Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition: Customs, Rites, and Ceremonies - Nigel Pennick 2015

Introduction

Preamble

Magic is an integral part of culture. It has often been ignored by historians, who, not believing in its efficacy or even recognizing that in the past many people did believe, thereby have dismissed any belief in it as beneath mention. Alternatively, when they have mentioned magic and the occult sciences, they have been portrayed as worthless superstition, or irredeemably diabolical and evil, unspeakable rites to be shunned because they might taint the reader. But to present magic as a dangerous subject that ought to be censored lest it seduce the reader into criminality is unhelpful, for it pushes students of magical history into a ghetto when students of human depravity and violence, such as crime and war, are welcome in the mainstream. Magic played a significant part in shaping people’s lives. Magic is an integral part of our cultural heritage, ancient skills, and wisdom that are a perennial response to universal situations and problems. Unraveling the history of an undocumented tradition in a definitive way is impossible. The only way to understand the themes embedded in the fragments is to take notice of historic parallels and examples, and draw conclusions from them.

Introduction

Northern Magic

MAGIC AND RELIGION

The traditional worldview is practical, consisting of what works or what is perceived to work. Ancient Pagan religions in Europe were concerned with rites and ceremonies; there was neither creed nor essential doctrines. All members of the family, clan, tribe, or nation participated in ritual activities, but belief was not demanded of the participants. There was no orthodoxy, and no heresy; participation was all that was required. In premodern times, life was unimaginably hard by the twenty-first-century standards of developed countries. People were reliant on agriculture, herds and flocks, hunting and fishing. There were no effective remedies for disorders, diseases, or epidemics of humans or livestock. Crop failures brought frequent famine; peasants often lived in grinding poverty at the edge of starvation. If a hurricane or flood occurred, there was no backup to rescue survivors, who had to get by as well as they could, having lost everything. Traveling was difficult, and wayfarers and voyagers ran the risk of attack by wild animals, robber barons, bandits, outlaws, or pirates, or dying crossing rivers and or in storms at sea. At home, there was always the risk of attack by marauding bands of fighting men, bringing rape, torture, death, or enslavement to those who could not resist or flee. Numberless diseases, disorders, and ailments beset the people, and their only recourse for a remedy was to practitioners of traditional medicine. Magic was an indivisible part of the craft of wise men and women as well as professional doctors. In such a fragile environment, people needed wisdom and skill to survive and flourish.

Magic practiced by the common people in pre-Christian times was part of everyday culture. It was embedded in the practical skills of everyday living. As in all parts of traditional society, there were specialists. Those in the handicrafts included smiths, wrights, carpenters, shoemakers, and other skilled workers who made things necessary for living, and there were also practitioners of herbalism, medicine, and divination whose arts were heavily on the magical side. But all of these arts and crafts had no theory; functionality was the operative criterion. They may have had origin-stories and mythical founders, but theory is something different, the arcane pursuit of philosophers and theologians. The Christian church, unlike traditional Pagan observance, insisted on belief in stories and doctrines that it asserted were essential to the afterlife. Belief in doctrines became confused with the practice of ethics. It was asserted that one could not be an ethical person unless one believed everything the church demanded. The northern Pagan point of view, however, is expressed in the Old Norse poem Hávamál (The Words of the High One), attributed to Odin. Hávamál describes desirable and undesirable behavior in terms of mannvit (common sense) and óvítr (foolishness). Behavior is defined as either skilled or unskilled behavior, and the outcome of unskilled activities is social: loss of face, ridicule, and outlawry. The concept of eternal damnation is not part of this way of understanding. One’s personal belief or disbelief does not matter, so long as one is a good citizen.

Fig. 1.1. Celtic stone image, Echterdingen, Germany.

A SHORT HISTORY OF NORTHERN PAGANISM

The history of indigenous religion in northern Europe provides some explanation of the context of traditional magic over the last sixteen hundred years. From what we can determine of ancient northern European religion, there was no distinct barrier between gods and lesser spiritual beings. The early religion of the northern peoples appears to have been centered not on an abstract universal deity, but upon the veneration of a divine ancestor and the natural forces of the world. The king’s ancestor was also the tribal god, and this principle was maintained among the Angles and Saxons in England. Seven out of the eight Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies descended from Woden, as did the royal line of Sweden. Ancestral holy places including homesteads, grave mounds, and battlefields were venerated as places where the ancestral spirits remained. Folk-Moots, the forerunner of parliaments, were held on moot-hills, some of which were the burial mounds of ancestors, whose spirits were invoked in collective decision making. The ancestors also played an important role in the everyday worship of the common people. There were goddesses similar to the Norse dísir, a collective of female ancestral spirits honored as guardians of a particular tribe, clan, family, or individual. Local cults venerated local gods and goddesses, and Roman influence led to the construction of temples to house their images and cult paraphernalia. In parts of northern Europe taken into the Empire, the gods and goddesses of local religious cults were taken over by the priesthoods of similar Roman deities under the intepretatio Romana. The Romans honored the spirit of each place with altars to the genius loci.

Fig. 1.2. Roman altar to Jupiter, Juno, and the genius loci. Bad Cannstatt, Germany.

Egyptian and Persian deities like Isis and Mithras were also worshipped in Roman cities in the north, such as London and York. Astrology and various forms of magic were embedded in everyday culture.

The Roman Empire was made officially Christian in 313 CE, and soon afterward Pagans were persecuted, their temples were appropriated or destroyed, and their treasuries were looted. But in northern Europe, in Britain on the fringes of the Empire, and outside the Empire, ancestral observances continued. For example, a Jupiter column was erected in Cirencester by the Roman governor Lucius Septimius in the late fourth century, a major Pagan sacred structure set up fifty years after the supposed destruction of the temples. In 410 CE the Roman army was withdrawn, and that part of Britain was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons in the following decades. Germanic Paganism arrived with them. Pagan worship was not static; new cults arose and were refined, and new temples were erected at the same time that the minutiae of Christian doctrines were being decided upon in church councils in the remains of the Roman Empire, which by then had ceased to have control over western Europe. For example, in Old Prussia, the temple at Nadruva (Romuva) enshrining the trinity of Patrimpas, Perkūnas, and Patolas was set up in the fifth or sixth century (Trinkūnas 1999, 148—49).

The Christian religion became dominant in Celtic parts of Great Britain while the Anglo-Saxons were still Pagan. Ireland was Christianized by St. Patrick (ca. 389—ca. 461 CE), and remnants of Christianity from the late Roman Empire may have been the spur for Celtic Christian missionaries from Ireland and Wales to the Anglo-Saxons and the Picts in Caledonia (later called Scotland) and later on into Germanic parts of mainland Europe. Missionaries sent by Rome from 597 CE onward came to England and converted some of the kings, who then imposed the religion on their subjects. The wars of this period in England were not fought on religious lines between Christian and Pagan as simplified histories claim. The most stalwart Pagan king of the period, Penda of Mercia (died 655), fought against the Christian kings of Northumbria, but Penda’s allies were not Pagans but forces of the Christian king of Wales, Caedwal II. The last part of England to remain worshipping the old gods officially was Sussex, whose king Arwald (died 686) was the last Pagan king in Britain.

Ireland and Britain became a center of Christian expansionism. The Northumbrian Christian monk Willibrord was sent to Frisia in the 690s to suppress local worship. This was part of the eastward expansion of the Christian Frankish Empire, a process that continued for centuries. In Saxony at the present Obermarsberg was a shrine with a very tall sacred pole called Irminsul, “the universal pillar.” It was destroyed by the forces of the Emperor Charlemagne in the year 772 during a crusade against the Saxons. The shrines of the god Fosite, on the holy island of Heligoland, were destroyed in the year 785. Bishoprics were set up in fortified towns in Pagan territory as centers for colonization and religious expansion. In 831—834, Hamburg became a bishop’s residence, and further outposts in the east were established. Poland was set up as a Catholic state between 962 and 992 by Prince Mieszco I. Between this state and Christianized Saxony was Pagan territory, where the Slav inhabitants strongly resisted missionaries and colonists. Now divided between Poland and Germany, Pomerania possessed several large and finely constructed timber Pagan temples, many located on defended islands in navigable rivers. A Christian state was established there in Pomerania in 1047 under Gottschalk, but he and the Bishop of Mecklenburg were killed in a rebellion in 1066.

In the Viking Age, major temples of the Nordic gods stood at Jelling in Denmark; Sigtuna and Gamla Uppsala in Sweden; Mæri, Lade, Skiringssal, Trondenes, and Vatnsdal in Norway; Kialarnes in Iceland; and at Dublin in Ireland. The temple at Retra was destroyed in 1068, and the one in Uppsala around 1080—1100. The Slavonic shrines and temples were destroyed by German and Danish expansion during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the Nordic temples through the conversion to Christianity of the indigenous ruling elites. A proclamation of 1108 by the bishops and overlords of Saxony called for Christian volunteers to destroy the “abominable people” and take for themselves the best land in which to live (Fisher 1936, 203—5). The Pomeranian temples were destroyed by Bishop Otto of Bamberg between 1124 and 1128, and the country was officially Christianized in the latter year. The temples at Brandenburg were demolished in 1136, but the god Triglav was still being worshipped by Slavs and Saxons there in 1153. In the Baltic was the holy island of Rügen with a number of Pagan temples, the largest of which was dedicated to the god Svantovit. The temples, which had been defended by three hundred dedicated men at arms, fell to a Danish-German crusade in 1168—69, after the death of their patron, Duke Nyklot.

On the Baltic shore, Old Prussia was another late stronghold of Paganism, where in 997 Bishop Adalbert of Prague died in a failed attempt to evangelize the inhabitants. Christianity was extirpated from Old Prussia in 1009, when the leading cleric Bruno of Magdeburg was killed. In 1200 a crusade led by Bishop Albert of Bremen led to the foundation of the city of Riga, and in 1202 a military order, the Fratres Militiae Christi (fraternity of the soldiers of Christ), better known as the Schwertbrüderorden (Sword Brothers Order, or Knights of the Sword), was established to impose Christianity by force. In 1225 they were reinforced by knights of the Teutonic Order, which had been founded at Acre in Palestine in 1190. Having been expelled from Transylvania by the Pagan Kumans, the Teutonic knights were sent by the pope to Prussia to colonize the Baltic lands for themselves as a religious-military state called the Ordenstaat.

The Knights of the Sword were defeated in battle by Pagan Lithuanian forces at the Battle of Schaule (Saule) in 1236, but in 1260 all inhabitants of the Ordenstaat were compelled by the Teutonic knights to swear allegiance to the Christian religion. This led to a war of genocide against the Sambian nation of Old Prussians, who refused to give up their religion. By 1283 the Teutonic crusade had devastated Old Prussia. Its inhabitants had been massacred or forced to flee as refugees. The Ordenstaat continued in existence until 1525. As a response to Christian pressure from the west and Islamic pressure from the south, the Lithuanian king Mindaugas set up state Paganism in 1251 as a means to unify the nation and resist colonization. In 1259 the Knights of the Sword attempted to take over Samogitia (lowland Lithuania) but were defeated again. In 1343, Estonian resistance against Danish colonists was manifested in the Pagan rebellion of Jüriöö Mäss (St. George’s Night, April 22/23) when all the churches and manors were destroyed and the Christian priests slain. Afterward, the Teutonic knights were sent in to kill the rebels. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania remained Pagan until 1387, while Samogitia came under the control of the Catholic Church only in 1414. In Lapland (Finland), church persecution of Sámi Pagan practices went on sporadically between 1389 and 1603, and a noid (shaman) was burnt alive with his drum at Arjeplog as late as 1693 (Jones and Pennick 1995, 167—73; 178—79). At the far eastern edge of Europe, in Russia, indigenous Pagan practices were never fully extirpated, and continue today in unbroken tradition. Although numerous indigenous religions of Europe were persecuted to destruction, beliefs, concepts, themes, and practices that were present could not all be utterly obliterated. They continued as forbidden practices, and in the customs and traditions of farmers, craftspeople, and in folk medicine.

Fig. 1.3. Christianized megalith at Trébeurden, Brittany, France. Commercial postcard ca. 1890. The Library of the European Tradition

MAGIC AND THE CHURCH

Once it had suppressed Pagan worship, the church claimed a monopoly on spiritual activities. It asserted that only ordained clergymen were permitted to deal with spiritual matters, and that meant that anyone else who made use of spiritual technologies was a criminal. Extending this, it was claimed that anyone who was not a priest who used magic, whether for good or ill, was being empowered by the devil. Dualistic belief in an evil god as an equal opponent of a good one had not existed in Pagan times. Those who practiced traditional magic that had originated before Christianization were accused of witchcraft, as the church clerics imagined their powers came from the old gods, who in the eyes of the church could only be seen as agents of the devil. Witches, imaginary or real, were labeled as deviants and transgressors, people whose way of life lay outside acceptable norms. They were viewed as part of an evil conspiracy determined to destroy society. In an era when a particular worldview was the only permitted reality, pluralistic realism—the possibility that numerous equally authentic truths can coexist—was not an option. Religious orthodoxy was enforced with draconian rigor and horrendous punishments. But because elements of pre-Christian lore and magic are present in recorded witchcraft practices and spells, certain writers have claimed wrongly that the whole body of historic witchcraft practice is Pagan. Many, if not most, recorded spells of healing and cursing especially drew strongly from Christian sources, sometimes from the mainstream Bible and occasionally from apocryphal sources (Davies 1996, 29).

In a feudal society that was based on well-defined classes and ranks, there were basically two kinds of magical practitioner: those who had an education in a monastery or university and those of a lower class who were part of a folk tradition. Clearly, the distinctions were blurred, and similar magical knowledge and theory was used in both traditions. It is recorded that some Christian monks and priests collected magical texts, and certain monasteries became well known for them. For example, the Icelandic “black books” called Rauðskinni (Redskin) and Gráskinni (Grayskin) were kept in the monastery library at Hólar. The former title was connected with Bishop Gottskálk Niklásson in the early sixteenth century. It appears to have contained magical lore from both the classical and runic traditions. In Germany a famous grimoire was attributed to the thirteenth-century cleric Albertus Magnus, and Abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462—1516), a contemporary of Niklásson, wrote around 70 works, many on magic, including Veterum sophorum sigilla et imagines magicae, an influential text on talismanic and image magic. The German renaissance magi Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535) and Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493—1541) were students of the master magician Abbot Trithemius, and their works remain in print today. In addition to incantations, medical recipes, and magical formulae, these published works contained sigils and signs that were part of the repertoire of craftspeople. They are still in use.

In his 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton expressed all the fears that people of his time had of magicians and witches, and the awesome powers they were alleged to possess. In the chapter titled “Of Witches and Magicians, How They Cause Melancholy,” he wrote:

Many subdivisions there are, & many several species of Sorcerers, Witches, Enchanters, Charmers, and so forth. They have been tolerated heretofore some of them; and Magick hath been publickly professed in former times, in Salamanca, Cracovia, and other places, though after censured by several Universities, and now generally contradicted, though practiced by some still . . . that which they can do, is as much almost as the Devil himself, who is still ready to satisfy their desires. . . . They can cause tempests, storms, which is familiarly practiced by Witches in Norway, Ireland, as I have proved. They can make friends enemies, and enemies friends, by philtres . . . enforce love, tell any man where his friends are, about what employed, though in the most remote places; and, if they will, bring their sweethearts to them by night, upon a goat’s back flying in the air . . . hurt and infect men and beasts, vines, corn, cattle, plants, make women abortive, not to conceive, barren, men and woman unapt and unable, married and unmarried, fifty several ways . . . make men victorious, fortunate, eloquent . . . they can make stick-frees, such as shall endure a rapier’s point, musket shot, and never be wounded . . . they can walk in fiery furnaces, make men feel no pain on the rack or feel any other tortures; they can staunch blood, represent dead men’s shapes, alter and turn themselves and others into several forms at their pleasures. (Burton 1621, I, ii, I, sub. III)

Although written in the early seventeenth century, Burton’s account reasserts earlier writings about the fearful power ascribed to magic. These beliefs are not yet dead.