Cunning folk and folk magic

The teaching

As the folk craft of the cunning folk, the charmers and the rootworkers teaches it.

Charms in the old faith's words

Folk magic in Christian Europe spoke the language of the church. Its charms were prayers, scraps of scripture and holy names, often with a little story at their heart: Christ or a saint met a sickness on the road and sent it away, and as it was then, so let it be now. They were said three times and ended with the names of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they were passed down by mouth, often from a woman to a man or a man to a woman, for a charm written down or told to too many was held to lose its power.

The night prayer of many English children was a charm of this kind: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on. The burn charm told of figures who came from the east, one bringing fire and the others frost, and bade the fire go out and the frost come in. Blood charmers in Britain, Ireland and the Appalachians said over a wound the verse of Ezekiel, “And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.” A burn is cooled under running water and a wound pressed, and both go to a doctor; the charms belong to the history of comfort, not of treatment.

The guards of the house

In folk belief iron guards the door. A horseshoe nailed above it, points up in most of England to hold the luck in, is held to turn away witches and fairies, and a knife or open shears under a doorstep or a cradle to do the same. Rowan, the mountain ash, with its red berries, was tied in crosses with red thread and hung over doors and in byres, and an old Scottish rhyme says that rowan and red thread put witches to flight. A stone with a natural hole, the hag stone, was hung in the stable to keep the night hag from riding the horses.

Builders worked guards into houses. Old shoes, worn and shaped by their owners, were hidden in walls and beside chimneys, and marks were cut by doors, windows and hearths: overlapping letters V for the Virgin of virgins, and circles drawn with compasses into six-petalled flowers, the daisy wheels. The witch bottle, a stoneware jar of pins and nails buried under the hearth or the threshold, was meant to turn witchcraft back on its sender, and so it belongs with the darkest work of the craft, the naming of witches.

The cunning folk's trade

The cunning man or wise woman of the village offered a set of services. They found lost and stolen goods; they told fortunes and the names of future husbands; they treated cattle and people with charms and herbs; they wrote charms to be worn; and above all they claimed to undo bewitchment, which meant telling the client whether a witch was at work, and who. That last service was the most sought and the most dangerous, for a name given by a cunning person could end in an accusation.

Their written charms mixed prayers and the names of God with signs copied from printed books of magic, folded into a small packet and worn or kept in the house, and the charm was not to be opened, for whoever read it was held to break it.

Powwow

In Pennsylvania the healing charms of the German settlers, which English speakers called powwow, rest on a small book, The Long Lost Friend. Its charms are Christian prayers said three times in the three highest names, against fire and thieves, for sick cattle and for many complaints of the body. The book itself promises that whoever carries it is safe from enemies seen and unseen and can be neither drowned nor burned: a promise the house records as the book's own.

Hoodoo

Hoodoo, also called conjure or rootwork, is the craft that grew among African Americans in the South from African, Native American and European roots. Its great book is the Bible, above all the Psalms, which are read and prayed for particular needs, the twenty-third and the ninety-first for protection. Its workers are called root doctors or two-headed doctors, and they work with roots, herbs, minerals, candles and the dust of special places, always with prayer.

Its best known tool is the mojo hand, a small bag of red flannel holding roots, herbs, stones or a written petition, tied shut, carried hidden on the body, fed now and then with a drop of whiskey or oil, and never touched by anyone else. For protection the tradition sweeps a house from the back to the front and out of the door, scrubs the front step, and lays red brick dust across the threshold, which no enemy's work is said to cross. The living communities that keep hoodoo teach it; much of it is aimed at love, luck and money, and some at others, and the house describes only its prayers and its guards.

The customs of luck

Folk magic is also a calendar of customs. In much of Britain no one began a journey or a new work on a Friday, spilt salt was thrown over the left shoulder, and a bird in the house foretold a death. The first person over the threshold at the New Year, the first foot, was best a dark-haired man bearing coal, bread and salt, and on May morning girls washed their faces in the dew. Such customs were kept as manners more than as magic, the shared courtesies of a household with its luck.