Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ploughshare

Stuart Bailey, The Cold Horror is Clear, 2024, Danish linen, embroidery thread and embroidered patch, 420 x 295mm

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Ploughshare | Second Wound | 8th November, 2024

Australian Black/Death Metal

Artwork by Necromodernism

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Charm made from a ploughshare, together with a dried bull's penis and human hair.

To cast a spell upon a person's house and family some witches resort to the following practice. At night two witches go to the appointed place, taking with them this plough-share and whip made form a bull's penis and human hair. They strip naked. The one who is to be the horse places the green cord across her shoulders while the ploughwoman puts the white cord around her neck. Then off they go with the iron plough-share swinging in the air between them. It is vital that at no time during the operation the plough-share touch the ground. Throughout the circuit incantations are murmured and the whip of hair applied and other acts not worthy of mention done. From Suffolk."

Cursed places are a mainstay of British folklore and a common occurrence along the highways and byways of England. Witches are often to blame, usually old crones from the sixteenth century, as at Mother Ivey’s Bay in #Cornwall, or at #Sturston in #Norfolk. The aim was usually to ‘blast’ crops or make the ground infertile and if anyone had the impudence to attempt cultivation, the curse would doubtless fall upon the first-born son of the landowner’s family. With land-ownership and residency so tightly bound together, a cursed field also meant a cursed family.

The #curse was elaborate and not without a dash of ‘folk horror’. Two witches, united in their purpose, went to the appointed place in the dead of night and stripped naked. The plough-share was strung between them over the shoulders – the one in the front took the cord with the green fleck, the ‘plough-woman’ brought up the rear holding to the red cord – the ‘iron plough-share swinging in the air between them’. ‘It is vital’ Williamson states, that ‘at no time during the operation the plough-share touch the ground.’ The whip, a shrivelled and dried bovine phallus bound with lustrous hair (certainly a females), was wielded by the ‘plough-woman’ whilst ‘incantations’ were pronounced.

The idea was to circumnavigate the victims’ property, whilst they were sleeping in their beds. The incantation is not recorded but variations of “Not one stone shall stand upon another, and the land shall bear no fruit”, are to be found up and down the country.

Other examples may shed some light on the matter. The famous ‘puddock-plough’ (puddock = a Scottish dialect word meaning frog or toad) was made by the Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie with her coven in the 1660s. Gowdie shackled some ‘puddocks’ to a plough made of a ‘half-gelded’ ram’s horn in order to transfer the “fruit of the land” to the coven and to make “thistles and briars … grow there” instead. A ‘half-gelded’ animal is usually one that has been castrated but which has a lodged or trapped testicle within the abdomen. Following early modern humoral theory, a half-gelded ram will likely be a beast of evil-intention, as its seed, essence or semen is trapped: doomed to waste, pollute and imbalance the blood. A similar belief was held regarding post-menopausal or ‘menstruous’ women – when menstruation ceased the ‘unclean’ blood would instead gush through the body, distorting the spirit and ejecting a ‘venomous breath’ from the witch’s ‘evil eye’.

Importantly, the castrated and humorally polluted ram was chosen to transfer the fertility or ‘fruit’ of the land to the witch; as a result the dried bull’s penis and the cut human hair – both symbols of curtailed fertility – could be interpreted as a means of capturing the spirit force of the land and transferring it to the two women enacting the curse. The broken plough-share dangles ineffectually, broken perhaps, to render it magically efficacious, or to invert the idea of tilth and meaningful toil.

More broadly, the ploughshare indicates a deeper universal belief that the land itself contains energy that can be harnessed and transferred using complex magical rituals and material objects.

#ploughshare #hair #hair magic #magic #witchcraft