Mitologjia Shqiptare

Flama (disease ghost)

Flamë / Flama

The same word names illnesses (epilepsy, glanders, vine disease, sëmundja e tokës).

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Description

Female ghost of the unquiet dead causing nervous collapse, epilepsy, plague, and other serious illness among the living — roughly Roman lemures type (Elsie 2001:90 s.v. Flama; Dhama Flama; Shqipopedia FLAMË). The same word names illnesses (epilepsy, glanders, vine disease, sëmundja e tokës). Curse formulas: të hëngërt flama!, të raftë flama!. She is a disease-spirit / unquiet dead — not a blood-vampire — and clusters with kukudh’s plague face as parallel disease-personification, not synonym collapse.

Features

  • causes nervous collapse, epilepsy, plague, severe illness
  • invoked in curse formulas
  • lexeme also names the illnesses themselves

Lead story

They do not say she drinks. They say she falls. A name in a curse — të raftë flama! — and the body remembers what the dead can still do: nerves go wrong, the fit comes, plague walks a house, a vine blackens, a horse’s breath turns foul. The same word is the illness and the ghost. Folk treat her like the old lemures: unquiet, female, a miasma more than a mouth. Do not put her in the vampire gallery beside the skin-wearing lugat. She is pale dread and fever grammar — disease wearing a woman’s unquiet name — and that is the whole short page.

Aliases

flamë · flama · të hëngërt flama! · të raftë flama!

Region

Pan-folk Elsie entry; curses + illness names

Relations

Linked stories

  • Shtriga, Flama, and AvullusheRecorded

    Shtriga drinks infant blood; Flama personifies disease; Avullushe smother with vapor. Keep them in the blood–nightmare cluster, not as one kind.

  • As të ha kukudhi!Recorded

    Southern face: blind female plague-carrier; same word names a sickness worse than cholera; curse still bites. Parallel flama — not synonym.

  • Abe the cloak phantomReconstructed

    Abe is a woman’s shape in a coarse aba cloak—Elsie’s thin phantom stub.