Vervain

Vervain, from time immemorial, has been the floral symbol of enchantment. In ancient times it was much in request for all kinds of divinations and incantation. Virgil alludes to it as one of the charms used by an enchantress:

Bring running water, bind those altars round

With fillets and with vervain strew the ground (*)

Vervain is not a showy flower and could be easily missed among the grasses and the flowers growing, as it often does, by roadsides or on waste ground. This always seems to have been the case. An anonymous verse from around the year 1400 says that it may be found “by way or gate” and Gerarde’s Herball(1597) refers to it as growing “in untilled places neere unto hedges, high waies and commonly by ditches”. A Garden Dictionary of 1741 lists it as a medicinal plant gathered in the wild but “rarely cultivated in gardens”.

But as the quotation (from T F T Dyer*) above indicates, it has deep magical associations. Pliny associated it with the Gaulish druids and the word verbenae in Latin indicates boughs used in religious ceremonies, but Pliny also had a particular plant – verbena – in mind, which has since been taken to be vervain (Verbena officinalis). It was recognised in Anglo-Saxon herbalism as capable of driving away disease and also as a herb used by sorcerers. Gerarde had his reservations, and suggested that its widespread fame had evil origins: “The divell did reveale it as a secret and divine medecine”. In spite of this it continued to be used well into the 18th century. The Welsh herbal lore of the Physicians of Myddfai advised that the herb be gathered “in the name of God” and that no heed should be paid “to those who say it should be gathered in the name of the devil”. They recommended it to prevent dreams and to counter the effects of Scrophula. Perhaps Gerarde’s doubts about the plant simply reflect its magical uses

Here, to end, is a verse by the 18th century poet William Mason:

Lift your boughs of vervain blue

Dipt in cold September dew

And dash the moisture, chaste and clear,

O’er the ground, and through the air.

Now the place is purged and pure.

*Sources:
T F T Dyer The Folk Lore of Plants(1878)
David Hoffman Welsh Herbal Medicine (1960)
Geoffrey Grigson The Englishman’s Flora (1958)
J Grattan and C Singer Anglo-Saxon Medicine (1952)

MOONWORT

Moonwort (Botrychium lunaria)

The first leet night, quhan the new moon set,

Quhan all was douffe and mirk,

We saddled our naigis wi' the moon-fern leif,

And rode fra Kilmerrin kirk.

Some horses were of the brume-cow framit,

And some of the greine bay tree;

But mine was made of ane humloke schaw,

And a stour stallion was he.

So James Hogg from his poem in Scots dialect The Witch of Fife. Hogg was a shepherd who was 'discovered' by Walter Scott when he was collecting folklore and ballads in the eighteenth century. Hogg often used the folkore he was steeped in as material for poetry, as here. In the dark of the night when the new moon has set they saddle horses with moon fern leaf. The horses are themselves transformed from cows, trees and a hemlock stalk. Riding on moonfern is a way of journeying  to Faery. The fern itself was seen as a 'key' to the Otherworld and so could be used to transport you there on whatever conveyance might be available.

May Spell

John Stewart and the Selkie

(1)

Those selkie girls, they like to climb

Up onto the rocks to take the air

Peel off their seal skins and recline

As human girls in the warmth of the sun;

But if a human from from the land comes near

They’re seals again and off they swim.

John Stewart knew that this was so,

Had watched them from his boat out in the bay

But never could get close enough before they’d go.

One day he hid himself among the heather

Above the rocks washed by the highest tides

Where he knew the selkie girls would gather.

Spreading their skins upon the rocks above

They sat and sunned themselves above the spray

Or cooled themselves in pools the selkies love.

(2)

He waited until they slid into the water

Then crept out to take the skin  of one he’d noticed

Above the others for her grace and beauty

Knowing that if he had her skin he’d also have her.

When he was seen the girls came out and scrambled

Onto the rocks to put their seal skins on

And swim back out into deeper waters.

But one remained, frantic, for the skin she’d shed,

Which he had folded away secretly.

He said to her ‘Come home with me

To be my wife and I will love you

For now you cannot go back to the sea’.

For nine years she lived with him

And bore him two girls and a boy

But gazing over the waves from the rocky shore

Her thoughts strayed often to her selkie kin.

(3)

One day she looked up and saw a leak

Dripping through the thatch of their cottage

And climbed up into the roofspace to check.

Then she saw it, lined in the thatch,

The skin she had shed nine years before,

Dry and wrinkled now, but intact.

Her husband was away at sea and she

Felt the swell of the waves, and the taste

Of the the tear on her cheek was salty.

So she took the skin and called to her children,

For the last time, her heart breaking,

Fed them, bade them be good, and kissed them

Went to the beach and put on the skin,

Felt a shiver as the chill waves touched it

And swam, as a seal, back to the ocean.

Rigantona

It seemed so long ago, but also no more than a moment, since that day she passed through. It is like that for gods. Time is both Eternity and instantaneous; Space is both Infinity and as close as breath. But things had been ebbing away then. That fading that is one of the waves of her being, one of the drifts of her thought: that time when the Grey Mare was led into the stable. When she wore a dark shroud ….. Wasn’t that someone else?

So long ago compared to now. Apple blossom gleams in the morning sunshine. A drifting mist of early dawn clears slowly as the day warms. As it clears, she rides her white steed through the gate of dawn.

In a forest – its floor a mist of bluebells – her birds stir. Their song covers the last echoes of winter, brings the burgeoning of spring and the promise of summer.

As she rides she listens. She hears the song of the birds even as she calls upon them to sing. The awakening land responds as her senses sharpen to the breeze, the sun, the green leaves of her flowering trees. Who does she seek? What else does she listen for?

The songs her people sing for her, as she rides for them.

Rigantona of the days before,
Rhiannon of the days that come after,
Great Queen, your people do you homage
As you come again amongst us and your land awakens.

*

Rigantona, we strew rose petals about your altar
For your coming from the Otherworld.

Ursilla and the Selkie

Ursilla was not happily married. And what she could not get from her husband, she sought elsewhere. No other man on the island would do. So she looked to the Selkie folk.

She went early one morning, to sit on a rock at the high-tide mark, and when the tide was washing against the rock, she shed seven tears and let them fall into the sea. This is what you must do if you wish to speak with the Selkie folk. Then, out of the grey light of the dawn over the sea, she saw the Selkie coming towards her through the waves. She spoke to him of her desire, her tongue freed by his unearthly beauty and his own direct manner.

He said he would visit her at the Seventh Stream of the spring tide, and he would come in human form. She came at the appointed time and he was there on the rocks before her with the waves washing at his heels. She went with him under the cliffs, hand in hand, her cold, hard beauty softening as they went and he gazed upon her with his eyes like wells of clear spring water.

It is said that, later, she had a child with webbed feet, though this is not confirmed. Nothing ever is where the Selkie folk are concerned. Did Ursilla walk, hand in hand, with a Selkie in human form? Did a seal man come from the sea to her? Certainly she sat on that rock and shed those tears. Certainly a seal’s head bobbed out of the water as she did so. But there the certainty ends. For that is how it is with the Selkie folk.

(A version of a folk tale from Orkney.)

Rainbow

A faint rainbow that is there - and not there

A faërie thing fading

Out of the visible air.