Flying High

I thought about making my first post of 2016 a Happy New Year sort of affair – y’know, where I tell you about my resolutions and lay out my goals for the coming months. But the truth is, I have little in the way of writing goals other than to keep writing and keep publishing. So far, so obvious. So instead, I’m going to write about witches and broomsticks because … well, because I want to.

Witches feature just as heavily as werewolves in the Wolf Land books and, yes, my witches fly. Sometimes with the use of potions, sometimes on a broomstick and sometimes by other means …

Whilst I’ve created my own fictional world in Wolf Land, and my witches do whatever my imagination wants them to, I thought it might be fun to take a look at just where the stories of witches riding broomsticks and flying high in the sky began.

Any Wiccans among you might have heard of the besom broom. The phallic nature of the broom’s shaft – commonly made of ash – is said to be masculine, while the bristles – made of birch – are said to be feminine. The combination, apparently, balances the feminine and the masculine. And whilst there are many Wiccan rituals that involve the besom, there were witches long before there was Wicca, and they were using other means to fly …

In Wolf Land Book One, when told of her mother’s skills at making flying potions, Sorcha says: “Perhaps she created such a heady hallucinogen that she thought she could fly.”

Sorcha may have been right. The ointments that witches were said to have used to enable them to fly were highly hallucinogenic mixtures. In The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia by Paul Devereux (Daily Grail Publishing, 2008), the author tells us of the 20th century experiments of folklorist Will Erich Peuckert. Peuckert used a mixture of belladonna, henbane and Datura and said:
“We had wild dreams. Faces danced before my eyes which were at first terrible. Then I suddenly had the sensation of flying for miles through the air. The flight was repeatedly interrupted by great falls. Finally, in the last phase, an image of an orgiastic feast with grotesque sensual excess.”

I would not advise anyone to try that particular experiment.

There are other ‘recipes’ for flying ointments. They include ingredients like ergot, hemlock, wolfsbane, henbane and belladonna, usually in a base of animal fat (or, I’m sorry to say, the fat of a young child). Of course, these ingredients would be highly toxic if ingested, but it seems that instead of swallowing, the witches rubbed the ointment on the skin. They may have also employed the use of opium, a substance which is said to be antagonistic to belladonna, in order to avoid/cure being poisoned. I cannot state it enough times – do not try this at home, or outside your home, or in a field at midnight while the moon is full and the other naked ladies are telling you it’s the only way to join their gang …

Lady Alice Kyteler is infamous in Irish history for being the first witch condemned to death. She even features in the William Butler Yeats’ poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen. She was said to have used sorcery to kill her husband but she escaped (of course she did, she was a witch!) and in 1324 her maid, Petronilla de Meath, was flogged and burned at the stake instead.

Here is some of the damning evidence that was used to prove Kyteler’s guilt (recounted by the English historian Raphael Holinshed): “In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of ointment wherewith she greased her staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.”

And in the Quaestio de Strigis (An Investigation of Witches, about 1470), Giordano da Bergamo  says of witches that on “certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

The idea of witches riding staffs began to take hold. In those lovely old days of witch hunts, pictures and stories of pagan ladies were everywhere. And no matter what those horny old witch hunters might’ve said, those pictures were not for educational purposes. Famous artists depicted them naked and riding brooms or distaffs (or other household items). Parmigianino went one step further and depicted a witch riding a phallus. At least he was keeping it real!

We can all come to our own conclusions about whether women/witches really did use ointments and other implements for rituals, pleasure or freedom. In a society where women/witches are sexualized and feared at the same time … who knows what is and isn’t true. As women were forced further into domestic servitude, brooms had become the most common vehicle for flight (at least in the pictures). Witches were riding these brooms (a symbol of household drudgery?) and using them to fly up and out the chimney.

And that’s the image most of us have ingrained these days – the fully clothed witch, riding a broom with a cat on board. I don’t know about the cat (mine won’t go near a car so I seriously doubt he’ll ever join me on my broom) but I definitely prefer the idea of flying with my clothes on. It gets chilly up there 🙂

I wish you all a magical new year.
P.S.: Wolf Land Book Three will release in the spring …

The Werewolf Trials

Werewolves are supposed to be frightening, aren’t they?  Creatures of nightmare?  Yet I struggle to think of a time when they frightened me, rather than fascinated me.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.  In modern media, the werewolf is often the hero of TV shows, movies, books, comics …

It’s easy to be fascinated rather than frightened when you know that something is just fiction.  It’s easy for teenage girls (or thirty-year-old women) to imagine falling in love with a werewolf or a vampire when they’re depicted as tortured souls, out to make amends/get revenge/insert suitable back story here …

I write the Wolf Land series – beautiful witch falls in love with handsome werewolf.  Okay, there’s more to the stories than that but … in my books the werewolves are (for the most part) the good guys.  They fight on behalf of the dispossessed, they fight to stop the forests being destroyed, they fight to help protect the real wolves from destruction.

And I’m not the only one who writes and reads this sort of fiction.  So I have to wonder: were people ever really frightened of these creatures?  Or did they always see them as the fictional creation that they (probably) are?

While writing the Wolf Land series I read a lot about the werewolf trials of the past.  I refer to two of them in Wolf Land Book Two, and I’d like to delve into both a little more deeply in this blog.

The Werewolf of Dole

The first trial I refer to in the book is one which one of my characters, Maria, attended in her past.  Maria speaks of a trial she witnessed where: ‘The man being tried had, undoubtedly, done terrible things. He had killed young children. Consumed their limbs and … oh, you do not need to know the gore. The man claimed that he had done these things only because he had been cursed. He claimed to be a werewolf.’

Although I add some fictional elements, I was inspired by a  very real trial when I wrote this section.  The trial I was thinking of was that of Gilles Garnier, a trial that took place in France in the 1570s.  Gilles was also known as the Werewolf of Dole, and the Hermit of St Bonnot.  Gilles lived much of his life as a hermit and, when he eventually took a wife, he found that feeding two mouths was more difficult than feeding just one.  So he took the rather extreme action of turning to cannibalism.  He killed and consumed children, carrying out the killing alone.  He would, however, take the leftovers home for his wife.

Gilles claimed that he carried out these acts in the form of a wolf.  One night while out hunting for food, he said, a spectre appeared to him and gave him a magic ointment that would allow him to transform, and so make hunting easier.  He was found guilty of crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft, and was burned at the stake in 1573.

The Werewolf of Bedburg

Later on in Wolf Land Book Two the rector tells the local children the lovely tale of Peter Stumpp.  Some of you may have heard of Peter, though perhaps not under that name.  The Werewolf of Bedburg was known by many names, often spelled differently:  Peter Stube, Pe(e)ter Stubbe, Peter Stübbe or Peter Stumpf … Abal Griswold, Abil Griswold, Ubel Griswold …

If you google the subject, you’ll find many stories about this man and his crimes.  He confessed that the devil had given him a belt which allowed him to transform into a wolf.  The crimes he is said to have committed in this form, under insatiable blood lust, began with killing sheep and newborn lambs; he soon progressed to murdering and consuming human victims.  His victims number 14-18, depending on the source.  They include the unborn fetuses of two pregnant women.  He is even said to have eaten the brain of his own son.

These crimes, if true, are incredibly unsettling.  The details of Peter’s execution, however, are more unsettling still.  He was put on a wheel on October 31st 1589, his body splayed out and stretched painfully.  The flesh was torn from his body by hot pincers, and his limbs were broken by the blunt side of an axe to prevent his body from returning from the grave.  He was beheaded, then, before being burned on a pyre.  His head was placed on a pole as a warning to others who might be tempted towards sorcery or shapeshifting (y’know, in case Satan ever offers them a magical belt).  It’s said that his daughter and his mistress (the Gossip of the pamphlet I link to below) were considered accessories to his crimes.  They were said to be raped, flayed and strangled (because, of course, it’s not a sin if it’s a sinner you’re doing it to) and their bodies burned alongside his.

The main source of information on this subject is a pamphlet named the Damnable Life and Death of Stubbe Peeter (you can read it here – please let me know about any dead links).  Two copies of this pamphlet exist, one in the British Museum and one in the Lambeth Library.  It was produced in 1590, and it is a translation from a German pamphlet detailing the case and trial of Peter Stumpp.   There are no remaining copies of the German pamphlet, and the English translation was rediscovered in 1920 by the occultist, Montague Summers.  Montague reprinted the pamphlet,including a woodcut, in his work, The Werewolf.

There is some additional information in the form of an alderman’s diary entries, and some German broadsheets.  The broadsheets, however, were probably reprinted from the English translation.  Any original German documents about the trial were apparently lost; Peter’s date of birth is unknown, too, because local church records were destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).

Such a dearth of real information will always lead to speculation.  There are some who believe that Peter Stumpp’s trial was a political trial in disguise.  In Wolf Land, Sorcha tells us Brian Farrell’s theories on the subject: ‘I too knew the story of Peter Stumpp, but I knew the story as Brian told it; Brian, a man eager to believe in werewolves, had always said that this was not a story of the horrors of werewolves, but a story of the horrors of man. Peter Stumpp was caught in the middle of a religious war – he was a powerful Protestant in an area where others were determined to re-establish Catholicism.’

There were reasons for such theories.  Peter grew up in Bedburg, and so was quite likely a Protestant. When the area was overthrown in 1587, in an effort to establish Catholicism, it’s conceivable that – if Peter was a Protestant in a position of some power – the new Catholic authorities may have wanted to make an example of him.  Many powerful people came to his trial, and in a time when such trials were ten a penny, this was unusual.  But … if Peter really did commit the crimes he confessed to, the trial would have been quite a draw, so perhaps the attendance of the peers and princes of Germany was not so unusual after all.

 

Conclusion

I began this post with a question in mind: does anyone really fear werewolves?  And after reading about the trials in this blog, and so many similar cases against witches and werewolves over the centuries, I’m no closer to an answer.  It could be argued that, in such trials, calling oneself (or being accused of being) a werewolf or a witch was just an excuse.

It wasn’t my fault, your honour, the devil made me do it.

Or:

Kill him, he’s in league with the devil.  Never mind that it’s terribly convenient for us that this man no longer exist, just … kill him.  I’m telling you – he’s got a magic belt and he knows how to use it!

But imagine we did believe that Gilles and Peter were werewolves.  Imagine we believed that the countless women tortured, abused and murdered during the witch-hunts over the centuries really were witches.  Would they still fascinate us or would they become something to fear?

I – and many others – create worlds filled with witches and werewolves.  I’ll continue to do so.  And they’ll (almost always) be the good guys.  My werewolves aren’t serial killers or child murderers.  But they might just chow down on the guys that are carrying out such heinous deeds.  And as for my witches, if they’re ever tempted to resort to the blackest of magics, then I’ll make sure their hair looks good while they’re doing it 🙂

Wolf Land: Tea Time

As I write this I’m drinking my second cup of tea of the day.  I’ll probably have at least three more cups between now and bedtime.  For me, drinking tea is a comforting ritual.  Each morning I wrap my chilly fingers around a warm cup, take a sip and say, ‘Aaaah, that’s lovely so it is.’

But there was a time when no one in Ireland or England had heard of tea, and in Wolf Land Book Two, some of my characters experience it for the first time.

Lady Tolbert is a huge fan of tea. She brings it to Wolf Wood from Portugal, where she drank it with Catherine of Braganza. But in Wolf Wood, tea is not met with sighs of, ‘Aaaah, that’s lovely so it is.’  Maggie, the lady’s maid, refers to tea as, ‘That stuff,’ and says, ‘I am astounded as to how she keeps that foreign drink down.’

But whilst Lady Tolbert and Maggie are fictional characters, Catherine of Braganza lived and breathed in the real world instead of the one in my mind. Catherine was a Portuguese princess (and later Queen consort of England, Ireland and Scotland). She was born into the House of Braganza in 1638 – a house which became Portugal’s royal house in 1640.

Tea was popular among the rich of Portugal. It was an exotic drink imported from the East, and my mind plays vivid images of Lady Tolbert (a woman who knew how to influence the people of influence!) visiting Portugal in the 1650s and sipping the drink with the young Catherine.

Catherine did not arrive in England until 1662. She disembarked at Portsmouth in May of that year, and it is said that the first thing she asked for was a cup of tea. And – as well as the many expensive items that would be sold off to pay the debts of her husband, King Charles II – she made sure that a chest of tea was shipped to England for her arrival.

We know that tea was available before Catherine ever docked at Portsmouth. It was for sale in a London coffeehouse in 1657. Thomas Garraway, the owner of the coffeehouse, produced a pamphlet to advertise his latest offering. In 1658 an advertisement appeared in the Mercurius Politicus, calling tea: ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink.’

In Thomas Rugge’s Diurnall (a journal preserved in the British museum) he describes tea as being ‘sold in almost every street in 1659.’

The introduction of tea is also recorded in another famous journal, the diary of Samuel Pepys. In Samuel’s entry dated 25^th September 1660, he records some time he spent discussing foreign affairs with friends. He tells us that, after this meeting, he ‘did send for a cupp of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.’

But although all of these sources tell us that tea was available, it was not yet the drink of the masses. It was sold in mostly male frequented places, and was promoted as a medicinal drink (against the advice of the Royal College of Physicians who wondered whether the drink would ‘agree with the Constitutions of (our) English bodies’).

Upon Catherine’s arrival in 1662 she made it clear that tea was her drink of choice. It was what she and her fellow wealthy women drank at court – not for medicinal reasons, but simply for enjoyment – and under Catherine’s influence the drink gained the popularity it still has today.

So thank you, Catherine. Because of you, I have this lovely cup of warm liquid in my hands. And I’m about to dunk a biscuit.

Run Rebel Run

‘We have three beasts to destroy, that lay burdens upon us. The first is the wolf, on whom we lay five pounds a head if a dog, and ten pounds if a bitch. The second beast is a priest, on whose head we lay ten pounds; if he be eminent, more. The third beast is a Tory, on whose head if he be a public Tory we lay twenty pounds; and forty shillings on a private Tory. Your army cannot catch them; the Irish bring them in; brothers and cousins cut one another’s throats.’ – Major Morgan (MP for Wicklow), speaking at Westminster in 1657.

Nowadays we think of the word tory as being a colloquial name for the British Conservative Party or its supporters. Whilst there is an interesting history behind why the name came to be used in English/British/UK politics, today I’m going to focus on the original meaning of the word.

The word tory comes from the Irish word tóraidhe – meaning an outlaw or a pursued man (the Irish word tóir means pursue, and some translate tóraidhe as pursuer rather than pursued man). Basically the tories were Irish rebels, and those rebels were on the run. They were disbanded Confederate soldiers, raiding English-held areas and operating as guerrillas against invaders. They operated in rugged areas, such as the Wicklow mountains, attacking Parliamentarian soldiers and stealing their supplies. Oh, and they attacked tax collectors, too. Obviously, the Parliamentarian soldiers were not too happy about such things. The New Model Army meant to reconquer Ireland, and such rebel activity was not to be tolerated.

If an area was a suspected tory stronghold, then the soldiers must do anything to bring things back under control. And when I say anything, I mean anything. Crops would be burned. Cattle would be destroyed. Burn them out … starve them out … any tactic was acceptable. Some areas were free-fire zones – everyone had to get out, and if they did not, they would be considered tories or tory sympathisers, and be slain.

The fact that innocent people died, or had their crops and houses razed forcing them to become dispossessed … well, all’s fair in war. The tactics led the country into famine – a terrible famine which was worsened by a plague outbreak. The population was decimated (most deaths being those of civilians). The country was in ruins. The country was on its knees. The country was – as intended – ripe for re-conquest.

Most tories met unpleasant fates. Some were sold into slavery. Some were given deals which allowed them to leave the country to serve as soldiers in France (the English Royalist court was in exile in France) or Spain. But such deals were not always what they seemed. In 1653, the last organised tories surrendered in Cavan, thinking that they were to be sent to France. In fact, they were either executed or sent to penal colonies.

Of course some rebels remained and, despite the formal surrender, they would continue their activities on a smaller scale for the remainder of the 1650s.

The Irish Confederate (Eleven Years’) War:

So why were the tories seen as Royalist supporters? Why support one form of English rule over another? Well, the fact is that they probably did not. Affiliations are rarely iron-clad, but held only as long as is convenient.

The Eleven Years’ War (1641-1653) did not start out with Royalist support as its aim. In fact, the original Confederation was a Catholic movement, with the intention of fighting English soldiers sent by the government of Charles I. But even then there were grey areas as to allegiance and objective – otherwise why would the Confederates have felt the need to insist that their fight was against the King’s advisers rather than the King himself?

The war began in 1641 with the Ulster Rebellion – in which thousands of English and Scottish settlers were killed. Until 1649 the Confederates had somewhat of a de facto rule over Ireland. They professed to side with the Cavaliers, they claimed loyalty to Charles I, and they had the support of the Catholic clergy.

It was a complicated war, with constantly shifting loyalties and, at one stage, a brief civil war within the Confederate factions themselves.  It was the arrival of the New Model Army which put an end to it all (a brutal and bloody end), but most people reading about the events arrive at the same opinion: had the Confederates been united instead of constantly shifting sides and engaging in in-fighting, then the Irish Confederate Army might well have won Ireland back for good. In the words of the 17th century poem Tuireamh na hÉireann, the Eleven Years’ war was ‘an cogadh do chríochnaigh Éire’ – the war that finished Ireland.

This is a messy subject – hard to simplify, and even harder to confine to a short blog-post.  There was no ‘right side.’  With people being killed on the basis of their religion, every side carried out what would be called ethnic cleansing today. There is a wealth of material dealing with this period (much of it available online) and I spent a huge amount of time poring over it all. At the end of that research this was the conclusion I came to: in this Irish conflict, the only thing that anyone really supported was their own best interests. Human nature?

But war is ever-present. The world today is filled with those displaced by conflict, desperate to find a safe place, a place to call home. So let’s not end on a cynical note. Let’s end on a hopeful one. In recent weeks, huge swathes of people have been marching to ask that Syrian refugees be welcomed into their countries. There are people – ordinary people – inviting these refugees to share their homes. Perhaps some of us are changing. Perhaps some of us are looking past our own immediate concerns. Perhaps four hundred years from now historians will look back and say: in the 21^st century, people cared.

 

Wolf Land: Little Burial Grounds

It’s the first day of September. It’s chilly. It’s raining (it’s raining here anyway). All of that is enough to put anyone in a sombre mood, so I don’t suppose today’s blog about cillíní is going to perk us up much! For those who don’t know, a cillín is a ‘little burial ground’. The word can also translate as ‘little cell’ or ‘little churchyard.’ Cillíní is the plural.

In the Wolf Land books, there is a cillín behind the village church. It’s where Sorcha’s mother is buried because she was considered a witch. Unbaptised babies were buried in such places because, not having been cleared of original sin, they would not be deemed fit to enter Heaven. Their souls were not said to go to Hell, but to exist forever in Limbo instead. Other burials might include shipwrecked sailors, the mentally ill, women who died in childbirth, religious heretics, and suicides.

To quote Wolf Land Book One: ‘I thought of all the bodies I knew were buried there: babies who died too soon, without married parents, without having been baptised; women, joining those babies in the cillín with the help of a potion, or a blade, or a rope.  Sinners, in the eyes of the church.  Loved ones, in the eyes of the people who laid flowers on their graves.’

Cillíní are no longer in use. Babies who die too soon, people who take their own lives and all the others who may have been marginalized in life as well as in death, are now buried on consecrated ground. But the treatment of such individuals is a part of Irish history that will not, and should not, be forgotten.

Wolf Land: more than just a book title

The eradication of the wolf in Ireland was not what you would call an overnight  success.  Supposedly, the last wolf in Ireland was killed in 1786, but the campaign to exterminate them had been going on for a long time.

There are early historical references to wolves attacking people, such as in the Annals of Tigernach (1137) where it states: The Blind one of … that is, Giolla Muire, was killed by wolves.

In the Annála Connacht  (1420) it is stated: Wolves killed many people this year.

The first legislation to exterminate wolves, however, did not come until 1584.  More legislation followed over the years, but during the Cromwellian re-conquest of Ireland, the campaign really stepped up.

During wars, there will be bodies, and where there are bodies there will be wolves.  Wolf numbers increased, giving rise to the nickname Wolf Land (or wolf-land, depending on the source).  But … Irish men could hardly be allowed to hunt, could they?  Hunters would need weapons, and weapons were something that the Irish were not supposed to have.  Hunters from elsewhere would have to be attracted to Wolf Land, and the only way to do that was to pay them a whole lot of money.

In Wolf Land Book One, Sorcha lists out  some typical bounties at the time. She tells us: They will earn six pounds for every female they kill, five for the males, two pounds for the younger wolves and ten shillings for the cubs.

Even with such money on offer, getting rid of our Irish wolves was not an easy job.  In 1652, for example, it was forbidden to remove any wolf-hounds from the country because, with a wolf population like ours, hunters would need the help of such able dogs at their side.  So why was Ireland such a special case?  Why were our wolves so difficult to eradicate?  I have read that, in Ireland, we saw them as a part of the landscape; indeed, their Irish name, Mac Tire (son of the land) would suggest just that.  Whatever the reason, most Irish people I talk to still have a inexplicable passion for wolves.  It may be 2015, but Ireland is still a Wolf Land at heart.