âThe idea that associating faeries and Witches with the dead related to an initiatory phase of the faerie encounter makes sense of why faeries are often confused with the dead, and why Witches are relentlessly associated with death. The Witch as poisoner of the well and bringer of disease is much like the apples of the Underworld upon which the Queen of Elphame claims "all the plagues of hell are upon," which could even be taken literally as diseases.
There is a risk in passing through the realm of the dead to get to the Crooked Path, there is a risk of an incomplete initiation that brings back demons of madness and disease instead of healing powers. For this reason many of the motifs of Witchcraft have to do with initiatory death and the Underworld, even though it is as much about the realm of Faerie as it is about the world of the dead. What we see in Witchcraft are images of blackness, skulls, bones, poisons and narcotic ointments, curses, animalistic transformations, cannibalism, perverse sex, and sorcerous tortures. This is all the uninitiated or partly initiated ever get to see. Our faerie light, the cunning fire, is hidden from view, but hidden in plain sight.
Initiation in other shamanic cultures involves things like dismemberment, eating of the flesh and blood by demonic entities and heating and forging symbolism. Eva Pocs talks about the way something was often removed or put in during a Witch's initiation in the Balkans. She says the removal of a bone or even the little finger was required in some parts of Europe. Just as Witches sucked illnesses or fairy darts out in the British Isles so did other Witches remove a bone from the body of an initiate, scratch them and take their blood for a pact or take something else from them that would serve as a relic of their personal power. The procedures of healing and the processes of induction into the cult resonate profoundly, and initiation can be seen as a form of drastic healing.
Things may also be inserted into people's bodies, both by faeries and Witches. You can see in the following charm that way back since the dark ages both faeries and Witches have been linked together in the practice of throwing elf shot or "witch shot" as it was also called.
The tenth century metrical charm âAgainst A Sudden Stitch" (WiĂ fĹrstice) offers remedy against sudden pain (such as rheumatism) caused by projectiles of either ĂŠse [gods], ylfe [elves] or Witches (gif hit weere esa gescot OĂĂE hit wĹre ylfa gescot 0ĂÄÂş hit wĂŚre hĂŚgtessan gescot) âbe it Ăse-shot or elf-shot or witch-shot." This brings to mind the physical ways in which Witches are renowned for putting things in people, such as pins of blackthorn into the heart of a poppet doll. The bewitched were sometimes seen to vomit up pins, and the tangled hair of the one who had hexed them. In this way both for good or ill, Witches and faeries were united in being held responsible for either removing strange body parts like an extra unnoticed bone, or instead inserting magical objects into the body of either a victim or potential initiate. As we have seen, when it comes to the realm of Faerie and humans the only difference between victim and initiate is a strong familiar spirit who acts as a kind of bridge and guide between the worlds.
Eva Pocs gives an account of how death and resurrection experiences were part of becoming known as a woman or man of Faerie. Lady Wilde also spoke how Irish Faerie Doctors often acquired their trade through having spent time in Faerie following abduction. Pocs tells us in her Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe that the living ones, as in people who had not passed through the initiation trauma, were not permitted to gaze upon the Otherworld in Balkan traditions. But the light-shadowed people who were either faerie already, or who had been taken away and "changed" were allowed to know it. The light- shadow was perceived as an aura around the person's head like a halo.
"As far as 'transitory death' and temporary soul journeys are concerned, they, according to several beliefs, mean initiation; if someone has ever looked into that other world,âeg. Has seen the fairies who must not be seen by a living person,âfrom that time on he/she is considered initiated." Or as another account from the area puts it: âThe faeries killed him but revived him, giving him power." ďżź
During these abductions the iele takes out a piece of bone and replaces it with a stake or wheel spoke. One year later in the same location they put back the removed bone. This trope of something being removed or inserted into the body of the initiate is found in many shamanic cultures throughout the world. In some cases the shaman is believe to be in possession of an extra bone that must be counted by the spirits.
These faerie motifs of abduction, initiatory death and repatriation into the community with altered status, and the insertion or removal of body parts and blood are all clues to better understanding how Witchcraft flows forth from the Faerie Faith. Eva Pocs points out the following similarities. Just like faeries:
"The witch, for instance, flies in the form of a crow or a whirl-wind, sits in a swallows nest, where she seems to sometimes be little, sometimes big, and sometimes disappears, she walks on the top of trees as quickly as the wind; or the whole witch company 'transforms into crows and alights on wil- lows'. They travel in green coaches on the top of the trees..."
Of course this close connection between the Faerie Faith and Witches was muddied by persecution of the Craft. The faerie practices were increasingly assimilated into the household and moved away from the wilderness, with Sicilian Fairie Witches going from house to house, rather than out into the forest. Meanwhile Witchcraft was given all of the dangerous Otherwise characteristics, the ones so crucial to initiation that were slowly being stripped from the faerie narrative. In the process the realm of Faerie was losing its teeth and claws, and Witchcraft was being vilified almost out of existence.
All of the negative or dark attributes of the faeries, which were originally part of their primordial ambivalence, were gradually settled on Witches. Cunning practices became strongly associated with Faerie, and Witchcraft with demons, even though originally it is almost impossible to make this distinction in a meaningful way. In this way most forgot that Witches serve with the right hand as surely as they blight with the left, a characteristic shared with the fĂŠes of Brittany. Faeries throw darts and blast crops as surely as they bestow blessings and cure the diseases they cause.
LOnce faeries, and the human practitioners of magic who had faeries for familiars, both shared in those characteristics, including the ones that do mankind good, and those that do mankind ill. Faeries, and the Witchcraft that grows forth from it into the human side of the hedge, carry with them all the plagues and poisons of the Earth, and also the potential inoculation and medicine that affects every cure.
Only those who have passed through the world of the dead are offered access to the Third Path. Only he who has walked that path and come back wearing the virid doublet of Faerie and learned to keep silent, can now come back and eat of the fruit upon which all of the plagues of Hell alight to find the secret of their cure. In the Underworld, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life and Death are the same tree.
Even in Britain where we don't find the bone tak- ing motif and only occasionally see an explicit spiritual death followed by resurrection, we do find the passing of the breath, where a Witch's shadow is able to enter someone else, giving them soul, through the breath and mouth, or illnesses is sucked away with the mouth. Witch teats also allow something to be sucked away as a form of nourishment to the familiar, who also sometimes drank the Witch's blood drops. Familiars were sometimes put in another person by blowing them into someone's mouth and we may conjecture during sexual encounters with faerie beings where vital force was being taken out and inspiration put in.
The relationship between faeries and Witches is as much peppered in the language of consumption and assimilation through eating as it is in sexual ex- pression. Witches and their familiars live off each other, eat of one another. Here do we perhaps find the origins of the "eat of me" theme behind the Housel or Red Meal. Where some Witches consume the body and blood of their Devil and his Dame, just as the Christians consume Jesus Christ.
In this natural religiosity of consumption and mutual nourishment we see the foreshadowing of all such edible sacraments. The spirit world is understood to enjoy blood. As early as the 13th century in Ireland Alice Kyteler sacrificed a black cock at the crossroads to the spirit Robin Artisson, her spirit lover and familiarâhimself a man of Faerie, a dweller at crossroads.
Jeffrey Burton Russell says of Robin Artisson: âAs much like a faerie as a witch's familiar, Robin appeared in a number of shapes, a cat, a shaggy dog or an Ethiopian."
Alice was also said to gamble about on a salve-covered broom (no talk of flying on it only of putting ointment on it mounting it and moving around) so perhaps something was introduced into her body via the salve. Even if the straddling of the broom does not suggest intimate applications of the unguent, flying ointments, regardless of how they are administered are always an herbal formula given to them from outside the hedge, which is put into the body via the pores of the skin.
Another Witchcraft tradition, prominent mainly in Britain that involves taking something out, is the practice of taking blood above the breath. This procedure, where one suspected of bewitching someone was attacked and scratched badly enough to make blood flow, usually above the nose and mouth, was believed to neutralize their power for a time. We can conjecture that the reason has to do with the way power or Virtue is considered to be stored in blood and breath and is connected via an invisible thread to the power of the familiar spirit nourished by these two things. The Witch's power and virtue is expected to leak out in great glut in blood above the breath because so much power lives in the skull. Drawing the blood above the breath can be seen as an attack on the Witchs familiar as well as herself. It is quite illuminating to look closely at the scratching attack on Joan Guppy, whom we have mentioned earlier in relation to Faerie Doctoring.
"They scratched her face with overgrown brambles, saying that Guppy 'was a witch and they came for the blood and they would have it and her life also before ... they left her." Not just blood but "the blood" â witch-blood. This statement is reminiscent of the sweet blood faerie Witches were believed to have in Sicily. We can conjecture that when they say they came for the blood and would have "her life" before they left, what they actually meant was her soul force or magical virtue, as they didn't actually kill her. Witchblood, sweet blood, the power that holds a tenuous thread, like a bridge made of one hair, between this world and the paradise of Elphameâa thread that must cross the abyss of Hell and is like-wise just as capable of unleashing it.â
Chapter 9: âFaerie Doctors and Magiciansâ
