In Memory of the Pendle Witches

   

Here is a copy of the paper I read at the Capturing Witches Conference this weekend at Lancaster University. Academics, writers, and independent researchers from all over the world gathered to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Lancashire Witch Trials. 

This weekend marks the 400th anniversary of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials. Throughout the region people will be commemorating this solemn occasion. It’s my sincere hope that these events portray the accused witches not as some ghoulish sideshow but as real people who suffered and died unjustly because of other people’s ignorance. 

As a novelist, I wanted to devote my work to honouring these people, to raising them from the ashes. I wanted to give voice to the voiceless. An expat writer, I have lived in a number of different countries, but no place has touched me as deeply as the Pendle region in Lancashire, my home for the past ten years.

Evocation of place is my passion. The question I ask myself is what makes this place I’m in now unique, unlike any other place I’ve ever been? What song does the land sing? What stories does it have to tell? What ancestors and elders cry out from the depths of this earth? I am obsessed with local history and regional folklore, how these stories merge with the landscape itself. History is a fluid thing that, together with folklore and myth, continually shapes the present. As contemporary British storyteller Hugh Lupton has said, if you go deep enough into the old tales and can present them in an evocative and meaningful way to a modern audience, you become the living voice in an ancient tradition—the highest aspiration I have for my own writing.   

I arrived here knowing next to nothing about the Pendle Witches, but I soon became haunted by the images of witches I saw everywhere. In Pendle, witches are inescapable. They appear on pub signs, beer mats, bumper stickers, the sides of buildings, an entire fleet of double-decker buses. In the beginning I believed these witches on broomsticks belonged to the realm of fairy tale and ghost story. The truth, when I took the time to learn it, was far more disturbing.   

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches, based on testimony given by a nine-year-old girl. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he paid particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could even come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts described her: 

            She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had 
been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast 
place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man 
knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no 
man escaped her, or her Furies. 

Reading the trial transcripts against the grain, I was amazed at how her strength of character blazed forth in the document written to condemn her. This is the kind of heroine every novelist dreams of creating—except Mother Demdike was better than any fiction. She was real. 

I immersed myself in the local studies section of Clitheroe Library and read everything about the Pendle Witches I could get my hands on, including the novels already written about them. Robert O’Neill’s Mist over Pendle is my favorite work of fiction devoted to the Pendle Witch lore and yet, as delightful as O’Neill’s prose is, I was disappointed that he cast Mother Demdike as a sad and pathetic figure when the primary sources seemed to be pointing out that she was much, much more than that!

Then I turned to more recent research in witchcraft studies such as Robert Poole’s The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories and Jonathan Lumby’s The Lancashire Witch-Craze, which drew me into a mysterious lost world, where recusant Catholicism rubbed shoulders with popular folk magic. Emma Wilby’s watershed book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits helped me decipher Mother Demdike’s testimony in the trial documents, such as her first encounter with her spirit Tibb in the quarry in Goldshaw Booth outside Newchurch in Pendle, and place her firmly in her historical context as a cunning woman. This research allowed me to recast Mother Demdike, so often maligned in fiction and popular culture, as a tragic heroine. 

I had to tell Mother Demdike’s story in the first person. It was important to me to give her story back to her, let it unfold from her point of view, allowing her to shine forth like the firebrand she was. I yearned to spin her tale as best I could so my writing could be a mouthpiece for this mighty cunning woman that the authorities had worked so hard to silence. In the course of working on my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, Demdike, who I called Bess, became a true presence, a shining light in my life. An ancestor of my heart, if not my blood.

Bess Southerns’s life unfolded almost literally in my backyard. Her essence seemed to arise directly out of the wild Pennine moorland outside my door. Writing about her wasn’t a mere exercise of reading books, then typing sentences into my computer. To do justice to her story, I had to go out into the land—literally walk in her footsteps. Using the Ordinance Survey Map, I located the site of Malkin Tower, once her home. Now only the foundations remain. My horse’s livery yard is near Read Hall, once home to Roger Nowell, the witchfinder and prosecuting magistrate responsible for sending Bess and the other Pendle Witches to their deaths. Every weekend, I walked or rode my chestnut mare down the tracks of Pendle Forest. Quietening myself, I learned to listen, to allow Bess’s voice to well up from the land. Her passion, her tale enveloped me. 

As I sought to uncover the bones of Bess’s story, I was drawn into a new world of mystery and magic. It was as though Pendle Hill had opened up like an enchanted mountain to reveal the treasures hidden within. Every stereotype I’d held of historical witches and cunning folk was dashed to pieces. 

Once in a place called Malkin Tower, there lived a widow, Bess Southerns, called Demdike. Matriarch of her clan, she lived with her widowed daughter and her three grandchildren. What fascinated me was not that Bess was arrested and imprisoned but that the authorities only turned on her near the end of her long, productive life. She practiced her craft for decades before anybody dared to interfere with her or stand in her way. 

Cunning craft—the art of using charms to heal both humans and livestock—appeared to be Bess’s family trade. Their spells, recorded in the trial documents, were Roman Catholic prayer charms—the kind of folk magic that would have flourished before the Reformation. Bess’s charm to cure a bewitched person, quoted in full in the trial transcripts as damning evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary: 

            What is yonder that casts a light so farrandly,
Mine owne deare Sonne that’s naild to the Tree.

Bess herself would have been old enough to remember the Old Church, for the English Reformation didn’t really get under way until the reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s short-lived son, who came to the throne when Bess was a teenager. She would have remembered the old ways of lighting candles before statues of the saints, of making offerings at holy wells, of processions around the fields to make them fertile—all practices that English Protestants condemned as pagan and un-Christian. 

Indeed Bess had the misfortune to live in a time and a place where Catholicism became conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, most of the enlightened men of the English Renaissance, thought that the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In 1645, in a pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: “No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists.”

So were Bess and her family at Malkin Tower merely maligned and misunderstood practitioners of Catholic folk magic? The truth seems far more tangled. Bess and her sometimes-friend, sometimes-rival Anne Whittle, aka Chattox, accused each other of using clay figures to curse their enemies. Both women freely confessed, even bragged about their familiar spirits who appeared to them in the guise of beautiful young men—otherworldly lovers. Bess’s spirit was named Tibb, while Chattox’s was called Fancy. 

When Bess was in her fifties, walking past the quarry at Goldshaw Booth at sunset—called daylight gate in her dialect—a beautiful young man emerged from the stone pit, his hair golden and shining, his coat half black, half brown. He introduced himself to her as Tibb and promised to be her familiar spirit, her otherworldly companion who would be the power behind her every spell. 

Bess is the narrator of the first part of the book. The second part is narrated through the voice of her granddaughter Alizon, a teenager who showed every promise of becoming a cunning woman as mighty as her grandmother. But Alizon is two generations removed from the rich folk magic and the old ways of Mother Demdike’s youth. The child of a sterner Puritan age, she isn’t finding it so easy to come to terms with the legacy her grandmother wants to pass on to her. Will Alizon accept the call of power or will she refuse it? How will her decision effect her family’s fate? 

The crimes of which Elizabeth Southerns and her fellow witches were accused dated back years before the trial, but for decades on end, no one dared to meddle with her. But in 1612 that all changed. On March 18, 1612, Alizon had a bitter verbal confrontation with John Law, a pedlar from Halifax in Yorkshire. A few minutes after the young woman told him off, John Law collapsed from a stroke. 

Both Alizon and the pedlar were convinced that her anger had struck him lame. Falling to her knees, Alizon burst into tears and begged his forgiveness before fleeing in terror. When witnesses reported Alizon to the authorities, magistrate Roger Nowell wasted no time in arresting her. Possibly through the use of leading questions, he browbeat this young woman into implicating her grandmother and also Chattox, Bess’s rival, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redfearne. This was the beginning of the end that saw twelve people from the Pendle region imprisoned in the Well Tower in Lancaster Castle, chained to each other and to an iron ring on the floor. 

Not long after her arrest, Bess Southerns died in prison. Ever the wily cunning woman, she cheated the hangman before she could be brought to trial. Her family and friends experienced a different fate. 

Alizon, first to be arrested, was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a passionate tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. Roger Nowell brought John Law, the pedlar she had supposedly lamed, before her. Filled with remorse to see the man’s suffering, she again begged his forgiveness. John Law, perhaps pitying the condemned young woman, replied that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to cure him. Alizon sadly told him that she lacked the powers to do so, but if her grandmother, Old Mother Demdike, had lived, she could and would have healed him and restored him to full health. The following day Alizon and the others were hanged and buried in an unmarked grave. 

Long after their demise, Mother Demdike and her fellow witches endure as part of the undying spirit of Pendle. Their legacy is woven into the land itself, its weft and warp, like the stones and the streams that cut across the moors. This is their home, their seat of power, and they shall never be banished. By learning their true history, I have become an adopted daughter of their living landscape, one of many tellers who spin their neverending tale.   

From Daughters of the Witching Hill:
Let my children arise and come home to me.
Neither stick nor stake has the power to keep thee.
Open the gate wide. Step through the gate. Come, my children. Come home. 

Of Witches and Saints: Mother Demdike and Hildegard von Bingen

This summer marks the 400th Anniversary of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials. In August 1612, seven women and two men from the Pendle region in Lancashire were hanged for witchcraft based on evidence given by a nine-year-old girl. The most notorious of the accused, Elizabeth Southerns alias Old Demdike, escaped the hangman by dying in prison before she could even come to trial. She is the heroine of my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill.

Throughout the Pendle Region, people will be commemorating this solemn anniversary. It is my sincere hope these events portray Mother Demdike and her fellow accused not as some ghoulish sideshow, but as real people who unjustly suffered and died on account of other people's ignorance and religious intolerance.

I will be taking part in a number of events in remembrance of the Pendle Witches. My schedule is listed below. I wish to draw particular attention to Capturing Witches at Lancaster University, August 17 - 19, a multi-disciplinary academic conference discussing everything from historical witchcraft to Neopagan belief to the horrifying persecution of so-called "child witches" in modern day Nigeria.

This summer has also marked the much belated canonization of 12th century powerfrau, Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the heroine of my forthcoming novel, Illuminations.

Some readers might wonder how I could make the leap from writing about historical witch, Mother Demdike, to Hildegard, a Benedictine abbess. In fact, Hildegard and Demdike had a lot in common. Demdike earned her bread as a healer with her charms and herbal remedies. She was known as a cunning woman, a woman of wisdom. Hildegard, a brilliant polymath and composer,healed with herbs and gemstones. She believed in viriditas, the green and animating life force manifest in the natural world, infusing all creation with moisture and vitality. Demdike was guided by visions of Tibb, her familiar spirit, while Hildegard was called "Sibyl of the Rhine" and revered for her visions and prophecies. Demdike's charms, recorded in the official trial documents, drew on the mystical imagery of the old Catholic Church, outlawed by the Reformation. Hildegard's gemstone remedies seem to draw on sympathetic magic, as seen in her "Sapphire Charm," listed below.

Both women seemed to inhabit a worldview where the boundaries between religion, magic, and visionary experience were fluid. Demdike, a practitioner of Catholic folk magic who also appeared to believe in the so-called Faery Faith that coexisted alongside Christianity for centuries, fell foul of her Puritan magistrate and was condemned as a witch. She died, most likely of hunger and typhoid, while imprisoned in a lightless dungeon, chained to a ring in the floor with the eleven other accused Pendle Witches. The founder of two monasteries, Hildegard would seem to be a pillar of the religious orthodoxy of her day. Yet even she earned the enmity of her archbishop when she refused to disinter a supposed apostate buried in her churchyard. As punishment for her disobedience to male authority, she and her nuns suffered an interdict - or collective excommunication - lifted only a few months before her death. Hildegard might well have died an outcast. And I believe that if Hildegard had lived in Demdike's Puritan England with its abhorrence of mystical experience, she might also have been accused of witchcraft.

Fortunes can change. On October 7, 2012, Hildegard will be elevated to Doctor of the Church, a rare and solemn title given to theologians who have made a significant impact. While such a lofty title will never be attached to Mother Demdike, let's hope that she and the other Pendle Witches might at least be remembered with respect and sad reflection for what they were forced to endure.

Sadly, the Pendle Witch tragedy is as relevant in 2012 as it was in 1612. Witch hunts are still ongoing. Children in West Africa and even the United Kingdom are being tortured and killed.

May we work together to end this injustice. May mystics and visionaries of all faith backgrounds receive recognition and honour. May all witch hunts end forever.

Illustration: Hildegard's vision of the universe as an egg inside the womb of God


Hildegard's Sapphire Charm to dispel undesired attraction

Sapphire is hot and develops after noontime, when the sun burns ardently and the air is a bit obstructed by its heat. The splendor is not as full as it is when the air is a bit cool. Sapphire is turbid, indeed more fiery than airy or watery. It symbolizes a complete love of wisdom. . . . If the devil should incite a man to love a woman so that, without magic or the invocation of demons, he begins to be insane with love, and if this is an annoyance to the woman, she should pour a bit of wine over a sapphire three times and each time say, "I pour this wine, in its ardent powers, over you; just as God drew off your splendor, wayward angel, so may you draw away from me the lust of this ardent man." 

From Hildegard von Bingen's Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing, translated from the Latin by Priscilla Throop, and published by Healing Arts Press.

The Illuminating Life of Hildegard von Bingen

      

      


My forthcoming title, Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen, will be published on October 9,     2012, and is available for pre-order on Amazon.


Who was Hildegard of Bingen?


Born in the Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard (1098-1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a prodigious intellectual outpouring that was unprecedented for a 12^th century woman. Her prophecies earned her the title Sybil of the Rhine. An outspoken critic of political and ecclesiastical corruption, she courted controversy. Late in her life, she and her nuns were the subject of an interdict (a collective excommunication) that was lifted only a few months before her death. Hildegard nearly died an outcast.


873 years after her death, the Vatican has finally given her the highest recognition for her considerable achievements. On May 10, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI canonized her. In October 2012, she will be elevated to Doctor of the Church, a rare and solemn title reserved for theologians who have significantly impacted Church doctrine. Presently there are only thirty-three Doctors of the Church, and only three are women (Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Therese of Lisieux).


What inspired you to write a novel about this 12^th century powerfrau?


For twelve years I lived in Germany where Hildegard has long been enshrined as a cultural icon, admired by both secular and spiritual people. In her homeland, Hildegard’s cult as a “popular” saint long predates her official canonization.


I was particularly struck by the pathos of her story. The youngest of ten children, Hildegard was offered to the Church at the age of eight. She reported having luminous visions since earliest childhood, so perhaps her parents didn’t know what else to do with her.


According to Guibert of Gembloux’s Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, she was bricked into an anchorage with her mentor, the fourteen-year-old Jutta von Sponheim, and possibly one other young girl. Guibert describes the anchorage in the bleakest terms, using words like “mausoleum” and “prison,” and writes how these girls died to the world to be buried with Christ. As an adult, Hildegard strongly condemned the practice of offering child oblates to monastic life, but as a child she had absolutely no say in the matter. The anchorage was situated in Disibodenberg, a community of monks. What must it have been like to be among a tiny minority of young girls surrounded by adult men?


Disibodenberg Monastery is now in ruins and it’s impossible to say precisely where the anchorage was, but the suggested location if two suffocatingly narrow rooms built on to the back of the church.


Hildegard spent thirty years interred in her prison, her release only coming with Jutta’s death. What amazed me was how she was able to liberate herself and her sisters from such appalling conditions. At the age of 42, she underwent a dramatic transformation, from a life of silence and submission to answering the divine call to speak and write about her visions she had kept secret all those years.


In the 12^th century, it was a radical thing for a nun to set quill to paper and write about weighty theological matters. Her abbot panicked and had her examined for heresy. Yet miraculously this “poor weak figure of a woman,” as Hildegard called herself, triumphed against all odds to become one of the greatest voices of her age.   


What special challenges did you face in writing about such a complex woman?


Hildegard’s life was so long and eventful, so filled with drama and conflict, tragedy and ecstasy, that it proved mightily difficult to squeeze the essence of her story into a manageable novel. My original draft was forty-thousand words longer than the current book. I also found it quite intimidating to write about such a religious woman. In the end, I found I had to let Hildegard breathe and reveal herself as human.


How did you research this book?


I completed a course on Medieval Studies at Lancaster University. I also read extensively in both English and German while listening to Hildegard’s transcendent music. My research took me to all the locations mentioned in the novel, from the ruins of Disibodenberg Monastery where Hildegard languished in the anchorage, to the site of Rupertsberg, the monastic house she founded for her nuns when life at Disibodenberg had become unbearable. Unfortunately Rupertsberg was completely destroyed in the Thirty Years War, but the location is still very beautiful and inspiring. You can see photos on my blog.


Hildegard’s second monastery at Eibingen endured right up until the secularization in the early 19^th century when it was torn down. However, the former convent church remains and is now the Parish Church of Saint Hildegard, where Hildegard’s relics are kept – her heart, her tongue, and her hair. A short distance away is the new Abbey of Saint Hildegard, built in 1900, a flourishing Benedictine community and pilgrimage site where suitably enlightened nuns offer wine tasting (they grow their own vintage) and sell books on planting medicinal herbs by the phases of the moon.


Across the Rhine in the Hildegard Forum, also run by nuns who offer outreach for secular people who want to learn more about Hildegard, particularly her philosophy of holistic healing and nutrition. They manage a café/restaurant; offer seminars and retreats; and maintain an orchard and a medieval-style herb garden.


I also visited Bermersheim, Hildegard’s birthplace. Unfortunately nothing remains of her family home, but there’s a statue of her in the churchyard, high on a hill, with views of lush green vineyards. Not far away is Sponheim, her mentor Jutta’s birthplace, where the ruins of Sponheim Castle still stand.


If Hildegard has long been venerated as a “popular” saint in Germany, why  did it take the Vatican so long to canonize her? Why Hildegard and why now?


The first attempt to canonize Hildegard began in 1233, but failed as over fifty years had passed since her death and most of the witnesses and beneficiaries of her reported miracles were deceased. Her theological writings were deemed too dense and difficult for subsequent generations to understand and soon fell into obscurity, as did her music. According Barbara Newman, Hildegard was remembered mainly as an apocalyptic prophet. But in the age of Enlightenment, prophets and mystics went out of fashion. Hildegard was dismissed as a hysteric and even her authorship of her own work was disputed. Pundits began to suggest her books had been written by a man.


Newman states that Hildegard’s contemporary rehabilitation and resurgence was due mainly to the tireless efforts of the nuns at Saint Hildegard Abbey. In 1956 Marianne Schrader and Adelgundis Führkötter, OSB, published a carefully documented study that proved the authenticity of Hildegard’s authorship. Their research provides the foundation of all subsequent Hildegard scholarship.


In the 1980s, in the wake of a wider women’s spirituality movement, Hildegard’s star rose as seekers from diverse faith backgrounds embraced her as a foremother and role model. The artist Judy Chicago showcased Hildegard at her iconic feminist Dinner Party installation. Medievalists and theologians rediscovered Hildegard’s writings. New recordings of her sacred music hit the popular charts. The radical Dominican monk Matthew Fox adopted Hildegard as the figurehead of his creation-centered spirituality. Fox’s book Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen remains one of the most accessible and popular books on the 12^th century visionary. In 2009, German director Margarethe von Trotta made Hildegard the subject of her luminous film, Vision. And all the while, the sisters at Saint Hildegard Abbey were exerting their quiet pressure on Rome to get Hildegard the official endorsement they believed she deserved.


Pope John Paul II, who had canonized more saints than any previous pontiff, steadfastly ignored Hildegard’s burgeoning cult, possibly because he was repelled by her status as a feminist icon. Ironically it is his successor, Benedict XVI, one of the most conservative popes in recent history—who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, defrocked Matthew Fox—is finally giving Hildegard her due. Reportedly Joseph Ratzinger, a German, has long admired Hildegard.


Were Hildegard’s visions caused by migraines?    


Neurologist Oliver Sacks believes that Hildegard’s visions and the debilitating chronic illnesses she suffered throughout her life can be attributed to migraines. In Scivias, she describes being bedridden while she received the divine command to write and speak about her visions. Sacks maintains that the symptoms she describes are identical to those of migraine sufferers. He also states that the concentric rings of circles in the illuminations of her visions are reminiscent of a migraine aura.


Critics of this theory will point out that Hildegard, in her medical treatise Causae et Curae, described the migraine in detail but never connected this diagnosis to herself. Moreover she herself did not paint the illuminations that illustrated her visions. So the rings of light could be the illuminator’s stylistic interpretation and nothing to do with any alleged visual hallucinations on Hildegard’s part.


Thus, the “migraine theory” remains speculative. In our hyper-rationalistic age, I think we are too hasty to “diagnose” historical figures with readily-identifiable conditions—ie “Mozart was autistic.” One thing we do know is that Hildegard lived in an age of faith. She and those around her sincerely believed her visions were real. Hildegard wrote an epic trilogy explaining her visions, relating them to the human struggle for redemption, how the fallen world can be reconciled with the created world. Therein lies her genius, not in any catalogue of physical symptoms.


What was going on between Hildegard and the young nun Richardis? Was Hildegard a lesbian?
Hildegard’s passionate letters to and about her protégée Richardis von Stade reveal the abbess at her most human and vulnerable. Alas, it’s far too easy to misinterpret this in an anachronistic light. In her otherwise gorgeously nuanced film Vision, Margarethe von Trotta portrays Hildegard in the throes of a painful midlife infatuation with a much younger woman. This belies the fact of how long their relationship endured—Richardis closely supported Hildegard during the ten years it took her to write Scivias. When Richardis left to be abbess in distant Bassum, Hildegard was heartbroken. Richardis later deeply regretted leaving her. 

I don’t believe their relationship was sexual. Since Hildegard made no attempt to hide her love for Richardis, I don’t believe that she believed their love was in any way shameful. In Surpassing the Love of Men, Lillian Faderman points out that before Freud and Havelock Ellis and our modern theories of sexual orientation, women could be very ardent in expressing their love for each other  without experiencing any social condemnation. Think of Emily Dickinson’s deeply romantic letters to Sue Gilbert, who later became her sister-in-law. The Victorians made no attempt to censor these letters. Only in the 20^th century did people begin to find them scandalous.

In Hildegard’s own age, the view of sexuality was completely male-oriented. Male homosexuality was punishable by death while the only recorded cases of women being punished for loving other women were in the rare instances where one woman cross-dressed as a man, usurping male identity and male privilege, and under this guise actually married another woman. Otherwise it appeared that nobody really worried about women’s relationships. According to John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Anastasius, one of the many popes during Hildegard’s long lifetime, dismissed the one passage in the Bible (Romans 1:26) alluding to women’s same sex relationships, and actually queried whether lesbian relationships were even possible. “Women offer themselves to the men,” Anastasius wrote. An intimate relationship that did not involve men was apparently inconceivable to this pontiff.   

What relevance does Hildegard have for us today?


I think that Hildegard’s legacy remains hugely important for contemporary women. While writing this book, I kept coming up against the injustice of how women, who are often more devout than men, are condemned to stand at the margins of established religion, even in the 21^st century. Women bishops still cause controversy in the Episcopalian Church while the previous Catholic pope, John Paul II, called a moratorium even on the discussion of women priests.


Modern women have the choice to wash their hands of organized religion altogether. But Hildegard didn’t even get to choose whether to enter monastic life—she was thrust into an anchorage at the age of eight. The Church of her day could not have been more patriarchal and repressive to women. Yet her visions moved her to create a faith that was immanent and life-affirming, that can inspire us today.


The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world, infusing all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator. Hildegard’s re-visioning of religion celebrated women and nature, and even perceived God as feminine, as Mother. Her vision of the universe was an egg in the womb of God.


Hildegard shows how visionary women might transform the most male-dominated faith traditions from within.


But surely Hildegard was no feminist in today’s sense. She was a woman of her time.  


Traditionalists will point out that Hildegard was deeply conservative in many respects and will argue that she has been unfairly appropriated by feminists and by New Age spirituality. She never called for women priests, for example. But Hildegard lived in a golden age of monasticism, when an influential abbess could wield considerably more power than the average parish priest.


Kathryn Kerby-Fulton in her essay “Prophet and Reformer: Smoke in the Vineyard,” maintains that although Hildegard’s sacramental theology was orthodox, her reformist thought was radical, as evidenced in her blazing sermon against ecclesiastical corruption which she delivered in Cologne in 1170. If the clergy did not reform and end their abuses, Hildegard preached, the secular princes would rise up against these men, oust them from their offices, and seize their property and wealth. For this reason the Lutheran Church in Germany regards Hildegard not only as a reformer, but as a prophet of the Reformation. Indeed her theology and philosophy are so complex and multi-stranded that her work and life continue to inspire very diverse groups of people, from conservative Catholics to feminist theologians, such as Barbara Newman, whose book Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine profoundly influenced me.

Pendle Witch Summer

August 2012 commemorates the 400th Anniversary of the Pendle Witch Trials in which nine people from the Pendle region in Lancashire, England were hanged as witches based on the testimony of a nine-year-old girl. Mother Demdike, the most notorious of the accused witches, died in Lancaster Prison before she could even come to trial. She is the heroine of my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill.

To commemorate this solemn anniversary, I will be taking part in several events this summer.

8:00 Friday 15 June, I'll be telling tales of cunning woman Mother Demdike and the Queen of Elfhame at the Storytelling Circle at Pendle Witch Camp.

2:30 Sunday 24 June, I shall appear in historical costume to discuss the Pendle Witches' true and tragic story and to read from Daughters of the Witching Hill at Pendle Heritage Centre in Barrowford.

August 17-19, I'll be a speaker at the Capturing Witches Conference at Lancaster University, a multi-disciplinary academic gathering with speakers addressing everything from historical witchcraft to fictional treatments of the witches to Neopagan belief to the current witchhunts still targeting children in Nigeria.

It's my hope that these events draw attention to the often overlooked fact that the Lancashire Witches are not some ghoulish sideshow, but real women and men who suffered and died on account of ignorance and religious intolerance. May all witch hunts end forever.

The Late Great Canonization of St. Hildegard of Bingen

On May 10, 2012, Benedict XVI formally recognized Hildegard von Bingen as a saint.

If Hildegard has long been venerated as a saint with her own feast day of September 17, why did it take the Vatican so long to canonize her? Why Hildegard and why now?

The first attempt to canonize Hildegard began in 1233, but failed as over fifty years had passed since her death and most of the witnesses and beneficiaries of her reported miracles were deceased. Her theological writings were deemed too dense and difficult for subsequent generations to understand and soon fell into obscurity, as did her music.

According Barbara Newman, Hildegard was remembered mainly as an apocalyptic prophet. But in the age of Enlightenment, prophets and mystics went out of fashion. Hildegard was dismissed as a hysteric and even her authorship of her own work was disputed. Pundits began to suggest her books had been written by a man.

Newman states that Hildegard’s contemporary rehabilitation and resurgence was due mainly to the tireless efforts of the nuns at Saint Hildegard Abbey. In 1956 Marianne Schrader and Adelgundis Führkötter, OSB, published a carefully documented study that proved the authenticity of Hildegard’s authorship. Their research provides the foundation of all subsequent Hildegard scholarship.

In the 1980s, in the wake of a wider women’s spirituality movement, Hildegard’s star rose as seekers from diverse faith backgrounds embraced her as a foremother and role model. The artist Judy Chicago showcased Hildegard at her iconic feminist Dinner Party installation. Medievalists and theologians rediscovered Hildegard’s writings. New recordings of her sacred music hit the popular charts. The radical Dominican monk Matthew Fox adopted Hildegard as the figurehead of his creation-centered spirituality. Fox’s book Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen remains one of the most accessible and popular books on the 12th century visionary. In 2009, German director Margarethe von Trotta made Hildegard the subject of her luminous film, Vision. And all the while, the sisters at Saint Hildegard Abbey were exerting their quiet pressure on Rome to get Hildegard the official endorsement they believed she deserved.

Pope John Paul II, who had canonized more saints than any previous pontiff, steadfastly ignored Hildegard’s burgeoning cult, possibly because he was repelled by her status as a feminist icon. Ironically it is his successor, Benedict XVI, one of the most conservative popes in recent history—who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, defrocked Matthew Fox—is finally giving Hildegard her due. Reportedly Joseph Ratzinger, a German, has long admired Hildegard.

I, for one, am heartened that Hildegard, the great polymath and powerfrau, is finally receiving this official recognition. Her ethereal music, her philosophy of natural medicine, her transcendent visions, mandala-like illuminations, and her insights on the immanent divine in the natural world have made her icon to people all faith backgrounds. I can only hope her canonization and her upcoming elevation to Doctor of the Church will
allows many more people to be inspired by her life and work.

British Folk Magic & Familiar Spirits

In popular imagination, the figure of a witch is accompanied by her familiar, a black cat. Is there any historical authenticity behind this cliché?

Our ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries believed that magic was real. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in witchcraft and the spirit world—rich and educated people believed in spellcraft just as strongly. Cunning folk were men and women who used charms and herbal cures to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was illegal—sorcery was a hanging offence—but few were arrested. The need for the services they provided was too great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury—your local village healer with her herbal charms was far less likely to kill you.

Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods could turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder.

While witch-hunters were obsessed with extracting “evidence” of a pact between the accused witch and the devil, there’s little if any substantive proof of diabolical worship in Britain in this period. It seemed the black mass was a Continental European concept first popularised in Britain by King James I’ polemic, Daemonologie, a witch-hunter’s handbook and required reading for his magistrates.

In traditional British folk magic, it was not the devil, but the familiar spirit who took centre stage. The familiar was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form. Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, was a cunning woman of long standing repute, arrested on witchcraft charges in the 1612 Pendle witch hunt in Lancashire, England. When interrogated by her magistrate, she made no attempt to conceal her craft. In fact she described in rich detail how her familiar spirit, Tibb, first appeared to her when she was walking past a quarry at twilight. Assuming the guise of a beautiful, golden-haired young man, his coat half black, half brown, he promised to teach her all she needed to know about the ways of magic. When not in human form, he could appear to her as a brown dog or a hare. Her partnership with Tibb would span decades.

Mother Demdike was so forthcoming about her familiar because without one, she, as a cunning woman, would be a fraud. In traditional English folk magic, it seemed that no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their familiar spirit—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Black cats were not the most popular guise for a familiar to take. In fact, familiars were more likely to appear as dogs. In the Salem witch trials of 1692, two canines were put to death as suspected witch familiars.

But the familiar was just as likely to assume human form, generally the opposite gender of their human partner—cunning men usually had female spirits while cunning women usually had male spirits.

Was there a connection between the familiar spirits and the Fairy Faith, the lingering belief in fey folk and elves? Popular belief in fairies in the Early Modern period is well documented. In his 1677 book, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. In 1576, Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, executed for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit had been sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame. For more background on this subject, I highly recommend Emma Wilby’s scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, and Keith Thomas’s social history, Religion and the Decline of Magic.

A Short History of Valentine's Day

The origins of Saint Valentine's Day lie shrouded in obscurity. Saint Valentine himself, a third century Roman martyr, seems to have nothing to do with the romantic traditions that became associated with his feast.

Dr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, cited in The Book of Days, writes:

It was the practice in ancient Rome, during a great part of the month of February, to celebrate the Lupercalia, which were feasts in honour of Pan and Juno. whence the latter deity was named Februata, Februalis, and Februlla. On this occasion, amidst a variety of ceremonies, the names of young women were put into a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The pastors of the early Christian church, who, by every possible means, endeavoured to eradicate the vestiges of pagan superstitions, and chiefly by some commutations of their forms, substituted, in the present instance, the names of particular saints instead of those of the women: and as the festival of the Lupercalia had commenced about the middle of February, they appear to have chosen St. Valentine's Day for celebrating the new feast, because it occurred nearly at the same time.

The first mention of Valentine's Day traditions in England originate from the 14th century writers Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower who both allude to the folk belief that birds choose their mates on the feast of Saint Valentine, their patron.

In Britain, the mating flights of crows, rooks, and ravens can generally be observed by February 14. Here in Lancashire, I notice more and more birdsong each day as February advances and the birds repair their nests, preparing for a new cycle of birth and life.

Around 1440, John Lydgate's poem in honour of Queen Katherine, widow of Henry V, is the first to mention romantic traditions among humans associated with this date:

To look and search Cupid's calendar,
And choose their choice, the great affection.

People of both sexes sent tokens of admiration. You could either send a token to the romantic interest of your choice, or draw lots as to who would receive your Valentine. In 1470s Norfolk, the Paston family seems to have perferred drawing lots rather than sending tokens to a chosen person.

Actual Valentines could be quite costly. In 1523, Sir Henry Willoughby, gentleman of Warwickshire, paid 2S, 3d for his. Unfortunately no description of this costly item remains for us today.

After the Reformation, the feast of Saint Valentine was abolished, and yet the amorous traditions flourished.

By 1641, the system of casting lots for Valentines was so well known in Edinburgh that a wag waggishly proposed their new Lord Chancellor be chosen by the same method.

A Dutch visitor to London in 1663 observed:

it is customary, alike for married and unmarried people, that the first person one meets in the morning, that is, if one if a man, the first woman or girl, becomes one's Valentine. He asks her name which he takes down and carries on a long strip of paper in his hat band, and in the same way the woman or girl wears his name on her bodice; but it is the practice that they meet on the evening before and choose each other for their Valentine, and, come Easter, they send each other gloves, silk stockings, or sometimes a miniature portrait, which the ladies wear to foster the friendship.

In his diaries of the same decade, Samuel Pepys reveals how he would call by a colleague's house early in the day in order to make the man's daughter his Valentine. Pepys would also arrange for a young man to call to pay the same homage to Mrs. Pepys and bring her presents, which Pepys then paid for. One year when Pepys was short of cash, alas, no young man with presents appeared and Mrs. Pepys was quite irate. Eventually they settled on a yearly ritual, whereby Pepys's cousin paid a visit to honour Mrs. Pepys and bring her presents which Pepys knew she desired.

Sources:

The Book of Days

Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain