, for example, that educated people didn’t believe their stories of witchcraft, which the inhabitants of Bois-au-Bœuf would sometimes discuss, sitting in the middle of the hamlet, preferably late at night and of course in patois. Because my brother and I didn’t speak this language, we were presumed not to understand these stories. This made them all the more interesting, for in fact, we had a passive grasp of patois that the local people were unaware of. As a city kid, I tended to mock these witchcraft tales. But, when night fell and my grandparents went about their business, and I found myself alone in bed, I was easily scared. Suddenly witchcraft seemed undoubtably true, and terrified me. This was also the case, of course, when Ritou and I came back late from visiting a lonely neighbor in another hamlet, even more remote than ours, walking along the dark, unlit paths of the countryside. Anything unusual – a noise, a shadow, a branch in the middle of the path – became an ominous sign.

What struck me in retrospect, when we had to empty out my grandparents’ house after my grandmother moved to my mother’s place, was the complexity of the spatial organization of its interlocking spaces, each with its own distinct function: the shed, the cellar, the barn, the cowshed, the henhouse containing the rabbit hutches. More recently, I have come to realize that while the spaces intended for animals, such as the cow barn, were separate from where humans lived, they were contiguous to it, establishing a profound intimacy between humans and farm animals, as also expressed in the constant, attentive care that humans lavished on their animals.

I would describe this shared intimacy as well-tempered, insofar as, on the one hand, the animals were confined to the spaces close by, specifically and respectively reserved for them, and on the other hand, gestures of tenderness towards farm animals were not deemed appropriate. Dogs were not allowed inside the house. Cats circulated a little more freely, but were only temporarily tolerated in certain rooms at the bottom of the human dwelling: the small ‘dining’ room, where we ate only when there were more than three of us, and where the big transistor set with its wooden casing sat on a small buffet; a tiny kitchen, as my grandmother cooked mainly in the ‘bakehouse’ adjoining the shed where her wood-burning stove was located. On the other hand, access was strictly forbidden for the animals to the bedrooms upstairs, and the same applied to the majority of people not belonging to the household.

Indeed, my grandparents imposed a strict delimitation between the spaces where we, the human intimates, could move freely, and the spaces into which strangers, but also more distant family members, were not allowed to enter. For example, I remember being violently reprimanded for letting a distant cousin into the room where I was sleeping. There was no question of inviting friends into our bedrooms, or even other guests who weren’t very close relatives. My grandparents, like their neighbors, didn’t allow strangers into their domestic space beyond the rooms immediately adjacent to the front door. Strangers were received in the entrance hallway, and if ever they were invited in, it was only to the dining room, a place where we ate only on those exceptional occasions when great-uncles and great-aunts were invited to a meal. This distinction between intimates and strangers was very strict and unspoken. We didn’t talk about it. That is just the way it was.

So, there were gradations of intimacy, and not just for animals. One had to know how to keep one’s social place, whether at home or out and about. Class consciousness was very acute, and went hand in hand with a highly developed sense of modesty. Revealing anything to do with the intimacy of the body was not only seen as shameful, but also as dangerous. And this has something to do with witchcraft, insofar as it refers to the possibility of affecting others by having access to their bodily secretions, to beings (children, animals, spouses), or objects that have been in direct contact with their bodies (clothing for example), or emanating from their bodies (hair, nails…), or even to the possibility of seeing what is supposed to remain out of sight. This extreme importance attached to the boundaries between the self and the non-self is perhaps not unrelated to the frequent suspicion among peasants of encroachment by neighbors on the land they own. Just as housing is linked to the bodies of its rightful occupants, so the land they occupy is part of their identity, as Jeanne Favret-Saada has also shown³⁰.

Infants, especially babies, as well as livestock, especially cows, because of the physical proximity required to care for them, are also in some way an extension of the body of those who own them and look after them. As such, and because they are also vulnerable and defenseless beings, they are likely to be the prime target of witchcraft attacks. My grandmother also warned us against the temptation to take food, money or any other object we might find out of the house. This was how the evil one was likely to ‘get’ us. To be ‘taken’ meant to fall under the spell of witchcraft, and once taken, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to extricate oneself from the spell unless one called upon an intercessor who was sufficiently equipped to counter the forces of evil. All this is important, it seems to me, in explaining the witchcraft attack during the Second World War on four of my grandmother’s eight cows.

The bewitchment of the Ritou’s cows

My grandmother’s account of the bewitchment of her cows, told to me at my request many years after I’d first heard it as a child, followed a dramaturgy that is difficult to recreate in writing. It was a highly melodic chronicle, whose emotional scansion was upheld by involuntary exclamations in dialect, my listening mother’s chorus-like interjections. In short, it was a performance, whose content I will shorten considerably.

The tragic tale opened with “Ah, my poor little girl!”, accompanied by a few tears, wiped away with the large checked handkerchief. Then, suddenly regaining her natural authority, my grandmother, tiny and hunchbacked from carrying so many heavy loads, turned to my husband, an American from Malibu:

“I know you don’t believe me! [educated city folk laugh at us poor peasants], but sir, when you’ve seen with your own eyes what I’ve seen!!! And [look what happened] with Marie [her sister, whose husband’s eye was poked out by a cow one night], a cow doesn’t turn around like that at night! [No doubt the devil, working through a sorcerer, had something to do with it, especially for that couple who notoriously claimed to believe in neither God nor the devil]”.

Then she went on to relate various strange phenomena she had witnessed or had been told about. One Sunday in her youth, as she and her friends – cousins, neighbors – crossed a field walking home from an afternoon ball, they were chased by a mad horse who seemed to be possessed.

On another occasion, a baby from Bois-au-Bœuf had fallen ill; no remedy could calm him, and he wouldn’t stop crying or eating, driving his mother mad with anguish. A woman advised her to look inside the baby’s pillow. And sure enough, there she found a perfectly round, thick crown of feathers that no human hand could possibly have made. The feathers were removed and burned. The baby got better, but soon fell ill again, and it was discovered that the crown had been reconstituted.

Such disquieting little tales, strung together one after the other, provided the atmosphere my grandmother needed to tell her own tragic story. It was wartime.³¹ Her husband was a prisoner in Germany; living alone with her daughter, she struggled to make ends meet. Suddenly, one after another, the cows began to die. When they were in the barn, instead of lying down, they just stood frozen. It was impossible to milk them because their udders were as hard as wood. On the other hand, when the cows were in the meadow, they lay down instead of grazing, as if their sleepless night had exhausted them.

The forces concealed within the land, what we modern urbans refer to as ‘Nature’, are the source of both life and death, fertility and sterility, goodness and malevolence.

So, my grandmother went to consult an exorcist, the parish priest of a nearby village. He asked her to think about the people with whom she had financial dealings. She realized that she had been selling milk and eggs to a neighbor known as ‘the great sorcerer’. He and his sisters had settled in Bois-au-Bœuf without anyone really knowing where they came from. Next time, this man came to get the milk and eggs he used to buy from her, she gave them to him on the front doorstep, facing the main road, without letting him in. He then handed her a banknote, which required her to give him change, which she was obliged to fetch from inside the house. When she returned to give him his change, she discovered him on the other side of the house, in front of the kitchen window where her daughter Simone, my mother then in her early teens, was washing. “He was making faces while staring at Simone through the window!”. La Ritou handed him the money she owed him, and told him she would no longer have milk and eggs to sell him. He left, without saying a word.

Unfortunately, the cows continued to die. So, my grandmother went back to see the parish priest, who told her: “It’s more serious than I thought. I need to come and bless your stable”. He entered the barn where the cows stood, frozen still, with their hardened udders unable to produce milk. He said his prayers while throwing holy water at the four corners of the barn. The cows began to moo and milk flowed from their udders. That was it, the spell was broken. Four of the cows survived.

The story ended with the inevitable triumphant exclamation: “Well, when you’ve seen it with your own eyes! There can be no doubt! It’s the truth!” Jeanne Favret-Saada’s remarkable study of witchcraft in the Normandy bocage perfectly rendered this same sentiment: “You have to be caught to believe it”; “Those who haven’t been caught, they can’t talk about it.”³²

By way of epilogue

According to Spitilli, in Europe, in myths and rites, the ox plays a mediating role between humans and invisible, supernatural forces. During rituals, that is, in extra-ordinary situations entailing the summoning of a territorially anchored saint, and the consecration of an ox belonging to a local peasant, this mediating function takes on a positive character, capable of countering the effects associated with evil. In Limousin, this evil is referred to in a personalized way, as ‘the devil’.

Outside such ritual, that is, in ordinary, everyday life, the intimacy between cattle and their humans is likely to take on a decidedly negative quality as the possible mediating term between their human owners and evil, invisible powers. While saints represent the forces of good that intercede with the benevolent God – Saint Zopito at Loreto, Saint Christophe at Bois-au-Bœuf – sorcerers, at least in the Limousin region of my grandparents, are the devil’s minions.

In this region, the sorcerer is prototypically a foreigner. He comes from elsewhere, and therefore is not part of the local network of acquaintances. He does not partake in the obligations owed by the natives of the land. As such, he incarnates an extreme form of predation that nothing can permanently satisfy. To reach his fully-grown prey, an adult, he will often make use of the intimacy he or she has with their vulnerable dependents, paradigmatically children or domestic animals. And because the sorcerer is an unquenchable predator, in order to signify his act of bewitchment, he is said to ‘take’.

My grandmother, for example, used to tell me never ever to open the Grand Albert, a book of folk magic that the sorcerer has to pass on to someone else before he dies, for if he doesn’t, he will die in excruciating pain. “As soon as you open the Grand Albert”, she told me, “you’re caught”. That is why, in order to counter this unquenchable predator before death ensues, it is necessary to oppose it with another mediating figure, such as, in the case presented by Spitilli, the figure of the consecrated ox who mediates the relationship between the bewitched person and the saint. In the case of my grandmother’s cows, it was Saint Christopher, summoned by the priest of the parish dedicated to him.

It seems to me that this ongoing fear peasants have is due to the fact that, for them, the forces concealed within the land, what we modern urbans refer to as ‘Nature’, are the source of both life and death, fertility and sterility, goodness and malevolence. In the case I have presented, and no doubt since the forced Christianization of this region, good and evil are represented by God and the Devil, and their earthly agents embodied respectively by patron saints and sorcerers. The latter are assimilated to predators who do not participate in the commensality of a network of familiars established on a well-defined territory. And it is precisely because they are strangers that they are unable to participate in the tacit contract of symmetrical exchange between long-term residents, whose bodily substance permeates their well-defined territory. This is why the devil is able to take possession of them in the first place.

In embodying the figure of the supreme predator, who takes more than it gives back, sorcerers reflect humanity’s predatory side: humans feed off their environment without always taking care to maintain boundaries between themselves and the entities that make up this environment, boundaries that guarantee the balance of exchanges between what they take from it and what they give back through their labor. This is why humans must not be tempted to take what they haven’t earned: food, money, or objects they come across. Otherwise, they are likely to be ‘taken’ in turn in order for balanced exchanges to be restored. In such cases, they have to turn to mediators, notably the saints with whom animals are frequently associated, non-humans who often give far more than they receive, helping to rebalance the relationship between humans and non-humans.

1. A first version of this article was published in French as «Des vaches et leurs humains au Bois-au-Bœuf : intimité partagée et agression sorcellaire dans un hameau de la Haute-Vienne au XXe siècle», in Didier Nourrisson (ed.), Les paysans et leurs animaux. Festival d’Histoire de Montbrison, Montbrison, 2024, p. 263-294. This revised English version is the result of Marika Moisseeff’s participation at the workshop “Ecosophy: Transversal Bridges to other Forms of Relation”, organized by Interstices: Center for Transversal Thinking and held at the Alain Daniéliou Foundation in September 2024.
2. Marika Moisseeff : Un long chemin semé d’objets cultuels : le cycle initiatique aranda, Paris, 1995; Marika Moisseeff: L’inscription spatiale du Rêve : un art de la mémoire et de l’oubli chez les Aranda du désert central australien, in Alain Berthoz and John Scheid (eds.), Les arts de la mémoire et les images mentales. Réflexions comparatives, Paris, 2018, p. 177-194.
3. This paper subsequently gave rise to an article: Philippe Le Guern, Robots, élevage et techno-capitalisme : Une ethnographie du robot de traite, Réseaux 220-221(2) : 253-291, 2020. Based on a well-documented comparative ethnography of productivist agriculture and “peasant” agriculture, this work is accompanied by an in-depth reflection on the changing relationship between farmers and their animals imposed by the growing use of milking robots and computer technology in the drive for ever-higher performance.
4. For a recent comparative anthropological study focusing on the relationships between humans and non-humans in a wide range of contemporary ritual practices in different cultural areas, see Jean Chamel and Yael Dansac (ed.), Relating with More-than-Humans. Interbeing Rituality in a Living World, London, 2022.
5. I would like to thank his wife Roberte Hamayon-Devaux for giving me Sylvothérapie.
6. Record Guinness du plus long câlin à un arbre. Photo: Yves Provencher pour Journal Métro (24/09/2014) journalmetro.com/actualites/montreal/563681/record-guinness-du-plus-long-calin-a-un-arbre/
7. aint-junien.fr/decouvrir/histoire-et-patrimoine/historique/
8. saint-junien.fr/decouvrir/histoire-et-patrimoine/ville-ostensionnaire/
9. Odile Vincent : Les retrouvailles anachroniques d’une communauté avec son fondateur. Saintes reliques et définitions territoriales dans la région de Limoges, in: L’Homme 163: 79-106, 2002, p. 103. On the Limousin Ostensions, including those of Saint-Junien, see also Françoise Lautman: « Toujours plus belle, la fête ! Les Ostensions de Saint-Junien », Ethnologie française 13 (4): 369-394, 1983.
10. Gianfranco Spitilli : Le saint et le bœuf. Contribution à l’analyse d’un complexe rituel, in: Gianfranco Spitilli and Vincenzo Spera (ed.), Sacer Bos I. Usi cerimoniali di bovini in Italia e nelle aree romanze occidentali, ORMA Journal of Ethnological and Historical-Religious Studies 22 : 278-317, 2014 ; Gianfranco Spitilli : Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, in: Christiane Dunoyer (ed.), Des combats des vaches dans les Alpes et ailleurs. L’animalité et le monde contemporain, Aoste, 2017, p. 69-84. I would like to thank Denise Lombardi for putting me in touch with this researcher.
11. François Arbellot : Origine des noms de lieu en Limousin et en Périgord, Lanmeur, 2012 [1887], p. 39.
12. François Arbellot : Origine des noms de lieu en Limousin et en Périgord, p. 41.
13. François Arbellot: Origine des noms de lieu en Limousin et en Périgord, p. 41.
14. Cis van Vuure and T. van Vuure, Retracing the Aurochs – History, Morphology and Ecology of an extinct wild Ox, Sofia, 2005; Claude Guintard and Olivier Néron de Surgy, L’Aurochs. De Lascaux au XXIe siècle, Chartres, 2014.
15. Gianfranco Spitilli : Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, p. 70.
16. Gianfranco Spitilli : Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, p. 71.
17. Gianfranco Spitilli : Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, p. 71.
18. Gianfranco Spitilli : Le saint et le bœuf. Contribution à l’analyse d’un complexe rituel, p. 314.
19. Gianfranco Spitilli: Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, p. 69.
20. Gianfranco Spitilli: Des animaux exemplaires. L’importance des bovins dans l’Europe chrétienne, p. 69.
21. Gianfranco Spitilli: Le saint et le bœuf. Contribution à l’analyse d’un complexe rituel, p. 311. In this quotation, I have taken the liberty of modifying the somewhat shaky translation of the French version provided to me by the author, these changes being notified by the square brackets.
22. Jean-Marc Moriceau: Histoire et géographie de l’élevage français, du Moyen Âge à la Révolution, Paris, 2005, p. 15.
23. Françoise Héritier: Stérilité, aridité, sécheresse : quelques invariants de la pensée symbolique, in Marc Augé and Claudine Herzlich (eds), Le Sens du mal : Anthropologie, histoire, sociologie de la maladie, Paris, 1984, p. 123-154.
24. Gianfranco Spitilli: Le saint et le bœuf. Contribution à l’analyse d’un complexe rituel, note 67 p. 311.
25. This is a notable difference with the data collected by Jeanne-Favret Saada in Mayenne from 1969 to the mid-1970s. Both in her book (Jeanne Favret-Saada: Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le bocage, Paris, 1977), and in a radio interview (Jeanne Favret-Saada: L’homme qui condamna Jeanne, France Culture, Radio France, 06/03/1978, rediffusion 20/08/2023), she states that she has never heard speak of the devil or of God. Perhaps my proximity to my grandmother gave me access to a different discourse, but given Favret-Saada’s close connections in the field, I see this difference as reflecting above all the specific socio-economic context of the Normandy bocage, which is very different from that of the Limousin.
26. Franz Michael Felder: Scènes de ma vie, Der Doppelgänger, Lagrasse, 2014 [1904].
27. Franz Michael Felder: Scènes de ma vie, Der Doppelgänger, pp. 23-25.
28. Franz Michael Felder: Scènes de ma vie, Der Doppelgänger, pp. 25-26.
29. John Berger: Souvenir d’un veau, La cocadrille, Paris, Seuil, 1992 [1979], pp. 29-33.
30. Jeanne Favret-Saada: Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le bocage, 1977.
31. It’s worth recalling that, during the Second World War, Saint-Junien took in displaced Alsatians from the town of Schiltigheim from the beginning of the war in September 1939 until the June 1940 armistice; my grandmother took in a couple of grocers. Oradour-sur-Glane, where one of the massacres perpetrated by the Germans in June 1944 took place, is located some fifteen kilometers from Bois-au-Bœuf.
32. Jeanne Favret-Saada: Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le bocage, p. 28.