by Jan Morris
Most of their sanctities have been frittered away into folk-tale or tourism, and outsiders make a joke of the Loch Ness chimera, draw silly cartoons of it and call it ‘Nessie’. To many Scots people living around the loch, though, it is as real as the lake itself. Long before the engines of publicity fell upon the mystery, they had been brought up in the everyday knowledge of creatures out there in the water. Their fathers and grandfathers had known of them, and never doubted their existence; in the Gaelic language they were called nothing so insulting as ‘monster’, but each uisce, ‘water-horse’. I have met several sober people who assure me they have witnessed Loch Ness water-horses, who see nothing comical in the idea of them, and who talk without self-consciousness about their experiences. In 1985 the postmistress of Dores told me that she occasionally saw a creature or two playing off the point below her house. It was usually about teatime, she said.
10 Looking for witches
The idea that the megalithic cults gave rise to a benevolent European witchcraft has apparently been discredited by scholars. Religious witches and warlocks throughout Europe think otherwise: they maintain white witchcraft to be an ancient and benign matriarchal faith, inherited from most ancient times and given a bad name by macho Christian persecutors. I prefer to agree with them, because I feel a sympathy for what I read about their practices: their reverence for the old stones, their taste for harmless private ritual, their belief in a universal Mother-God all seem to make theirs one of the less unappealing of organized religions, even if it is tangled up with Aquarianism, New Ageism, Flower Peopleness, feminist dogma and neo-Tolkienism. But of course for most people a witch is a witch is a witch, and belief in witchly maleficium certainly survives. Not only schoolgirls, in twentieth-century Europe, stick pins in wax effigies of their enemies, and nobody denies the power of suggestion, for good or for ill. In Normandy in the 1970s bad witches were still often blamed for miscarriages, children’s sicknesses or butter refusing to churn, and good witches (‘blessers’ they used to be called) were frequently called in to put things right. Recognizing your witch is, of course, always a problem. In sixteenth-century Europe the only sure sign was thought to be something called ‘the witch’s mark’ – a sort of teat on a woman’s body, usually near the pudenda, which showed where her devilish familiar – rat, toad, hare or cat – had sucked her blood; yet even in my time people in different parts of the continent have confidently asserted the presence of genuine, old-school witches.
A few years ago in the Sierra Nevada of Spain, for example, I was assured that witchcraft both malicious and benign was flourishing. I should look out, they said, for herbalists and magic potionists in the hill-villages. Sure enough, idling through one such hamlet I saw a notice in a window advertising an infallibly curative and rejuvenative jelly, and went inside to inquire. The room was pitch-black but for the flickering light of a television showing, at that moment, a young American male in bed with two nubile girls. Amidst the gloom, surrounded by dim glass jars of liquids and boxes of desiccated vegetables I could just make out two grimly antediluvian figures: a withered old man with a stick, sitting in an armchair, and a fierce stooped-shouldered woman at a velvet-clothed table. They stared at me in grisly silence. Real witches? I hardly liked to ask – ‘Excuse me, do you happen to have a teat near your pudenda?’ – and thinking that they looked decidedly more malicious than benign, I bought a bag of figs and ran. Then again, I was intrigued to learn that a village in Corsica which really did seem to me of black vibrations was a notorious residence of the Mazzeri – powerfully scary seers and sorcerers who had the power to foresee death, could be in two places at the same time, and lived in a dream-world all their own. How chill and penetrating were the eyes, at least in retrospect, of some of the villagers I interviewed!
Near my home in Wales a woman who habitually left field gates open, allowing sheep to wander, was alleged only half in fun to be a witch, but for myself I agree with the English sage Reginald Scot, who wrote in 1584 that malevolent witchcraft was a matter for ‘children, fooles and melancholike persons’. It is not witches we should fear, but witch-hunters.
11 ‘Mere superstitions’
‘Mere superstitions,’ say Christian theologians about all these remnants and echoes of old faiths, but of course they have long spilled over into the Christian consciousness too. It is belief that does the trick. Contemporary European beliefs run the gamut from trust in lucky numbers to the conviction that the bread and wine of the Eucharist really are, despite all taste and appearance, transmuted by magic mantras into the flesh and blood of Christ. At Namur in Belgium people revere a reliquary supposed to contain some of the Virgin Mary’s milk! Thousands of Neapolitans are persuaded to this day that on the feast of St Januarius the solidified blood of that martyr is miraculously liquefied, although it is 150 years since the Oxford scholar William Buckland, falling on his knees before the liquefaction, licked the blood and pronounced it bat’s urine. Adolf Hitler, the dominant European of his time, belived in the tomfoolery of astrologers. In the streets of Bucharest, after nearly half a century of dialectical materialism, it was common to see well-dressed, perfectly modern members of the bourgeoisie crossing themselves before braving a traffic intersection; in Zagreb market-men do the same thing, without looking up from their commerce, when the cathedral bell sounds the angelus. I myself have not walked under a ladder for years, and invariably reach out of my bedclothes to touch my wooden bedstead if a rashly complacent thought enters my mind. Like nearly everyone, too, I frequently offer a silent prayer at moments of stress or frustration – always opening archaically, I have observed, with the phrase ‘Please O God’, inexpungible echo of an Anglican childhood.
Charms, magic crystals, holy oils, tarot cards, vampirology, exorcisms, the prophecies of fortune-tellers, prayers for rain or victory, sacred relics, touching things – Europeans still have faith in all these nostrums. In the months before the Second World War the then-famous astrologer of the London Daily Express repeatedly assured his readers, having consulted the constellations, that there would be no war in Europe. When the Germans invaded Poland, precipitating the maelstrom, the headline above his column read ‘HITLER DEFIES THE STARS.’
12 In between
Being a sort of permanent compromise myself, I especially enjoy the syncretics of European religion, places and rituals where old faiths impinge upon new. Gandhi used to say that all religions were right, and all were wrong. Certainly they are all related, however much they detest each other, and when its time came Christianity never did quite throw off its pagan inheritances. Of course the Christian Establishment did its best, being particularly severe about the rocks. Lighting candles at stones, declared St Martin, Bishop of Dumium, in 574, was nothing more or less than devil-worship, and the Decree of Nantes, in 658, ordered bishops to ‘dig up and remove and hide in places where they cannot be found those stones which in remote and woody places are still worshipped’. In ancient churches all over Europe I have been pleased to find elfish figures, little green men or chimeras, deftly translated from one belief to another – from one sect to another too, for they have often been willy-nilly inherited through doctrinal revolutions and reforms, and it is fun to see them mischievously peeking out from rood screens and choir stalls in austere churches of Protestantism. Often you will find a rock of ancient faith nervously incorporated in a church wall, just in case, or standing outside a Gothic porch like Banquo’s ghost, or converted into a cross or a Calvary. At Gamla Uppsala, where Sweden’s primeval kings are buried, the little church beside the burial mounds was built on the site of Sweden’s last active pagan temple – perhaps on the same foundations, perhaps even to a similar design. The imagery of the rock proved inexpungible, too. ‘Upon this rock I will build my church,’ said Jesus himself of Simon Peter. ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,’ sing faithful Anglican congregations to this day. ‘When God made the rocks he made the fossils in them,’ declared the brave fundamentalist John Keble. When Charlemagne set up hi
s imperial capital at Aachen in the eighth century of the Christian era, his royal chapel was built with infinite subtlety of biblical allusion, following the proportions of the mystic numbers in the Book of Revelation; but although one of his own edicts, in 789, had execrated ‘before God’ all the holy stones, still his own throne, the supreme seat of earthly power, was made of rough marble rock.
Beside a road in central Portugal I once came across a little building which seemed to speak to me direct from the in-between days of European religion. The chapel of São Brissos was famous actually, but I had never heard of it before. Its basis was an ancient cromlech, three stones in tripod with a boulder on top, but a Christian church had been built within and around it. All was whitewashed, with a blue margin around the base, and pagan and Christian were inextricably united. On one side there was a door, and a window with white lace curtains, looking rather cosy: on another the rocks were bare and lightly touched with lichen, and looked as though they had been there since the Ice Age. They held regular Christian services in this primeval structure, so a passing bicyclist informed me, and I had to assume that the priests of the rock had been obliged to give way to the priests of the Cross. I could not help wondering, though, whether the devotions of the present congregation were not partly pagan too, and sure enough long afterwards I came across this observation about São Brissos, and other such hybrids, in an official Portuguese publication of 1992: ‘Local people are aware of the religious character of dolmens and … it is in the interest of those who hold power in society that these monuments be integrated into the official order of things.’
13 Regression
As it happens those who have held power in society have often been under the spell of the rocks themselves, almost into our own times. The common people of Europe frequently used the ancient megaliths as Christian shrines, as tombs, as barns, as cowsheds and even occasionally as cafés. The governing classes more often made new ones, because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became modish to commission mock-megalithic monuments, garden follies and hilltop ornaments. Some were very convincing shams. Most strangers who penetrate to the so-called Druids’ Temple near Masham in Yorkshire, England, take it to be as old as Merlin. Actually it was built in the 1820s by a local squire, William Danby, to give work to local people at a time of hardship. Hidden away secretively in a pine plantation on the moors, it is a very elaborate approximation of Stonehenge – smaller, but more so. Within a circle of standing stones and capstones there are ceremonial pillars, platforms, altars and chambers, and among the trees around stand sundry dolmens and triliths. When I was there an elderly man I found intensely studying the ensemble asked me how old I thought it was. I told him about Mr Danby, and he said I had cruelly shattered his illusions, especially as it had taken him two days to find the place.
In Germany megalithic monuments were often associated with more dreadful pagan traditions, warlike gods and Wagnerian legends, and so had a particular appeal for the balefully mystic Nazis. It is said to have been Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS and chief scourge of the Jews, who inspired the most ambitious of all megalithic shams, the vast pagan place of ceremony at Sachsenhain, near Verden in Lower Saxony. Built in the 1930s, it was meant to commemorate 4,500 Saxon slaves slaughtered there by the Franks – a slaughter, that is, of healthy Nordic pagans by effete Christian intruders from the South. Accordingly 4,500 boulders were taken to the site and erected in a vast circular avenue, perhaps a mile and a quarter round. I suppose it is the largest neo-antiquity ever made. Sometimes the avenue opens out into platforms, sometimes it is joined by lesser paths of boulders, and it surrounds a pleasant grassy meadow, with a stream running through it, and cows grazing, and cherry blossoms in season, and a tump, whether natural or man-made, conveniently sited at the edge of it.
When I was led to Sachsenhain I was at first rather charmed by the place. It suggested to me Christ Church Meadows at Oxford, harmlessly transformed under the influence of some eccentric scholar. But as I walked around the avenue myself (birds singing, a couple of women exercising their dogs) I thought about the fanatic ceremonies the Nazis held there at solstice times, proclaiming their allegiance I suppose to the virile and ethnically impeccable Old Gods of the Germans. I fancied then their torchlight parades processing between the rocks, ritually challenged by other companies of cultists at symbolical intersections, shouting slogans, singing hymns of hatred, pausing at platforms for curses or incantations; and in the flicker of their torches I saw the glinting narrow eyes of the High Priest Himmler, behind his steel-framed glasses. Even phoney megaliths can be powerfully evocative.
14 Inscription upon an entirely bogus mock-megalithic folly erected by George Law, Bishop of Bath and Wells, circa 1840
Here where once druids trod in times of yore
And stain’d their altars with a victim’s gore
Here now the Christian ransomed from above
Adores a God of Mercy and of love.
15 We Druids
Those Druids came somewhere between the megalithics and the Christians, and they are relatively familiar to us. Nobody knows what a priest of the megalithic religion looked like, but we all think we know the look of a Druid. Druids survived into historical times, and left some of their mysteries behind. In Wales the classical forms of alliterative verse, still enthusiastically practised by poets young and old, are said to be inherited from the mnemonics of the Druids, and costumed Druids preside over the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, the itinerant national cultural festival, attended by flower-maidens of the forest. I am myself a Druid on those occasions, a member of the White Order of the Gorsedd of Bards. Our rituals and regalia are in fact of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century origins, devised by a half-crazed genius littérateur called Iolo Morgannwg, and given substance by the painter Hubert Herkomer and the sculptor Goscombe John, who between them designed a glorious set of neo-Druidical robes and insignia – blue, green, white, gold, silver and ermine.
Before the grand occasions of the festival, we members of the Gorsedd (a body of bards which Iolo resurrected, or perhaps invented) assemble in some nearby school to Druidize ourselves in flowing robes and headdresses. There is no denying comedy to this process. The setting is generally prosaic – the usual deal tables and metal-framed windows of a country school, the playground empty outside, the air smelling slightly of chalk and india-rubber. The bards range from scholarly dissertationists to opera singers or poetical anarchists. The Mistress of the Robes is a motherly soul like a minister’s wife at a chapel fête. And there we cheerfully transform ourselves, with laughter and badinage, into figures from a mythical past. The men’s shoes tend to protrude awkwardly beneath their robes. The women’s earrings are not invariably in keeping. Some people have trouble getting their headgear right. Never mind, off we go in a mass of whites, greens and blues, to clamber into the buses that will take us to the Eisteddfod field – through their windows we can be seen peering out, often incongruously spectacled, to wave greetings to un-Druidical friends and relatives lining the route. Outsiders often sneer at this charade, but they do not understand it. It has its funny aspects, but it represents a conviction and a comradeship as strong as any forest-oath of the original Druids. When I first assumed the dignities of the Druidic Order of the White Robe it was one of the proudest moments of my life.
16 Atavism
In the most varied European places one discovers religious atavism (‘some strange recurrence,’ as Walter Bagehot defined it, ‘to a primitive past’). When St Bernadette saw her apparition of the Virgin at Lourdes in 1858, she called it ‘une petite demoiselle’ – a fairy in the local vernacular. As late as the 1880s, in England, the Revd John Atkinson was told disconcertingly that ‘the priests of the old religion were more powerful conjurors than you church priests’. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, declaring God to be dead, allowed that the divine shadow might still lurk in caves! Inside the Church of England church at Haworth in Yorkshire, where the Revd Patrick Brontë brough
t up his genius daughters, in the 1980s I found a branch of a tree set up as a votive. Among its twigs the local population had expressed its hopes and yearnings as fervently as any African tribeswoman propitiating evil spirits. ‘Please Let Me Be Mark Aspen’s Girl Friend,’ said one childish scrawl on a crumpled piece of lined writing-paper, ‘Please Let Me And My Sister Be Friends Again,’ said another, and there were several heartfelt pleas requesting a victory for Halifax Town in their Saturday match. Tatters of rags on Polish bushes – discarded crutches in holy places of Spain or Italy – midnight processions and miraculous cures – ‘Please O God make me find the car keys’ – all such feral manifestations, conducted now under the aegis of the Cross, remind me still of the rocks.
17 In love with death
A death-cult, some scholars think, was part of the megalithic religion. If so, it has certainly been inherited by modern Europeans. Mummies and corpses, blood and bones go naturally enough, I suppose, with a culture which was founded upon death by torture, and no ghoul or necrophile need feel deprived in Christian Europe. Dead people are available everywhere, together with innumerable anatomical pieces pickled in reliquaries. There are mummified nuns in Dublin, calcified monks in Naples, leathery corpses from the marsh at Schleswig, perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old people from Trundholm Bog in Denmark, a charnel-house lined with the bones of 5,000 dead bodies at Évora in Portugal and the skeleton of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, wearing nankeen trousers and bedroom slippers, sitting in a glass case at University College, London. If you drop fifty forints into a slot in Budapest the mummified hand of St Stephen will automatically be illuminated. At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled ‘BAMBINA – SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL’. ‘Be very careful,’ one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice as I left this macabre exhibition – ‘watch out for robbers.’ I thought there was a queer look in his eye, rather like the stare of those Corsican villagers, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motor-bike snatched my bag and left me destitute.
