An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Trees and Witchcraft

The late Elliott O’Donnell, author of so many volumes of ghost stories, also wrote a fascinating book called Strange Cults and Secret Societies of Modern London (Philip Allan, London, 1934). In this book, O’Donnell gives some very curious particulars of what he calls the tree cult. He relates how certain people, usually with something of the Celt in their ancestry, find a peculiar kinship with trees, and have some remarkable beliefs concerning them.

This tree cult is still in existence, and has a good deal in common with the Craft of the Wise. (It is not called ’the tree cult’ by those who follow it; but it is convenient to follow O’Donnell’s example in naming it thus.)

Beliefs concerning trees, their magical properties and the spirits that are thought to indwell them, are so old and so widespread that it is impossible to do more here than give a glimpse into tree lore and its connections with witchcraft.

TREES AND WITCHCRAFT. The World Tree, Yggdrasill.

Trees not only have distinct personalities of their own, for those who are sensitive to such things; but many trees are the abodes of spirits, which may be friendly towards humans, or sometimes very much otherwise. Elliott O’Donnell had a curious word, ’stichimonious’, to describe such spirit-haunted trees, which I have not seen elsewhere than in his works. He found so many stories of an uncanny or ghostly nature connected with trees that he later wrote a volume of such tales, entitled Trees of Ghostly Dread (Riders, London, 1958).

A haunted wood in Sussex, particularly connected with the ghost of a witch, is Tuck’s Wood near Buxted. The story behind this haunting is that, many years ago, a beautiful young girl called Nan Tuck somehow acquired the reputation of being a witch. One day an angry mob set about her and threatened to ’swim’ her in the pond at Tickerage Mill. She fled, with the mob in pursuit, and made for Buxted Church to ask for sanctuary. She managed to reach the church, and tried to grasp the ’sanctuary ring’ (the big ring of iron on many old-fashioned church doors). But the parson pushed her away, quoting the text about “not suffering a witch”; and presumably she was abandoned to the mob.

She subsequently hanged herself from a tree in Tuck’s Wood; and ever afterwards her ghost has haunted the wood and its neighbourhood. Her burial place is marked by an old grave slab outside the churchyard wall, near the lych gate.

It is not so inexplicable that there are many stories of ghostly phenomena connected with woods and with trees in general, when one realises that so old and powerful a living thing as a tree must have a strong aura, or field of force, surrounding it. Some sensitive people can see the auras of trees, as a faint silvery light against the sky. By leaning their back against a tree, they can attune themselves to its vitality, drawn deep from the earth and nourished by sunshine and rain. Many trees have a healing influence upon humans, when their life-force is contacted in this way.

The world’s oldest living things are trees—the ancient redwoods of California, estimated to be about 4,000 years old, and still producing buds and leaves. One of the world’s greatest pieces of music, Handel’s “Largo,” is a melody in praise of the beauty of a tree. There is far more in trees than merely wood and leaves.

A conspicuous tree has often been used as a trysting-place for many purposes, including those of the Old Religion. Solitary thorn trees, with their strange gnarled shapes, somehow suggest witchcraft and the Kingdom of Faerie; and few more so than the fantastic tree known as as the Witch of Hethel.

This very old thorn tree stands in the village of Hethel, south-west of Norwich, in Norfolk. How old it is, no one knows. A previous owner of the land, the first Sir Thomas Beavor, was said to have had a deed, dated early in the thirteenth century, which referred to the tree as “the old thorn”. Another scrap of tradition states that the tree was a meeting place for discontented peasants, when they staged a revolt in the troubled reign of King John (1199—1216).

Today, the trunk of the thorn is cloven, and its twisting branches have spread to become like a miniature wood in themselves. In several places, they are supported by props. Yet in spite of its amazing age, the Witch of Hethel still manages to produce a few bunches of sweet-smelling blossom each May. Happily, this historic tree is today cared for by the Norfolk Naturalists’ Trust.

But why is it called the Witch of Hethel? No one seems exactly to know. There is one significant pointer; the tree stands near to the village church, and although the latter is old, the thorn is thought to be older. We know that early churches were often built upon pagan sacred sites; so this church may have been deliberately built near a sacred tree. The Witch of Hethel may once have been the Goddess of Hethel, under the form of her sacred tree.

That hawthorn was once a sacred tree is shown by the fact that it is considered unlucky to bring its blossoms indoors. The only time when it was lawful to break the branches of the White Goddess’s tree was on May Eve, when they were used in the May Day celebrations. There are many folk tales of people who have suffered injury or misfortune, through cutting down or uprooting some venerable old thorn tree.

The oak, the ash and the thorn are the Fairy Triad; and where they grow together, you may expect fairies to haunt. There is a popular rhyme in the New Forest:

Turn your cloaks,

For fairy folks

Are in old oaks.

Turning your cloak inside out, and wearing it like that, was a remedy for being ’pixy-led’, or made to lose one’s way by fairy glamour.

The oak is the old British tree of magic, reverenced by the Druids; one of the mightiest and longest-lived of trees, and yet lying potentially within the smallness of the acorn. This is the probable origin of the old Sussex belief that to carry an acorn in one’s purse or pocket will preserve health and vitality and keep one youthful.

Also, the acorn in its cup is phallic in shape, and hence an emblem of life and luck. For this reason, the heads of gateposts at the entrance to a house were in olden times often carved in the shape of an acorn.

This is the reason, too, why old-fashioned roller blinds at windows often have a carved wooden acorn at the end of their cords. The acorn hung at the window originally to bring good luck, and keep away evil influences. Its real meaning tended gradually to be forgotten; but the custom of decorating window blinds with an acorn remained.

It has been suggested that the old nonsense-words, ’Hob a derry down-O’, which sometimes occur in folk-songs, are actually the worndown remains of a Celtic phrase, meaning ’Dance around the oak-tree’. Derw is the old British word for oak; and it seems fairly sure that Derwydd, meaning ’oak-seer’, is the origin of ’Druid’. Present-day witches sometimes dance around an oak or a thorn-tree and pour a libation of red wine at its root. The tree is an emblem of the power of life and fertility, which they worship by this act.

Fragments of traditional lore about trees often bear witness to their ancient importance in pagan religion. For instance, there is a curious passage in John Evelyn’s book, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (London, 1664). Writing of a certain very old and venerable oak-tree in Staffordshire, he tell us: “Upon oath of a bastard’s being begotten within reach of the shade of its boughs (which I can assure you at the rising and declining of the sun is very ample), the offence was not obnoxious to the censure of either ecclesiastical or civil magistrate.”

This seems certainly to hark back to the fertility rites of olden times, beneath the sacred oak. The same old custom lies concealed in a certain Sussex place-name, Wappingthorn Wood, just north of Steyning. ’Wap’ or ’wape’ is an old word meaning to have sexual intercourse, in this case beneath the sacred thorn tree.

The elder is a tree of rather sinister repute, and much associated with witchcraft. No careful countryman of olden days would burn logs of elder in his fireplace, because to do so would bring the Devil into the house. The berries of the elder make potent wine, and its strongly-scented white flowers are valued by the herbalist, to make elder-flower and peppermint mixture, a remedy for colds and chills. Yet there is something disturbing about the heavy perfume of elder flowers in the warm air of summer. Arthur Machen described it in a telling phrase, as “a vapour of incense and corruption”. Some regard it as noxious, while others believe it to be an aphrodisiac.

The elder tree is notoriously a dwelling place of spirits; so much so that an old belief says you should never cut or break a piece from an elder tree, without asking leave of any unseen presences. An elder tree that grows in an old churchyard is particularly potent for magical purposes. For instance, it can be used to charm warts, if you cut a small stick of green wood from it in the waning moon, rub the warts with the elder stick and then bury it somewhere where it will be undisturbed and rot away. As the stick decays, so the warts will disappear.

Some people believed the elder to be a protection against witchcraft; perhaps because it was thought to be the tree of which the Cross was made, and also the tree on which Judas hanged himself. Others regarded solitary elder bushes with suspicion, especially if they encountered one in the twilight where they could not remember seeing a bush before. It might be a witch in disguise, changed by magical glamour into the appearance of an elder tree. Some old stories said that witches could do this. There are so many legends about the elder tree that its association with magic and witchcraft is almost certainly pre-Christian.

A continuing cult of magical beliefs connected with trees is shown by a curious incident that happened in Sussex in 1966. In March of that year the Brighton Evening Argus reported that a curse had been publicly laid upon whoever cut down an ancient elm tree near Steyning, Sussex. The tree was threatened with destruction to make way for housing development; and a notice had been found pinned to it, which read:

Hear ye, hear ye, that any fool,

Who upon this tree shall lay a tool,

Will have upon him a curse laid,

Until for that sin he has paid.

The notice was adorned with magical symbols. The police investigated the matter; but so far as I know the author of the mysterious threat was never discovered.

The expression ’Touch wood’ is a relic of the ancient worship of trees. (I once had a man say to me, in all seriousness, “I don’t believe in superstition; and, touch wood, I never shall!”) The concepts of the World Tree or the Tree of Life occur again and again in pagan mythology and symbolism. Our Christmas tree, with its bright baubles and the star on the top, is a miniature version of the World Tree of our pagan ancestors, with its roots deep in earth, the sun, moon and stars hung on its spreading branches, and the Pole Star on its topmost point. Sometimes the star is replaced by a fairy doll, who represents the goddess of Nature ruling over the world.

A sign that a tree is the home of uncanny influences, is the presence upon it of the peculiar growth that country people call witches’ brooms. This appearance is actually caused by a kind of fungus, which has the effect of stimulating certain branches of the tree into unnaturally thick growth, dense and bushy like a broom. The broom-like cluster of branches also tends to come into leaf before the rest of the tree. A tree that had the sign of the witches’ broom upon it was certain to have something strange and magical about it, in old country lore.