Enchantment

I know a place

Where oak trees grow

And silver-white birches too

It's very still

And very wet

And the trees are very tall.

All the leaves are green

If you go there now

And the ferns are greener still

If you go at dusk

There are owls calling

With a song of twilight shrill

And the wood so softly singing

In a language strange to hear

Yet the song it sings will find you

As the twilight draws you near.

White Bryony

Bryonia dioica

"The White Bryony, whose leaf is not unlike that of the grape, has a magical reputation, and the cottage folk believe its root to be a powerful ingredient in love potions, and also poisonous. They identify it with the Mandrake. If growing in, or close to, a churchyard, its virtues are increased, for though, becoming fainter as they lengthen, the shadows of the old superstitions linger still."

So wrote the Victorian writer on country life Richard Jefferies. Mandrake, which has a root in the shape of a man, had (on Biblical authority) the reputation of being able to get women pregnant. But it was an exotic item so in Britain the herbalists used Bryony instead. The roots grow to some size and are sometimes forked when they can resemble a small baby.

Eirin Gwion (Gwion's Plums) was the name in Wales, after the  miraculous child who tasted some drops from the cauldron of Cerridwen and so was inspired. Cerridwen chased him in the classic pursuit by a witch where the person chased changes shape and the witch then changes too. Eventually Gwion hid as a grain of wheat but Cerridwen became a chicken and ate him. She was then pregnant with him but when he was born abandoned him on a river for him to be found and become the legendary poet Taliesin.

This is a particularly imaginative link between the plant and childbirth. It does more than link it to stories about mandrakes but carries the mythology of the plant through to a specific birth of a legendary character. The 'plums' or berries of the plant are apparently very bitter, which is just a well as they are also poisonous in spite of being used in some herbal remedies. Perhaps these berries were one of the ingredients of the magic brew that Cerridwen was preparing when she employed Gwion to to stir the cauldron.

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.