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

Boundaries and Liminal Spaces

BORDERLINES

Boundaries are primarily about ownership. Property rights—whether private, public, sacred, or otherworldly—define the meaning of areas in culture and in law. Those who claim ownership to areas can bar access to the latter by those whom the owners consider have no right to be there. This principle applies to areas defined as human property as well as those deemed to be in the ownership of spiritual beings. Access to space has always been controlled carefully in all civilizations. Concepts of belonging to the group, ritual cleanliness, personal worthiness, and status are necessary for one to have access to an area, whether it be national territory, a private club, or the inner sanctum of a temple. From antiquity, religious buildings have been made in forms considered worthy to be the indwelling places of gods and goddesses, and the boundaries around them have been policed to prevent access by those considered profane.

Boundaries are lines of division between areas perceived by humans as distinct from one another. Boundaries can be invisible or visible lines of demarcation that distinguish and define relationships between different areas in contact with one another. They can be natural or artificial, passable or impassable. Natural boundaries such as rivers, unclimbable ridges, mountains, and seas are obvious to everyone. They are barriers to everything that moves on land. Only flying creatures may cross them without problems. Because boundaries in themselves are the interface between two distinct areas, they are difficult places. The problems of physical boundaries are self-evident. It is not easy to cross a river without a boat, a bridge over it, or a tunnel beneath it. To cross a mountain range needs a pass, which may be impassable because of snow in wintertime. These natural boundaries are geographical realities with which human beings must deal. Human-made boundaries, though arbitrary, are invested with the characteristics of natural boundaries, usually backed up with violence, implied or actual.

Human-made boundaries are intended to mark the point where the area belonging to “us” becomes the area belonging to “them.” So they are always potential places of contention and strife. Many fights between neighbors and wars between gangs, tribes, and nations begin as border disputes. Historically, all boundaries were ill defined and ever changing. The history of the boundaries between clan, tribal, ethnic, religious, feudal, and national areas in northern Europe is so complex that much of it is unknowable. One thing is clear: human-made boundaries are not fixed forever. They are a process rather than a thing; they are essentially arbitrary and transient. In historical terms they do not last long. Even when they are visibly of profane origin, boundaries have a magical function. They form a conceptual barrier against the “other,” a line over which the “other” must not cross on pain of physical or supernatural retribution. In this way they are comparable to the circles made by magicians, which theoretically create magic boundaries that enclose and protect the operator whilst preventing any summoned entities from entering and doing harm.

The origin of geometry (geometria) in land surveying is apparent in the word itself: geo- (earth) + metria (measurement). Fixing property boundaries, locating boundary markers, and verifying them required practical methods that would be transparent in their function, easily resolving disputes between neighbors. Ritual redefinition and magical reempowerment of boundaries was necessary, and annual public perambulation of the boundaries of villages and fields was a feature of life. In Pagan times, circumambulation of fields with an image of a god or goddess, stopping at marker points, was continued in a Christian context with the rituals of “beating the bounds” in medieval and postmedieval times. In the fourth century CE, the repaganization of the Gothic lands was accomplished by a perambulation of divine images around boundaries. The Greek Orthodox chronicler Socrates recorded that between 369 and 372 CE the Goths rejected missionary attempts to make them convert to the Arian sect of Christianity, expelling the missionaries and expecting Christians to attend public rites and ceremonies. King Athanaric stated that the Goths’ ancestral religion was being debased and ordered the Gothic territories be reconsecrated by a xoanon (the Greek word for a carved cult image) perambulated around each settlement. Gothic xoana were images consisting of a human head carved on a post, such as those well known from the temples of the Baltic. By making a circuit of the boundary, everything within it was reconsecrated. A Byzantine triumphal arch set up in Constantinople had a carving of this event, showing the xoana carried on camels. The image in figure 6.1 is from Imperium Orientale by A. Banduri, published in Venice in 1729.

Fig. 6.1. Gothic repaganization of the land by xoana carried on camels. The Library of the European Tradition

In the north of England, a comparable sacred perambulation was made by Christian monks with the bones of Bishop Cuthbert, who died in 687 CE and was buried at Lindisfarne. In the year 875 the inhabitants of the monastery fled a Danish military invasion, “the wicked army of the unbelievers.” Bishop Eardulph and his monks fled with their treasure, books, ritual paraphernalia, and the bones of Cuthbert. Then they carried his bones round the northlands for seven years. Churches were founded at many places where they stopped. This ritual perambulation was first to Elsdon and down the River Rede to Haydon Bridge, then up the South Tyne to Beltinghame, then along the road by Hadrian’s Wall to Bewcastle. From there they turned south to Salkeld and went by way of Eden Hall and Plumbland into Lancashire and the River Derwent. Then northward to Whithorn, on the Galloway coast, then southward again across Stainmoor into Teesdale. From Cotherstone the trail ran through Marske, Forcett, and Barton to Craike Abbey near Easingwold. The entourage stayed there four months before they resumed their travels, going to Chester-le-Street. The destroyed monastery was refounded there, Cuthbert was reburied, and Chester-le-Street became the seat of the Bishop of Bernicia.

Boundary markers were always taken seriously, and means enacted to maintain them. There is a biblical curse on boundary movers, and even supernatural sanctions against those who tamper with boundaries. Von Schaewen’s Dissertatio physica de igne fatuus (1714) tells that in Germany the sprite called Feuermann (“Fireman”) appeared carrying a red-hot measuring rod on a chain and riding on a horse of fire pulling a red-hot plough. He came to punish those who moved boundary markers. But even when boundaries are seemingly obvious, there are ways around them. There is an English tradition from Lincolnshire that tells us, “If a person sells his soul to the Devil, to be delivered at a certain specified time, the vendor, if wary, may avoid payment by putting in the contract ’be it in the house or out of the house’ and then when the time arrives, sitting astride on a window sill or standing in a doorway” (Peacock 1877, I, 84). Then the Devil is thwarted. While this is an amusing story, it teaches that one must be precise in definitions, and that being on the liminal space of a boundary is to be neither inside nor outside.

THE MAGIC OF CROSSROADS, BURIALS, MAGIC, AND SPELLS

Crossroads are places of transition, where the axis linking the underworld with the upper world intersects this world on which we walk. As with all liminal places, the crossing of roads is a place of physical and spiritual dangers. Here the distinction between the physical and nonmaterial worlds appears uncertain, and the chance of encountering something Otherworldly is more likely than at other places. In the Roman Empire, crossroads were acknowledged with a herm, an image of the god of traffic and trade, Mercury. This god, who indicates the right road and guides the traveler’s footsteps, was the generalization of the particular spirit of each individual crossroads. Woden (Odin), as god of the crossroads, was in this aspect similar to Mercury, and later Christians set up stone crosses where the Roman herms or posts sacred to Odin had once stood. As Hangatýr (God of the Hanged), Odin was the god of the gallows, and often gallows and gibbets were set up at crossroads for the execution of criminals. In England until 1823 the bodies of people hanged there were often buried at the crossroads.

Burials at liminal places, including roadsides, parish boundaries, and crossroads, are common in English folk tradition. Bob Trubshaw noted that many Anglo-Saxon Pagan burials are found near parish boundaries, which may postdate them (Trubshaw 1995, 4—5). Until the nineteenth century, crossroads were favorite places of execution in England, as the crossroads place-name Caxton Gibbet in Cambridgeshire attests. The bodies of the hanged were buried close by, often under the road surface itself, as they were not allowed in consecrated ground. The records of crossroads burials in England go back to the sixteenth century: a parish record from Pleasley in Derbyshire from 1573 tells how a man found hanged was buried at midnight at the highest crossroads in the district with a stake in him (Roud 2003, 443). Until 1823, under Church of England rules, suicides, Nonconformists, Quakers, Jews, Gypsies, outcasts, and executed criminals were not permitted to be given burial in consecrated ground (Stephen 1868, 152ff). The practice was abolished finally by an Act of Parliament (4 Geo. 4, ca. 52, 1823) that also prohibited the custom of hammering a stake through the body.

People who killed themselves were thought to become earthbound spirits, dangerous to living people (Tebbutt 1984, 17), and a stake was driven through a suicide’s body to prevent the person from walking as a revenant. In his Historia rerum Anglicarum (ca. 1190) William of Newburgh tells how the corpses of the dead could come forth from their graves, wander about to terrorize and attack the living, and return again to the grave. He tells of a case in Buckinghamshire, England, where a dead man left his grave and attacked his widow, then her family and neighbors. The revenant was laid by a Christian cleric, who wrote a text and put it upon the corpse to bind it in the grave (William of Newburgh 1861, 5, 24). In Iceland is a tradition that a magician could activate a draugr (revenant) and send it to attack someone (Solheim 1958, 298). A magical text published almost 700 years later in 1903 by Ólafur Davíðsson gives a remedy using a magnet for those suffering from draugablettir, “ghost spots” caused by the touch of a draugr sent to get them (Davíðsson 1903; Flowers 1992, 102).

The custom of driving a stake through the body as binding magic to prevent the draugr from walking and doing harm to the living is recounted in the thirteenth-century text Eiríks Saga Rauða. It tells how in the Norse colony in Greenland bodies were buried provisionally at the place where they died until they could be taken for burial in Christian sacred ground. The provisional burial involved a stake being hammered through the chest as a magical precaution against the deceased’s becoming a draugr. When the corpse was exhumed so it could be taken for Christian burial, the stake was removed, and consecrated water poured into the space where it had been (Hasenfratz 2011, 70). In ancient Germany, Iceland, and England, the corpse of a criminal was treated in the same way, with a stake through the body, and Grettis Saga tells that heavy stones were laid upon it and also other magical bindings, including wicker hurdles and binding knots of wool to bind the ghost (Tacitus 1959, 28—29). A typical example from nineteenth-century England is from The Peterborough Weekly Gazette, July 30, 1814: “an unknown man found dying of poison, self administered, in Godmanchester, was buried at the crossroads leading to Offord.” Suicides and executed criminals were often buried at the same crossroads, as an account from Norwich in Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries (August 15, 1896) attests: “R. M. L.” tells how his father remembered “seeing a suicide carried past his house at twelve at night, to be buried at the cross roads at Hangman’s Lane. An immense crowd followed, to see the stake driven though the body.”

In England trees growing at crossroads were reputed to have grown from stakes driven through the bodies of murderers and suicides. A typical example was at Redenhall, Norfolk, where a willow tree called Lush’s Bush, said to have grown from a stake, marked the grave of a suicide. In 1813 another suicide, Mary Turrell, was buried there and had a stake hammered through her heart by the parish constable (Halliday 2010, 84). The Cruel Tree at Buckden in Huntingdonshire, felled in 1856, was much feared as a place of bad luck. It was reputed to have grown from a stake driven through the body of a murderer who suffered burial at a classic liminal place: the crossroads of the Great North Road and Mere Lane on the parish boundary of Brampton and Buckden (Tebbutt 1984, 18). Another sort of outcast buried in the road in England was women reputed to be witches. In 1915 Catherine Parsons reported that in Cambridgeshire the Horseheath woman known as Daddy Witch was buried in the middle of the road opposite the hovel where she had lived. The place was marked by an unusual dryness of the road, reputed to be caused by the heat from her body (Parsons 1915, 39). The Horseheath Women’s Institute Scrapbook for 1935 states that one must nod one’s head nine times for good luck before passing over Daddy Witch’s grave (Porter 1969, 163). At nearby Bartlow was a bump at a crossroads where a witch was said to be buried (Porter 1969, 161).

Crossroads were places of divination. A custom to ask questions of the dead was practiced in Denmark. One had to go to crossroads at midnight on New Year’s Eve and stand inside the square made by the intersection of cart tracks. Then the querent had to call out the name of a dead person, and he or she would appear and answer three questions (Kamp 1877, 390). It was believed in Wales that on each of the teir nos ysbrydion (the “three spirit nights”: May Eve, St. John’s Eve, Hallowe’en) one could go to a crossroads and listen to what the wind was saying. It was a way of finding out the most important things that would happen during the forthcoming year (Trevelyan 1909, 236). The same rite existed in Germany, where, as in Denmark, the individual had to go to a crossroads on New Year’s Eve, sit on an animal skin, and listen for what was to happen (Grimm 1888, III, 1115). This recalls the ancient Norse practice of útiseta (sitting out) where a person sat out at night under the stars on the skin of a sacrificed animal to hear inner voices or the voices of spirits. Sacrifices at crossroads also appeared in the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler as a witch in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324. Among other accusations, “they offered in sacrifice to demons living animals, which they dismembered, and then distributed at crossroads to a certain evil spirit of low rank, named the Son of Art” (Seymour 1913, 27). In the nineteenth century black cats were still being sacrificed at crossroads in Denmark. The animal was buried there and dug up again when decomposed so that a neck bone could be recovered and worn as a ring that supposedly conferred invisibility (Kristensen 1885, III, 72).

The crossroads is a “favorite place to divest oneself of diseases or other evil influences” (Crooke 1909, 88). In northern magic it is customary to rid oneself of used materia magica at the crossroads. Objects believed to be bewitched were burned at crossroads (Stracherjan 1867, 358). Among other dangerous powers, the crossroads conducts away the baneful energy of the evil eye, dispersing it to the four quarters of the world, so preventing it from injuring the person or object of its focus. The ague, warts, and other diseases have been the object of rites and spells at crossroads. A tradition recorded in Shropshire is that a person suffering from warts must rub an ear of wheat against each wart, wrap the wheat ears in a piece of paper, then throw it away at a crossroads. The warts would disappear, being transferred to whoever found the piece of paper and picked it up (Burne 1883, 200).

Under Christian influence, despite the cross’s being a Christian emblem, the crossroads became associated with the evil spirits and the Devil. In the Alps the entity called Schratl was called up magically by a crossroads ritual. One had to write one’s name on a piece of paper, sign it with one’s own blood, put it in a box, catch two black beetles, imprison them in the box with the paper, and take it to a crossroads. Then Schratl would appear in the form of a huntsman and offer to fulfill one’s desires (Puhvel 1976, 172). Welsh folk belief asserted that on May Eve witches dance at crossroads with the Devil (Trevelyan 1909, 152). The crossroads Devil appears in an Irish spell titled How to have money always, as recounted in 1887 by Lady Wilde: “Kill a black cock, and go to the meeting of three crossroads where a murderer is buried. Throw the dead bird over your left shoulder then and there, after nightfall, in the name of the Devil, holding a piece of money in your hand all the while. And ever after, no matter what you spend, you will always find the same piece of money undiminished in your pocket” (Wilde 1887, II, 82—83).

Tales of the German magician Doctor Faustus say that he went to a crossroads in a forest near Wittenberg to raise the Devil: “toward evening, at a crossroads in these woods, he drew certain circles with his staff; thus in the night between nine and ten o’clock he did conjure the Devil.” The crossroads features as the locus of a central European magical tradition of making magic bullets that are certain to hit the target. The rite also involved summoning the Devil (or another infernal spirit) there and casting the bullets under his supervision. Carl Maria von Weber’s 1821 opera Der Freischütz, based upon genuine folk tradition, includes a scene where magic bullets are cast at a crossroads. Like much of northern magic, it has a numerical element:

Now the blessing of the bullets! [Bowing to the earth in each of three pauses] Protect us, you who watch in darkness! Samiel, Samiel! Give ear! Stand by me in this night until the spell is complete! Bless for me the herb and lead, bless them by seven, nine and three, that the bullet be obedient! Samiel, Samiel, to me!

It is clearly the demon Samael that Weber intended to portray. According to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Samael is the Prince of the Accusers, the devil of fire in the infernal world. In Jewish magic he is one of the three princes of Gehenna, the place in the north that stores all fire, ice, snow, hailstones, violent winds, and darkness (Agrippa 1993 [1531], II, VII; III, XXIV).

THE GOODMAN’S GROUND

In northern Europe in medieval and later times was a tradition of setting aside pieces of land that neither spade nor plough was allowed to touch. Typically, they were triangular corners of fields, dedicated by the farmer who promised never to till the earth there. Inside the boundary the pristine condition of the earth prior to its tilling by man is preserved. There, the land wights still have a place to be, and the former “wilderness” is remembered. In England uncultivated triangular pieces of ground at a trifinium, the center of the junction of three country roads, were frequently called no-man’s-land, inferring their ownership by nonhuman entities. Some of them still have stone crosses that may denote the Christianization of a place considered to be eldritch.

There were forerunners of this practice in Pagan times; the Scandinavian sacred enclosure called a vé is an example. The vé was a triangular enclosure, set aside from the everyday world by a row of bautasteinar (uninscribed standing stones) or a fence called the vébond. The Danish royal sanctuary at Jelling was such a vé (Dyggve 1954, 221ff.).

The vé was primarily a place for rites and ceremonies. After the Christian church became dominant, these were deemed heathen practices and were forbidden. In northern Europe early Christian legislation forbade people specifically from worshipping at groves, at stones, in sanctuaries, and at places designated stafgarðr (fenced enclosures) (Olsen 1966, 280). Elder trees (Sambucus nigra) often grow in such places, such as the grounds containing Siberian “spirit sheds,” and veneration of this kind of tree was specifically prohibited as a “heathendom” in England by a law of King Edgar (reigned 959—75 CE). Helmold’s Chronicle (1156) records that the sacred grove of the Slavonic god Prove at Stargard (Szczeciński) in Pomerania, was enclosed by a fence (Váňa 1992, 178, fig. 44). In the Polish countryside to this day, one can see crosses by the roadside and at “no-man’s-land” triangles, with fences around them.

Fig. 6.2. Runestone in the vé at Jelling, Denmark.

Under Christian influence these tracts of sacred land became associated with the Devil. Eldritch field corner triangles in Scotland are called the Old Guidman’s Ground, the Gudeman’s Croft, the Halieman’s Ley, the Halyman’s Rig, the Black Faulie, the Auld Man’s Fold, Clootie’s Croft, and the Gi’en Rig. The plethora of recorded names shows how widespread the practice was; in Scots all but the latter are “eke-names” or bynames of the Devil. Sir Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, noted “though it was not expressly avowed, no one doubted that ’the gudeman’s croft’ was set apart for some evil being; in fact, that it was the portion of the arch-fiend himself . . . this was so general a custom that the Church published an ordinance against it as an impious and blasphemous usage.” Scott continued:

This singular custom sunk before the efforts of the clergy in the seventeenth century; but there must still be many alive who, in childhood, have been taught to look with wonder on knolls and patches of ground left uncultivated, because, whenever a ploughshare entered the soil, the elementary spirits were supposed to testify their displeasure by storm and thunder. Within our own memory, many such places, sanctified to barrenness by some favorite popular superstition, existed, both in Wales and Ireland, as well as in Scotland; but the high price of agricultural produce during the late war [Napoleonic War] renders it doubtful if a veneration for greybearded superstition has suffered any one of them to remain undesecrated. For the same reason the mounts called Sith Bhruaith were respected, and it was deemed unlawful and dangerous to cut wood, dig earth and stones, or otherwise disturb them. (Scott 1885, Letter III, 78—79)

Another Scottish name for these places is Aplochs, corners of cornfields or meadows left uncultivated for the supposed benefit of the warlocks, to keep their favor (Warrack 1988 [1911], 8).

In Lincolnshire, eastern England, trees grow in the triangular corners of some fields. These are called Devil’s Holts. The folklorist C. B. Sibsey noted in 1930 that the belief was still current that they were left for the Devil to play in; otherwise he would play in the fields and spoil the crops (Rudkin 1934, 250). Daddy Witch, the nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire wise woman, was said to own a grimoire called The Devil’s Plantation (Parsons 1915, 39). The name of this book refers to the local word for uncultivated corners of fields, deliberately left fallow by farmers because they are no-man’s-land, places where the yarthkins or hytersprites dwell. In the west of England, this kind of “waste piece of land” is called a gallitrap. Folklorist Theo Brown viewed gallitraps as transdimensional gateways, artificial entrances to the underworld (Brown 1966, 125), for the word “gallitrap” was also used to describe a magic circle, pentacle, or triangle made by a conjuring parson to lay a ghost or entrap a criminal. An eighteenth-century account of ghost laying in Cornwall, southwestern England, by the Reverend Corker, a famed “conjuring parson,” refers to just such a magic triangle:

The parson, assisted by Dr. Maddern and the miller, drew the magic pentagram and sacred triangle, within which they placed themselves for safety, and commenced the other ceremonies, only known to the learned, which are required for the effectual subjugation of restless spirits (Rees 1898, 255).

Related to these set-aside areas are clumps of pine trees that stand isolated from other trees. They can still be seen in many places in England and Wales. These plantations are generally Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris), which grow closely together and are dark, tall, and visible from a long way off. They were planted as markers on trackways and drovers’ roads along which sheep and cattle were herded. Athough driving herds had existed for thousands of years, by the Middle Ages the business of driving herds of animals long distances had developed. By the seventeenth century major routes from Wales into southeastern England and from Scotland to East Anglia and London became established. When the drove was stopped each night, the beasts needed to graze, and stances where this could happen were established, where drovers could pay to pasture animals overnight. Drovers’ stances were marked by plantations of a few Scots pine trees, located to be visible from afar in open country. Many remain today, untouched in the manner of the eldritch field corners and Devil’s Holts.

HOLMGANGA, BATTLE, AND TRIAL BY COMBAT

Related to the Norse vé is the enclosure created in ancient Iceland for hólmganga (single combat, literally “going on an island”). Such judicial combats (duels) were conducted formally in places separate from the everyday world: either on an island (the meaning of the word), in a special enclosure such as a circle of stones (Egils Saga, chap. 64), or on a “cloak” pegged down by tjösnur, ritual pegs with round heads reminiscent of household images (Kormáks Saga, chap. 10). The cloak on which they fought was a piece of fabric or animal skin five ells long. The pegging down was done with a rite called “The Sacrifice of the Tjösnur” (Collingwood 1902, 67). Hólmganga was banned in Iceland in the year 1004. In medieval times the formal lists used in chivalric combats are a descendant of this tradition, and the boxing ring continues it today.

In Anglo-Saxon England temporary enclosures for judicial single combat and even full-scale battles were cut off from the everyday world by a fence of hazel (Corylus avellana). All around the battlefield, hazel poles were set up, marking the ground where the battle was to be. This was called “enhazelling the field.” The poles were erected by the heralds in charge of the proceedings. Once a battlefield had been enhazelled it was considered a shameful act for an army to scour (pillage) the country until the battle was won (Hull 1913, 67). The decisive Battle of Brunanburh (937 CE), in which English forces under King Æthelstan defeated the much larger Confederation army composed of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Danish, and Norwegian units, was a formal challenge held upon an enhazelled field. A medieval Arthurian text, Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys, tells of the adventures of Sir Gawain at Castle Orgellous, where a delineated field of combat was laid out: “At the four corners of the meadow were planted four olive trees, to show the bounds of the field, and he was held for vanquished who should first pass the boundary of olives” (Weston 1907, 66).

Trial by combat was an ancient legal method of determining guilt or innocence. Medieval laws, including the Capitularies of Charlemagne, the French Laws of St. Louis, and the crusader-era Assizes of Jerusalem, set the rules for duels fought for the settling of property rights, or for avenging crimes. The Assizes of Jerusalem list murder, manslaughter, rape, wounding, treason, neglect of feudal service, and deprivation or exclusion from rightful possession as grounds for trial by combat. Even witnesses at court and judges could be required to fight a duel with the accused or plaintiff. Only ladies, men older than sixty years, and disabled people could appoint a champion to fight in their place. Duelists fighting according to the rules of the Assizes of Jerusalem fought in lists surrounded by trenches and palings as in hólmganga. Before the combat, each duelist had to swear an oath on the Bible that neither his person nor his horse was secretly guarded (by magic) and that he had used no witchcraft. The defeated duelist, if he was not killed in combat, was hanged. If a champion lost the duel, both champion and plaintiff were hanged. A woman whose champion failed was burned at the stake, and he was hanged. In France the final trial by combat took place in 1547 (Kottenkamp 1988, 105—7).

LABYRINTHS

There are over five hundred ancient stone labyrinths documented in Scandinavia and Iceland, and a few cut in the turf in England, Germany, and Poland. Stone labyrinths are made of rounded stones ranging in size from pebbles to boulders, laid on the earth or on rock surfaces. Some are close to prehistoric burials or grave fields, and it is claimed that some may date from the Bronze Age, though most are thought to be less than nine hundred years old (Kern 1983, 391; Kraft 1986, 14). There are numerous folktales and folk practices recorded about these labyrinths, and their names are evocative of ancient cities and turning pathways. For example, the Russian labyrinth name Vavilon (Babylon) derives from the old Russian word vavilonistyy (“twisting, curved”). A Welsh name, caerdroia, literally means “city of turnings” but is also associated with another famous ancient city, Troy, hence one of the English names for labyrinths, “Troytown.” Scandinavian names include trøborg and trælleborg, with allusions to both Troy and trolls. German names also refer to Troy, such as Trujaburg, but others include Windelbahn (“winding way”), Schlangengang (“snake path”), and Zauberkreis (“magic circle”). An Icelandic name, völundarhús (“Wayland’s house”), associates the labyrinth with the legendary blacksmith Völundr, a myth parallel with the tale that the labyrinth was invented by the metalworker Daedalus on the island of Crete (Meyer 1882, 290). The apotropaic power of iron to shield against and bind evil and bad luck is shared by the labyrinth pattern.

Fig. 6.3. Turf labyrinth formerly at Sneinton, Nottingham, England, 1797. The Library of the European Tradition

In 1684 the Swedish antiquarian Johan Hadorph, who catalogued over one thousand runestones, wrote about the Troijenborg at Rösaring, where, he commented, there had been much sacrifice to the gods in olden days. The labyrinth at Rösaring is part of a “cult site” that has ancient cairns and what appears to be a ceremonial roadway running a north-south alignment along the ridge for 590 yards (540 m). In 1872 S. Sörenson wrote about a labyrinth called Truber Slot that existed in former times at the mouth of Oslo Fjord, Norway. Said to have been built by a virgin, it was activated to ensure favorable winds for sailing. Appeasing the deity of the northwest wind was given as the functionality of labyrinths in a newspaper article in 1945 (Kraft 1986, 15). John Kraft notes that the fishing village of Kuggören in northern Sweden retained knowledge of labyrinth magic into the 1950s. A fisherman from Södermöja recalled visiting Kuggören in 1955, where he saw an old man run through the labyrinth. As he ran, he spit in his hand, or on something he held, and threw it backward over his shoulder. This was for luck in fishing. This man was known locally as the Kuggören cunning man who used steel to heal people and livestock and practiced magic in the labyrinth. He died in 1963 without transmitting his magical knowledge to his sons, who were not interested.

In Sweden in 1973 Eva Eskilsson from Härnösand recounted that a former ship’s pilot had told her that when mariners were delayed by bad weather and could not sail, they would build labyrinths of stone so that the wind would get caught up in them and so reduce in strength (Kraft 1986, 15). The same story has been collected by folklorists from Husum, Germany, and Haparanda and Luleå in northern Sweden. As turning magic, labyrinths were used to trap harmful sprites. Kraft reported in 1986 that Gösta Janssen from Rådmansö parish told him that he had heard that fishermen used to walk a labyrinth near Stockholm when they laid their nets. This was to exorcise evil ghosts to guarantee a good catch (Kraft 1986, 15). The Swedish fishermen used them to prevent smågubbar (little people), malicious land wights, from coming on board ship to disrupt the haul. The smågubbar, it was believed, would follow the fishermen around until they boarded their vessel. So the fishermen would go into the center of a labyrinth, and the smågubbar would follow them in, getting confused in the process. Then the fishermen would run from the labyrinth to the ship and cast off before the smågubbar could reach it.

It is possible that labyrinth fishing magic has a prosaic origin. Fish weirs and fish traps on rivers and in tidal areas made from stones, sticks, wattles, basketwork, and timber, either with or without nets, were used widely in Italy, France, England, Scotland, Wales, Poland, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, and Germany, where they were called a Fischzaun (fish fence) or a Fischirrgarten (fish maze) (Buschan 1926, 322). Coastal magical labyrinths for the entrapment of fishing with nets from ships may follow on from the construction of actual coastal fish labyrinths (Fischirrgärten), using the form of the unicursal labyrinth rather than the shapes suitable for catching fish. The labyrinths on the coast of the White Sea in Russia are in the area of the spawning grounds where seasonal fishing was carried out (Gurina 1948, 33). In northern Sweden and Finland, labyrinths were used by Sámi herdsmen as a means of magical protection of their reindeer from attacks by wolverines (Kraft 1986, 19).

CHURCHYARDS AND GRAVES

The Houses of the Dead

An ancient Germanic custom was to bury bodies in Totenbäume, “trees of the dead.” They appeared in the Alamannic period (213—496 CE). A Totenbaum was made from a hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree, with a lid that was carved with a scaly serpent with a head at each end. The last known burial in a Totenbaum was Graf von Buchaw in 1151 (Paulsen and Schach-Dörges 1972, 21—22). Some hogback tombstones of the Viking Age in Scotland have serpentlike roof ridges that resemble the Totenbaum, although these tombstones did not contain the body. Beds of the dead made of planks slotted into cornerposts were used in Merovingian times along with Totenbäume in Germany (Paulsen and Schach-Dörges 1972, 23—25). Grave chambers made from jointed planks had existed in Celtic burials in mainland Europe in pre-Roman times. From the late seventh century similar “box shrines” were made in Ireland from thin slabs of stone whose form was derived from carpentry (Herity 1993, 101—94).

FUNERAL CUSTOMS

The lykewake is the tradition of watching over a corpse until it is taken away to be buried. The period between death and burial was believed to be dangerous, as the spirit of the deceased remained close to the body. The sight of the dead was considered dangerous. The corpse’s eyes were shut, and coins were placed over them. The old Norse death rites (ná-bjargir) were conducted from behind the corpse so that the one performing them could not fall under the gaze of the deceased, who could then claim the living person and bring him or her over to the side of the dead (Hasenfratz 2011, 69). When the cause of death was uncertain, there were particular rites to ask the spirit what was the cause of death.

Churchyards and graveyards are special tracts of land ritually set aside for the dead. They are places of dread because everyone knows that one day we will die and end up in one. They were also feared because the spirits of the dead resided there and could affect people unfavorably if they happened to go there. Traditionally, there are apotropaic amulets, talismans, and sigils that ward off evil spirits from a place, or pin them down, and the graveyard is no different from anywhere else they are used. A cross upon a grave, apart from being a marker that someone is buried there, also serves a magical function to prevent his or her spirit from manifesting. Graves and tombs contain the remains of individuals who led particular lives. Because the spirit was once present in the body, the grave is not just a meaningless place where the corpse is disposed of, but a meaningful location associated with the individual buried there. Graveyards contain the remains of famous and infamous people, saints and criminals, and their graves are resorted to by relatives, descendants, pilgrims, tourists, and those who believe some benefit will accrue for visiting any particular grave. Traditionally, the tomb or grave is the house of the shade or ghost of the individual. It must be kept clean, adorned with flowers and other offerings in order that the memory of the deceased be kept up, and also that the shade might not wander from the grave and do mischief. In the Catholic tradition there is a special day, November 2, on which family and ancestral graves are swept, cleaned, and tended, thereby maintaining the protective power. This day is observed in some countries as the Day of the Dead. It is close to the old Celtic festival of Samhain, and the Hallowe’en ghosts and demons of the modern festival continue the observance in a commercialized manner.

THE FIRST BURIAL

The actual location of the first grave in a new cemetery is also significant, for tradition asserts that the spirit of the first one buried becomes the guardian of the graveyard. An ancient Norwegian belief about the haugbonde (Old Norse haugbúi, mound dweller), which haunted burial mounds near farms, was that it was the ghost of the first owner (founder) of a farmstead, and its supernatural guardian. Offerings of food and drink were left for it. Animals (and people) sacrificed at the foundation of buildings were deemed to remain as ghostly apparitions that guarded the place, such as the Kirk-grim or the guardian of churches, and the graveyard belief is clearly the same (Howlett 1899, 31). In Somerset this being was called the Churchyard Walker (Tongue 1958, 44). Writing in England in 1899, George Tyack noted:

There is a superstition in many places that it is something worse than unlucky to be the first corpse buried in a new churchyard; the Devil, in fact, is supposed to have an unquestionable claim to the possession of such a body. In Germany and in Scandinavia the enemy is sometimes outwitted by the interment of a pig or a dog, before any Christian burial takes place. For a long time the people were unwilling to use the churchyard of St. John’s, Bovey-Tracey, for this reason; and only began to do so after a stranger had been laid to rest therein. The same idea prevails in the North of England and in Scotland. There can be little doubt that in this we have a relic of the Pagan custom . . . namely, the offering of an animal, or even of a human, sacrifice at the foundation of a new building.” (Tyack 1899, 80)

In 1958 Ruth Tongue noted that the sexton (gravedigger) was often appealed to “behind the parson’s back,” so a person would not be the first to be buried. She tells how in one instance a large black dog belonging to a local farmer had mysteriously disappeared, and the sexton was said to have killed it and buried it in the graveyard before the funeral of the person (Tongue 1958, 44). A Breton tradition is that the last person buried any year becomes the Ankou, a grim reaper who drives a spectral cart that comes for the dead. He or she remains the Ankou for a year, when the last person of that year is buried (Simpson 1987, 41).

A rare account from the English West Midlands in the mid-twentieth century concerns the customs of traveling showmen who were accustomed to lay out fairgrounds. The custom recorded was sufficiently notable that a national newspaper reported it (The Sunday Express, December 12, 1943). The funeral of Pat Collins, “The King of the Showmen,” took place at Bloxwich in December 1943. The location of Pat Collins’s grave was ritually divined by his son:

There was a strange incident at the cemetery when the old man’s son visited it accompanied by Father Hanrahan, of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Bloxwich, to select a site for the grave. When he came to seek a site for his father’s last resting place it was found that the Catholic portion of the cemetery was full. The adjoining land which belongs to the cemetery was specially consecrated. When Mr. Collins went to select a place for the first grave, he brought his foot forward, raised it and brought his heel down sharply on the turf, making a deep dent in it, exclaiming as he did so, “This is the spot. I want the exact center of my father’s grave to be over that mark.” He explained to the priest: “My father used those words and that gesture for 60 years every time he inspected a fairground site to indicate where the principal attraction, usually the biggest of the merry-go-rounds, was to be erected. He never measured the ground, but the chosen spot was always in the exact center of the show ground. It was a ritual with him.”

Pat Collins was duly buried at the center of the new graveyard as the first interment. Whether or not a dog had preceded him was not mentioned.

Divination of a gravesite in open country, that is, ground not consecrated by the church, appears in the ballads of Robin Hood. Medieval outlaws like Robin Hood and Little John were refused Christian burials, and the reputed graves of both men were in unconsecrated ground. Whoever the original Robin Hood was, there are two extant old ballads telling of Robin Hood’s death, Robin Hood His Death and Robin Hood’s Death and Burial. The first appears to suggest an outlaw’s road burial at “yonder streete” with a grave “of gravel and greete (grit).” The second tells how Robin Hood lies dying from blood loss at Kirkley-hall. He summons Little John to his deathbed and asks him for his bow. With his last strength Robin shoots an arrow out of the window to divine the place where he will be buried (Dobson and Taylor 1997, 134—39). Divination by arrow shot also appears in folktales about the location of medieval churches, including Salisbury Cathedral.

EVOCATION OF THE DEAD AND GRAVEYARD MAGIC

The Norse magic for summoning the dead, a “death charm” or “death song” (val-gardr), is a waking song, beginning with “Vaki!” (“Awake!”), such as is described in the Eddic poem Svipdagsmál. If the awakened dead is not a relative, then the information obtained may be a curse, the spirit telling of the necromant’s doom, for instance. The Indiculus Superstitionum et Paganiarum, from the era of St. Boniface (Winfrith) in Germany (seventh—eighth century), is an index of forbidden “superstitions and heathen customs” that includes dadsisas, “sacrilege committed over the dead” (Boudriot 1964, 51). The oldest known northern death magic talisman is a bracteate found in the mouth of a skeleton in a Swedish grave. It bore an anagram of the Latin letters SISU (Düwel 1988, 75, 77, 90, 105). The sis component of dadsisas is clear.

In the north of England, malevolent entities that emerged from graveyards in the shape of the vicious bar guest, boggart, or bogey man were believed to be the spirits of those who were not honored as worthy ancestors, but instead ignored or vilified. One belief about the bar guest was that he was the ghost of a suicide or murderer, an unjust oppressive landlord, or a murder victim. This shunned outcast was denied rest in the proper place in the spirit world, but instead was aimlessly wandering the earth, doing mischief and physically attacking people. They were not vampires like those described by William of Newburgh. Magicians called boggart-seers were employed to deal with these dangerous apparitions. The last one died around 1850 (Harland and Wilkinson 1867, 49, 55).

Churchyards and cemeteries are also places where the materia magica used for certain purposes can be obtained. Practitioners of graveyard magic who intended to contact spirits used bones, graveyard earth, and fragments of coffin. Churchyard materials are deemed to possess magical and physical qualities; for example, coffin dust is said to be toxic (Newman 1948a, 127). The fear that one’s bones may be used in necromantic conjuration or for other magical purposes was always an argument for cremation. In his Hydrotaphia (1658), Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “to be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials” (Browne 1862, 152).

Digging in graveyards for human bones for magical purposes has always been prohibited. But people did take human bones from churchyards and use them magically. There is a considerable literature from Scandinavia of such human bone magic. In his Northamptonshire folklore Sternberg (1851) mentions one instance he found of someone who possessed a human kneecap to ward off rheumatism (Sternberg 1851, 24—25). In 1895 W. B. Gerish published an East Anglian churchyard charm taught by the Chedgrave Witch to a Loddon girl at the beginning of the ninteenth century. The rhyme or charm gave a graveyard rite for a woman to gain a husband, seemingly with a form of evocation of the dead. She had to go alone to the burial ground and make three crosses from “graveyard bits,” then choose a gravestone to hold them between the “finger slits” over the stone. One cross represented the girl, another the would-be husband, and the third stood between them. If both crosses leaned across the middle one, the man’s name would come to the girl. But in performing the ritual, she would lose a year of life, and the person who was buried in the grave over which the rite was conducted would somehow be able to use the “last year on earth-life” that she would have had (Gerish 1895, 200). The widespread belief that everyone has a particular fixed time to live is implicit in this rite.

Another kind of marriage magic used churchyard toads. According to Mabel Peacock, using toads found in churchyards were recommended by witches to women who wished to entrap men who would be “compelled to accept the yoke of wedlock.” A woman who wanted to marry a particular man had to go to Holy Communion at eight o’clock. She should take the communion bread but not swallow it. Then, “after you come out of the church, you will see a toad in the churchyard.” She had to spit the host out so that the toad would eat it. After that, her man will be magically compelled to marry her (Peacock 1901, 168). In Ireland, a spell to cause hatred rather than love between partners made use of graveyard materials. It involved taking a handful of clay from a new-made grave and shaking it between the couple, saying, “Hate ye one another! May you be as hateful to each other as sin to Christ, as bread eaten without blessing is to God” (Wilde 1887, II, 82).