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

Traditional Buildings and Practical Magic

BUILDERS’ RITES AND CEREMONIES

Omens and Portents

The foundation of sacred buildings, especially when done by Celtic Christian priests, often used divinatory methods to determine the site. Wild pigs were ostenta for building several churches in what are now England, Wales, and France. St. Dubricius (Dyfrig, ca. 450—ca. 530) owned an estate called Inis Ebrdil in south Wales. Seeking the place to build a monastery, he found a white sow and her piglets, which he took as an ostentum to build there. They called the monastery Mochros, “the swine moor” (Baring-Gould and Fisher 1907—1913, II, 366). In Alsace around the year 660, St. Arbogast (whose name means “swine spirit”), founded the monastery of Ebersmünster in the Forêt de Haguenau, because of the same ostentum. In the sixth century the Welsh king Gwynllyw was converted to Christianity and decided to build a church. He searched around and found a white ox with a black spot on its forehead. This was the omen, and there on the hill where it stood, the church of St. Wooloo was built (Baring-Gould and Fisher 1907—1913, III, 238).

According to old chronicles, also in sixth-century Wales the Celtic saints Cadoc, Dunwyd, and Tathan loaded their building materials onto a wagon and yoked up a pair of oxen. The location for their church was to be determined by where the ox wagon stopped. So they started the oxen off and allowed them to wander, pulling the wagon. It stopped on a high point between two woods, Pen y ddau lwyn (Pendoylan), and there the new church was built (Baring-Gould and Fisher 1907—1913, II, 386—87). In the Norse tradition the Vatnsdœla Saga tells how the Norwegian wise woman Heid told Ingimund, whose hlutr (portable sacred image) of the god Freyr had disappeared, that it would be found in Iceland. Ingimund sent two Finnish magicians there to locate the hlutr, which they did. But as they were unable to recover it for him, Ingimund emigrated to Iceland and founded a new hall called Hof on the site.

Fig. 10.1. Wolf with the head of St. Edmund, St. Edmundsbury Cathedral.

Locating the best place for a building was not restricted to churches and temples. There are spiritual house-site location practices recorded from all over northern Europe. Once the actual site was determined, it had to be tested to see if it was suitable. A person with “land wisdom” (Old Saxon landwîsa) had to be consulted. Methods used by the practitioner included asking permission from the earth spirits, fairies, landvættir, jordvättarne, and so on. A south Slav divination used a wheel-shaped bread, rolled onto the site. If it fell on its upside, then the earth sprite had agreed it was a good place to build. If it fell upside down, then no building took place (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, III, 1558). The haunts of local spirits, such as standing stones and ancient mounds, had to be recognized and avoided. Houses were not to be built blocking fairy paths or spirit paths, or where the Wild Hunt was known to ride, so a local knowledge of these was necessary for the locator. There were prohibitions against building at places where predators ate their prey or where animals were slaughtered, sites where bones had been dug up, or where there was a boulder too large to move. Places where once houses had stood, but had burned down, were avoided. Locations where livestock lay down to sleep, or where a lucky object had been found, were considered favorable. Places where strong crosswinds were prevalent (wind corners) were avoided. Building over a spring of water was not recommended. The locator had to camp out on the site for a Thursday or Friday night to determine what the nature of the place was (Honko 1962, 189).

An Estonian custom placed stones on the site. If, after three days, there were worms beneath them, then the site was viable. In Iceland the site of a new house was measured three times. If the measures were the same each time, then building could proceed. In the Faroe Islands a magnetic compass was taken to the site. If the compass gave a false reading, “out of line,” this was an indication that the huldu (hidden) spirits there had refused permission to build (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, III, 1558). Direction was important. Traditional houses took the prevailing winds into account, if possible. Of course, a new house that was a continuation of a row of houses followed the orientation of the others, whether or not the first house had been oriented properly or not. Certain evil spirits were associated with certain winds at certain times of the year, and it was best not to have to contend with them.

In some places the site of the house and garden was marked symbolically and magically by ploughing a single furrow sunwise between four corner markers right around the boundary. The boundary ditch was a deepening of the sulcus primigenius, the primal furrow. In Estonia and Finland a cross was dug in the earth on the site before building commenced (Honko 1962, 190). A tradition in eastern England is that after the ground where the house is to be built has been cleared of vegetation, it should first be swept with a nine-bramble sprite flail, then again with a besom of birch twigs on an ash stave made especially for the purpose. After use, both flail and broom must be burnt, for once a broom has swept away harmful influences, if it is not destroyed, it can be used magically to cause harm. In many cultures a sacrifice was made when a building was commenced, and the remains of the sacrifice buried in the first posthole or beneath the foundation stone.

Fig. 10.2. Carving of bound sacrificial victim beneath the font of Castle Frome church, Herefordshire, England.

Foundations laid in blood were believed to make the building stand firmly (Howlett 1899, 30). In his Deutsche Mythologie Jacob Grimm noted that in former times it had been considered necessary to build living animals, even human beings, into the foundations of buildings. Such foundation deposits have been discovered in places too numerous to list. Horses were significant in the north, as detailed below. Not only animals were put down at the foundation ceremonies. Excavations of the sites of ritual centers in Scandinavia unearthed foundation offerings in the form of pieces of gold foil embossed with images. In Sweden at Helgö, twenty-six gold pieces were found, while at Maere in Norway nineteen were found in the postholes of a building that existed on the site before a Christian church was built there (Lidén 1969, 23ff.). Similar embossed gold foil images are known in Germany as far south as Konstanz. Clearly they were sacred offerings placed in the earth during the rites and ceremonies of foundation to give the building spiritual protection. In the thirteenth century the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order placed a golden cross in the ground at Romowe in Old Prussia as the foundation of the church built where the felled sacred oak of the Pagans had stood. There is a tradition in Germany that sprigs of the juniper tree (Savin, Juniperus communis) should be laid ceremonially in the foundations of a building to ward off future disharmony among the people living there. The day of the week and the phase of the moon were also taken into account. In Germany building should not start on a Monday, nor should one begin to build a chimney on a Friday (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, III, 1562).

HORSE BURIAL, HORSE REMAINS, AND BONES IN BUILDINGS

The horse had preeminence as the most sacred animal in the northern tradition. The oldest Norse law texts indicate that the horse was the most important sacrificial animal in public rites and ceremonies (Carlie 2004, 124). Human burials containing horses and parts of horses took place widely in northern Europe in Pagan and later times (Cross 2011). Horsemen and horsewomen were accompanied to the grave by their sacrificed horses, and certain medieval aristocratic funerals featured the slaughter of the deceased’s horse. Such was the case in 1216 at the funeral of King John of England and in 1378 for the funeral of the Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV. When the French nobleman Bertrand du Guesclin was buried at St. Denis in 1389, his horses were sacrificed after being blessed by the Bishop of Auxerre. The tradition continued in military circles. In 1499 Landsknechte mercenary soldiers sacrificed a horse to mark the end of the Swabian Wars. At Trier in the Rhineland in 1791, the horse of General Friedrich Kasimir was buried with him in his grave, and at the funeral of Charles Davis, Queen Victoria’s leading huntsman at Sunninghill in England in 1866, his horse was shot and its ears cut off and buried with the huntsman in the churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels.

It is notable that Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1200) recorded the northern practice of setting up the head of a horse: “so he first put on a pole the severed head of a horse that had been sacrificed to the gods, and setting sticks beneath displayed the jaws grinning agape” (Saxo 1905, 209). This was the niðstöng (scorn pole), set up with the horse’s head facing the house of the magician’s enemy. Functionally, the niðstöng is the same as the apotropaic carved heads on ships’ prows. On land the intention of the niðstöng was to drive away the landvættir and render the land of one’s enemy álfreka (defiled, spiritually dead; literally a “driving away of the elves”). According to Icelandic Pagan belief and much later tradition in East Anglia, it was recognized that at places where helpful sprites of the land (e.g., the Icelandic landvættir) have been driven away deliberately, the land is spiritually dead. In Pagan Iceland the word álfreka was used, and this is the common technical term used today in English (in East Anglia, it is gast land, “ghost land”). When such places are no longer tended by their spiritual guardians, inevitably they will become barren; animals and people living there will decline and die.

Traditional buildings in lower Saxony have gables in the form of two opposed horses’ heads that are an overlapping continuation of the barge boards (Windbretter) beneath the roof at the gable end (Von Zaborsky 1936, 279—87). A horse’s head was used in Germany to prevent witches from entering a house (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, 1, 143ff.). Horse skulls were deposited beneath and inside many buildings in northern Europe, sometimes in large numbers (Hayhurst 1989, 105—7). For example, forty horse skulls were neatly laid in ranks under the floor in a seventeenth-century house in Bungay, Norfolk, England (Mann 1934, 253—55), and in Helsinki Old Town, Finland, a horse skull was discovered in 1993 beneath the north wall of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century outbuilding (Hukantaival 2009, 350—56). In eastern England, W. H. Barrett recalled in the 1960s a foundation rite his uncle performed when building a chapel in the remote fenlands in the 1890s. During the digging of the foundations of a Primitive Methodist chapel at Black Horse Drove, Barrett was sent to buy the head of a horse from a knacker’s yard. It was brought to the site, and Barrett’s uncle located the center of the site with a stake, dug a trench, opened a bottle of beer, and put the head in the trench. Then he poured some beer over the head, and the builders all had a drink of beer before burying the head under bricks and mortar to make the foundation (Porter 1969, 181). The function was to bring good luck and keep the witches away.

Fig. 10.3. Primitive Methodist Chapel, Black Horse Drove, Cambridgeshire, England, site of the last known horse-head foundation rite.

A practice of stable-building magic was recorded in the ninteenth century at Kiiminki, Finland. A horse made from alder wood was made when a new stable was built. It was covered with a blanket belonging to a woman who had recently given birth, The horse’s eyes were marked by the woman’s blood. A mixture of barley grains and quicksilver (mercury) was placed in front of the alder horse in a basket, and the whole assemblage was buried under the threshold of the new stable to protect the building and its horses. If the alder horse is inverted, it will kill the horses in the stable. If a thief steals the alder horse and puts it under his or her stable, the protection and luck is transferred. A means of destroying the good fortune of the stable is to steal the alder horse, carry it around the perimeter of the pasture, then bury it upside down by an anthill to the north of the field. Then the horses pastured there will die, and the only remedy is to abandon the stable and build a new one in a different location (Hukantaival 2009, 350—56).

The Museum of Cambridge has a number of horse fragments recovered from old buildings, both from Histon: half a jawbone found bricked into a chimney and a leg bone from another chimney. Another horse leg bone was found in 1959 in the building that houses the museum, the former White Horse Inn. In the nineteenth century, beneath part of the Norman gatehouse of Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, twenty-one skulls were found. Twenty were wolf skulls, and one was that of a wolfhound. Bones were a building material in former times, and floors were made from them, such as in a house at Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, whose hall floor was of sheep bones (Evans 1971, 200). But clearly cats, dogs, chimney bones, and horse skulls were not structural materials.

From early times, however, the bones of large whales were used to build houses. In his 1655 description of the north, Olaus Magnus wrote that people constructed houses erected from whole whale ribs. After the whales had been defleshed, the skeletons were left to the weather until they were totally disarticulated, cleaned, and whitened. Then they were taken to a suitable place and erected like a cruck house, where the walls and roof are integral. The structural bones were covered with suitable material and smoke holes left in the roof ridge or at the sides. Internally the house was divided up into separate rooms. Doors were made from whale skin leather. The remains of a few houses of whalebone existed until recently in Greenland, Ireland, England, and Germany, mostly at ports where whaling had been a major concern (Redman 2004, passim).

TOPPING OUT AND CONSECRATION

The completion of the roof is the magical act of enclosure. There are traditional rites and ceremonies for this still performed in many parts of Europe. In Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, it is the Richtfest or Hausräuchi, which is best performed on a Saturday. Before the final topping out, the timbers were hit with tools, chains were rattled, and a general Hillebille (hullabaloo) was made to chase away evil spirits. A fir tree covered with ribbons or a garland of flowers was raised to the roof with singing and rejoicing. The Bauherr (master) of the carpenters, dressed in ceremonial clothes, hammered in the last nail. At the end a glass or a bottle was thrown from ground level over the roof. If it did not break, this was a bad omen (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, III, 1564, 1570—1571).

From ancient times, topping out involved the completion of the roof ridge and the installation of any sacrificial or apotropaic objects. Gable ends and roof corners of traditional buildings are protected by various talismanic images, such as carved dragon’s heads on Norwegian stave churches, gargoyles on stone churches, and hip knobs, horse’s heads, and roof-ridge figures on vernacular buildings. They are said to ward off the evil spirits of the air, and keep the building safe. In the year 517 Pope Gregory I gave an edict against exhibiting the heads of sacrificial animals in the Germanic lands, but the custom of setting up animal heads on buildings was never abolished. There is a record of a sheep skull erected on an upper corner of a house at East Baldwin on the Isle of Man to overlook a chapel opposite (Hayhurst 1989, 106). Skulls with antlers are still set on buildings in districts where hunting takes place. Ancient stone buildings incorporate the heads of animals, a practice that appears to be a reminiscence of the use of sacrificial beasts. The early medieval church at Belsen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, shown in figure 10.4, has heads of cattle, sheep, and pigs, and the image of a being known as Béél.

Fig. 10.4. Heads of livestock and figure of Béél, Belsen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Christian rites were incorporated into the rite of entry, with a priest saying prayers and using salt and holy water. Salt, pepper, and sometimes bread was strewn upon the window ledges. Moving in should not take place during a waning moon or a new moon, and an animal such as a cat, rabbit, or hen was sent in first. This was because of the common belief that the first to enter a new house would die within a year, or in the second year at the latest. People had to enter with full hands, so they would never be short of food, and in the state of Baden, the rhyme “Glück ins, Unglück raus!” (In with luck, bad luck—get out!) was recited (Bächtold-Stäubli 1927—1942, III, 1566).

BUILDING DEPOSITS

Artifacts and Animals

Despite the relatively large number of artifacts found within the fabric of old buildings and reported, they have all been random discoveries. They are few in number, and often their provenance is poorly documented. Perhaps the largest class of objects is shoes. There is a very large collection in Northampton of old shoes discovered in this way. Above a fireplace in the seventeenth-century Long House at Walsworth, Hertfordshire, were deposited a mummified cat and rat, and in the ceiling of a ground-floor room, a shoe, a shoe iron, three marbles, two buttons, two coins, and a pair of scissors. In 1981 at Billericay Hospital, Essex, a cache of magical items was discovered in the roof. It contained two human figures made from rags, a notched wooden tine, a piece of coal, and ruminant bones, including part of a jaw with teeth and the head of a thigh bone. The items appeared to date from the 1850s, when the hospital was a workhouse (Simon Walker, personal communication). Around 1940 a human figure made of clay or putty was discovered on a beam in the Cambridge University Anatomy School, a building completed in 1938. M. Hume told Cambridge folklorist Enid Porter that the senior laboratory men knew of the figure and were protective toward it as a safeguard. It was still there in 1962 but subsequently disappeared (Porter 1969, 397—98).

Whole animals were deposited in places where they dried out and became naturally mummified. In a study the author conducted in the 1980s (unpublished), more than fifty examples of dried cats were found in England alone, though there were also examples from Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Oral tradition explains that dried or naturally mummified cats were tied up and put in place alive and left there to die. They were put there to ward off fire and vermin. To remove them from their resting place brings bad luck on the house. A cat found in 1971 in the roof of an 1820 watermill at Sudbury, Suffolk, had its feet bound together with string. The press recounted the trail of bad luck that followed in the wake of its travels before being replaced (Groves 1991, 69). Another dried cat with bound legs was found in a boarded-in part of the roof space at Compass Cottage in Baldock, Herfordshire (Simon Walker, personal communication).

In the early 1980s a mummified cat found in the Eagle Inn in Cambridge was shown to the author by the craftsman who discovered it during refurbishment work. Another mummified cat was in the author’s possession, having been discovered in an eighteenth-century barn at Newport, Essex. It was kept in the workshop of Runestaff Crafts and disintegrated in 1996 when the workshop was blown down in a storm.

Fig. 10.5. Mummified cat from the roof of a barn in Newport, Essex, England.

The skull, recovered subsequently, showed a puncture wound that appeared to indicate that the cat was killed by a blow to the head before being deposited on a roof beam. It is clear that far more cats than dogs ended up as building deposits. An unusual instance was at the Carlton public house in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, in 1984, when a mummified whippet dog was discovered beneath the floor of stables built in 1898. The belief that it is bad luck to move such an animal led to its ceremonial reburial in a wood-lined grave, with sprigs of yew and thyme, and a message to the dog apologizing for disturbing it (Saward and Saward 1984).

BONES

Toad and Frog Magic

There is a large body of magical lore about toads and frogs. Pliny, in his Natural History (ca. 77 CE) mentioned the rubetiæ, toads that lived among the brambles and briars, whose bones could be used magically. If the little bone in its left side was put into boiling water, Pliny claimed, it could procure love and cure mad dogs. If the little bone from the right side was put into the water, it would become cold and could never be made hot again unless the bone was taken out. If the right-side bone was bound to a sick person by a snakeskin, it cured the quartan, and restrained love and lust (Pliny 1989, bk. 32, chap. 18). A ritual for finding the magic toad bone is the central feature of British toadmanry. It is mentioned in connection with witchcraft in The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot (1584). Medieval bestiaries asserted that the toad is a venomous animal, fatal to humans. Its head was believed to contain a talismanic stone with the power to heal all kinds of venomous bites and sores upon the human body (Simpkins 1912, 357). The stone was boiled in water, then applied to the afflicted part. What passed for toadstones were identified in modern scientific taxonomy as the palatal teeth of the fossil fish Lepidotus (Ettinger 1939, 151). In German tradition, the Krotenstein (“toad-stone”) is a fossil echinoid.

Toad and frog bones played a significant role in British country magic. A person who had performed the ritual for finding the magic bone was called a toadman or toadwoman. Possessors of the toad or frog bone claimed magical powers over fellow creatures, both animal and human. It was particularly associated with horsemanry, the bone giving a man the power to control any horse, however vicious it might be (Burn 1914, 363—64). The magic bone was obtained by a specific ritual. The would-be toadman or toadwoman would catch a frog or toad and kill it. Then it was defleshed, either by allowing it to rot naturally or by burying it in an anthill. Once it had decayed, leaving only the skeleton, the bones were carried to a stream running north—south. The bones were floated in the running water, and a bone that appeared to turn against the current and float upstream was the magic bone (Scot 1584, 6, 7; Parsons 1915, 37). Different accounts of the ritual specify different times and days to perform it: on the full moon (Porter 1969, 56; Evans 1971, 217—19), on the new moon, or on St. Mark’s Eve (Burn 1914, 363—64; Roper 1883, 794). A version of the rite was called The Water of the Moon by the Norfolk horseman Albert Love (Evans 1965, 217—18). A person who has conducted this ritual “has been to the river.” This was said of visiting ploughmen who performed unexpectedly well in ploughing matches, or a surprisingly accurate visiting darts player in a pub.

The toad bone was said to give toadmen power over not only horses, but also cattle, pigs, and women, and the toadwomen power over horses, cattle, pigs, and men. Lincolnshire folklorist Mabel Peacock noted that the toad bone could hypnotize all sorts and conditions of creatures at the will of its owner (Peacock 1901, 169). The bone also gave the power to steal without getting caught, because toad-men and women could gain entry to places that were closed to others. There was a saying from the Fenland of eastern England, “No door is ever closed to a toadman” (Pattinson 1953, 425). There are a number of accounts of toadmen gaining access; one from 1911 tells of a head horseman who claimed the ability to make locked doors fly open by throwing his cap at them (Randall 1966, 110—11). Another used the heart of a frog to enable him to go through the small holes cut in barn doors to allow cats access, so that he could steal corn (Rudkin 1933, 199). Going out of the sight of men—invisibility—was another attribute of the bone owner. A related technique of invisibility using animal parts was published by William Singer in Scotland in his 1881 book about the Miller’s Word and horsemanry. This “coat of darkness” involved shooting a black crow over the shoulder and taking certain objects from the crow’s brain (Singer 1881, 12). Black cats and crows featured in invisibility magic in other parts of Europe.

BOTTLES, HEARTS, AND PINS

Magically trapping and binding someone’s spirit into a bottle or another sealed container, thereby stealing his soul, makes him dispirited. We say that someone has “lost her spirit,” or that someone “drove his spirit away.” Techniques for conjuring and imprisoning people’s spirits are a universal theme in European witchcraft, American hoodoo, and other magical traditions. There are traditions of trapping spirits and sealing them in a container so they can do no more harm, or so they can be used for magical purposes by their owners (Thompson 1934, 138). The bottle is the most common instrument of this. This concept seems to underlie the apotropaic use of sealed jars and bottles deposited beneath thresholds and in buildings for magical purposes. In England they are known as “witch bottles,” and the most characteristic is the “Greybeard” or “Bellarmine.” The latter name refers to Cardinal Bellarmine (1524—1621), a Roman Catholic persecutor of Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, though the bottle jugs were being made for a generation before the cleric ran the Spanish Inquisition in Holland. They were made from around 1500 to 1700 in the Rhineland and shipped to England. They are squat, brown, salt-glazed, round-bellied stoneware vessels, commonly five to nine inches in height. On the front of the neck, a bearded face is imprinted.

Witch bottles contained pins or nails and urine in addition to other organic materials (see Bunn 1982, 5; Massey 1999, 34—36). One found at Ipswich, Suffolk, contained a heart-shaped piece of felt, stuck with pins. A large proportion of discovered witch bottles came from old inns, possibly because the large numbers of people constantly coming and going made additional magical protection necessary. In 1908 the folklorists Gutch and Peacock reported an example of bottle magic from Lincolnshire:

A few years ago, in pulling down an old house in a neighboring village,^*3 a wide-mouthed bottle was found under the foundation, containing the heart of some small animal [it was conjectured a hare], pierced as closely as possible with pins. The elders said it had been put there to “withstand witching.” Some time after, a man digging in his garden in the village of Yaddlethorpe came upon the skeleton of a horse or ox, buried about three feet beneath the surface, and near to it two bottles containing pins, needles, human hair, and a stinking fluid, probably urine. The bottles, pins, and so forth came into my possession. There was nothing to indicate the date of their interment except one of the bottles, which was of the kind employed to contain Daffy’s Elixir, a once popular patent medicine. The other bottle was an ordinary wine pint. At the time when these things were found, I mentioned the circumstance to many persons among our peasantry; they all said that it had “summut to do with witching”; and many of them had long stories to tell, setting forth how pins and needles are a protection against the malice of the servants of Satan. (Gutch and Peacock 1908, 96)

The nails and hearts found in witch bottles are part of a wider magical practice, as they were put in chimneys along with other magical objects. H. C. Agrippa noted that images were sometimes hung in a chimney over the smoke (Agrippa 1993 [1531], II, XLIX). For example, in a chimney of Shutes Hill Farmhouse at Chipstable in Somerset, England, a bullock’s heart pierced with nails and thorns was discovered in 1892. With it was “an object, said to be a toad, also stuck with thorns” (Ettinger 1943, 246). The function of this kind of magic was described by a writer in The Times (March 5, 1917), who noted, “a sheep’s heart pierced with pins and nails to break the spell of a black witch . . . was prepared by an old woman who practiced in London as late as 1908.” It was hung in the chimney to carry out its function. A number of unusual and even unique artifacts used in building magic are in the possession of private individuals. In the author’s possession is a ceramic model church, roughly finished with a dark brown glaze, measuring five by four by two inches (127 × 102 × 51 mm). It was discovered up a chimney of an old house in Histon, Cambs. The model church fell upon a chimneysweep who was cleaning the chimney, so was reputed to be unlucky. It is likely that it was made as an apotropaic object, the church representing sacred power, put in the chimney to prevent entry of evil spirits and bad luck.

Fig. 10.6. Magical artifacts: Cambridgeshire witch bottles and ceramic model church found in chimney at Histon, Cambridgeshire, England.