Szeptucha,the "whisperer" healers of Poland

The Whisperers: The Christian Folk Healers of Eastern Poland

"Szeptucha (pronounced: Shep-too-hah) or sometimes szeptunka, which translates as ‘whisperer’ or ‘one who whispers’, is a term used to describe traditional Polish woman-healers practising predominantly in Podlasie, and less notedly in other parts of the country, e.g. Roztocze and Podkarpacie. Their story is closely linked to Poland’s eastern frontier, an area influenced by the mysticism of Orthodox Christianity and, in its central part, by the Belarusian language.

"Due to the peculiar healing rituals the whisperers perform, they are sometimes compared to shamans or witches. But it ought to be said that the ‘magic’ they allegedly use is ... aimed to do good, not wrong. Most importantly, and this is how the healers got their name, they pray for the health of their patients, whispering and otherwise uttering various Christian prayers of Orthodox provenance. These are delivered in a peculiar mix of Polish, Belarusian and Old Church Slavonic, which makes it hard for someone not privy to this composite dialect to understand them. Here’s an example of a whisperer’s healing prayer (translated by some learned soul) taken from a Polish Radio broadcast entitled Whisperers:

Evil ghost! Don’t wake the man up, don’t crush his bones, don’t dry up his blood, don’t touch the veins... From veins, from body, bones and eyes, from legs and hands and from urinary tracts take off herpes, psoriasis, stains and growths...

"It is believed that the ability to heal through whispering is a gift from God, a gift whose origin can be traced all the way back to Jesus, himself a healer who used words. But even though the whisperers are devout Orthodox believers, they do have pre-Christian folk chants in their medicinal repertoire. Moreover, they perform bizarre ceremonial actions during their séances, like the already-mentioned burning of flax and pouring of wax into water. Among the practice’s classic therapies, you can also find rubbing an ill body with a glass filled with wood ashes and neatly wrapped in a napkin.

"Due to these near-pagan rituals, the Orthodox Church doesn’t approve of whispering, but not in a particularly stringent manner: for example, a prominent whisperer is known to have been admitted to a church choir. 

"In 2009, the script of the play Opowieści Teremiszczańskie (Teremiski Tales) was published in the Podlasie village of Teremiski. In the play, partially based on accounts about real-life whisperers, one of the characters says:

  The whisperers used ashes to heal. A whisperer could heal with nothing more than a prayer. You took ashes from the oven, mixed them with water, making a ball, a whisperer would then run the ball over the sore body part, while at it she would pray quietly.

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"So what are the conditions the whisperers believe they can treat? First off, there is przewianie or ‘the chills’ – shivers or even physical pain caused by a cold wind. Róża or ‘rose’ is a reddening of the skin, also a rash, though it oughtn’t be confused with similar official skin diseases like Erysipelas. Przestrach or ‘fright’ is a kind of agitation caused by an abrupt, unpleasant event. Urok which stands for ‘charm’, is when someone is, as the name implies, under the influence of a bad charm cast by somebody else. Finally there’s nerw-kołtun or the ‘nerve-plait’, a complex notion, explained in the following quote taken from an article published in Białostocki Medyk (Białystok Medic), the journal of the Medical University of Białystok, by ethnologist and whisperers expert Małgorzata Anna Charyton:

'This complex conviction encompasses traditional folk psychology modernised by the whisperers. […] I’ve portrayed the plait – a folk illness that’s caused by the activation of an idle being existing within the human body. Historically, that being was called a ‘gościec’ [guestling - ed.]. Today the whisperers relate the disease-causing mechanism of irritation to nervousness, anxiety. '

"The syndromes of this strange condition are said to include insomnia, abdominal pains and a general weakness of the body.

Burning flax on a cloth placed over the person's head.

"People get to see the problem with their own eyes and that it’s being dealt with. Sometimes that’s enough to provide consolation. That’s why many of the whisperers’ rituals revolve around drawing the illness out of the patient’s body and disposing of it. Here’s what anthropologist Zuzanna Grębecka says about the burning of flax in the aforementioned Polish Radio broadcast:

  'Flax is a common and therefore familiar plant in the region. Moreover, it has properties that allow it to combust and drift in the air, and it therefore can symbolise burning and blowing out a malady. Also, it resembles human hair; there are very old folk beliefs connected with tangles, according to which humans have within them diverse sicknesses and sometimes these sicknesses surface in the form of matted hair […]. And so flax may symbolise tangled hair, which we can remove in the ritual.'

"In some cases you can also receive accompanying ‘medicines’: bread, poppy seeds or water that has been prayed over by the healer." 

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