FIT TO BE TIED

Kitsch Fortune-Tellers of a Kitsch Policy

AIM, Beograd, December 3,1994

Serbia today is telling its fortune using cards, beans, gazing at stars, with coffee or stones, symbols. They are making inscriptions and amulets, removing spells. "Even serious people", says Ljubisa Trgovcevic, one of the most popular sorcerers in Belgrade, "would give the shirt off their back to hear me say that they are under a black magic spell". One cannot establish direct contact with the seeress Branka, whose video spot is constantly on TV Pink (an ikebana array consisting of crosses, beans, cards, icons and scrolls). Her secretary will put you on the waiting list. After fifty years of faith in brotherhood and unity, the avant-guarde of the working class and Marxism, the craving for the arcane, for illusion, is assuming the proportions of a mass-scale hysteria. Having had their fill of this world's misery, the Serbs are, at long last, on the right road to becoming a heavenly people. This is not a story about our clairvoyants. This is a story about the impotence of a people under a spell.

"CHILDMETER" OUT OF ORDER TODAY

At a funeral in a little village just outside Belgrade, one person was in charge of specially guarding the deceased. Very often people will stop at nothing to get the hair, an article of clothing, or a piece of a corpse's shroud in order "to cast" or remove a spell from them or their family - via the dead. Despite the guard, after everything an upside down burnt out candle was, nevertheless, found. Thereby, someone tried to "make short work" of a hated enemy.

A few months ago, in a village near Cacak, a girl had got it into her head that she was divinity embodied. Her "thesis" was accepted by her parents, and equally by her neighbours who always took off their shoes, as she instructed them to do, when they entered her yard. All this could have passed for superstition, had not this "deity" persuaded her household that Satan had invaded her own grandmother. So they first tried to drown the seventy-year old unfortunate woman in the nearby spring. As the devil resisted and would not get out, they simply burned her in the yard. The neighbours did nothing to prevent them.

Just how gullible people are willing to be was best demonstrated last winter by the troupe of the popular "Index" theatre. They advertised the invented Agency "Destiny" for just one day. Over two hundred people called the radio station, to ask the popular Micko to see their future, read their palms, coffee dregs and the fabricated Etruscan horoscope. These wretched people were really unaware that he was pulling their leg, they put their palms against the telephone receiver so that he could "see" their line of destiny, they sipped their coffee so that he could tell by the "sound" of their sipping what lay in store for them. They agreed to pay as much as DM 30 for that sting, an amount which last winter was a veritable fortune. To add insult to injury they believed that that amount would be charged to their phone bill. Micko seriously claimed that his "childmeter" was out of order so that he could not see the future of their children, and as for numerology, he added up the years under the sanctions, and the 22,000 percent monthly inflation to calculate their level of bashfullness - how red in the face the client could get. Interestingly enough, the phone kept ringing for another two months with women calling in on the recommendation of their satisfied friends.

Since last winter to date, uncertainty has grown, and with it the market of illusion has burgeoned. As far as we know, there are today around 70 fortune - telling agencies registered in Belgrade, and last year about 500 individuals were licensed to set up "good-luck surgeries". One session costs from DM 20 to 100. If we leave aside the actual abilities of individuals making up this motley world of con artists, or of persuasive mythomaniacs, or romantic eccentrics who believe in their own divine mission (or of those with real extra-sensory perception powers?), there remains an industry with an enormous turnover.

Now, big capital is already behind the agency "Ramovic" which operated in the Sava Center last year. Twenty-two alternative practitioners of all kinds worked under the watchful eye of Zoran Ramovic, with the rate per session being DM 100 last winter. To obtain a working permit, one has to be a member of the "Extra Sensory Association of Yugoslavia" headed by no one else but Ramovic himself.

The "leftovers" were picked up by other, smaller agencies. For instance, one Nina is the owner of the agency "Venera". She is a palm reader, deals in numerology with one session being up to 70 dinars. Ljubisa Trgovcevic specializes in tracing missing persons and cars. He says that if he manages to find some object of value he charges a commission, and for resolving some personal problem 50 dinars.

To reach Cleopatra, Ma Keti, Vanesa or Buba, has become a question of life or death. The media have collected a king's ransom for creating the images of these new stars.

In the very popular show "The Eye of the Horoscope", over the last two years TV Politika has presented some 80 clairvoyants, white and black witch-craft magicians, astrologers, bio-energy healers, numerologists, diviners. Anyone who could pay could be a guest on the show. The rates varied. Cleopatra paid DM 500 for every hour bought on Studio B. The Third Channel "made" Buba, and the "Horoscope" of Milja Vujanovic. Every appearance of Trgovcevic on TV Kraljevo cost him cca.700 dinars. And the TV station "Pink" with seeress Branka keeps up the good work.

The first sorceress here, Vava, recalls that the media used to be impenetrable, that it was hard to assert oneself. Nowadays, "medicine men" arrange for their friends to call them in the studio and all live shows are staged. Trgovcevic who was a real furor on TV "Politika" also claims that the paid time slots are in 90 percent of the cases prearranged in detail. Except for those, needless to say, in which he participates.

"Were it not for TV programmes devoting a full hour to a fortune-teller and thereby promoting a quasi and harmful form of social behaviour, their influence would be much smaller. What we have here is the deliberate imposition on the spectators of something which is not tangible, not visible, not defined, so that they might forget the principal problems weighing down on this society", was the comment given on the current state of spiritual affairs by the ethnologist Dr.Ljubinko Radenkovic.

The big war-propaganda-mongers have capitalized on fear to shape suitable societal behavioural patterns. And, they in fact charged that same society for it via the electricity bill (which also includes a state TV fee).

MILOSEVIC AS OUR FATE

For over a year now, Milja Vujanovic, the well known astrologer, has been inciting hatred towards the West with a vengeance every Wednesday on state TV. As if mesmerized, the population of Yugoslavia stared at the screen only to hear that computers were the work of Satan which must be expelled from Serbia, that the Serbs were the oldest people, that the Americans were in the hands of the devil. When official policy was changed from a war-mongering to a peace-making one, the show was taken off the screen and Milja herself dumped on the scrapheap of history.

The famous painter Milic of Macva, armed with a hawthorn stake and a garlic garland, donning a black cassock, cast anathemas, spells and aspersions on the Americans, before millions of viewers.

The scientist Nikola Tesla was also put to political use. It is well known that he studied the abstruse and experimented a lot, and this served as a basis for the propaganda war. His "secret weapon" had been snitched from America, was the message Arkan and Zhirinovsky sent from Erdut, and was in Serbian hands, and would destroy only enemy troops.

People could also read in the papers that the "Black Sect of Toplice" a satanist sect of young boys and girls, was conducting rites in houses and on cemeteries, "emitting negative black waves at the enemies of Serbia and the Serbian people". As the "Vecernje Novosti" wrote, they created an energy field via which they broadcast messages to the inhabitants of West Europe. Sardinela, a prostitute, turned the rite into a religious-erotic show, at the cemetery near Prokuplje.

Nine genie-khojas came to Sarajevo when the war began and sealed with black magic the nine Sarajevo springs. A group of people in Serbia is trying to overpower them with counter - magic. At least, that is what Ljubisa Trgovcevic believes.

In January 1994 one Zvonko Ramanovic said: "I see peace for this year. Mr.Milosevic is the most deserving for it. Some would say that I might be wrong, but he is our fate. The war will end by the end of winter, and then the sanctions will also be lifted".

Lav Gersman, advertised as the Russian white magician, said last year: "In the three years to come, what remains of Yugoslavia and what carries its name, will be among the wealthiest states of Europe. No one can ever destroy the people of this country, although many have tried. And I will tell you why. Because of the food. A people who have food, can survive every adversity and should not worry for its chlidren".

Living this illusion, people find it hard to abandon the offered safe haven. The punchline is that it will take less to lift the sanctions than the spell over the Serbs. The explanation of this enthrallment does not lie in black magic.

Technological optimism is dying down in the world, the prevalent feeling is that the mechanical civilizational model has been exhausted, there is a strong scientific movement studying the para-psychological, telepathy or hypnosis in order spiritually to ennoble the institutionalized society. Events in Yugoslavia however, have a totally different trend - a reversal to tribal civilization. We are experiencing psyco - social regression. This is how Dr.Vuk Stambolovic, the first in Yugoslavia to open the door to alternative practices already fifteen years ago, explains the boom of the irrational.

• We have lived a long time after the Sisyphus archetype. That is the communist project which says - it is difficult for us now, as we are pushing the stone up. Once we reach the top, we shall live happily. The basic message was clear, the stone can never be pushed to the top, the purport being that the sacrifice is pointless. The myth lost its legitimacy, the people suddenly found themselves instilled with great hope, but one they could not endure, - explains Vuk Stambolovic. Then, the Academy of Sciences offered them a necrophilous nationalistic project, instead of hope, a fantasy about the Serbs, the chosen people. Compensatory hatred was offered, one after another "culprit" was named, to explain why the hope cannot materialize. Man is on a see-saw, on a string. The myth of Kosovo is proposed as the basic value in this century. The tragic message is that life should be sacrificed on the altar of spiritual values, while it is precisely on life that spirituality rests. Man has been confined to a small number of roles, but these roles are not firmly grounded, but rather imposed by media campaign and various pressures.

According to Vuk Stambolovic we are living in a private state, this country has an owner who has his right-hand men. Institutions have been virtually abolished. Everyone is doing what they please in their respective domains. I feel like it - a manifestation of the law of the jungle. Like when, for instance, Biljana Plavsic says that she does not like to live with the Moslems, and then Moslems are killed. There is no framework, and people cannot live without one.

• The dam was ruptured by this social regression, together with kitsch politics, kitsch music, kitsch papers, with the general kitsch in this country. So we also have kitsch fortune-tellers - adds Stambolovic. It is like a drug, you get hooked, you reach out to them, and you get a pipe dream. And the craving is only greater. There exist in the world associations of alternative therapists, and the membership is subjected to controls. There indeed do exist people with extra-sensory powers. Their biggest problem lies mainly in the fact that they could not bear their own ability, the awareness that they are capable of doing things other people cannot do. As the old rule of the alchemist goes, a step forward in this domain implies two steps backward in one's own development. Otherwise, everything becomes its opposite, manipulation.

Gordana Igric

Entrefilet

THE BALKAN PROPHECIES

"There will be no more pitting people against people, the opposition is not capable of leading the country. Sanctions will be lifted, war will end, - says Vava, otherwise a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, a communist. - There will be changes in the party in power, but not on the top. There will be personnel changes, and the people will wholeheartedly welcome them. Avramovic's programme will be successful, and the left is on the march everywhere.The economic linking of the former Yugoslav republics in three years is a realistic proposition.

Ljubisa Trgovcevic is privately a champion of iron fist rule, so that it is hard to distinguish between his "visionary" and his political orientation. He admits that some parties have tried to recruit him, but he refused.

• I expect the sanctions to be lifted by the end of March. The war in Bosnia will come to an end, but there is no living there. Relations in Bosnia will be normalized only in 1999. There will be no war here. Better times are in store for Serbia. Seselj will soon be released from prison, and Milosevic will remain in power. Had it not been for Milosevic, there would have been chaos in Belgrade a long time ago. Those in opposition cannot hold a candle to him. I see no upheavals or riots.

Tomislav Sili, an employee, an amateur fortune-teller who uses the Chinese book "Ji-Ying", sticks and symbols, has his own interpretation of the policy of abusing the arcane.

-Everything is in the service of the authorities. When they need the occult, then they promote it, and when they do not need it, there is a witch-hunt. The Chinese book says that Avramovic's programme has come to an end. The period ahead will bring chaos, provoked by the will of those whose brainchild that programme is. There will be profound changes in geography, borders, a very harsh winter, with much suffering and hardship. Evil will persevere, and man should shut himself out and not allow himself to succumb to base instincts. Such a situation will last until the summer of 1995. The spring of that year will see the end of the process of shaping of what should represent some new state. It will mark the beginning of progress and the new epoch, and the change of the system. A sobering up through profound suffering.