An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Old One, The

’The Old ’Un’ is a dialect term frequently used to indicate the Devil. It is a significant pointer to the fact that ’The Devil’ is really a pre-Christian god, who has been degraded to devildom because his characteristics did not fit in with the new puritanical conception of deity.

Yet the Old Religion, with its roots in Nature, still lived on in the hearts and minds of the people. The way of referring to the Devil as ’The Old ’Un’ is an instance of this, and so is another term for the same mysterious personage, ’Old Harry’.

This comes from the Saxon hearh, a hill-top sanctuary where the pagan gods were worshipped. It survives in Mount Harry, a height of the Sussex Downs, and the Old Harry Rocks on the South Coast, which were supposed to have been put there by the Devil. ’Old Harry’ is the Old One who was worshipped on the hills.

Christina Hole, in her book English Folklore (Batsford, London, 1940), notes the fact that the word ’providence’ is sometimes used by old-fashioned country folk to mean, not the Christian idea of providence, but the Devil, or the ancient powers of paganism. She quotes a farmer’s wife who defended some old pagan good-luck rite in connection with the harvest, by saying that it didn’t do to forget “Owd Providence”, and perhaps it was best to keep in with both parties!

This little story is very revealing, in its insight into the thoughts and feelings of old-time country people, who lived close to Nature and had an unlettered wisdom of their own.

Another term for the Devil is ’Old Hornie’, an obvious reference to his famous attribute of horns; while ’Old Splitfoot’ or ’Clootie’ refer to his cloven hoofs, the characteristics of the Great God Pan.

A dialect term for the Devil, almost forgotten now, is ’Old Poker’. It is similar in origin to the words Puck or ’pooke’, and is a relic of the Old English puca and Welsh pwca, meaning an uncanny being or spirit. Another dialect term is ’Old Scratch’, from the Old Norse skratte, a goblin or monster.

Perhaps the best-known reference to the Devil beginning with ’Old’ is ’Old Nick’. This takes us directly back to pagan times, because Nik was a name for Woden, the Old English version of Odin, the All-Father, the Master Magician. Like the Devil in later years, Woden was believed sometimes to amuse himself by taking on human form and wandering about among mankind. Any mysterious stranger might be he, especially if he had an uncanny air about him, and seemed to possess knowledge beyond the ordinary.

Woden’s followers were the Wild Women, the Waelcyrges, whom the more northern nations called Valkyries. The Old English Waelcyrges, however, were more akin to witches than the warrior women whom Richard Wagner has depicted in his operas. They fly by night with Woden in the Wild Hunt, when the winter wind blows high and clouds scud across the moon. Indeed, the word Waelcyrge in old manuscripts has sometimes been translated as ’witch’.

It is not difficult to see how Nik and his Waelcyrges contributed to the idea of Old Nick and his witches.

In places where a Christian church was built upon a site of heathen worship, Nik was sometimes transformed and Christianised into St. Nicholas. For instance, Abbots Bromley, in Staffordshire, where the famous Horn Dance is performed every September, has its very old parish church of St. Nicholas. In this church the horns and other properties of the dance are stored when not in use; and at one time the dance was performed in the church porch. The dance is generally agreed to be a survival from very ancient times, and to have a pre-Christian origin.

Again, the oldest church in Brighton, Sussex, is that of St. Nicholas. It is built on a hill, where, according to local tradition, there once stood a pagan stone circle. Churches dedicated to St. Nicholas will nearly always be found to rest upon very old foundations.

There is also more relationship between ’jolly old St. Nicholas’ and the pagan Saxon festival of Yule, than there is with the Christian version that we call Christmas. The merry, scarlet-clad old fellow, who drives a team of reindeer from the North Pole, has much more in common with some old god of fertility and revelry than he has with