carbon-coated flues, he could wander the neighborhoods with his fellows, accepting treats in exchange for the blessings he bestowed.
Obviously, the chimneysweep’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century patrons did not consciously regard him as an intermediary between the household spirits and the living members of the family. By that time, a fireplace was just a fireplace and no longer a temple. But people did continue to look upon the chimneysweep as something more than what met the eye. Was it his blackened countenance that placed him among the other dark yet indispensable Christmas spirits?
The age of coal should have fostered a dramatic rise in chimney revenants or unquiet ghosts, for, all too often, the climbing boy became wedged inside the flue and choked to death on the fine soot his movements dislodged. Then the bricklayer, who was not a lucky talisman, had to be called to come and dislodge the corpse. The reason why the ghostly climbing boy seems never to have made it into oral tradition is probably because these children, most of whom were sold into their so-called apprenticeships, had no one to answer for them. Few homeowners would want it known that a child had died in their walls. In fact, the master of a wealthy house might not even know of it until he was presented with the bill for the dismantling and restoration of the brickwork. The master sweep would soon replace the dead boy with another orphan or penniless waif, and all would be forgotten. Since many climbing boys eventually succumbed to asthma, tuberculosis, and cancer of the scrotum, brought on by prolonged exposure to soot, there was no one left to tell the tale.
Way back in the wood-burning days of the late sixteenth century, we find every Englishman’s favorite hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, forsaking his usual sylvan haunts to roam the streets of London disguised as a chimneysweep. “Ho! Ho! Hoh!” he cries as he runs amuck with his brushes in The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow. Despite the grim reality of his situation, it seems the stage was already set for the climbing boy to take on a little of the power of Faerie.
The Fairy Queen’s Men
The chimneysweep’s soot-streaked face was the natural consequence of his profession, but what of those roving characters who deliberately blackened their faces? The bellsnickle and other wild “Nicholases” liked to blacken their faces, as do Knecht Ruprecht and the Moorish Zwarte Piet to this day. We have not yet mentioned the most famous of the Three Kings, Balthasar, who is traditionally portrayed with the dark complexion of a sub-Saharan African, no matter that the Magi were Persians. But, with the exception of Zwarte Piet who is made to wriggle up and down the chimney in the bishop’s stead, none of these characters have much to do with the chimney or the hearth. Or do they?
The so-called Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset may provide a missing link of sorts. This family heirloom, which had at all times to be kept in the vicinity of the house’s main chimney, was supposed for a long time to have belonged to a West Indian man, a servant of one of the house’s early masters. As long as it was left in place, the skull would protect the house from harm. It was later proven to have been a woman’s, so who knows who its original owner was or how it came to be resting in the chimney nook. The important thing is that the tutelary spirit attached to the skull was believed to have been dark of face.
The association between the spirits immanent in the chimney at Christmastime (or throughout the year as at Bettiscombe Manor) and the appearance of dark skin, whether genuine or artful, has been going on for longer than anyone can remember. The current house at Bettiscombe Manor was built in 1694, but the pan-European first-footer, who was preferably both dark-haired and dark-complexioned, recedes into the mists of the pre-Christian past.
Could anyone blame us if we were to go looking among the morris dancers (read “Moorish” dancers) for clues to this mysterious association? The folklorists of the early 1900s found in England’s morris dancers a tantalizing pantheon of prehistoric fertility gods. The so-called “Welsh Border Morris” appears to provide exactly what we are looking for: black-faced dancers wielding sticks in an early winter ritual as old as the land itself. But further probing reveals that the morris dance began as a courtly Christmas entertainment and can only be traced back as far as 1458.
So who are these strange characters supposed to represent? Dark elves? The ancient dead, grown black from lying so long in the cold ground? It is tempting to surmise that the office of the first-footer was originally executed by a priest who blackened his face and hair in order to impersonate either one of the ancestors or some long-forgotten deity of winter. More romantic still is the notion that he may have belonged to an aboriginal European people, this time raven-haired instead of red, that fled to the hills at the rippling advance of the Indo-Europeans. In this scenario, an uneasy truce is reached in which the votaries of the native fertility goddess are invited down at the winter solstice to bestow the blessings of the old goddess upon the new stewards of the land.
Of course, there may be a more prosaic explanation for the dark-faced Christmas spirit. We have already witnessed the use of masks to disguise and transform. Ever since the Roman Saturnalia went head to head with Christmas, the Church had been speaking out against the wearing of masks. To dress as a devil was devilish in itself, except, of course, if you were trying to frighten the children into learning their catechism. Now and again throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the carving and wearing of Larven and the like were outlawed, for even though they had found legitimate employment with a saint, Čert, Krampus, and the Buttnmandln could still get out of hand. At such times, those who could not or would not resist the social and spiritual forces that compelled them to take on otherworldly personae could get around the law by simply blacking their faces.
Thus, a soot-blackened face came to signal both an alliance with the ancestral spirits, elves, and fairies and to mark the disguised person as something of a rebel. In June of 1451, a party of one hundred men went hunting in the Duke of Buckingham’s forest. They helped themselves to over a hundred deer, but they were not professional poachers; they were ordinary men dissatisfied with their living conditions. Dressed in makeshift war gear, their faces obscured by fake beards and a thin coating of charcoal, they identified themselves as the servants not of King Henry nor, certainly, of the Duke of Buckingham, but of the “queen of the fairies.”
Why black? Why not woad or red ochre as in the old days? For one thing, soot was more readily available—all you had to do was reach into the fireplace—and it obscured the features more effectively than flour. There was also a belief, handed down from antiquity, that black made the wearer invisible to the spirits of the dead. (That is why black is the color of mourning in the Western world: originally it was a means of protection, not an expression of sorrow.) We may never have a completely satisfying explanation for the dark-faced Christmas spirit, but it seems that, by blackening his face, the mummer, Bellsnickle, Knecht Ruprecht, or servant of the Fairy Queen could put one foot in the unknown and keep the other safely planted in the here and now.
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40. They did not disappear all at once; in Lithuania, where such rituals went on a lot longer than elsewhere on the continent, the hearth spirit Gabija was addressed respectfully each morning when the fire was stoked and again at bedtime when the embers were banked. When a bride departed for her new home, she carried with her the fire from her mother’s hearth. In Ireland, St. Brigid (formerly the goddess Brigid) was invoked each evening when the central hearth fire was covered over with ashes.
41. In 1966, WPIX in New York City came up with a no-maintenance solution to the age-old problem: a televised Yule log. It burned merrily all Christmas Eve to a soundtrack of popular Christmas carols, and if you watched it long enough and carefully enough, you would notice the log grow smaller, then larger, then smaller again every few minutes.
42. The English climbing boy did have one other day off and that was May Day, when he was allowed to lay his brushes a
side and was given plenty to eat. American climbing boys enjoyed no such day and, unlike their English counterparts who were practically slaves, the American chimneysweeps often actually were slaves. Even in northern cities like New York, small boys were rented out from Southern slave owners and brought north to do the job. The use of underage chimneysweeps went on a lot longer in the United States than in England, where the practice effectively came to an end in 1875.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Christmas Witch’s Herbal
Generally, the medieval herbal, or “herball,” was much plainer than the medieval bestiary. The hand-drawn or woodblock illustration of each plant had to resemble the real thing if the book was to be of any use, while the entries had to convey the unique properties of each species and how it might be employed in the stillroom, kitchen, or hall. That is not to say that there was no room at all for fancy or folkloric musings. On the contrary, many flowers, trees, and roots were valued as much for their power to banish ghosts, reveal hidden treasures, and keep witches away as they were for their ability to relieve cough or indigestion.
The plant world’s link to the supernatural has certainly been weakened in recent centuries, but it has not been broken. To this day, it is hard to talk about garlic without mentioning vampires, or to speak of mistletoe without bringing up the Druids in the same breath. This chapter is the sort of herbal that I imagine a well-traveled Frau Holle (whose name may actually be related to the root word for “holly”) might put together, then leave open on the bench beside her for a little light Christmas reading while she sits spinning by the hearth.
There are no instructions here for making tinctures or brewing herbal teas. Both the apple and the lingonberry are edible, of course, as are the berries of the juniper and the hips and petals of the white rose. All the rest are highly poisonous and, like the others, are presented here for the sake of their relationship to Christmas and for the strange tales attached to them.
Mistletoe
(Viscum album)
Why do brides make such wonderful ghosts? Is it because they already have the right clothes on? This might hold true for those who met their doom during or since the Victorian era, when the white wedding dress came into fashion, but before that, European brides were as likely to wear red, silver, or even black. It is the bride’s precarious position in life—one foot over the threshold of conjugal bliss, the other still planted in childhood—that puts her at risk. If the earth should break open between her slippered feet, she will teeter and tumble into the Otherworld, never to return except as a ghost. Set her wedding during the supernaturally unstable Christmas season, and the opportunity for thrills and chills increases. Of course, most weddings go off with scarcely a hitch. In the case of the Mistletoe Bride, the tragedy struck during the reception.
The occasion is a Christmas wedding, the scene the great hall of a castle or manor house hung with holly and bunches of mistletoe to celebrate the nuptials of Lord Lovel (or a nobleman of some other name) and his lady love, a playful slip of a girl. As the evening wears on, the bride suggests a game of hide-and-seek. But after her turn comes to hide, she cannot be found—not that night, nor the morning after, nor in the days and months that follow. She seems to have evaporated, leaving her new husband to pine away, but first he orders his lost bride’s possessions stowed away in the attic so they will not remind him of his grief.
Years or decades after the bride’s unfathomable disappearance, another family or branch of the family take possession of the place. They are sorting through the dusty old sticks of furniture when they happen upon an old chest, inside of which they find a skeleton in a wedding gown and crumbling bridal wreath. We are to understand that the girl either banged her head with the lid or got locked inside and suffocated during the infamous game of hide-and-seek.
The Mistletoe Bride was made famous by Thomas Haynes Bayly, whose wildly popular ballad “The Mistletoe Bough” was published around 1830. But did Bayly make the whole thing up? Not according to the owners and caretakers of a number of old houses scattered from Yorkshire to Cornwall, a few of them no more than collections of chimney stumps and empty arches rising up from well-tended lawns. At Brockdish Hall in Norfolk, there is supposed to be a Jacobean bust of the bride, while Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire has both the right family name and the story of a skeleton discovered in a secret space behind the chimney in 1708. But there were also Lovels at Skelton in Yorkshire. Both Bramshill House and Marwell Old Hall in Hampshire have since mislaid the famous chest, though Bramshill has managed to hold on to a ghostly “bride,” who appears now and then in one of the bedrooms.
Samuel Rogers, writing about a decade before the publication of “The Mistletoe Bough,” would make the heroine a juniper bride, for “Ginevra,” the name he assigns to both the bride and his poem, means “juniper.” By his own admission, it was Rogers’ personal stroke of creativity to set the familiar tale in Modena, Italy. As a piece of folklore, the Mistletoe Bride is unique to the English-speaking world; there is no corresponding Mistelbraut motif in Germany, Bohemia, or anywhere else on the continent.
Even Lucy, smallest of the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, knows you should never shut yourself in a wardrobe. The same goes for old dowry chests, although, since they can only be locked from the outside, it would be very tricky indeed to get stuck inside one. Silly as she might have been, the Mistletoe Bride has nevertheless earned her place among the unquiet Christmas spirits of the British Isles.
Mistletoe had long been accepted as a decoration in home and hall, but the idea that the mistletoe was not permitted among the Christmas greens in English churches is a common slander. The reason usually given is that mistletoe was sacred to the pagan Druids, but it could just as easily be a distant Germanic memory of the beloved god Balder’s death by mistletoe, or the fact that twiggy growths of mistletoe on the trunks of trees were known as “witches’ brooms.” The early church fathers disapproved of any adorning of the pews and aisles with Christmas greens because it smacked of the pagan Kalends and Saturnalia. Still, English church wardens continued to haul such greens inside by the bushel, mistletoe included, even under Oliver Cromwell’s rule, when the celebration of Christmas itself was illegal.
Not that the mistletoe really needed the church’s approval; it already had an established place in the home, where bushy balls of mistletoe hung from the ceiling at Yuletide. Some of these balls were decorated like Christmas trees, with corn dollies, fruits, paper roses, ribbons, and candles. At first it was just to look at; widespread kissing under the mistletoe did not start until the 1700s, and for a long time it went on only below stairs. The mistletoe has been used to solicit kisses since time immemorial, but it used to involve chasing the girl down with sprig in hand, and then you could only kiss her as many times as there were berries. If it had been a bad year for mistletoe, the wooden hoops of the “kissing ball” could be covered in ivy or even the prickly gorse (Ulex europaeus), which could be gathered on the moor and might still have a few yellow flowers on it at Christmastime. Still, a token sprig of mistletoe, however scrawny, must hang from the bottom of the ball.
In the mountain inns of the Rhaetian Alps, on the Austrian side of the Swiss border, there used to lurk a sort of living kissing ball, though he was not at all pretty to look at. On the night of December 31, St. Sylvester’s Day,43 each inn installed its own Silvester in a dark corner of the tap room. This Silvester did not represent the fourth-century pope for which he was named any more than the Pelznichol could be said to portray the Bishop of Myra; he was the incarnation of the old year, or its last gasp, and he was eager for a kiss before he went on his way. Wearing the mask of an old man with a long white beard and a mistletoe wreath on his head, he must have looked like a withered Father Christmas as he sat there in the gloom beyond the hearth light. There he waited for someone—anyone—to forget himself or herself and cross beneath the wreath of pine boughs hanging from the ce
iling. As soon as the hapless drinker did so, Silvester leapt up and planted a rough kiss on his or her lips. When the clock struck twelve, the fun was over, for at that moment Silvester was driven out into the snow.
The Rhaetians, who gave their name to this stretch of the Alps, were an ancient Alpine people who may have been Etruscan, Celtic, or simply Rhaetian. Their language merged with Latin to create Rhaeto-Romansch, which is still spoken in pockets of Switzerland. The Rhaetians may have been the earliest runemasters, for they left behind plenty of very runic-looking inscriptions on wood, bone, and stone. We know that the runes eventually made it north into the hands of the Germanic peoples, so it is not impossible that those Celts who would later be known as Gauls and Britons might have taken something of this ancient New Year’s ritual with them when they left their old central European homeland. Could it have been that hint of lasciviousness, which characterized the Alpine Silvester, that lingered and later gave the English the idea that mistletoe was not, or ought not to be, allowed in church?
Because regional attitudes vary greatly, a few churches probably did deny entry to our little green-and-white friend, but most of them welcomed any plant that was still green in December, and not just in the aisles. Records indicate that in York, the mistletoe, like the ghostly bride who bears its name, made it all the way to the altar.
The Old Magic of Christmas Page 16
