#fictional deities

Black Dogs

The spirits managed by Herne the Hunter, and some of the most famous and distinctive figures of English folklore. These are red-eyed black dogs the size of calves, who materialise before a death or some other disaster and are visible only to the victim or someone close to them. However, they have a more benevolent aspect, and are often protectors of roads and bridges, in particular defending women or clergy travelling on roads. Nonetheless, they have a dread reputation, and people thus rarely worship or pray to them except when travelling and in need, or sometimes by people who have seen a black dog and hope to ward them off – in such situations, a mundane black dog is sacrificed at one of the roadside shrines found to them occasionally. Such rituals occupy a grey area between fair and foul deities, where (due to affection for dogs) such actions are seen as darker than mundane sacrifices, but do not kill humans and hence are not “foul” rites. Nonetheless, finding a priest willing to perform them is difficult, and they are usually done by laity. Due to their fearsome reputation, they have neither a national shrine nor a feast day, and those with some particular commitment to black dogs (such as those protected by them) use Herne the Hunter’s national shrine and feast of Herne’s Oak and the 31st August.

Blood Libel and Muslim Rape Saints

English Christianity was the child of a far-right movement, and accordingly revived the blood libel saints – children such as William of Norwich and Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, whose deaths were blamed on Jewish ritual murder and used as a pretext for antisemitic pogroms – as an important English religious tradition, since England invented blood libel. To their ranks they have added the considerable number of White British women raped (in reality or imagination) by Muslim men, and framed both as martyrs and examples of what happens when foreign religions are tolerated on English soil. Both are visually represented as the children or teenagers they were in life, but with a halo, a willow branch (an English substitute for the martyr’s palm of traditional iconography) and a bloodstain – that of the blood libel martyrs on the throat, and that of the Muslim rape saints on the crotch. They are nearly always venerated as a group, with only particularly notable examples (such as the aforementioned Little Saint Hugh) having individual images and shrines, and those being rarely visited by people not from the city they are from. Due to their political origin, most worship occurs at the state level, with sacrifices to them (of chocolate and sweets, as befits their childlike nature) in petition against foreign religions and in thanksgiving for discovery of one of the few remaining Muslims or Hindus in Britain; however, rape victims or parents of murdered children may petition them for help. Their national shrine is the Rotherham Memorial Shrine in Rotherham, Yorkshire, and their feast day is the 21st April, the date that Islam was banned in the British Empire.

Church Grims

Originally from Yorkshire but now spread all over the country, church grims superficially resemble black dogs but are drastically different. Visually, they are distinguished from black dogs by being smaller and having white rather than red eyes. More importantly, they are unambiguously positive figures, who help protect both churchyards against demonically-induced storms and the souls of the dead of the parish from demons trying to drag them down to Hell. It is said that, during storms or the death of a parishioner, the parson can sometimes see the church grim in the bell tower, barking and ringing the bell to drive away demons. When the death is finally complete, the grim runs down the tower, and the sound of its barks provide evidence for the eternal fate of the soul. To give thanks for them, a sacrifice is made to the church grim on the 2nd November, All Souls’ Day, of a lamb or piglet slaughtered and burnt upon a gravestone of a suitable size and shape, with the remaining meat being eaten by the parishioners or buried in the churchyard. If someone wishes to invoke a church grim at a different time of year, a small portion of lamb or pork is cooked in the graveyard and buried there. The national shrine to church grims is Kilgrim Bridge in Yorkshire, where the Devil was said to have been cheated out of a soul by accepting a dog called Grim instead, and on All Souls’ Day the Archbishop of York burns a piglet on an altar next to it and throws the remains into the stream below it.

Faeries

These come by a synthesis of the faerie traditions of England – the pixies of the West Country, the pucks of the Midlands, the hobthrusts and hobgoblins of the North – into a single creature. The synthesis has resulted in a detailed description; faeries look like 1.5-to-2-feet-high people (men with dark skin, and women with peach-coloured skin) dressed in green clothes and pointed red caps, with large eyes and mouths, pointed ears and upturned noses and walking with sticks made of holly, with either childlike or elderly complexions. Their general tendency is to mischief, with their favourite hobby being pixie-leading, leading people astray by magic, which can be rectified by various means, including carrying bread in the pocket or turning ones’ coat inside out and wearing it that way. They are prone to other feats of mischief, such as creating mist, stealing horses and riding them at night before returning them exhausted in the morning, and stealing children (and hence children who turn out to be neurodivergent are often euthanised and buried beside barrows and stone circles to return them to the faeries). However, they do have a more benevolent side, being known to perform domestic work, for which they take libations of milk, and to heal diseases both human and animal, for which they take offerings of Cornish pasties and other local pastries like Bedfordshire clangers and Melton Mowbray pork pies or burnt offerings of sheep. They are associated with stone circles and barrows throughout England, but in particular with various sites on Dartmoor such as Gidleigh Common and Huccaby Moor, and hence around the summer solstice the Bishop of Exeter performs a five-day tour of such sites, burning sheep and offering meat pies and milk for the faeries.

Folklorist Saints

Herein lie an assortment of notable folklorists, canonised for their importance in preserving and passing down the English folk tradition. They are handled as a group, since all are revered in similar ways and none is particularly important as an individual. All are depicted in the same way – as they were in life, with a halo behind them made of a mix of oak, ash and hawthorn leaves, and holding a book in their left hand and a symbol of their most important work (for example, Katharine Briggs is shown holding a faerie, and Jeremy Harte is shown holding a devil) standing atop their right palm. These are regarded as the patron saints of the communities they were born in (or, if born outside of England, which they moved to – Ronald Hutton, who was born in India, is the patron saint of Barkingside) and defenders of the countryside and as the religion of England. In the former capacity, they are prayed to by lovers of and dwellers in the countryside both to maintain it and to give thanks for its beauty, and in the latter they are invoked in Masses and the great sacrificial feasts and seminarians are expected to read their work. Each has an individual shrine in their hometown containing their body and a feast day on the date of their death, but there is a collective feast of them on the 12th March (the birth of John Aubrey, the first English folklorist).

Ghosts

The spirits of the unquiet dead – whether due to sins committed by them, a tragic fate or some other kind of unfinished business – who linger at the sight of their life or death in a vaguely corporeal form, making strange noises and moving objects, and detectable by the fact that candle flames burn blue in their presence. Unusually for spirits, they are not sacrificed to or otherwise worshipped – the passage of souls is seen as the domain of the Holy Trinity, and hence it is inappropriate to make them objects of religion. This is done by priests saying Masses for the souls of the dead, and if that fails and the ghost is particularly troublesome they are exorcised (or as it is called in this context, “laid”) – most seminary degrees include a module on ghost-laying. There are innumerable haunted houses around Britain (the Tower of London is only the most notable) – although many are now bare of ghosts due to the Masses and exorcisms performed for their souls – and the 31st October is a date when ghosts are considered to be particularly active, and hence Masses for their souls are held in every church on that date.

Human Sacrifice Saints

This is the reason why (admittedly rarely) some people volunteer to become human sacrifices to the foul gods and spirits – because, after death, they become saints thought to be able to intercede against the god they were sacrificed to. For example, children who chose to be sacrificed to Black Annis are able to help endangered children, and are prayed to in this regard. This status is only accorded to people who went to their deaths voluntarily, which conveniently excuses them from canonising enslaved people. Different types of sacrificed people are visually represented in different ways – for example, people sacrificed to river spirits are shown with wet hair and broken shackles around their wrist, and people sacrificed to Herne the Hunter are shown with antlers in their head and holding the two halves of a bow snapped in two – but their worship is always fairly similar. Each has a shrine of varying size, depending on how much money their relatives and later patrons invested in it – it may just be a headstone with a mention of how they died, or an elaborate crypt and tomb – near to the place they were sacrificed at, where people make sacrifices for their aid. Children are given libations of fizzy drinks or burnt offerings of sweets and chocolate, while adults are given libations of alcohol or burnt offerings of steak; most shrines have a plaque further specifying what offerings they want. Such offerings are made whenever they are needed, as well as one by a shrine caretaker each year on the anniversary of their death. They are too widely dispersed to have a national shrine, but they do have a collective feast on the former Remembrance Day, which fell out of popularity due to being seen as pacifistic, but returned in order to commemorate the human sacrifice saints.

Mermaids

Sea spirits – but not exclusively nautical, since they are known in several inland places such as Marden in Herefordshire and Child’s Ercall in Shropshire – with a proclivity for stirring up storms and seducing men, luring them down to the sea, where they tend to drown. As such, they are mostly seen as malevolent spirits, and sacrifices to them (mostly of gold or jewels, their preferred goods, and occasionally of humans if the storm is particularly severe or stopping it is particularly urgent) are made mainly to stop them from calling up storms or to get them to call down a current storm, and may be performed to bring about the return of a missing man. However, they have a more useful side, teaching people magic and bestowing wealth upon them, and so people may sacrifice to them to acquire one of these things. Mermaids are depicted as is typical of them, but with seal rather than fish tails, and hence seals are now a symbol of mermaids, along with oysters – since they contain pearls – and sea sand. Mermaids have several shrines, most of them in Cornwall or the West Midlands (where mermaid folklore is particularly strong), and the most important is Piper’s Hole, a cave in Tresco in the Isles of Scilly where mermaids are said to congregate. Their feast is midnight on Holy Saturday, when an immortality-granting mermaid is said to appear in a pool near the Derbyshire village of Kinder Scout.

River Spirits

Most river spirits are benevolent entities who are content to let humans sail on and swim in them, with no need of anything but respect from the people using them. Some, however – such as the spirits of the River Dart in Devon, the River Trent in the Midlands and the River Ribble in Lancashire – are “foul” in the same sense as the foul gods, being prone to flooding and drought and needing human sacrifices to placate them, and these are usually what people are referring to when they say “river spirits”. In such cases, the sacrifice is a slave, or less commonly a free volunteer, who is chained hand and foot to ensure they drown and has iron weights attached to the chains to ensure they sink to the bottom and stay there. Sacrifices to these are even rarer than sacrifices to foul gods, since their geographical limitation prevents them being sent upon Britain’s enemies. Like the foul gods, these do not have regular festivals, although most of them have statues of themselves erected next to the rivers they dominate. Such images show a vicious-looking old man (in the South) or woman (in the North) with long unkempt hair (and beard, if male) made of waterweed and a fanged mouth, holding a rusty chain in their left hand and a genuine stone drawn from the bed of the river they preside over in the right hand.

Storm Spirits

These are the demons of the air, who raise storms and use them to assault houses and churches. Hence, there are many defences against them, all in some way based on Christianity – yew trees planted in churchyards, the ringing of church bells, the lighting of candles blessed on Candlemas and the reading of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, and as a martial god of the sky St. George is frequently invoked to drive them off. While storms are far less dangerous in an industrial era than they were historically, the belief that demons are upon the prowl is nonetheless frightening. Storm spirits are sometimes represented as black dogs, based on the likeness of their master Black Shuck, but are more commonly represented in stereotypical demonic form, with black goat legs, black skin and bat wings, and horns, claws and fangs, usually with lightning around them. The rarity of the former depiction is sometimes said to be to avoid conflating them with Herne the Hunter’s black dogs, but the real reason is apologetic rather than artistic. Outright trafficking with demons is too much even for English Christianity, and so Black Shuck is regarded as a spirit appointed by Christ to rein in the aerial powers – thus, he needs to be artistically differentiated from the demons he governs. Hence, said demons have no festivals or symbolism, and no shrines or sacrifices.

Tree Spirits

A complex of cults based on various items of tree folklore in England, devotions are paid to notable members of fourteen species of trees – apple, ash, aspen, bay, blackthorn, elder, hawthorn, hazel, holly, mistletoe, oak, willow, yew and rowan. The personalities and domains of these trees vary greatly. Some are good, such as bay (which gives dreams and protects against plague, lightning and evil spirits) and apple (a giver of food and healing) and a few are evil, such as elder (the tree of witches and the Devil) and willow (the tree of sorrow and misfortune). The most common position, however, is moral neutrality or ambiguity – trees in this category include hazel (which is associated with divination but is said to be haunted by the Devil during nutting season), yew (a morbid and poisonous tree that nonetheless shelters churchyards from evil spirits) and even the mighty oak (oaks ward off storms and cure illness, but felled oaks are sites of dark magic). In all cases, worship is largely the same – when a tree’s help is wanted or people seek to chop wood or collect fruit from it, the tree is given a ritual libation of wine (if the tree bears fruit), soup (if it bears nuts) or tea (if it does neither) made of the tree’s own fruit/nuts/leaves, together with a prayer of request and a hymn to it. Each tree additionally has a feast day, held on its first budding after winter (or, in the case of yew, the first berries), where it is given a meal of pork, bread, butter and beer, which are burnt beneath it to allow it to enjoy the fruit of civilisation. The national Feast of Trees is Candlemas (2nd February), traditionally considered the start of spring, when the Green Man’s national shrines all have large meals of the above contents given to them.

Well Spirits