In the late 1970s, Irina Tsareva was working in a laboratory at an academic institute in Russia. She was a physicist by training, but something strange was happening. Secret research on telepathy was being conducted behind closed doors. The whispers in the hallways and the rumors from the smoking rooms began to shake her faith in scientific dogma. She later said that the spirit of those secret studies made her question everything she thought she knew.
Tsareva went on to earn degrees in physics and psychology, and eventually a diploma in parapsychology. But she never felt comfortable performing "passes over someone's head" (the kind of gestures associated with magical practice). Instead, she wanted to understand the phenomena without falling into either blind belief or rigid skepticism. She described it as walking the edge of a razor, balancing between two opposing views of the universe.
The Birth of the "Phenomenon" Association
Tsareva founded the Public Association "Phenomenon" with the goal of studying anomalous events and sharing findings with the public. She found like-minded people both in scientific circles and among writers. The association aimed to investigate unexplained natural phenomena and publish the results.
One of their most famous projects involved "witch circles," strange rings of mushrooms or grass that appear in fields and forests. In European folklore, these circles were said to be created by dancing witches or fairies. Some traditions warned against stepping inside them, claiming they could trap a person in an enchanted space. Others believed they marked places of ancient power or buried treasure.
Tsareva and her co-author Igor Tsarev wrote a book called The Mystery of Witch Circles, which was published in 2005. The book proposed a natural scientific explanation for the phenomenon. It was awarded a diploma named after Vladimir Vernadsky, a famous Russian scientist, for its natural-science approach to a mysterious topic.
What Are Witch Circles?
Witch circles go by many names: fairy rings, elf circles, pixie rings. They appear as arcs or complete circles of mushrooms, or as rings of darker, lusher grass. In some cases, the grass inside the ring dies, creating a visible pattern from above.
Folklore traditions across Europe have different explanations. In English folklore, they were places where fairies danced at night. In German tradition, they were where witches gathered on Walpurgis Night. In French stories, they were guarded by giant toads who could curse anyone who entered.
Modern science offers a more mundane explanation. Many fairy rings are caused by fungi that grow outward from a central point. The mycelium spreads in a circle, and as it grows, it depletes the soil of nutrients in the center. The outer edge remains fertile. This creates the ring pattern. But not all rings are explained this way, and some researchers, like Tsareva, have looked for other natural mechanisms.
Why This Matters for Folklore Today
Tsareva's approach is a good example of how folklore and science can coexist. She didn't dismiss the old stories as mere superstition. Instead, she took them seriously as descriptions of real phenomena that people observed and tried to explain with the language of their time.
I find this approach refreshing. Too often, we either reject folklore as nonsense or embrace it as literal truth. Tsareva tried to do something harder. She looked for the natural phenomenon behind the legend. She wanted to understand why people saw these rings as magical, and whether there was something genuinely unusual happening.
Her work reminds me that many folklore traditions are based on careful observation of nature. The people who told stories about witch circles were not stupid. They saw patterns in the landscape and created narratives to make sense of them. Today, we can appreciate both the scientific explanation and the cultural meaning of those stories.
Whether or not you believe in fairies or witches, the circles themselves are real. And the human impulse to find meaning in patterns is just as real. That's something worth thinking about the next time you see a ring of mushrooms in the grass.
For entertainment purposes only.
