Konotop witch tarot

The five positions

• Water of Truth: in the story, water was supposed to reveal who was telling the truth. This card shows what is really going on in your situation, including what isn’t visible at first glance.
• Broom: witches rode brooms, but a broom also swept bad energy out of the house. This card shows what it’s time to clear out of your life.
• Moon over Konotop: hidden influences, fears and things happening quietly in the background.
• Salt on the Threshold: an old sign of a protected home. Here the card shows what keeps you steady and what you can lean on.
• Dawn: where the situation is heading once the night is over.

The cards are laid out in a pyramid, like our five-card spread, and at the end you get a summary of the whole reading. Open questions work best, such as “What is really happening in my relationship?” or “What is holding me back at work?” A yes-or-no question is better suited to yes or no tarot.

Konotop, the town with a reputation

Konotop is a real town in northern Ukraine, in the Sumy region, about 120 miles northeast of Kyiv as the crow flies. It’s known for a 1659 battle in which Cossack and Crimean Tatar forces defeated a Muscovite army, for its railway works, and, in Ukrainian folklore, for its witches. To this day, calling a woman a “Konotop witch” is a half-joking compliment: someone clever, stubborn and best not crossed.

That reputation owes most of its fame to one book. Folk belief across Ukraine already held that witches gathered on bald hilltops, stole the dew from neighbors’ fields and milk from their cows, and could cause or stop rain. A nineteenth-century writer gave those beliefs a hometown.

The Witch of Konotop, the novella

Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko (1778–1843), from near Kharkiv, is often called the father of modern Ukrainian prose. His comic novella The Witch of Konotop (Konotopska vidma) is usually dated to 1833, when it was written, and was published in 1837 in his second collection of Little Russian tales. Most literary histories give those dates; a few date the writing a year or two differently, so treat 1833 as the commonly cited year.

The plot is a satire. The Cossack captain (sotnyk) of Konotop, Mykyta Zabrioha, has been turned down by the woman he loves, Olena. Sulking and idle while a drought ruins the harvest, he lets his scheming clerk, Pistriak, persuade him that local witches have hidden the rain. Zabrioha orders the town’s women “swum” in the river to find out who is a witch. The ordeal goes as badly as such ordeals did in real life, and the true witch of the story, the sly old Yavdokha Zubykha, takes her revenge with spells that make the captain look more foolish at every turn.

Spellings of the names vary in English: Zabrioha, Zabrekha and Zabriokha all appear, and Yavdokha is also written Jawdocha or Yavdocha. What doesn’t vary is the target of the joke: not witches, but officials who would rather blame a scapegoat than do their jobs. The story has been staged and filmed many times in Ukraine and is still read in schools.

The water ordeal: the dark history behind the comedy

The test Kvitka-Osnovianenko mocked was real. “Swimming” a suspected witch meant throwing her, often bound, into a river or pond. If she sank, water, a pure element, had accepted her and she was considered innocent, though she might drown before anyone pulled her out. If she floated, she was judged a witch. The ordeal appears across Europe from the Middle Ages on, including England during the witch panics of the seventeenth century.

In Poland and Lithuania, where witch trials peaked later than in Western Europe, the water test was used in some local courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Polish parliament restricted witchcraft trials and banned torture in 1776. Ethnographers in Ukraine and Belarus recorded villagers ducking women suspected of causing drought well into the nineteenth century, outside any court, which is exactly the scene the novella satirizes. Barbara Zdunk, executed in 1811 in Reszel (then in Prussia, now in Poland), is often called the last person executed for witchcraft in Europe, although she was formally convicted of arson; historians disagree on how much the witchcraft rumors decided her fate.

That’s why we treat “magic” here as tradition, story and reflection. The witch of our spread is the wise woman of the legend, not someone to fear, and certainly not someone to blame.

Bald Mountain and the witches’ sabbath

In Ukrainian and Polish belief, witches flew to their gatherings on a bald mountain, Lysa Hora. In Ukraine the name belongs above all to a hill on the edge of Kyiv; in Poland, to Łysiec in the Holy Cross Mountains. The great gatherings were said to happen on Kupala Night in midsummer and on the eves of major feasts.

Americans may know the idea without knowing its source: Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (first version 1867) pictures exactly this sabbath, and Disney animated it in Fantasia (1940) with the giant figure of Chernabog on the mountaintop.

Folk protection customs from Ukraine and Poland

People believed a home could be protected with simple gestures. Today they work well as small mindfulness rituals for your own space:

• A pinch of salt on the threshold or in the corners of the house was meant to stop bad influences at the door. Now it’s a nice excuse for a clean, fresh start in your home.
• Wormwood and mugwort tucked behind a beam or an icon protected the house, especially around Kupala Night.
• Poppy seeds scattered by the door: a witch or a restless spirit had to count every seed and couldn’t get in before dawn.
• A red thread tied on a child’s wrist or near a cradle guarded against the evil eye.
• A mirror turned to the wall at night, so nothing could look into the house through it.

All of these customs are about protecting yourself and the people you live with. We don’t publish rituals aimed at other people. For more of the old calendar, see Slavic divination and Dziady.

Frequently asked questions