Animal Crackers:The Folklore of Animals @ SELFS.

Animal Lover! Animal Nitrate! Super Furry Animals! These Animal Men! The Eagles! Fleet Foxes! The Stray Cats! Grizzly Bear! Echo & The Bunnymen! Seal! Adam Ant! The Counting Crows! Bastard Kestrel! Rock Lobster! Who Let The Dogs Out?! Bat Out Of Hell! Funny Little Frog! Hungry Like The Wolf! Dolphins Were Monkeys! I Am The Walrus! Buffalo Soldier! When Doves Cry! This list goes on and on and on and on.

It's not just bands, and their songs, that are obsessed with animals. We all are - and so we should be. They're all around us. They share the planet with us. We keep them as pets. We ride on their backs. We lock them in cages so we can gawp at them. We even eat them, cut them up, and test make up on them. Our relationship with the animal world (of which we seem to regularly forget we are part of) is nothing if not complex.

So it's no surprise whatsoever to find that the folklore of animals is so rich, varied, and, often, downright weird. It was the first SELFS event of 2020 and I'd dragged my gout addled body up to The Old King's Head in London Bridge for it. It wasn't to be something I'd regret. SELFS head honcho George was both curating the evening and giving the talk, The Folklore of Animals, and I arrived early enough to briefly chat with him about future plans.

Next month's talk should be about mermaids (something Sophia Kingshill covered, brilliantly, at the London Fortean Society last May - but well worth a look from another angle), his Is Bowie a God? talk will be heading east to Wanstead, and there's plans afoot for a monthly cult film night at the Balham Bowls Club which, with films Penda's Fen, Nuts in May, Arcadia, and Requiem for a Village being touted for potential screenings, sounds very promising.

If the film nights, and mermaid talk, prove anywhere near as interesting, amusing, and enlightening as The Folklore of Animals was then I (and you) should really try and get along. George began his journey back into animal folklore by stating that there was so much of it that it was going to (a) stick, primarily to Northern European, and specifically British, animal folklore and (b) that he'd, again for the most part, try to focus on some of the lighter, sweeter, and more amusing tales. There's a lot of really dark shit in the world of animal folklore and though it was occasionally skimmed over we never really went there.

Maybe for the best. Cruelty to animals is never fun to hear about. It was probably far more edifying to start with a look at the wall paintings on the Lascaux caves in France's Dordogne region and ask if our ancestors viewed animals the same way we do. Many tribes trace their ancestry from animals and Dawn Urquhart from Shetland Isles, we saw a photo of her taken in 1895, believed that her great great grandmother was a seal. Her great great grandfather had captured her, tamed her, and married her!

It's a fairly fantastical tale but it was hardly exceptional. There's a long held belief that both Gods and mortals could transform into animals in much the same way that eggs can be seen to turn into birds and caterpillars into butterflies. Witches, particularly, were believed to have the power of shape shifting and, in fact, in the Middle Ages, the gap between animals and people was deemed to be so slim that it was not uncommon for animals to be tried in courts of law!

"When an ox gores a man or a woman to death the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be clear" - Exodus 21:28.

The citation from Exodus may not be one of the Bible's nicest verses (although Psalm 137:9 insists "blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks" so it's far from the worst, maybe this hate filled book needs banning?) but it does seem to have provided justification for show trials of animals. At least domesticated animals. Non-domesticated animals like rats and caterpillars were dealt justice in church, rather than law, courts. 

It's not noted if any of the animals employed lawyers to defend them or, indeed, defended themselves but it is a matter of record that the punishment dished out was usually of a capital nature. Some of the crimes were serious. Pigs were tried for murder and in the mid-18c a monastery in France took legal action against a colony of ants that were eating their wheat.

The last recorded English case study was a dog tried in Chichester in 1771. Again, it is not a matter of record as to what attire the accused, and accursed, hound wore for its court appearance but there is an account of a sow, again in France, being dressed in human clothes for its execution.

When humans weren't trying, and executing, animals they were investing them with magical powers that they almost certainly don't have. Dogs and horses were said to use a 'second sight' to see ghosts, in Iceland it was believed that you could talk to hawks by placing their tongue directly beneath yours, and if you wanted to get rid of rats you wrote a letter to St Gertrude of Nivelles (in present day Belgium), the patron saint of cats, gardeners, and rat-catchers. Remembering, of course, to butter it on both sides before sending it. Of course.

With that introduction to the magical, and crazy, world of animal folklore it was time for George to break the talk down into three different categories. Insects, birds, and mammals were all given, roughly, quarter of an hour each and each group had rich, varied, funny, and totally bizarre stories about them. Our six legged friends were up first.

INSECTS:- If the Cornish belief that ants are fairies sounds like the stuff of standard, even dull, folklore then in Scotland they go the extra mile when it comes to ants. There's a belief that deafness can be cured by pouring a mixture of ant's eggs and onion juice into your ear.

"Bees. Bees awake. Your master is dead and a new one you must take" is the song that some in England once believed you should sing to your hive to inform them of a death in the family. Bee folklore, as you may have already gathered, is quite odd. Bretons believed that bees sprang from the tears of Christ as he died on the cross and, on Christmas Day, they would sing sacred hymns.

It was once believed that bees should be fed entire funeral meals but they weren't only treated on gloomy occasions. They were also given slices of wedding cake to bring luck to the newly weds. Because of their religious connotations it was considered unlucky to move your hive on any day except Good Friday and, because of their status, it was considered disrespectful (to the bee) to use any currency except gold to buy bees with.

Butterflies are another group of insects associated with Christ. It is believed their emergence from the cocoon/chrysalis is a representation of Christ's resurrection (although butterflies are cooler because they were once caterpillars, Christ was still a man) but that's pretty much as nice as it gets when it comes to butterfly lore which is a fairly violent and cruel area of study.

Biting off a butterfly's head, apparently, will bring you new clothes! In Sicily, should a butterfly fly in to your house of its own free will you should trap it to bring you good luck. Elsewhere the luck is dependent on the butterfly's colour. A white butterfly represents white bread - and prosperity. A brown butterfly = brown bread and poverty. In Devon, you kill the first butterfly you see each year and in Lincolnshire, you name a butterfly after your enemy and then crush it to death.

Nasty! Ladybirds, or "God's almighty cows" as they've been called, get a better deal. The more spots the ladybird you see has, the more luck is coming your way. All you have to remember is that you should always blow them off (not like that, you filthy muppet) instead of brushing.

There were way more insect folklore stories than I've included but I'll just add the ideas that eating lice (with bread and butter) was once believed to cure jaundice, that moths were once thought to be witches (Yorkshire), and that spiders (who aren't even insects but have, as usual, crawled in uninvited) are believed to be lucky. Especially money spiders. So don't freak out next time you find one in your bath. Feel fortunate.

BIRDS:- It was once thought that barnacle geese ripened and fell from trees like fruit! It was also thought, and this is how they got their name, that they started their lives as barnacles attached to boats and grew into geese! Elsewhere, birds are often associated with death. A crow on your roof means a death in the family, a crow in the churchyard is a sign there will be a funeral soon (quite likely in a churchyard, you'd have thought), the 'seven whistlers' of the Welsh borders warn of impending danger or even the apocalypse, seabirds (in the UK) are believed to be the souls of dead fishermen, and in New England it's believed that if your breathing finds itself in tune with the call of the whip-poor-will then it's a sign that that bird, a kind of nightjar, is coming to take your soul away.

Before people understood the concept of migration, some believed that cuckoos turned into hawks during the winter. When you hear the first call of a cuckoo in summer, however, remember to check inside your shoe. A hair should be deposited there and that hair will be the same colour as the hair of your future true love.

That's a nicer story. As is the one that insists no evil spirit can ever inhabit a dove or that wrens, the kings of birds, were known by the French as 'God's chickens' because they were believed to be in Christ's manger at the time of his birth. But that's about as good as it gets with our avian friends. Magpies were believed to be ridden by witches (just for fun) and to have refused to board Noah's Ark or to even go into mourning following the crucifixion. The heathens! If you see one it is suggested you spit at it and proudly announce "devil, devil, I defy thee". Unless you're in Somerset where carrying an onion about your person should suffice.

The Welsh once held the belief that a magpie over your head was a sign of your future decapitation. Ravens are, if anything, worse. It's believed the raven is one of the forms taken by Satan, it's unlucky to hear a raven croak three times, there's Cornish lore says that King Arthur turned into a raven and, to this day, tours his kingdom checking everything is in order, and it's also been believed that you could make yourself invisible by climbing a tree with a raven's nest in it and killing one of their babies.

You should inform ravens of family births and deaths (obvs) and though their close relations in the corvid family, the rooks, are considered lucky it seems they're only lucky until they leave your 'estate', an event which brings you famine. It is said, of course, that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London that Britain will fall so similar legends have attached themselves to different members of the corvid clan.

My friend Michelle recently told me a story of a person who thought that robins only appeared on Xmas Day! That made me do an actual LOL - as did many of the stories George told at The Folklore of Animals - and it's actually even dafter than the idea that the robin got its red breast from pulling a blood soaked thorn from the body of Christ as he lie dying on the cross.

A robin entering one's house was long considered an omen of death and when they first started appearing on Christmas cards people were concerned about, scared even, of having images of robins indoors. People were also scared of seagulls and it was believed you should neither feed them or look them in the eye in case one should peck your eyes out!

MAMMALS:- It's well known that cats were mummified in ancient Egypt but it was news to me that mice were mummified alongside them to keep them company on their journey in to the spirit world. Cats were so revered in ancient Egypt that it was a capital offence to kill one and there is a medieval tale of the devil attempting to make a man, presumably as a rival to the man made by God, but instead accidentally creating the hairless cat.

St Peter took pity on the bald, and cold, feline and gave it a fur coat. Since then we've long held an ambiguous relationship with our domestic cats and black cats have been attached to some folklore so well known we hardly need cover it here 'cept to say that in the fishing communities of the North East of England black cats were considered so lucky that the price of them became almost prohibitively expensive.

We've talked about cats. So let's talk about dogs. It was believed, in Staffordshire, that to ward off a dog you should take off your left shoe, spit on the sole, and place it upside down. Headless black dogs, obviously, represent the devil but if you were bitten by a dog (presumably one with a head) it was said the best cure was to take a hair from that dog and swallow it.

It's where we get the saying 'hair of the dog' from. Less well known is the idea that when the sun appears and it rains at the same time not only do we get a rainbow but, somewhere, a fox is getting married! It was believed that deer could cry but, because they ate snakes in the summer, venison should be avoided during those months.

The Swiss believed that goats visited the devil to have their beards combed and that if you sleep with a goat horn underneath your pillow, your insomnia will be cured. Conversely, it was held that hares never slept. It was also said that they changed gender annually. Boudica would release one before going into battle, they were shot on Mayday, and ancient Britons employed hares for divination.

On the Isle of Portland in Dorset, rabbits were considered so unlucky that the word was not even used. Instead they'd say 'bunny'. Or 'underground mutton'! When the film The Curse of The Were-Rabbit was shown there the title was changed. For fishermen it was pigs who brought bad luck and on some ships the word 'pig' was banned. On the Island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland they were simply called 'the thing'.

There was a belief that slaughtering a pig would cause you to see the devil and that's one that fits in well with lots of other mammalian myths. Some people thought that seals were drowned people, that rats (when they're not leaving a sinking ship) gnawing on your clothes was a death omen, that moles entering your house meant you'd be on the move soon, and that female mice would lay on their backs while the male mouse stacked food up on her tummy and then pulled her along by her tail like a living food trolley!

Mice, too, have a lot of death related stories surrounding them - as do weasels. Our speaker related his father telling him he stared at a weasel once and had a migraine for three days. Wolves, in Anglo-Saxon times, were often hanged alongside criminals. They were also believed to be afraid of both crabs and shrimps. Werewolves could be identified by their monobrows.

Cows and horses are both rich with lore and mythology. Celts believed in fairy cows (white ones, with red ears) and they are, famously, sacred in the Hindu faith (as I witnessed when visiting India and seeing one coaxed gently out of a pizza restaurant in Goa) and the French believed that cows had lovely breath because they used it to warm Jesus in the manger.

No jokes about French people's breath please! Dairy farmers used to kill hedgehogs on sight as it was believed they suckled on the teats of cow's udders. Cows, and their milk, were valuable. Horses were even more important before the machine age. They were used for transport, agriculture, and defence so it's no surprise they are writ large in the pages of folklore.

It was believed that witches (witches, death, and spitting - these are the three themes we kept returning to) commandeered them to ride on the sabbath and would leave the poor horses covered in sweat. Witch's sweat. The worst kind. Mix a horse's spit with juice squeezed from a live crab and you've got yourself a cure for a sore throat.

During the sections on insects, birds, and mammals (but not fish - why not fish?) our speaker also managed to touch on lycanthropy, sympathetic magic, the folk song collector AL 'Bert' Lloyd, the Padstow Obby Oss (a Mayday tradition that was briefly mentioned by Lisa Knapp at SELFS last year), the Egyptian cat goddess Bast, M.C. Escher's drawing of an ant, and James I of England (James VI of Scotland) who, due to his 1597 'philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy' - Damenologie, was mooted as a potential subject for a future talk.

H.P. Lovecraft, Vinegar Tom, Pyewacket, and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, also all appeared either in brief digressions or as illustrations in what was, as ever, a fascinating, funny, and informative evening. I even asked a question.

Frogs had been the outlier of the talk (both the texture of their skin and the location of frogspawn in a pond have been used in weather divination, whooping cough can be cured by placing a live frog in the sufferer's mouth, and to have one in your house is unlucky but to meet one while out wandering is a sign of good fortune) but there had been no time for any other amphibians and reptiles, even snakes, barely merited a mention.

As I expected, this was simply due to time constraints and, as it happened, I'd learned enough for one evening about the folklore of animals. If I want to learn even more then next month nearby Southwark Cathedral is holding a conference, with songs, about cats. But, for now, I decided to forgo one for the road in the nearby King's Arms with the friends I'm gradually making at these events and head home to sleep and, hopefully, dream of mad, magical, and mystical animals.

Thanks to Clare, Tim, David, and Paula (my Fortean and SELFS friends) and thanks to George, once again, for an excellent, excellent talk. I'm already looking forward to the next one and no amount of crows, rats, robins, or mice will keep me away from it. Although a return of gout might.