#nigel jackson

Tumblr Witchy Book Club: The Pillars of Tubal Cain Book Crawl

During the trial of the Aberdeen witches in the 16th century, Andro Man described a Sabbat meeting at which he saw the Old One, “....come out of the snow in the likeness of a stag.” This was an encounter with one of the most primal, archaic divinities of the European folk-soul - the ancestral Horned god of death, fertility and mantic ecstasy, the underworld king whom Welsh lore calls Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Annwvyn who reaches far back to the common Celtic figure of Vindonos, son of Nudons. At the start of the winter months he is Master of the Wild Hunt, and his frenzied and ghostly chase is accompanied by his primary totems of stag, hound, raven and snow goose, Old Hornie is the fearsomely rough, strange god who rides out a-hunting during the paradoxical periods of ritual reversal, the ‘time between the times’, The Horned One's eerie pack, white of coat and red of ear, are called Yell Hounds - a worn-down form of the term ‘Gabriel Hounds’; it is significant in this respect that in mediaeval funeral processions the bier was called ‘St. Gabriel’s Wain’. Here the archangel with his trumpet has assimilated the heathen archetype of the god of the Furious Host who winds his horn to summon the spirits of the dead.

In East Anglia a small glass bottle was filled with a bewildering maze of intertangled multi-coloured threads and then corked and sealed with wax. This bottle, if properly prepared and consecrated would entrap ghosts and the malefic spells of witches and was either placed in the window or buried beneath the doorstep.

Rune Art: