Guest Blog: Folk Magic and Folk Religion

By Nukiuk

In folk religions respect is of the utmost importance because everything has a vitality, every thing has a life and so any action will have an impact on another soul which has its own powers and its own ability to impact the world. Thus a person’s interaction with the magical world must be about seeking to have respect for one’s fellow humans, for nature, for objects, and the spirits, fairies, kami, etc that inhabit all of these.  With this in mind there are three fundamental types of spells and prayers which people use in Folk Religions.

1-Respectful Actions.
Not so much spells as a way of interacting with the things around a person to ensure that they have good luck, while avoiding bad luck. In Celtic lore such respect meant asking permission before moving a stone or cutting a tree so that the fairy within wouldn’t be offended. In Japan such respect included warning the spirits that live within the earth before peeing on the ground so that they could move out of the way and wouldn’t grow angry and curse the one who had wronged them. To utilize respect people would think about what might be offensive to nearly every object/spirit and try to mitigate it. This doesn’t usually mean not doing something, rather it means giving fair warning that one is about to do something, while apologizing and or asking permission to do it. Such respect keeps a person safe while making more likely that their spells wills succeed.

2-Charms or Spells
Charms utilize a person’s own abilities and powers as well as those of other spirits in order to achieve a goal. There are two things one must keep in mind when crafting charms and spells. First that Celtic lore states that humans are related to the fairy, thus the Celtic Folk Religions tells us that we can potentially have great abilities and knowledge. Second one must keep in mind that everything has certain powers and so these powers can be used to enhance the impact of one’s own powers.
Thus charms involve a person utilizing certain objects, herbs and or short chants in order to gain help from other powers as well as well as a short set of words or actions designed to draw out a person’s own powers (such as sympathetic actions and poems). For example, one Cornish charm used to remove corns from one’s feet called for a person to show their bare feet to the moor while telling the corns to vanish nine times.

An interesting charm of Finnish origin to prevent wasp stings is as follows;

O Siilikki, woods’ daughter-in-law, pray discipline thy wee ‘winged bird,’ hide away thy ‘feathered chick,’ bind up its wings, confine its claws, to prevent it stabbing with its pike, to prevent it sharpening its steel. Kuutar, conceal thy children now, hide, Päivätär, thy family, and follow not a wizard’s wish, don’t be made jealous by jealous folk.

This charm is interesting because in not only makes a request of a nature spirit to keep wasps away, it makes a request of two other magical beings to keep wizards from using their magic to make wasps from stinging.

3-Closer Relationships and Contracts
The most complex of all three forms of folk magic involves both the development and utilization of a relationship with spirits which in many ways can be likened to a contract. Sutras, prayers, songs, offerings and similar things were done either to create a contract between a person and spirits, deities, fairies, etc; or to honour a pre-existing contract. Songs, feats, celebrations and sutras are useful to this end because they attract spirits and fairies to a place and allow these beings to enjoy the company of humans. This is a large part of what Samhain, Beltane, Yule and similar holidays were and are.
In many cases such celebrations involved things specifically designed to invite fairies to come among the people. Yule and Beltane both involved bringing trees and greens into the village and home so that fairies and similar nature spirits would have a place to reside among humans during the festivals. Other celebrations involved actually building figures out of straw or similar materials for the spirits to reside in so that people might dance with them or make offerings to them directly.
Not all contracts are so simple to honour as creating beautiful music and celebrating an event. Often such contracts require that those humans honouring them follow a very specific set of instructions involving; chants, songs, movements, specific offerings, and formulas which must be followed to the letter. It is these more complex contracts that required druids to learn for years, even decades to learn to fulfil.

Because folk magic is about relationships rather than formulas the exact nature of any contract, charm or respectful action is based not only one what a person is trying to accomplish but whom they are requesting help from. This is why understanding the nature of fairy and deity as well as the personalities of specific fairies and deities is the most important part of folk magic.

 

 

Nukiuk is a folklorist who has been studying the relationship between Eurasian Folktales and beliefs in order to better understand the ancient religions. You can find more of his research of fairies at http://www.zeluna.net/fairies. You can review many of his resources at http://fairies.zeluna.net/p/resources.html

Reflections on Folk Magic

I recently read Stephen Wilson’s The Magical Universe – a book cataloguing evidence of magical practice and belief in mediaeval Europe.  This is not the high, learned magic of people who might self identify as sorcerers, but everyday magic. The sort of magic your typical peasant might be dabbling in. Evidently much of it intertwined with, and leaned upon Christianity. I get the impression that our mediaeval ancestors had no problem doing magic and seeing themselves as Christians. Plenty of magic in fact called on saints, priests, relics, dust from sacred places, holy water, the wafers from communion and so forth. There might well have been pagan roots, but there was a lot of Christianity in the mix too.

What struck me most was this: The entire tome could be summed up by saying that the folk magic of mediaeval Europe was about trying to cajole a hostile world into letting you live, reproduce and keep your offspring alive. This is the magic of survival. I don’t know enough to say just how highly the odds were stacked against life, but the magic described in this book suggests a belief that it was so. Magic is about getting the crops to grow, warding off storms and vermin, tackling disease, finding a mate, keeping children safe from evil influences, cursing and warding off curses, for the greater part.

What do any of us do in face of a hostile reality that is beyond our control? We pray, we ask for help, we try and find some way of getting in control. It’s easy to look back at our history and see the foolishness of superstition, but what about the present? Are we any better, or merely different?

We put so much faith in politics and democracy to give us a bit of control and influence, and yet the same kinds of people, from the same kinds of families tend to be the ones in power, and it’s very, very rare that a change of government makes any significant changes to things for the better. We get bigger, nastier weapons, more compelx systems, not much compassion. Progress is small and slow.

We put our faith in science, too. Our fictions, books and films alike, are full of it. Meteors, aliens, diseases and all the other things that might imperil humanity may threaten us, but worry not, clever boffins will save the day! And so we believe that clever boffins will save us from climate change, from the effects of over consumption, from the diseases we create for ourselves through our modern lifestyles. We expect a pill for every ill, and a device to offset every wrong thing we do. As a consequence, we carry on poisoning ourselves, feeling entirely rational about the idea that science will save us. Is this faith in the power of science any more rational than the belief in the intervention of saints? Might it not be a magic wand by another name? Yes, science can do a great deal, and no doubt will, but it is not a magic cure all, and we are going to have to take responsibility for our own individual and collective fates.

We don’t have oracles any more. We have the media, which tells us what is going to be the next ‘must have’ whether we are the right shape, the right style of parent, the right face, whether we want the right things. Is our collective acceptance of the voices that come out of little boxes actually any better founded than believing the words of priestesses deep in a trance? Is it any more useful? Any less manipulative than the worst imaginings we have had about magicians manipulating ignorant, primitive people? The magic words come out of the box and we all run out to buy a new pair of shoes. Most of us don’t listen to religious leaders any more. We don’t go to the wise woman for advice. We listen to TV experts, we read agony aunt columns, we let ourselves be led by people we’ve never met, who know nothing about us. And this makes us more rational than the mediaevals?  We don’t believe in saintly miracles, but we do believe in miracle diets, miracle cleaning products, miracle life saving drugs even though there’s plenty of evidence that none of them are totally reliable.

We still do belief and superstition. We’ve just change the delivery methods and the names of the forces to whose wills we consider ourselves vulnerable. We placate them with offerings of money, and hope they won’t turn on us and destroy our lives.