The Old Magic of Christmas Read online

  Craft: White Witch Window Star

  My little origami kitchen witch who flits around the house on a toothpick broomstick began life as the point of this star—hence the name of the following craft. To the trained eye, this star looks like a coven of eight white-cloaked witches gathered around a blossoming bonfire. To the untrained eye—your neighbor’s, say—it’s a simple winter decoration. Translucent paper window stars are a Christmas tradition in Germany and the Netherlands. The possible folding patterns are endless.

  Tools and materials:

  Scissors

  Glue

  2 sheets white origami paper 57⁄8 inches square, each cut into quarters

  Clear tape

  Take the first of your eight small squares of paper and fold it in half into a triangle. Fold in half again, then unfold all the way. You now have a cross to mark your center point (figure 1.1).

  White witch window star, figure 1.1

  Fold points A and B in to the center point as in figure 1.2.

  White witch window star, figure 1.2

  Fold points C and D in to the center line. Here is your little witch, waiting to warm her hands at the fire (figure 1.3).

  White witch window star, figure 1.3

  Repeat all steps with the remaining seven squares of paper. Assemble by gluing each point (or “witch”) half-overlapping the previous one (figure 1.4). A dab of glue is all you need.

  White witch window star, figure 1.4

  When you have glued all the points (figure 1.5), and the glue is dry, press your star under a heavy grimoire for a day or two. Put a tiny roll of clear tape in the center of the star to stick it to the window.

  White witch window star, figure 1.5

  [contents]

  CHAPTER TWO

  At Home with the Elves

  Because the world of the elves is closely bound up with our own, it is in our own best interests to stay on the good side of these mysterious creatures. In the old days, this might mean the pouring of milk, blood, and even gifts of gold and silver into their earthen houses. Nowadays, it can be as simple as showing kindness and respect to a stranger, because you just never know. The elves in this chapter have no interest in making toys (or becoming dentists), nor are they particularly small. They have, however, always been a part of Christmas, even if their feast was originally held in October.

  “What’s with the Elves?”

  We know that the feast of the elves was called Álfablót, or “Elf Sacrifice,” and we know that it took place in southwestern Sweden, but we do not know exactly what took place. In fact, we know almost nothing about Álfablót, and that is the fault of a rather ill-tempered old farm wife who lived in the settlement of Hov in the year 1017. But before we take her to task, we must answer a question: who exactly are the elves?

  “Hvat er med alfom?” or “What’s with the elves?”2 asks the prophetess in the Old Norse poem Völuspá. You may be asking the same question, for it is not yet December, and the battered rinds of the neighbors’ jack-o’-lanterns are still moldering at the curb while the Thanksgiving turkey cools its heels in the freezer. Hvat er med alfom? indeed. The ancient Scandinavians regarded the Álfar as a distinct class of beings, though there was some fluidity among the bloodlines of elves, gods, norns, and even humans. Thirteenth-century Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson offers us not one race of elves but two. Light elves, whom Sturluson likens to the sun, lived in Álfheim, or “elf home,” which was located somewhere in the heavens. The dark elves, who were “blacker than pitch,” dwelt deep inside the earth.

  From earliest times, or the Bronze Age at least, elves were associated with the sun. In Sweden, cup-shaped depressions can be found in rocks bearing carvings of what we presume to be sun wheels. These stone cups held offerings of milk, which rural Swedes continued to pour out for the elves into the twentieth century. An Old Norse kenning for the sun itself is álfröðull, or “glory of the elves.” The elves’ role as intermediaries between mortals and the life-giving sun helps to explain their shining aspect.

  The highly literate Snorri Sturluson divided the elves neatly into light and dark, but this does not mean they were so divided throughout the Nordic world, or that every peasant who sought practical help from the elves was aware of such a division. The elves might have shone like the sun, but they were also very much of the earth. Because they were believed to be physically present in the landscape, they were often of more immediate importance to the farmer than were the mighty gods. It is possible that propitiation of the elves preceded worship of the gods, just as it has long outlived it in the general population, for the story of the elves does not end with Ragnarök, the fiery demise of the Old Norse worldview.

  “Will You Know More?”

  “Vitod er enn?” the Völuspá prophetess goes on to ask as she describes the end of that world. While many of the chieftains and kings of northern Europe were able to trade in Odin for Christ without much thought, the tillers of the soil had been working on their relationship with the elves for thousands of years and they were not about to give them up so easily. Rather than let the elves go, they resettled them within a Christian cosmology. In this new world, the elves were semi-fallen angels. When Lucifer rose up against God, the elves, or fairies, failed to choose sides and so they were not cast all the way down but were doomed to haunt the wild places of the earth until Judgment Day. The idea that these creatures of light reached their state because of the actions of the Angel of Light fit neatly with the old beliefs.

  Another, rather more amusing theory has to do with an unexpected visit God paid to Adam and Eve long after they had been expelled from the Garden of Eden and set up house for themselves. By this time, they had so many children that Eve couldn’t keep them all properly bathed, so she presented to God only the ones who had just come out of the tub. When God asked to see the rest of the children, Eve denied that there were any, having sent the filthy ones to hide in the backyard. (She had apparently not learned her lesson about lying to an omniscient deity.) God declared that those children whom Eve had hidden from him would remain hidden from all mankind. The descendants of these grubby children are the Hidden Folk, as they are known in Iceland to this day.

  Of course, not everyone is satisfied with such apocryphal explanations. From the early to mid-twentieth century, it was fashionable to identify the elves and fairies as Europe’s first settlers. In his 1955 book Witchcraft Today, original Wiccan Gerald Gardner equated them with the Picts and other tribes whose desire to keep the Old Ways in the face of Christianity sent them scurrying to the furthermost reaches of the Celtic realm, to the barren mountaintops and to dark holes in the hills where they could continue to practice their own brand of earthy magic. Already a small race compared to the Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons, their children were made smaller still by the deprivations of a life in hiding. These aboriginal “pixies,” a corruption of “Picts” as Gardner would have it, kept very much to themselves, stealing out only at night to pinch butter, milk, and the occasional cow from their more agriculturally advanced neighbors. In between times, they occupied themselves with their ancient rituals and with making stone arrowheads tipped with poison, or “elf-shot.”

  What did these pixies look like? No doubt their hair was knotted into “elf locks” for want of a good combmaker, and at one time it was common knowledge that they were red-haired. In Washford Market, Somerset, they were also thought to be cross-eyed and to have “pointed ears, short faces, and turned-up noses.”3 The observation that redheads could pop up unpredictably in otherwise blond or dark-haired families may have had to do with this belief. Rather than attribute such children’s coloring to a recessive gene or to the milkman, parents might regard them as changelings—the cast-off progeny of the pixies.

  We know from the Romans that the Picts brushed themselves with a blue paint that may have been mineral-derived, though the more popular exp
lanation is that it was derived from indigo extracted from the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria).4 According to Gardner, when they wanted to go unnoticed, they mixed this blue colorant with a dye made from the yellow-flowered weld (Reseda luteola), the result being a whole race of tiny men and women roaming the moors in varying shades of blue and Lincoln green, the latter eventually becoming the national color of Faerie.

  Like their Neolithic ancestors, these beleaguered but colorful “little people” maintained homes of dry-stone construction half sunk in the earth; perhaps even elaborate complexes of them as can be seen at Skara Brae in the far north of Scotland. Since the whole house was covered in grass or heather, it would have looked to the casual eye like a natural feature of the landscape. If one of the “big people” happened to be passing by on a winter’s night and witness the opening of a well-concealed door, he could not have failed to notice the blaze of hearth light staining the snow as it does at the doors of elvish abodes in so many folktales of northwestern Europe. There would have to have been smoke holes in those hollow hills through which the scents of the bracken fire and roasted shrew could have escaped, but these details are seldom present in the folklore. Gardner insists that most of the coming and going would have been through those primitive chimneys, which only added to the pixies’ exoticism in the eyes of their neighbors.

  Unfortunately, this Gardnerian version of elvish origins probably has a lot more romance in it than truth. Instead, Gardner’s concept of the “mighty dead” might give us a better idea of who the elves really are. The mighty dead are the spirits of magical practitioners—“witches,” if you will—who, through a series of reincarnations, have honed their skills to the point where they, in death, have become objects of worship or at least consultation.

  The elves were certainly revered, but one would hesitate to call them mighty. Especially in the Scandinavian folktales that were first recorded in the nineteenth century by roving ethnographers inspired by the Brothers Grimm, the elves appear to carry on lives that parallel those of their human neighbors. They move their cattle from one pasture to another and spread their hay to dry in the sun. They cook, clean, and concern themselves with the welfare of their children. They even attend their own church services, though they appear not to have undergone either Reformation or Counter-Reformation, even in those countries where the humans were staunchly Protestant. Often, the elves are possessed of an unearthly beauty, but just as often they appear as ordinary people, albeit in quaint dress.

  If the elves resemble us, it is because they are us, or, rather, they were. The human who stumbles upon a procession of elves or an impromptu elvish feast is often startled to recognize someone he knows among them: someone who has died either recently or years before. Often, this dead acquaintance advises the human witness how to safely leave the party, the standard precaution being not to touch the food. The elves, then, are the dead—not the quietly resting dead but those who, for whatever reason, have taken up new lives on the other side of the veil and at times, either knowingly or unknowingly, might come strolling back through it.

  Among these elves are the long-dead who speak a language the barest traces of which are remembered in the names of hillocks that used to be mountains, or of rivers that have long ago changed course. The bones of these people have become fully incorporated into the soil, yet still they rattle about the landscape on their elvish business. They no longer remember any other kind of existence and may be only dimly aware of developments since their passing. They are troubled by the tolling of church bells and might be scalded by the dripping of holy water into their homes, not to mention the seeping of car exhaust, for these things belong to a world they no longer do.

  The more recently dead, in their petticoats and high-crowned hats, have crossed over just long enough ago not to notice anything strange about the banquet, how the candles blaze but never burn down, how the platters of cakes are never diminished. But the sweetheart who was put in the churchyard just last week has not yet been fully absorbed into the company of elves. She can still remember who belongs on which side of the divide and will do what she can to prevent her living loved ones from being taken up prematurely by the dead.

  An Offering to the Elves

  It is time now to join Sigvat5 the Scald, or court poet, on a journey he has undertaken through southwestern Sweden on behalf of the Norwegian King Olav. It is the “beginning of winter.” Since this is the Viking Age, in which the year was divided into a summer and a winter half, this puts us somewhere around the time of our Halloween. No doubt snow has already fallen on the forest of Eidaskog, though the river is not yet frozen. Sigvat and his small party of king’s men are cold, footsore, and probably hungry to boot. Darkness is falling as they emerge from the woods at Hov. In search of beds or at least a pile of straw for the night, they approach the first farm they see, but the door is barred. As Sigvat attempts to stick his nose in the crack, it is explained to him by those within that he has arrived at a holy time, that the space inside is already consecrated and he may not enter. Since this is no church but a farmhouse, Sigvat, an Icelandic Christian, assumes correctly that it is a heathen observance. He curses the farmer, either for his lack of hospitality or his backward ways or both, and goes on his way.

  Scald and king’s men continue to the next farmyard, where they are again turned away, this time by an old woman who calls Sigvat a “wretch” and informs him that “they are holding an offering to the elves.” Her use of the third person suggests she may be a servant sent by the family to get rid of the unwanted visitors. We can only wish she had opened the door, for the compulsive versifier Sigvat would surely have left us a detailed, if biased, description of the ceremony had he been allowed inside to witness it. As it is, we can only wonder. How was the family dressed? In workaday clothes or in special garments reserved for the occasion? Did lights burn within? How was the table laid, or was all the action going on in the enclosed courtyard?

  We cannot lay all of the blame at the feet of the “old hag,” as Sigvat calls her, for Sigvat’s behavior is just as intolerable. Though an Icelander and a Christian, Sigvat is presumably of Norwegian descent. He should therefore have been familiar with the Dísablót, or “sacrifice to the dísir,” which his own heathen grandparents and possibly even parents would have celebrated at “winter-nights” at the same time of year. The Dísablót took place before an altar dedicated to the dísir, ancestral female spirits who are the precursors of our fairy godmothers and a few of our witches, too.

  There is a lot of overlap between the dísir and the norns who sat spinning among the roots of the World Tree. Like the dísir, the norns occasionally made house calls but all in all were considered to be more aloof than the dísir. Sometimes the dísir behaved more like bloodthirsty valkyries than fairy godmothers, and, in fact, the Dísablót altar was reddened with blood, though we are not sure whose. In the Saga of Hervor and King Heidrek, the Dísablót is presided over by one Princess Álfhild of Álfheim, so it is possible that the Álfablót and Dísablót were precisely the same thing. Had Sigvat shown a little respect for the traditions of Hov, he might have been allowed to slip quietly inside and take part in the feast.

  He might even have been asked to play his harp, if harp he had, and if his fingers were not too stiff with cold, for it was not unheard of for a Christian to join in heathen rituals in times of need. In the Saga of Erik the Red, Sigvat’s fellow Icelander, Gudrid, now a Christian, is persuaded to assist the prophetess Thorbjorg by chanting the magical formulae she had learned as a child. Unfortunately, there was no such syncretism that evening in Hov, and Sigvat is turned away by four more bonders before he gives up his search for hospitality. When he finally arrives at his ultimate destination, the hall of Ragnvald the Jarl, he is rewarded with a gold ring and sympathy, so you really can’t feel sorry for Sigvat.

  Was the Álfablót unique to that district of Sweden? The only other reference we have to a sacrifice made to the elves occ
urs in Kormak’s Saga. Here, a witch directs the wounded Thorvald to invoke the healing power of the elves by pouring bull’s blood on a nearby elf mound and making a feast of the meat for the elves dwelling within. Could the Hovians have been sacrificing something more precious than livestock? Human sacrifice was certainly not unknown at this time in this part of the world, but had that been the case, then surely the farm folk would have dissembled in front of the Christian Sigvat, pleading sickness in the house rather than announcing the occasion of a sacrifice. And whereas a portion of the livestock had to be slaughtered at the onset of winter anyway, humans were valuable members of the workforce and not to be dispatched lightly.

  So why the secrecy? The celebrants may have been in the process of inducing a trance state in one or more of the family members or even of a visiting prophetess like Thorbjorg. The speaking of prophecies serves as the highlight of several feasts in the Old Norse sagas. Much work went into preparing both the speaker and the space, so if this were the case, it is no wonder the old woman was short with Sigvat. She would have been eager to learn what the future held for her and therefore anxious not to break the spells that had been woven about the scrying platform.