Calus [antikvár]

Until the thirties, Australian and North-American Indian religions were more seriously investigated and better understood than the folk traditions of southeast Europe. On the one hand, the researchers were interested mainly in the folk literature; moreover, they collected the material with some laxity. On the other hand, their interpretations of rituals and "popular mythologies" followed one of the contemporary fashionable theories (Max Muller, Mannhardt, Frazer). Furthermore, many scholars, both in Eastern and Western Europe, considered the rural traditions as a fragmentary and debased survival (gesunkene "Gut") from a superior layer of culture, i.e., that represented by the feudal aristocracy or deriving from Church literature. In sum, taking into account the powerful influences of the Church and of the urban culture, one was inclined to doubt the authenticity or archaism of the rural religious traditions.Recent investigations have radically modified this perspective. Scholars, specialists in different areas of research, have brought to light a number of archaic elements surviving in folk traditions and oral literature of the Irish, Baltic, and Germanic peoples, the Slavs, the Romanian, and other Balkanic nations. Needless to say, such discoveries will greatly enlarge and rectify our knowledge and understanding of the religious history of Europe.In the last three centuries, the Calu§ari and their cathartic dances have attracted the attention of Romanian and foreign scholars alike. A great number of hypotheses have been elaborated concerning their relation to similar ritual dances in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the structure and function of the Calu§ cultic organization and methods of healing. Ethnologists and historians of religion have not failed to point out that the Cälu^ groups have the character of a male secret society: their initiation rites, their oath-taking ceremony, the symbolism of the sticks and of the "flag," the role of the leader, etc. No less intriguing have been the intimate relations between the Cälu§ari and avii