Wisewomen III: Diviners and Weather-Witches
Along with more examples of folk healing methods
Continuing on from Wisewomen II accounts of Scotswomen “meiting the belt” and German messerinen (“measurers”), whose healing practices involved measuring a person with a belt or cord or even a long altar candle. “Taking the measure” of someone connects with their personal life-force, while what is used to measure (a strip of bark or a thong that had been wrapped around an icon or a stone) conferred vitality.
The Letts cured headache by measuring the person around the head several times with the inner bark of the linden tree, then having them crawl through it. [Grimm, 1165-69] Hungarian wisewomen used “measuring” to detect if a sprain or spell caused a child pain. [Dömötör] This animist custom even appears in the Bible, where Elijah and Elisha restore life to a dead child by measuring themselves over him.
Christians measured their limbs with the candles when passing them up to the altar. Sometimes the candles had very long wicks that could be wrapped around a person’s body. [I’ve misplaced the French source that describes this custom.] Pregnant women measured wicks to the length of a saint’s image and tied it around their bellies. [Grimm,1164]
In Ireland, a belt was wound around a 13th century statue of St. Gobnait, which people would use in healing. [via Mary Condren] The Moylough belt-shrine was a kind of reliquary belt dating back to the 8th century. Its elaborately worked metal overlays are thought to have contained the belt of some unknown saint for use in healing. Karen Overbey explains the idea behind its use: “when saints' belt...circled the bodies of supplicants, those bodies occupied the space of the saint's body.” [Citation at link]
The Poles undertook divination to clarify the nature and cure of an illness. When the “white folk” afflict a sick person, the family makes up a bed of pea-straw and put the patient on it, and then someone with a sieve full of ashes walks around so that the ashes fall on the floor around the bed. In the morning “they count all the lines in the ashes and some one goes silently, greeting no one on the way, and reports the same to the wise woman, who prescribes accordingly.” [Grimm, 1165]
In many countries, children and animals were passed thru hollows of earth or stone or tree-clefts in order to heal them. Trees that grew with looped, contorted boughs were widely seen as having special potency. Swedes called these “elf-bores”; women in labor went through them, as magical portals. The sick crawled through them, as they did the oak near Wittstock in the Altmark. It was surrounded by crutches tossed away by people who had been healed. [Grimm, 1167]
Hungarians also passed children between branches of a forked tree—or thru a giant pretzel baked for this purpose, doubtless ritually prepared with incantations. Various rituals were performed to bless and protect mothers and children. A suckling mother and child were protected against evil influences by sleeping under a tented sheet, called “bed of the Happy Woman.” (Boldogasszony, “happy woman” or “blessed lady,” is an old Hungarian title of the goddess of the sun, fertility and birth; she became syncretized with the Madonna over centuries of christianization). It was customary to rename a sick child so that evil spirits would not take it; or the child was “sold” and passed out through the window, to fool the spirits. Less felicitous was the diabolist custom of licking infants’ eyes and then spitting, to get out the ‘devil.’ [Dömötör, 161]
Church and state acted in concert to repress ritual and ecstatic healers on charges of invoking demons, or curing with the devil’s help. In 1470 a Viennese woman who practiced medicine was made to confess that she had been “deceived by the devil.” [Green, 57, n. 51] Through the 1500s, torture-trials forced Italian and Swiss healers to say the same thing, while German cities passed laws prohibiting medical practice by “women and other untrained people.” [Green, 52, n. 39] English wisewomen were already among those being hanged for witchcraft. [Horsley, 183, citing a 1911 study by Wallace Notestein.]
Medicine was becoming a male-dominated field, its borders patrolled by bishops, magistrates, inquisitors and assorted secular judges. Even in areas where women could still legally practice—now being made contingent on their training under the male system and authorization by it—ordinances limited who they could treat and whether they could receive payment, as in the English case. Italian women often received licenses with the stipulation that they treat only women, “for reasons of propriety...” [Green, 61] But male doctors surmounted the barriers of propriety by hiring female helpers, under their control.
As women’s professional territory shrank, “women practitioners were gradually being restricted to a role as subordinate and controlled assistants in matters where, because of socially constructed notions of propriety, men could not practice alone.” [Green, 77] The last limits broke down when doctors stormed the final female citadel, midwifery. Meanwhile male pharmacists displaced the herbalist “old wives.” Artists show them supervising female workers who processed the raw plants.
Still, in a world accustomed to consulting female practitioners (and valuing their results more highly, as the Spanish writer Ciruelo emphasized), the male arrogation of medical practice required ideological props. Monica Green points out that doctors developed “a rhetoric about the ignorance of midwives and other women practitioners.” [Green, 76] The language they used to impugn women healers—superstitious, ignorant, unlettered—proved effective in suppressing folk healers, in Europe and in its colonies. But it prevailed because male authorities criminalized the women healers with fines and other punishments—up to the stake as we have seen. People did not easily give up on healers whose treatments worked.
DIVINERS
Upon a tale she heard a weird-wife tell / That thro’ the cuintray telling fortunes yeed.
—Scottish poem “Helenore” by A. Ross, 1768 [Scottish National Dictionary, 109]
The Gaelic expression an da shealladh referred to “second sight,” (“the two views,” or “second glance”) the power of seeing beyond time and space. [Campbell w/c 2S] This precognitive foresight was also called “the knowledge of the raven’s head” [Wood-Martin, 1902: 278] Colleen Harrington-Wood recounts, “I don’t know the language but people used this term when speaking about my paternal grandmother. She was born in Mayo. Sadly, she passed on before I was born. All who knew her said she had “the gift” or second sight. My Dad says she rarely spoke about it but helped many people. The family believed it was because she was born with “the veil” or full covering her face when she was born.” [People born with the caul (covered by the placenta) were expected to have extraordinary powers in many parts of the world).
In Plattdeutsch, people called psychics vorkieker, “forward-peekers.” Children born with a caul over their head were thought to have the power to see spirits, ghosts and witches. Powers of divination and healing were hereditary in some German families. Grimm quoted a woman soothsayer who said that the power had been in her family for a long time, and would pass to her oldest daughter when she died. Some families were reputed to possess clairvoyance of events like deaths or fires. [Grimm, 1107]
Other soothsayers were called traumscheider. [Grimm, 1145] Anglo-Saxons spoke of swefn reccan, “to interpret a dream,” and the Old Norse, draum ratha, “dream advisor.” An old German source has “a wonderfully old woman unravels the dream.” [Walth. 95, 8, in Grimm, 1039: “ein wunderaltes wip bescheidet den troum.’]
Drawing omens was universally practiced among Europeans. Sightings and meetings and sudden cries of animals were interpreted according to long-held traditions. In Church Latina and old German these were called superventa (“what floats or blows above”) and angang or aneganc: “what comes upon one.” [Grimm, 1119] The Gesellensprüche gives examples of angang: seeing frogs in a pool, ravens, the three old women, the maiden with the goat. [Grimm, 1123]
Meanings could be drawn from animals or people crossing the path at high tides of power, for example on May Eve / Bealtaine. Norwegians took it as a good sign to meet a bear. [Grimm, 1127] To be folowed by the raven’s fylgja (spirit form) is a sign of victory in[Nialssaga; another is the howling of a wolf under ashboughs. Omens were drawn from the flight of crows, or if they stood on the right or left foot, cried out or keeping silent—all these turn up in legends and in troubadour songs. [Grimm, 1123-32] Swallows and storks were seen as birds of luck. They were also seasonal omens: people watched for the first swallows as a sign of spring.
It was customary to listen by night in the fields of growing grain to hear the spirits talk among themselves about things to come. The pagan holy days were usually the preferred occasion for these divinations. People went into the fields of green grain on May Eve, or into the winter-crop on Christmas night to overhear the future. Others sat on the roof at New Years, wearing a sword, or listened at crossroads for the voices of spirits lingering there. [Grimm, 1115]
People poured molten lead into cold water on new years eve; the shapes it formed gave rise to prognostications about coming events. Similar customs were practiced in the Mediterranean and in the Arab world up to present times, though the divination is typically preceded by a rite to banish malign energies. Often this involves heating lead and pouring it into a bowl over the person’s head; it hits the water with a crack and a puff of (toxic) smoke. Then the shape formed by the lead is examined for omens.
In the Scottish highlands, young women divined who they would marry by sowing hemp seed over nine ridges of plow land on Halloween. While strewing the seed, the diviner repeated these words: “I sow hemp seed, and he who is to be my husband, let him come and harrow it.” As she looked back, she was supposed to glimpse the man’s spirit form. [Frazer] Elsewhere, they divined their future mates by floating nutshells marked with names in a bowl of fresh water. [Grimm, 1118]
Scots resorted to the gara howl, a megalithic holed rock, for divination. Women baked cakes there and left them as offerings on the summit; if they disappeared, it was an omen of recovery for the sick. One story tells of a man who came to the gara howl for an answer, but could get nothing from it but “go to Epack.” The villagers told him that Epack was a wise woman on the Mulbuie in the Black Isle. He went to see her, and she answered his question correctly. [Folk Belief in NE Scotland? check notes]
Another prophetic witch was Bessie Skebister “who had the power of informing fisherman and their wives whether any of their boats was in danger or not....” She predicted when the fishing boats would return. It was commonly said on Orkney island: “Giff Bessie say it is weill it is weill.” Nevertheless the weathr seeress was tried as a witch in 1633. James Sandieson accused her of riding him, with a bridle in his mouth, through the skies to Norway and Zetland. And Margaret Mudie blamed her for a sickness that occurred after her cow wandered into Bessie’s grainfield. The wisewoman ended up strangled and burned. [FLS, 264, citing Fergusson]
From ancient times, Europeans performed many kinds of divination using sieves. “Sieve-turning” was very popular in France and Germany from 1500 to 1700, judging from its mention in many books (also described as sieve-driving, sieve-running, sieve-chasing, or sieve-dance). The diviner suspended a sieve in various ways, often dangling it from a pair of scissors, while calling out names (of would-be lovers or suspected thieves or assailants) until the sieve spun or turned or fell.
Sometimes the diviner spoke a spell over the sieve as the she held it between two middle fingers and watched for it to spin or tilt over as she spoke names. In one German form of sieve-running, both a sieve and scissors were used, which must be inherited from kin. [Grimm, 1108-9] Italian bishops attempted to stamp out the practice of using sieves for divination [fatto l’esperimento del ‘setaccio’]. [Romeo, 193]
A Hungarian divination with beans, called babvetés or bobolás, was also performed on sieves. Vilmos Diószegi linked the “bean game” to sorcery of the ancient Magyars. The diviner places a certain number of beans, usually 41, on the outside of a sieve. She shakes or nudges its wide wooden hoop in deep concentration. She divides the beans into three random groups, removing four at a time until each group has four or less beans. These she places in a horizontal row. Then she recombines those taken out and begins again to get a second horizontal row, then a third. The way these three rows fell out generated her interpretation, according to principles that may now be lost. (The randomization method resembles the separating and counting out of yarrow stalks in I Ching divination.)
This divination was also known to the Rumanians and other southern Slavs, and to the Romany, but only in the Magyar babvetés was the sieve called a “drum.” The Hungarians used sieves the size and shape of a frame drum, a legacy of their Ugrian ancestors. They performed this divination on drums until medieval repression made it too dangerous to possess the instruments. Then they substituted sieves. “Practiced equally by men and by women, the method was used not only to acquire knowledge of the future but also to ascertain the whereabouts of animals that had strayed. It figures also in witch trials from 1734 onwards.” [Vilmos Diószegi, in Dömötör, 205] The Romany performed similar divinations using seeds on their tambourines. [Leland, 80] (Mongolian udagan performed similar divinations with their drums.) Rostaforgatás, “turning the bolter-sieve,” was another method of divination, sometimes used to discover the identity of thieves and troublemakers. [Dömötör, 204-5]
Diviners risked being tried for witchcraft in Franche-Comte (eastern France). In 1608 a diviner was put into the stocks, then banished after continuing to defy the priest’s orders to stop. [Monter, circa 170-75]
WEATHER WITCHES
Folk wisdom identified certain omens that forecasted the weather. The best-known is the Imbolc/Candlemas tradition (secularized in the US as Groundhog’s Day). In a Germanic version, if a bear emerges from its cave on Candlemas day and can see its own shadow, it creeps back in for a longer winter. But if it’s foggy, spring’s coming soon. [Grimm, 198] Germans had a saying that when the beaver builds high, the water will run high that year [Grimm, 1457]
Old women prognosticated the coming winter’s weather from the color of the breastbones of geese or other waterbirds: if red, then cold weather was expected, if white or transparent, then it would be mild: “...well can many an ancient dame...tell by the hue infallibly, how keen the winter’s cold shall be.” [Ganskonig by Lycosthenes Pesellinioros (Wolfgang Spangenberg), Strasbourg 1607, in Grimm, 1114]
In 1382 the count of Kyburg, Switzerland, secretly sent for a witch to help him disperse an enemy army surrounding his castle. She stood on the battlements and spoke her spells, bringing up rainclouds and a great storm that scattered the attackers. [Grimm, 1087] As late as 1563, the king of Sweden employed four witches for their weather-making powers in his war with Denmark. [Robbins, 487]
The Basques warded off hail and lightning with magical gestures and formulas. In the village of Ipiñizar they hold Uztai-Bedar, “rainbow herb,” in the palm of the left hand and with the right, direct the storm on the course they want it to follow. This prevents hail from falling on the area. Certain people with the gift of weather-making know how to use traditional verses and to change the course of rainfall or hail with movements of their hands. The goddess Mari, who controls storms, lightning, wind and rain, confers this ability. [Barandiaran, find cite]
Magical remedies are recommended to protect less skilled members of the community. Basque households took the precaution of placing an axe or sickle in the doorway, blade up, to prevent lightning from striking. Ancient stone axes, linked to lightning in popular tradition from Spain to Scotland, provided the best protection.
Germans called witches wettermacherin, wetterhexe, wetterkatze, donnerkatze, zessenmacherin (weather-maker or -witch, thunder-cat, storm-maker) and other similar names. When it snows, “the old wives are shaking their coats out.” Weter-kiesœre (”weather-chooser”) eventually became a surname. These powers became demonized, with claims that weather witches whipped the streams with their brooms, threw sand into the sunset, shot water into the air to cause storms and hail. They were said to skim off dew from others’ fields, taking the life-force out of them for their own crops. Or they accusing of boiling oak leaves to strew over the fields, causing winds to come up, or to hang them in a branch wrapped in a man’s shirt. [Grimm, 1073; 1088]
New refinements of witch-hating were invented as the persecutions expanded and the reasoning behind them became more incredible. It was not enough to blame frost and storms and plague on secret destroyers, swarms of vermin must be laid at the door too. A Dutch delusion held that mouse-makers fling earth pellets into the fields, filled with mice, or use magic herbs to brew up mice, which then leap out of the pot. In a Bavarian version, they make mouse-images out of napkins; when these were held over a four-legged instrument with special spells, they turned into live mice. [Grimm, 1090]
In the 1500s, many writers mentioned weather-witches who sold magical knots for sailors. Thomas Nash praised the witches of Ireland and Denmark for their wind-raising powers. Scotland had its own celebrated women weather-witches, some of whom knotted red threads with incantations. Others raised wind by striking a stone, a method also known to Papuans. [MacPherson]
German sources mention a woman on the Schlei who mastered wind-knots, as also a witch of Föhr. A maiden in a Lapland epic knows how to make three kinds of magical knots. [Grimm, 1473-74] In 1555 Olaus Magnus wrote of the Lapps (”Finlanders”) that they—”amongst their other errors of gentilisme [paganism]”—bound the winds in thrice-knotted cords. Giles Fletcher [1588], Peder Clausson Friis [1545-1614], Richard Eden [1555], and Knud Leems [1767] all wrote about the wind-making knotted cords of Saami noaidi, both women and men. Manx women were also famous for this art, according to another 16th century source:
Great was the practice formerly of spells and sorceries in this island; for there used to be there women making wind for sailors, which wind they confined within three knots made on a thread. And when they had need of wind they would undo a knot of the thread. [Rhys]
Legends on the Shetland Islands told of witches who stopped pirates from raiding villages. In one village, sea-raiders carried off all the poultry and promised to return for the cattle. Desperate, the headmen went to an old witch for help. She told them to have people secure their boats and bind up their corn. That night a tremendous storm blew in, sinking the pirate ship.
Another old “wise-wife” came to Nort-hus when pirates were sighted offshore, readying for the attack. She offered to lift the Stakka-Baa, a sunken rock, and sink their ship if the villagers gave her a choice piece of beef from the cow they were roasting. It was agreed. She sat at the bottom of a staircase, chanting her spells. After while she moved slowly up to the next step, and the sea rock raised a little too. She kept moving herself up the stairs and chanting the rock up to the water’s surface. At last the ship struck the rock and capsized. [Folk Lore Society, 155]
As an old Scottish wisewoman told a modern folklorist, “The sea is the greatest witch in all the world.” [Gentleman’s Magazine, 1882: 365, in Folk Lore Society, 168]
This concludes the Wisewomen chapter. As before, bibliographic citations will be added upon completion of The Terror, Vol XIV in the Secret History of the Witches series. (I’ll track down which of the many Folklore Society volumes is cited. But the Hungarian source is Tekla Dömötör, Hungarian Folk Beliefs, 1981)
Also: more on the healers, herbalists, and diviners appears in Vol XII, Female Spheres of Power; in Vol VII, Witches and Pagans; and other volumes.
Fantastic information! Thank you, Max, as always!