Ukranian/Romanian beeswax healing ritual and folklore.

Don’t you just love it when those unexpected things happen that feel just right, that are so perfect you know in your bones that there could have been no other way?

About a month ago an unexpected package came in the post marked from my grandmother who lives in Toronto. As I tore into the large envelope I hoped with all my heart that it was what I have been wanting for years now.

The package was full of photos, letters, and information about the Romanian/Ukrainian and Irish family on my fathers side.

When I was a little girl I had the great fortune to meet my great grandfather, a Ukrainian man who immigrated from Romania in the 1900′s to Canada. He met my Irish grandmother and together they had two children.

The story does not end there though, because you see my grandmother was married to another man when she met him, a Mason with whom she already had two sons with. It may sound all very romantic, but the letters show a whole real side to the story that I had never heard before, and which made me cry.

In the photo above, {the one with the two woman standing in a garden} you can see my great grandmother and her sister {Paraska and Bella Cetuchuk}, woman who have both now taken their place of honor as my ancestors.

My great grandmother{the older of the two women} if I look closely, shares an essence with my father, I can see it in her face, the way she holds her jaw and in her eyes. I see these things in myself as well and this makes me feel close to her.

This is a great comfort to me as I have been researching and longing to know more about my family for as long as I can remember. This intensified when I began a shamanic apprenticeship in 2007 and really started working with the spirits and my ancestors.

When I first began beekeeping my shamanic journeys were full of messages and information about how the women in my family kept bees in the walls of their homes and secret information about how they used the honey as medicine and for fertility.

Later as I started to dig and do research I realized that this was in fact what  was done in the past, and somehow this seemed to validate what I was experiencing with my bees and the information that I was being given shamanically. It helped me to carry on even-though beekeeping can be intense and tricky in the city.

Several months ago I wrote about the beekeepers task of refining any beeswax they may have gathered in the summer, and so this is what I began to do this past fall, making sure that my shamanic connection to the bees was there and listening to what I was being told to do with the wax.

And then once again it happened, as I was doing some research on the internet a link to an article that turned out to be a book that I was able to order appeared called The Word and Wax.

A Medical Folk Ritual Among Ukrainians in Alberta. Which is a book that explores medical folk ritual of wax pouring used by immigrants of the Ukrainian community in Alberta to drive away fear and curing minor ailments. “The ceremony is of the magico-religious and oral-incantational genre of folk medicine.”

This intrigued me right away  because of my work with beekeeping and beeswax, and I knew that I wanted to read and learn how to do this form of healing and divination.

Shortly after that another remarkable thing happened, knowing that I would need an enamel pot to melt the wax in I started looking into where I would buy one specially for this work, and of course low and behold as I was moving one of my friends I spied a white enamel pot at the bottom of a giveaway box.

When I pulled it out and asked her if I could have it, she got a bit misty eyed and said that she would love for me to have it since she was reluctant to part with it knowing it was a good pot but not having the room for it in her new home.

Later that night I pulled out my new pot and turned it over, I saw that on the bottom it read “Made in Romania” which told me that this was exactly the same kind of pots that they would have used, and now I owned one!

Knowing what I know about messing around with incantations and spirits I decided to take it easy the first time I tried out, calling on my guides to keep me safe and asking for any information I might need from my ancestors who knew about this tradition. I also realized after speaking to my shamanic teacher  that pulling fears out of people sounded quite a lot like shamanic extraction and this work would need to be taken seriously, and done properly.

The divination part of working with the wax, I found interesting because the practitioner pours the wax into a bowl of cool water over the persons head and then reads the bumps that form on the underside of the wax, much like tea leaf readings. I found this to be very intuitive, informative and fun, although I have recently come to realize that any kind of divination{Tarot, Runes etc..} requires a safe spirit that you know to do the work, otherwise you are essentially inviting anything in.

The Romanian’s believed in a ‘lower’ mythology (that was older in origin than the pagan belief in ‘higher’ gods), which involved ancestral-clan images and an animistic world view that populated how they understood nature with spirits. This tradition managed to survive until recent times. Water, fire, and eggs were held in the highest esteem by Ukrainian sorcerers as was lightning and thunder storms.

What I found particularly interesting was all the names they have for shamans, witches and sorcerers, there must have been close to 50 that I counted in my book and then more I found on-line, my favorite was the word pasichnyk which means bee-keeper, who protects bees.

Because my work with the bees has always been both spiritual and environmental in nature I am always interested in aspects of how beekeeping played out in myth and folklore, there is a wealth of information here and I am already delving into the Irish history and folklore surrounding beekeepers from this area of the world as well.

For now though I am preparing for a day of making mead with my dear friend Sarah Witch of Forest Grove. I shall post photos about our day and the story here as well as we have great plans for magic and mischief while making our mead.

To end my post I will leave a few beautiful photos of beehives in Romania I found on-line…