Corpse Lights & Blessed Wights

"A singular survival of sun-worship is to be found in the use of a fiery circle as a curative agent. In the volume of the "Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland" for 1889-90, the Rev. Dr. Stewart of Nether Lochaber recounts a recent instance of its use in the Highlands. A dwining child, a year and a half old, was pronounced by a "wise woman" of the district to be suffering from the effects of an "evil eye." The rite, called in Gaelic, Beannachd-na-Cuairte, i.e., "Blessing of the Circle," was accordingly resorted to. A straw rope was wound round the greater part of an iron hoop, and, oil being applied, the whole was set on fire. The hoop was then held vertically, and through the blazing circle the child was passed and repassed eighteen times to correspond to the months of its life. The blazing hoop was then extinguished in a neighboring burn. The result was in every way to the satisfaction of the child's relatives. In the same article Dr. Stewart gives an account, sent to him by a friend, of a similar superstition common in Wigtownshire till about half-a-century ago. In this case, the healing influence came through the channel of the iron tire of a new cart wheel. After fire had been applied to it to make it fit the wheel, the tire was passed over the head of the patient, who was thus placed in the middle of a glowing circle." -Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs. James M. Mackinlay.

At sea they take the form of sudden squalls, waterspouts, and spindrift columns, which cause wrecks and drowning, driving, besides, the fish from the shallows into deep water, so that the fisherman baits his lines in vain. n land their object is to check and crush back vegetation into its state of mid-winter torpidity; but failing in this, they swirl about in clouds of dust, which, being inhaled, causes grievous sickness in man and beast. Against the demon of the dust-cloud, as it swirls along the highway, a wise man will take this precaution: as it approaches, you are instantly to close your eyes and mouth as tightly as possible, at the same time turning your back upon it until it has swept by, mentally repeating - for you are not to open your mouth, nor as much as breathe, as long as you can help it - this rhyme: - "Gach cuman a's mias a's meadar Gu Pol, gu Peadair 'sgu Bride; Dion, a's seun a's gleidh mi 'o ole 'so chunnart, Air a bheallach, 's air a mhullach 'Sair an tullaich ud thall; Pol a's Peadair a's Bride caomh!" These old rhymes and incantations, abrupt and inconsecutive as they frequently are, and with such recondite allusions, are extremely difficult to translate, though to the competent Gaelic scholar and antiquary the general drift and meaning may be plain and patent enough. The above lines are something like this: - "Be the care of milk-pail, and bowl, and cog Given to Peter and Paul and Saint Bride: Wherever I wander protect me, ye Saints! Let not evil or harm me betide; Hear me, Peter and Paul, and gentle Saint Bride!" Twixt Ben Nevis and Glencoe: The Natural History, Legends, and Folk-Lore of the West Highlands. Alexander Stewart.

Indo-European structure of the Baltic pantheon hinges heavily on a correct appreciation and interpretation of Patollus-Pecullus. Christian demonology found him exploitable yet did not quite know what to do with him. He was a demon of the underworld and leader of the host of the dead in the skies, hellish and aerial at the same time. This hesitation helps piece together his original nature. He has a Lithuanian allonym Velinas (Velnias, Vels, nowadays 'devil'), which is cognate with veles 'ghosts' and with the ancestral goddess Veliuona; Szyrwid's dictionary of 1629 already equates Velnias with 'Piktis'. In Lithuanian folklore Velinas is the one-eyed, prophetic, treacherous, raging god of the veles who fight, hunt, and march in the skies; he is also the lord of hanging and the hanged. This dossier is ample to permit a typological comparison with both the one-eyed Hangagud Odin and the Old German Wutanes her. Beneath the death-god described by Simon Grunau and revived by Gunter Grass and the devil of demonology and folklore, we find a principal figure of the Baltic pantheon, whose name Pecullus has the same "rage" meaning that inheres in Odin, and whose parallel name Velinas is best connected with Old Norse valr, denoting the host of the slain. The presence of such a magical, death-oriented high god in close complementarity with the ruling thunder-god seems to be typical of several contiguous nothern European subgroups (cf: Odin : Thor and perhaps Esus : Taranis); Patollo's white headcloth may indeed be the missing link connecting Odin's floppy hat with Rudra's turban in India. Comparative Mythology. Jaan Puhvel.

Blood of the Hosts Alexander Carmichael records in his notes to Carmina Gadelica that, while collecting runes and invocations in the more southerly of the Outer Hebrides, he heard many strange tales associated with the Spirit-Multitude. He was told by a native of Barra that, after an aerial battle between the rival forces of the Sluagh, the rocks and boulders are stained as with crimson blood. The red crotal obtained from lichened rocks, following upon a spell of hard frost, is called Fuil nan Sluagh, Blood of the Hosts. And it is said that, when the Nimble Men (Aurora Borealis) are giving battle in the air, the blood of their victims falls to the ground; and this 'elf's blood' congeals and forms the stones referred to in the Western Isles as blood-stones. Although to-day belief in the Sluagh is on the wane, Carmichael noted that, since it is from the west that the Spirit-Multitude is believed to come, it was customary to close the doors and windows on the west side of a house in which an islander lay dying, lest any strange contingent entered, and brought ill-fortune to its departing inmate. In some parts of the mainland, where the tradition of the Sluagh is totally unknown, it was the practice to open as widely as possible the door and windows of a dwelling in which a person was on the point of death, so that at the moment of expiry the escape of his disembodied spirit might be facilitated. The persistence with which belief in the Spirit-Multitude prevailed in Argyll is demonstrated by the fact that, when a burial was taking place at Glen Creran, in Appin, as recently as last century, immediately the corpse had been lowered and the earth closed over it, the funeral party used to smash the bier against a certain tree in the burying-ground, so as to render it useless in the event of the Sluagh's endeavouring to lure the dead away with it. To those unacquainted with the intricacies of the Gaelic language, it may be of passing interest to mention that the word, slogan, is derived from the Gaelic words, sluagh, denoting a host or multitude, and gairm, a cry or calling. Hence the true meaning of slogan - the cry of the host, the battle-cry. The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-Tales and Traditions of the Highlands & Islands. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor.

A curious custom in the Highlands identifies the Yule-log with the Cailleach or Spirit of Winter. Early on Yule E'en, whilst the housewife was still busy in the kitchen, and the flailman chapped in the barn to provide fodder for the cattle, and the herd-laddie's axe resounded on the fir-stock, so that there should be plenty of fire-candles to brighten the Yule festivities, the head of the house went out to the woods and procured the stump of some withered tree, which he proceeded to carve into the rude resemblance of a woman. He was joined by the other members of the household, now relieved from toil, and they returned with the Cailleach in their midst. The stump was placed ceremoniously in the heart of the peat fire, and the whole company cracked jokes while the Christmas Old Wife blazed. -The Silver Bough, Volume 3: A Calendar of Scottish National Festivals - Hallowe'en to Yule. F. Marian. McNeill.

Originally a community festival, Yule became increasingly a season of family and social gatherings. There were great preparations in the home. The house was cleaned and whitewashed from floor to ceiling, and barns and outhouses as well; whilst the spence was stored with good things to eat. When merry Yule-day comes, I trow, Ye'll scantlins fin' a hungry mou!; Sma' are our cares, our stamacks fou O' gusty gear, And kickshaws, strangers to the view Sin fairn-year. During the Daft Days, every kind of avoidable work was banned. On Yule E'en, yarn was reeled and hanked, rok and reel were put by, the "peaty neuk" was filled to the rafters and the water-stoups to the brim; for, says the old rhyme, Atween Yule and Yearsmas Auld wives should'na spin, And nae house should be waterless Whar maidens lie within, lest the kelpie carry them off. Above all, a clean, bright fireside was necessary to propitiate the household gods. The folk of the hills garlanded their ingle-neuks with evergreens, and the folk of the sea theirs with seaweeds gathered at ebb-tide; and branches of the sacred rowan were hung above the lintel in house, sable, and byre to keep mischievous or evil spirits at bay. In wooded country a Yule-log was brought in. A small procession, headed by the man of the house, went off to the woods to cut it. It was carried home ceremoniously and placed on the blazing fire, usually late in the evening, so that it should continue to burn after the family were in bed, and preferably all night. The Silver Bough, Volume 3: A Calendar of Scottish National Festivals - Hallowe'en to Yule. F. Marian McNeill

Glastonbury Thorn On Christmas-eve, (new style), 1753, a vast concourse of people attended the noted thorn, but to their great disappointment there was no appearance of its blowing, which made them watch it narrowly the 5th of January, the Christmas-day, (old style), when it blowed as usual. - London Evening Post On the same evening, at Quainton, in Buckinghamshire, above two thousand people went, with lanterns and candles, to view a blackthorn in that neighbourhood, and which was remembered to be a slip from the famous Glastonbury thorn, and that it always budded on the 24th, was full blown the next day, and went all off at night. The people finding no appearance of a bud, it was agreed by all, that December 25 (new style) could not be the right Christmas-day, and accordingly refused going to church, and treating their friends that day as usual; at length the affair became so serious, that the ministers of the neighbouring villages, in order to appease them, thought it prudent to give notice, that the Old Christmas-day should be kept holy as before. This famous hawthorn, which grew on a hill in the church-yard of Glastonbury-abbey, it has been said, sprung from the staff of St. Joseph of Arimathea, who having fixed it in the ground with his own hand on Christmas-day, the staff took root immediately, put forth leaves, and the next day was covered with milk-white blossoms. It has been added, that this thorn continued to blow every Christmas-day during a long series of years, and that slips from the original plant are still preserved, and continue to blow every Christmas-day to the present time. -The Everyday Book, Vol. II. William Hone.

Robert Kirk and The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies Robert Kirk (1644-1692) was an Episcopalian minister and Gaelic scholar who spent much of his life in Balquhidder and Aberfoyle, both near Loch Lomond in the west of Scotland, and wrote a book about fairies; this was first published by Walter Scott in 1815, and Andrew Lang published another edition with a commentary in 1893. Fairies lived in "fairy hills", and there was such a hill at Aberfoyle called Doon Hill. According to Kirk, says Lang, the Highlanders "superstitiously believe the souls of their Predecessors to dwell" in the fairy-hills. "And for that end, say they, a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Churchyard, to receive the souls till their adjacent bodies arise, and so become as a Fairy hill." Kirk says of fairy beliefs: "'Tis one of their Tenets, that nothing perisheth, but (as the Sun and Year) every Thing goes in a Circle, lesser or greater, and is renewed and refreshed in its Revolutions." Later he adds: "They are not subject to sore Sicknesses, but dwindle and decay at a certain Period, all about one Age. Some say their continual Sadness is because of their pendulous State, as uncertain what at the last Revolution will become of them, when they are lock't up into one unchangeable Condition." Some say that fairies are "departed Souls, attending awhile in this inferior State, and clothed with Bodies procured their their Almsdeeds in this Lyfe; fluid, active, aetheriall Vehicles to hold them, that they may not scatter, or wander, and be lost in the Totum [Whole], or their first Nothing; but if any were so impious as to have given no Alms, they say when the Souls of such do depairt, they sleep in an unactive State till they resume the terrestriall Bodies again." This sounds very much like a cycle of reincarnation, and is not far from the Cornish belief that fairies who take animal form "get smaller and smaller with every change, till they are finally lost in the earth as muryans (ants)." Fairies, Ghosts, King Arthur, and Hounds From Hell: The Pagan and Medieval Origins of British Folklore. Robin Melrose.

In the seventeenth century there was in the possession of Lord Duffus an old silver cup called the Fairy Cup, concerning which the following tradition was related to John Aubrey, the antiquary, by a correspondent writing from Scotland on the 25th of March 1695. An ancestor of the then Lord Duffus was walking in the fields near his house in Morayshire when he heard the noise of a whirlwind and of voices crying: "horse and Hattock!" This was the exclamation fairies were said to use "when they remove from any place." Lord Duffus was bold enough to cry "Horse and Hattock" also, and was immediately caught up through the air with the fairies to the King of France's cellar at Paris, where, after he had heartily drunk, he fell asleep. There he was found lying the next morning with the silver cup in his hand, and was promptly brought before the King, to whom, on being questioned, he repeated this story; and the King, in dismissing him, presented him with the cup. -Edward Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairytales.