Sumerian ghosts, Giant Colin, devil's oatmeal, and the Jung tradition:Journeys Across the Haunted Landscape.

Two Saturdays ago I had the pleasure of attending the London Fortean Society's all day 'The Haunted Landscape:Folklore, Monsters and Ghosts' event at the Conway Hall and I must admit, though I've done these all-dayers before, I was slightly worried it would be a bit much. Drag a bit.

I needn't have. The speakers were all great and there were plenty of gaps throughout for toilet breaks, chats, and leg stretching. Even quite a lengthy lunch break (in which, remarkably, I steered clear of the pub and instead went to The Fryer's Delight on Theobald's Road for a chip butty with baked beans and a cup of tea). The day began with Jasper Goodall's 'Into The Wild Night'. 

Which began with the sound of The Young Tradition's Lyke Wake Dirge and a video of frogs, snakes, and other assorted creatures. Goodall talked about family deaths, hauntings, and what happens after we die and he showed some of his photographs (the reason he was here). Images of artificially lit forests and rocks (and a reservoir in North Wales) at night. Reimagined worlds that can never be seen with the naked eye.

Some of them looked very good. He talked about how darkness helps you see things that aren't there. Or even things that ARE there! Deer, woodcocks, snipes, owls, and floating lights. He spoke of a Swedish tradition that involved staying awake for thirty-six hours before sitting in a darkened room and holding a candle to a mirror. The theme that linked this tradition with his photographs was that they were both methods at chipping away at rationality so the imagination can be freed.

Which seemed to fit with the theme of the day. Next up was Roy Vickery with Folklore and Dangerous Plants. He spoke about unlucky and inauspicious plants like hawthorn, lilac, cow-parsley (or mother-die), elder, and duckweed (aka Jenny Greenteeth) and lucky plants like the four leaf clover, white heather, and money plants. With forty years under his belt on the subject, Vickery certainly knew his stuff.

He told stories of the teacher who placed hawthorn in a school room in Surrey and then fell down the stairs and broke her leg and another person who made the error of bringing hawthorn indoors which resulted in a ceiling falling down and smashing their favourite tea set! Hawthorn is said to smell like decaying flesh and lilac was used to decorate coffins and mask that same smell.

These are probably the reasons these plants are considered unlucky but let's go with superstition for now. Cow-parsley (which is messy and looks vaguely like hemlock) indoors means your mum will die. Not nice. Hence its alternate name. Other names for cow-parsley include dead man's bones, devil's oatmeal, dog's flourish, and even shit-parsley!

 

Jenny Greenteeth (the folkloric name for a duckweed monster) was believed to grab you, pull you under the water, and drown you and elder's reputation comes from its long association with witches. Though, on the plus side, it is said to treat all diseases except constipation. Recent thought, though, is that it'll even ease that.

Dr Victoria Flood spoke of 'Alderley Edge and the Dead Man'. The Invisible Worlds project is based in the village of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, a place Dr Flood described as a prime example of the palimpsest of the English landscape. Rural but close by to the industry of Manchester and written about in the fantasy novels of Alan Garner.

She showed us some film of people singing (or, strictly speaking, ululating) in caves and told us the story of a farmer who was stopped in Alderley Edge on his way to market in Macclesfield. He was led through iron gates and down into a cavern full of men and horses as well as a large pile of money. On attempting to exit the cavern he was unable to find his way out.

Which makes me wonder how we know this story. Anyway, the talk went on to mention King Arthur, Tennyson, Merlin, Walter Scott, Richard II, and the Morrigan and Dr Flood left us with a warning that the dead man will "ryse agyn" and live in "Lond" (London?). 

It was all a bit of a silly fun (much of the day was) and, following Dr Flood, the last talk of the morning session was by the artists Daniel and Clara. Avebury Imagining:A Personal History of a Stone Circle and a Hill was, of course - they're artists, a little self-indulgent and perhaps took itself a bit too seriously. It looked at how artists explore how humans make sense of their chaotic existence.

Working for five years in and around Avebury and Solsbury Hill, their work draws on dreams and mythology. The belief that each stone in Avebury has its own story, its own personality and that the stone circle was an attempt to give meaning, to create order, to build a dream, and to make imagination real. Which, I guess - in some way, could be said of any building.

Daniel and Clara's talk took in Paul Nash (always a favourite of mine), Derek Jarman, Eileen Agar, Derek Jarman, Richard Long, Joe Tilson, John Piper, and, of course, Children of the Stones and it ended up with them showing us their film which, disappointingly, wasn't really very good.

After a nice long lunch break it was back in the hall for Jeremy Harte's John Wesley Wrestling With The Demons. Jeremy Harts speaks quickly and enthusiastically and with a smile on his face but he's pretty intense. The notes I made read like this:-

"The Terror of the North Midlands, primitive Methodists dealing w/devils, dream diaries, bull baiting, Cleckheaton, the blood of Christ, dragons, Hell, circles, Hungerford, race courses, Westminster (then The Devil's Acre), teetotalism, pubs, Australia, Bristol, Horace Walpole, Glastonbury, poltergeists, witches, Weymouth, Methodism as a radical working class form of religion"

I'm gonna leave it like that because that captures some of the manic energy of Harte and it seems to me you'll be as able to work out the links between all that as me. He left me confused but exhilarated. The last three speakers were probably the best and they began with Bruce Stratford. His talk? New Forest:Myths and Folklore. About the New Forest pixies!

Yes! Pixies 'live' in the gap between what we believe in and what we don't believe in. Although very few people in England (except in Cornwall) now believe in them. They're more of a Celtic thing. With the rare exception of the New Forest where, in the eighties and nineties, kids would hunt for pixies and people would leave glasses of beer outside pubs overnight for them to drink.

The pixies, not the kids. So, what do we know of these pixies? For a start, they are always men and they are always short - with a varying degree of shortness. They look wizened and they're often found dancing, wrestling, or, best of all, scrumping. Never are they found tidying houses or cobbling shoes and Bruce Stratford was insistent they had no interest in milk.

He spoke of Giant Colin, the king of the New Forest pixies and others like Puck, Pug, and Lazy Lawrence who is known for his love of cider. To be "under Lawrence's influence" is to be drunk and to have a hangover, in the New Forest, is known as Isle of Wight fever. It is has even been said that Lazy Lawrence got Prince Harry and Meghan Markle drunk on his sweet cider.

Of course he did. The penultimate speaker was Lisa Scheidau, the best storyteller of the day, who spoke about River Folk:Tales of Britain and Ireland. During a great flood, a huge salmon swam from the sea to its river. It swam up its river, over gravel and under reeds, for many days until it reached a deep pool surrounded by nine hazel trees.

A hazelnut fell from one of the trees into the salmon's mouth and then another and then another. Eventually each of the nine trees fed the salmon with nine nuts each (eighty-one in total) and it gave the salmon infinite wisdom. The salmon now no longer bothered spawning and instead swam deeper into the pool. It had become 'the salmon of wisdom' and anyone who ate its flesh would gain all the world's knowledge.

A local king had fathered a son and a wise man had prophesied that that son would kill the king. So the king sent the son to live with a druid in the woods. This druid had been searching for the salmon of wisdom for seven years but on a fishing expedition it was the druid's charge, the young prince, who unknowingly hooked the salmon of infinite wisdom.

The druid told the prince not to eat the salmon, he wanted it for himself, but as it was being cooked a glob of fat landed on the prince's thumb and he licked it off. Immediately he knew everything in and of the world. 

The druid lost his taste for salmon and the young prince became the greatest Irish warrior of all time, Finn McCool. In telling us this story, Lisa Scheidau was telling us that rivers have stories, mysteries, and legends. Rivers are often killers in our folk talkes. They are often Gods. This was just one of her river stories but it'd be worth checking out more. Not least the one about a river monster in Wales that eats babies.

To end the day, the headliner if you will, we had Irving Finkel, the funniest speaker of the day with a whole host of hilarious digressions, with The First Ghosts. The oldest writing systems known to archaeology (and killed off by the alphabet - which Finkel raged against) can be found of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.

Written with chopsticks in clay, the Mesopotamian (centred between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in modern day Iraq) tablets include a word for ghosts (in fact two:- godim and etemmu) and these ghosts were believed to be one third female divinity and two thirds flesh and blood. They were believed to be demonesses who steal new born babies and people who saw the ghosts were able to foresee the future by, of all things, interpreting the ghost's clothes.

Exorcists were consorted, corpses were fed and watered via tubes, and love goddesses were forced to strip naked. Hmmm. To ward off ghosts, amulets and spells (such as zizzig, medesh, saggish, loabdash) were used and people were paid in dead donkeys in this strange strange old world. A world where an ancient cuneiform tablet has mention of, and a drawing of, the oldest known ghost in the universe.

It was a fitting way to end a day devoted to folklore, haunted landscapes, and the way humans made, and still make, sense of the chaotic world we live in. Many of us repaired to The Enterprise for a pretty lengthy debrief and I'd liked to say thanks to Dewi and Jade for joining me, to Scott Wood and Deborah Hyde for hosting, to all the speakers, to Conway Hall, and to the London Fortean Society for another great event. Next time I'm going with Giant Colin, Lazy Lawrence, Finn McCool, and the salmon of infinite wisdom.