Goldfish Breeds And Other Aquarium Fishes, Their Care And Propagation, 1908

The Sabbat was held as the Mirror rode high and full. The stang was lit, the spirit amassed, and the Dragon awoken from within the deep heart of the flames. The mighty serpentine force rose higher and higher as the mill was trod, the whole of the compass becoming bathed in the pale light of the vibrant stars bespekling the great black mare and the eldrich spirits attending the holy rite.

The sacred paint was enchanted and made manifest with blood, wort, and oil in the mysterious rites of the black cauldron. Then used to inscribe the first sigilum upon the brow of the beast, the witch’s hand guided by the dark whispers of the unknown ones.

The bestial, raw, and primal Scarlet King was beckoned forth, drawn toward the ensourceled goat skull at the base of the Great Tree. The hissing flames announced his arrival, the eyes opened and gazed upon us, and thus did He begin to speak…

Soon, I feel, shall the next sigilum be enscribed upon his ivory skull. Thus shall we continuing to therein enflesh the luminious bestial form and bring forth the great King to the Witches’ Sabbat.

But to make a Milkhare, do the following:

On takes nine different coloured thread of woolen yarn and go with them to a crossroads on a Thursday night between twelve and one o’clock. Here, one makes a fire from nine different kinds of wood and wind counter-clockwise, around the fire, a ball of the woolen yarn threads. When the ball is ready, one drops three drops of blood out of the left ring finger with the following words: ” If you will run for me here on earth, then I shall burn for you in Hell.”

Then one takes and whips the Milkhare with a birch twig and says: ”Money you will draw, butter you will drawn (or whatever one wants the milkhare to draw.)” Everything one desires one can get the Milkhare to draw, and the Milkhare follows generation after generation.

- Svartkonstböcker; A compendium of the Swedish Black Art Tradition, Dr. Thomas K. Johnson

Our Wish for the End, Me, Digital Collage, 2020

Thrjár by Maéna Paillet

https://vesemir.blogspot.com/2021/02/blog-post_12.html

Skotiy Bog

***

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I work to order.

e-mail: plastilinmira@gmail.com

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Hellequin: leader of the Wild Hunt and Fairy King

The “familia Herlequini” or “la mesnie Hellequin” is a term which, as Claude Lecouteux has shown in “Phantom Armies of the Night”, might encompass a wide variety of disparate phenomena, such as the wild hunt (die wilde Jagt) and the wild horde (das wilde Heer). The familia Herlequini represented a troop of the dead: the earliest explicit reference to the familia Herlequini is in Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History (1130s).

Orderic told the story of a Norman priest called Walchelin, who describes his encounter on New Year’s night in 1091 with a mysterious procession of knights, ladies, priests, monks, and commoners, “like the movement of a great army,” among whom he recognized “many of his neighbours who had recently died.” At one point Walchelin says to himself, “Haec sine dubio familia Herlechini est” [Without a doubt this is Herlequin’s household]. At one point Walchelin grabs one of their horses by the reins and experiences an intense burning, and at another, one of the knights seizes him by the throat, leaving a scar which he carries to the grave. All the members of the procession suffer penitential torments for their former sins: one of the knights, for instance, tells Walchelin: “The arms which we bear are red-hot, and offend us with an appalling stench, weighing us down with intolerable weight, and burning with everlasting fire”.

In this description, Herlechinus appears as a giant who raise a huge club.

The other early description of Herlequin’s ride, written some fifty years later, is from Walter Map’s “De Nugis Curialium”. Here a Welsh king called Herla encounters a diminutive Pan-like creature who predicts his future marriage and then strikes a bargain with him: he will attend Herla’s wedding on condition that the king help him celebrate his own wedding a year later. This creature, who is never named, turns out to be royal and shows up at Herla’s wedding with a splendid retinue bearing lavish gifts. The return visit, which involves passing through “a cave in a high cliff”, is equally successful, but when the time comes for him to leave, Herla’s host presents him with a small dog, with the instruction that none of his retinue is to dismount until the dog jumps down to the ground. He returns to his kingdom only to discover that hundreds of years have passed. Inevitably, some of his company dismount before the dog jumps down and are promptly turned to dust: “The King, comprehending the reason of their dissolution, warned the rest under pain of a like death not to touch the earth before the alighting of the dog. The dog has not yet alighted. And the story says that King Herla still holds on his mad course [circuitus vesanos] with his band in eternal wanderings, without stop or stay”. Later, Map refers to this band as “phalanges noctivage quas Herlethingi dicebant” [night-wandering battalions which they say are Herlething’s] or simply the “Herlethingi familia” [Herlething’s household].

Moreover, in a late thirteenth-century poem on confession, the priest is instructed to ask, “Creïs tu …  / Ne [le luiton] ne la masnée / Herllequin, ne genes ne fees?” [Do you not believe … in the goblin, in the household of Herlequin, in witches, and fairies?], and an early fourteenth-century Dominican redaction of the Elucidarium, known as the Second Lucidaire, makes a similar association when it speaks (in the early sixteenth-century English translation) of “elues, gobelyns, & helquins þe whiche men se by nyght, as men of armes trottynge on horsebacke with grete assembles.” Another fourteenth-century author, Raoul de Presles, commenting on Augustine’s discussion of incubi demones in The City of God, recommends that his readers consult William of Auvergne on the topic, “and also he speaks in that place of Hellekin’s household and of Dame Habonde and of the spirits that they call fairies, which appear in stables and woods”. Finally, when the author of Richard the Redeless, referring no doubt to the duketti created by Richard II in 1397, writes, “Oþer hobbis Ϟe hadden / of Hurlewaynis kynne,” he explicitly associates Herlequin with hobs or fairies.

In Adam de la Halle’s brilliant farce “Le Jeu de la feuillée” (ca. 1255), the action of the play takes place in Arras on a feast day (perhaps May Day or possibly Midsummer’s Eve) and concerns a banquet held in honor of the fairies. The sound of bells leads a character called Gillot to anticipate the imminent arrival of “le maisnie Hellekin,” and when another character asks, “will the fairies be following him?” [venront dont les fees après], Gillot assures her that they will. In the event, Hellequin himself does not appear but later sends a messenger to Morgan (one of the three fairies who do) with a love letter; at first she spurns his offer, but after learning that her current beau, the Arrageois Robert Sommeillons, has been cheating on her, she regrets having rejected so peremptorily “the greatest prince in fairyland” [le graigneur / Prinche ki soit en faerie]. He is described, therefore, as a king and shown to be in some sense the leader of a fairy troupe.

How to start worshipping Hellequin?

See:

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/170758896566/historically-attested-offerings-for-the-major

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/171876985371/how-to-make-offerings-to-the-major-spirits-ie

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/171332375001/the-sabbath-or-ludus-bonae-societatis#notes

Sources:

- Richard Firth Green’s “Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church”

- Carlo Ginzburg’s “Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath” and “Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” - Jacob Grimm’s “Teutonic Mythology” - Claude Lecouteux’s “Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead” - Karl Meisen’s “Die Sagen vom wüttenden Heer und wilden Jäger” (paradoxically there is a translation in Italian but not in English) - Wolfgang Behringer’s “Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night” - Emma Wilby’s “Burchard’s strigae, the Witches’ Sabbath, and Shamanistic Cannibalism in Early Modern Europe”, “Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits” and “The Visions of Isobel Gowdie” - Eva Pocs’s “Between the Living and the Dead”, “Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe” and “Traces of Indo-European Shamanism in South East Europe”.

Art Of Maquenda, Dukkha Lustre

Your Sight shall be in my Sight

in whose name you rest here

I will not disturb you

but hoped that you

in the name of peace may sleep

so that I may see the Hidden

and see its power

hear in celebration

and help in need.

Could you

O Holy Ghost

give to me of your power

In the name of the Holy Crucified One

Amen.

— From The Graveyard Wanderers— The Wise Ones And The Dead In Sweden by Thomas Johnson

These words were uttered as their speaker crossed themselves over a gravestone in a churchyard. When the speaker had finished the invocation, they then made the sign of the cross over each of their eyelids, three times. To the Klok— “The Wise Ones”, the folk healers and magicians of Scandinavia— graveyards, burial mounds, old execution sites and other such areas where the spirits of the dead dwelt were sacred places. In Sweden, these individuals were known as Kyrkogårdsgångare, or Graveyard Walker. The term is related to gengångare, which in Swedish means “those who walk again”. The word can be translated as “ghost”, but their form is entirely corporeal; not see-through or specter-like as phantoms in the Anglosphere tend to be.

The dead serviced the Graveyard Walkers in many ways. One could summon the spirits of the departed and ask for their service in everything from revealing secrets and hidden knowledge to obtaining lottery numbers. Or, a Graveyard Walker could utilize the dead in a more tangible fashion: both the left collar bone of an elderly man and the left ring finger of a corpse were considered to be among the best amulets for protection. (However, before the Wise One left the earthly plane, they must of course return the borrowed bone back to its original resting place.) Everything, right down to the very soil of the graveyard, was used: from rubbing Graveyard dirt on the skin to cure rashes, to drinking it in a slurry to restore a loss of appetite.

But how did one become a Graveyard Walker and a Wise One? There is the aforementioned invocation of course, but there was also the ancient practice of Uttesittning. Uttesittning is a ritual where one meditates in nature from sunset to sunrise, opening the soul and merging with the world of the spirits. There is one legend where one would go to a churchyard or any other places affiliated with burial or the dead for three consecutive Thursday nights to perform an Uttesittning ritual (Thursdays were important, as they were sacred to the old god Thor). On the third and final Thursday, a dark man might perhaps appear and reward the one performing this ritual with a gift. There are some stories that claim that the gift was a Book of Black Arts— a Svarteboken, or “black book”, also known as a Cyprianus (named after St. Cyprian). It was said these Black Arts Books would be written in blood, or written on black pages with white ink. A Wise One would keep all their spells in such books, which contained everything from Kabbalist literature to farm and home recipes.

The Wise Ones and Graveyard Walkers are endlessly fascinating to me, as well as folk magic in general. I hope to create many more artworks inspired by this topic, and I hope that I’ve piqued your interest in it as well!

For more books on this subject:

Gårdbäck, Johannesburg Björn. Trolldom: Spells and Methods of the Norse Folk Magic Tradition. The Ironwode Institution for the Preservation and Popularization of Indigenous Ethnomagicology (YIPPIE), 2015.

Johnson, Thomas. The Graveyard Wanderers — The Wise Ones and the Dead in Sweden. Society of Esoteric Endeavor, 2013.

Sibley, J.T. The Way of the Wise. XLIBRIS, 2013.

A special thanks to my friend Eli, for all your insight into Swedish folklore and folk magic!

What do you think of Joyofsatan.org? They claim to follow the Sumerian God Enki-Satan, they’re pro-choice, they follow gay Pagan Gods and they’re the largest Satanist group in the world.

Well I’d never heard of them before now. I just did a quick look at their website and although they swear that Satanism isn’t a reaction to Christianity (which I disagree with because look at Anton LaVey) their homepage is just paragraphs of how “Judeo/Christianity” (those are two separate religions but okay) is evil and terrible and the source of everything wrong with the world. Just seems like they’re trying too hard. I also really disagree with their stance on Satanism being the oldest/truest religion in the world. It looks like they’re just slapping satanic aesthetics/concepts onto older religions and claiming it as truth which just historically isn’t the case.

Again this is all just initial reactions to their homepage, I know nothing about them on a deeper level and hadnt heard of them before today so take all that with a grain of salt I guess.