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

The Magic of Music

SOUND AND NOISE

Since time immemorial, it has been recognized that rhythm and harmony impart grace to the inner parts of the soul. The human soul, it appears, being one with the cosmos, responds to the same cosmic harmonies. Aristotle wrote that music has the power to lead the soul back from states of unrest to that of harmony, to relieve mental illnesses and to rectify the character. Sound has a significant effect on the environment, and noise-making devices are used throughout the world at rites and ceremonies that serve to drive off bad luck and evil influences. Shouting and singing, clapping hands, and stamping feet need no instruments, but for continuous loud noises something more is required. Rattles, clappers, buzzers, drums, bells, and fireworks all have their part in ceremonial and magical performance. In preindustrial times before ubiquitous machine-made noise was everywhere, there was real silence. The Scots expression howe-dumb-dead describes the dead silence in the middle of the night, and “the dead of night” is a comparable English expression (Warrack 1988 [1911], 274). But silence in the night, let alone the day, is a rare thing in industrialized countries now.

In former times, before machine noise was everywhere, calls from instruments such as the lur, the alphorn, the Midwinterhoorn, and the highland bagpipes would carry for significant distances under the right conditions, for there was no extraneous noise to obliterate them, as is the case today with incessant motor traffic and aviation. Similarly, church bells could be heard miles away, and the state of the weather could be inferred by the varied sound qualities of the ringing. Church bells especially were considered to suppress all spirits and eldritch beings that were within their sound range. As Arthur William Moore wrote in 1891, “It is well known that all Fairies and their like have a great objection to noise, especially to the ringing of church bells” (Moore 1891, 41). In ancient Ireland and Scotland distances were often roughly calculated by the distance sound travels. In the Senchus Mór, “magh-spaces” appear in the law governing going to someone’s aid in distress. A maghspace was as far as the sound of a bell (an ecclesiastical handbell) or the crow of a rooster could be heard. The magh-space was also the feeding range for bees (North 1881, 56).

Rocking stones, boulders naturally perched on others but able to move, were revered as special. They were not seen as natural features, but rather ones that had been placed there by gods, giants, heroes, or saints. They had a connection with the winds, as many of them were so finely balanced that they moved in the wind. In his poem Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius (ca. 100 CE) wrote that Hercules erected a stone over the grave of one of the sons of Boreas, the north wind. It moved in the slightest breeze, seeming to hover above the rock below. Rocking stones that generated sounds were held in awe. The Roulter Rocks on Stanton Moor in Derbyshire were kept in almost constant motion, grinding against the basal stone on which they perched, making an eerie noise. One of these Derbyshire rocking stones was called the Minstrel of the Peak. Its sound, attributed to otherworldly spirits, could be heard from many miles away. Most rocking stones of the British Isles were destroyed by religious fanatics, who considered them to be objects of superstition. Those that survived religious conflict were knocked off their perches by deliberate vandalism once the stones had been made famous by antiquaries and became the focus of tourism.

INCANTATION

Spoken and Sung Charms

Priests of the Celtic Church in Ireland, Great Britain, and Brittany composed protective charms that could either be chanted or sung. They circulated widely for many centuries, and some of them are still in use. The Lorica of St. Gildas was composed against the devastating Yellow Plague in 547 CE, and Sen Dé by St. Colman mac Ui Cluasaig was against the plague of 697 CE. These charms, originally composed to magically ward off specific plagues, took on a more general protective character (Baring-Gould and Fisher 1907—1913, III, 129). A legend of the Breton saint Hoernbiu tells how his hen was stolen by a fox, so he prayed, and the fox brought it back unharmed. The prayer was written down and became a general charm against foxes in poultry yards (Baring-Gould and Fisher 1907—1913, III, 279).

Enchantment is literally weaving a magic spell by singing a song. Most religions have hymns and chants that appear during rites and ceremonies. There are numerous extant Pagan hymns from southern European antiquity, including those attributed to the musician-prophet Orpheus. In the north, too, are a few notices of religious and magical incantations and songs from ancient times. The Icelandic word for invocational magic, galdur, is associated with the verb gala, “to chant, sing, or call.” It is equivalent to the English word “enchantment,” which refers to a magical effect brought about by chanting or singing spells. The Icelandic Þorfinns Saga Karlsefnis tells how a female magician performed galdur with a beautiful voice. Galdur appears to have usually been performed alone, but it is possible that a group of people may have performed some of the incantations. The technical terms for Icelandic magical staves and sigils are galdrastáfur (staves) and galdramyndir (sigils), which indicate that incantation was part of making them. Éiríks Saga Rauða tells of an instance of incantation from the time in Greenland after the Christian religion became dominant. A völva (seeress) conducted a ceremony that reached the point where a hymn or incantation called a varðlokkur needed to be sung to continue. None there knew it, except a young woman on a visit from Iceland. She was a Christian but had learned it from a woman who looked after her when she was a child. She did not want to sing it but eventually was talked into singing the varðlokkur, which enabled the ceremony to be completed.

Incantations were associated with later European witchcraft, too. In his The Masque of Queens, performed at Candlemas in 1609 by the queen of Great Britain and her ladies, Ben Jonson notes that the witches in the play have “these shouts and clamors, as also the voice har, har, are very peculiar with them.” For example, the seventh charm of Jonson’s theatrical witches:

7 Charm, “Black go in, and blacker come out;

At thy going down, we give thee a shout.

Hoo!

At thy rising again, thou shalt have two,

And if thou dost what we would have thee do,

Thou shalt have three, though shalt have four,

Thou shalt have ten, though shalt have a score

Hoo! Har! Har! Hoo!”

(JONSON 1816, VOL 7, 118).

Jonson’s notes to the masque detail numerous sources for his characterizations, including ancient and contemporary literature and what would now be called folklore. There are similar calls in the traditional German Fastnacht carnival processions, many of which can be dated back to medieval times. Much later accounts of witchcraft also record incantations and calls. James Wentworth Day records an account by Alfred Herbert Martin, a farm laborer who worked on the Mersea Island in Essex for more than forty years in the early twentieth century. Martin claimed to have seen Mrs. Smith, known by the witch name of Old Mother Redcap, crossing the water to the island on a hurdle as if it were a boat. Martin claimed that as she peeled potatoes in her kitchen, Old Mother Redcap would chant the invocation “Holly, holly, brolly brolly, Redcap! Bonny, bonny” (Day 1973, 39).

MAGICAL INFLUENCES

In ancient Irish tradition, there were three different kinds of music: golltraidheacht, a festive and martial measure; geanttraidheacht, the sorrowful measure; and suanttraidheacht, a soothing measure. The latter had such power that it sent its hearers to sleep for a day or two (North 1881, 40). According to Lady Jane Wilde (1887), there was a beautiful description in one of the ancient manuscripts showing the wonderful power of Irish music over the sensitive humans: “Wounded men were soothed when they heard it, and slept; and women in travail forgot their pains” (Wilde 1887, I, 53). Music can bring joy and lift the spirits, a form of magic if ever there was one. The Old English Rune Poem has the following verse for the rune Peorð:

Byð symble plega and hlehter wlancum

Þar wiggan sittaþ on beorsele bliþe ætsomne.

“A lively tune means laughter and play

Where brave men sit in the mead hall

Ale-drinking warriors blithe together.”

The shape of this rune clearly signifies a lyre or harp. A lively tune, conserved into the twenty-first century by the modern Irish word port, which means a tune, more particularly among traditional musicians, a jig, or port béil, a lilt. In an Irish idiom, the port is seen as life, as in the saying “tá mo phort seinnte” (“I am done for”): the tune of life is finished. It seems to have had a magical use. A 1670 French grimoire, Magic Secrets and Counter-Charms, written by Guidon, “practitioner of occult healing,” deals mainly with shepherds’ and horsemen’s magic. It refers specifically to the jig in a charm ritual that is intended to give protection against all firearms, bewitching the star that guides the firearm by means of a jig. The jig is followed up by a command in the name of the Father, and the Son, and Satanatis, finished with the sign of the cross (Guidon 2011 [1670], 49). In some way the jig binds the power of the star that rules the specific day, thereby disempowering the gun.

Incantations unintelligible to those not in the know are associated with particular trades. They are, of course, part of the same tradition as the incantations magicians or witches use in their rites and ceremonies and in the preparation of active substances. Sea shanties are well known nautical work songs. But there are other, more magical, traditional songs and incantations employed by fishermen. One of the author’s ancestors, Shepherd Pennick (1820—1885), spent his working life as a master mariner sailing out of Brightlingsea, Essex, England, fishing for oysters. Oyster-dredgers were known for their special incantations, unintelligible to outsiders, uttered during the process of trawling the seabed for the shellfish. It was a widespread tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, noted by the American esoteric writer Astra Cielo in 1918: “During oyster dredging, fishermen often keep up a monotonous chant to charm the oysters into their net” (Cielo 1918, 144).

Other fishermen catching different things also chanted specific words and songs that were used only at sea. In Shetland these were called lucky words (Warrack 1988 [1911], 341). There is a fishing tradition in the Appalachian Mountains in the United States stating that fish bite best at night, and if you play a fiddle or guitar, the fish love music so much that they cannot remain in the water but will come to the surface where they can be caught. This may well have been an ancient belief in Europe. Generic boat songs are well known from the Scottish tradition, the jurram being a “slow and melancholy boat song” and the eeran an oar song sung during rowing (Warrack 1988 [1911], 155, 297).

There are fascinating old stories of how sounds and music affect animals. The prophet Orpheus is depicted in ancient Greek and Roman images charming the animals with his lyre playing. H. C. Agrippa stated that the sound of a drum made of the skin of the rotchet fish (red gurnard, Trigla cuculus) would drive away all creeping things, as far as it can be heard (Agrippa 1993 [1531], I, XXI). The legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin gives his music the power to charm both rats and children. A curious note in Fenland Notes and Queries (vol. IV [1899], 242) claimed that “when the Earl of Bedford determined to drain the land he adopted the strange device of training six of the largest deer and keeping them shut up some time he tamed them by the constant sounding of drums harps and other instruments then harnessed them like a set of coach horses and presented them to the King Charles I.”

In the Western Isles of Scotland, when driving the cattle to pasture in the morning, the herdsman or herdswoman sang a song with a pleasant melody. It was sung in slow, measured cadences, and the measured walk of the older cattle was in time to the singing. Going to bring the cattle home in the evening, on approaching the herd, the herder sang fàilte a’ chruidh, the song of welcome to the cattle, and they responded by making sounds (Carmichael 1997, n. 364). The use by horsemen of particular unusual sounds in the language for controlling horses was noted by the English folklorist Gertrude Jekyll in 1904. In her Old West Surrey, she noted that they were not pronounced words, but uttered with a rumbling, hollow resonance, perhaps produced from the stomach by an open throat (Jekyll 1904, 166).

OTHERWORLDLY MUSIC

From the ninth century at the latest, labyrinths made of turf or stones were used in the rites of spring, for ceremonies for the dead and weather magic. Folklore of certain labyrinths in the British Isles identifies them as dwelling places of fairies. The turf labyrinth at Asenby in Yorkshire, England, was in a hollow atop a hillock called the Fairies Hill, where those who ran the maze would kneel when they reached the center “to hear the fairies singing” (Allcroft 1908, 602). Fairy music and song heard at such places is a theme in Celtic folk tales, and certain tunes played today are said to have a supernatural origin. A motif in story telling is of the musician who considers himself not good enough to be taken seriously, who encounters the Otherworld, then returns empowered as a fine musician admired by all. In Ireland and Gaelic Scotland there is a tradition of ceol-sidhe, the “fairy music” gifted to musicians by otherworldly beings. Flannery, the legendary bagpiper of Oranmore in Galway, Ireland, became a virtuoso when he was taught piping below ground by a subterranean being.

Similarly, on the island of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides, a tale is told of Iain Òg MacCrimmon, who was depressed because he was not considered a good enough piper to compete in a contest called by the clan chief, MacLeod of Dunvegan Castle. Iain Òg MacCrimmon went into a cave at Harlosh Point to play the pipes alone, and there a fairy woman appeared to him, produced a silver chanter for his pipes, and taught him how to play it. “Your handsome looks and sweet music have brought you a fairy sweetheart. I bequeath you this silver chanter: At the touch of your fingers, it will always bring forth the sweetest music.” This was the famous sionnsairairgid na mna sithe, “the silver chanter of the fairy woman.” Iain Òg MacCrimmon went to Dunvegan Castle, entered the piping contest, and was judged to be the best of all. The enchanted chanter of fairyland gave him abilities denied to others (Carmichael 1911, 86). The cave is known today as the Piper’s Cave.

According to the ancient Celtic tradition, he was appointed as the hereditary piper to the MacLeods, and for many generations MacCrimmon’s descendants were renowned pipers and composers of new pipe music. At Borreraig Farm, across Loch Follart, opposite Dunvegan Castle, Iain Òg MacCrimmon founded a piping school to which advanced students came from all over Scotland and Ireland to perfect the art of piping. The highest standards of ceol mor or piobaireachd, the characteristic music of the Scots highland bagpipe, were attained at Borreraig, for the course to mastery of the pipes took seven years. The school existed from around 1600 to 1770. Another otherworldly musical piece connected with Dunvegan Castle is “The Dunvegan Lullaby” or “The Dunvegan Cradle Spell,” reputedly sung by a fairy woman who comforted an unhappy baby when its nurse was away for a while. The nurse listened and recalled it.

St. Patrick is said to have heard the ceol sidhe played on the timpán and stated that it would equal the very music of heaven if it were not for “a twang of the fairy spell that infests it” (Wentz 1911, 199—200). This account mentions the playing of the timpán at Samhain (Lá Samhna, November 1) by “The Wondrous Elfin Man,” when the fairy music would make all that heard it fall to sleep (Wentz 1911, 200). Turlough O’Carolan, the celebrated seventeenth-century blind Irish harper, was said to have slept out one night in a fairy rath (fairy hill or fort) and received the gift of ceol-sidhe in his dreams. When he awoke, he remembered the music and played it. Lady Wilde recounts the story of an Irish piper, who, walking through the hills one evening, heard a fairy piper play an exquisite tune called “Móraleana.” The fairy told him that he could only play “Móraleana” three times in his life before an audience. If he played it a fourth time, a curse would befall him. He played it only three times and never again until he found himself in the final round of a piping competition. He knew he would win if he played “Móraleana,” so he played it and won the prize as best piper. At the moment the garland of Bardic mastery was placed upon his head, he collapsed and died upon the stage. One must not use a fairy gift for worldly gain. There is a story told today among traditional musicians in Ireland and Britain that if the tune “King of the Fairies” is played through three times in a row, the king of the fairies will appear. If the musician has played well, he or she will be rewarded; but if the tune was played badly, some unspecified otherworldly punishment will befall the player. “King of the Fairies” is in the “eldritch key” of E minor.

In his Carmina Gadelica (1900) Alexander Carmichael noted an òran sidh (fairy song) that a man heard when searching for sheep at Creaga Gorma, Hèathabhal, on the isle of Barra in the Western Isles of Scotland. A fairy woman was grinding a quern (hand mill) and singing the song. Carmichael published this song and four others, recalled by girls and women from Iochdar, Sandray, and Mingulay. Three were heard at fairy mounds and another was part of a traditional story about Roderick MacDonald, a man who had built his house on a fairy site where a fairy woman sang as she ground her quern, so he was forced to move elsewhere (Carmichael 1997, 478—80, 663). The music of the Manx song called “Bollan Bane” (The White Herb), “a plant known to the Fairy Doctors, and of great healing virtues,” was noted around 1840 one evening on the mountains by a person who heard it being sung by the fairies (Moore 1891, 41). In her introduction to the section on the Isle of Man in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), Sophia Morrison recounted a twentieth-century tradition of otherworldly music. William Cain, a fiddler from Glen Helen (formerly called Rhenass), was known as “Willy the Fairy” for his knowledge of fairy music. He sang and played airs he said he had heard the fairies playing (Morrison 1911, 118). Once he saw a great glass house like a palace, all lit up, in a glen beneath the mountains at Brook’s Park, where the fairies were playing. He stopped and listened to a tune until he got it, then went home to practice it on the fiddle. William Cain later played that fairy tune at Manx entertainment staged in Peel by Sophia Morrison (Wentz 1911, 131).

ANCESTRAL MUSIC

Bardism in the past tended to be hereditary, and at certain times hereditary scalds and bards were attached to royal and noble families. There was an Irish tradition that the bardic families possessed secrets, which they transmitted from generation to generation. In 1887 Lady Jane Wilde wrote of the “herb of which a drink was made, called The Bardic Potion, for the Bards alone had the secret of the herb, and of the proper mode of treatment by which its mystic power could be revealed. This potion they gave their infant children at their birth, for it had the singular property of endowing the recipient with a fairy sweetness of voice of the most rapturous and thrilling charm. And instances are recorded of men amongst the Celtic Bards, who, having drunk of this potion in early life, were ever after endowed with the sweet voice, like fairy music, that swayed the hearts of the hearers as they chose to love or war, joy or sadness, as if by magic influence, or lulled them into the sweet calm of sleep” (Wilde 1887, II, 67).

In Scotland there were hereditary pipers retained by the chief of the clan, of which the Borreraig School MacCrimmons are the most famous. Others include the MacArthurs, pipers to MacDonald of Sleat; the Rankins, pipers to the MacLeans of Coll, Duart, and Mull; and the MacGregors, pipers to Campbell of Glenlyon. Hereditary bards and pipers in ancient Scotland had a piece of land given to them by the clan chief to farm or graze animals upon, and various payments for attending official events and celebrations. Instruments are handed down in the family, and generations of descendants may be playing the same instrument that their ancestors played. As an old Scots saying tells us, “shared gold goes not far, but a shared song lasts a long time.”