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Hell and Fairy: The Differentiation of Fairies and Demons Within British Ritual Magic of the Early Modern Period

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Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period

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Abstract

Belief in fairies was a key aspect of the spiritual cosmology of early modern Britain. Although fairies have been studied, one area has received little attention: manuscripts and printed works dealing with ritual magic. Based upon a survey of such sources, a picture emerges of early modern ideas about such beings, including their relationship to gender, domesticity, and sexuality. Such information is not only revealing about fairy beliefs, setting them outside the angelic and demonic realms, but also suggests patterns of spirit discernment outside dominant discourses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Moses Pitt , An Account of One Ann Jefferies (London , 1696), 19–20; R. Pearse Chope, “Anne Jefferies and the Fairies,” Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries 13.7 (1924): 312–4.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Katharine Mary Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (London : Routledge & Paul, 1959); Katharine Mary Briggs, The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London: Allen Lane, 2000).

  3. 3.

    James VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), 76.

  4. 4.

    Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London , 1584), 139.

  5. 5.

    Robert Burton , The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 64–5.

  6. 6.

    Robert Kirk , An Essay of the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the Most Part,) Invisible People … Secret Commonwealth … (Edinburgh, 1815).

  7. 7.

    In this capacity, the most important studies are Purkiss, Troublesome Things. See also Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, Scotland : Tuckwell Press, 2001); Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006); Peter Marshall, “Protestants and Fairies in Early-Modern England,” in Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe, ed. C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Ronald Hutton, “The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition,” The Historical Journal 57.4 (2014): 1135–56; Darren Oldridge, The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England (London : Routledge, 2016); Darren Oldridge, “Fairies and the Devil in Early Modern England,” The Seventeenth Century 31.1 (2016): 1–15.

  8. 8.

    I have expanded upon Claire Fanger’s definition of ritual magic to include rituals for conjuring other spiritual entities, such as fairies. See her, “Medieval Ritual Magic : What It Is and Why We Need to Know More About It,” in Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, vii–xviii (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), vii.

  9. 9.

    W. Lilly , William Lilly’s History of His Life and Times from the Year 1602 to 1681 (London : Curll, 1721), 102–3.

  10. 10.

    Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (London , 1651. [i.e., 1650]), III.32, 450. The translator, identified only as “J. F.,” rendered the original Latin text’s “fauni” as “fairies” here. See Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres, ed. V. Perrone Compagni (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 500.

  11. 11.

    John Dee, The Diaries of John Dee, ed. Edward Fenton (Charlbury: Day Books, 1998), 25.

  12. 12.

    On Walsh, see The Examination of John Walsh, Before Maister Thomas Williams (London , 1566); “The Examination of John Walsh (1566),” in Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing, ed. Marion Gibson, 25–32 (London: Routledge, 2000). On Swapper /Swaffer see Annabel Gregory, Rye Spirits: Faith, Faction and Fairies in a Seventeenth-Century English Town (London: Hedge, 2013). On Tyrrye, see Richard. Holworthy, Discoveries in the Diocesan Registry, Wells, Somerset: A Paper Read Before the Society of Genealogists, 10th March, 1926 (Wells: Diocesan Registry, 1926), 4–5. On Gowdie, see Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie : Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).

  13. 13.

    J. Kent Clark, Goodwin Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Frances Timbers, The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish: The Occult World of Seventeenth-Century London (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2016).

  14. 14.

    These cases are described in The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle in Hampshire (London , 1595); The Seuerall Notorious and Levvd Cousnages of Iohn West , and Alice West (London, 1613).

  15. 15.

    Readers familiar with Anglo-Saxon magical and medical literature might be surprised that a corpus in which individuals actively set out to make contact with fairies exists in England, given the well-documented charms to heal the damage from “elfshot” and to keep such creatures at a distance. Karen Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 133–67; Anglo-Norman Medicine , ed. Tony Hunt, 2 vols. (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 2: 224–5. Such operations were not entirely absent from the period under discussion; for example, short procedures occur in a number of manuscripts for those who wish to throw off the effects of fairies. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional B.1.; Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland MS GD 188/25/1/3; also Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 122, and at least one Elizabethan author cited the virtues of bay and peony to ward off or cure attacks by these creatures. William Langham, The Garden of Health (London , 1597), 47 and 483. Nonetheless, much of the literature discussed in this chapter acknowledges the potential dangers of such contact, but nonetheless empowers, enables, and encourages the reader to seek out interaction with these beings. The reasons for this shift are unknown.

  16. 16.

    Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 112–6, 248–55.

  17. 17.

    Frank F. Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 175–76; Frank Klaassen and Katrina Bens , “Achieving Invisibility and Having Sex with Spirits: Six Operations from an English Magic Collection c.1600,” Opuscula 3.1 (2013): 1–14; Frederika Bain, “The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 1.2 (2012): 323–54.

  18. 18.

    Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 725; Gregory, Rye Spirits, 56–7; Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 4–5, 106–9; Oldridge, “Fairies and the Devil,” 11–2; Oldridge, The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England, 121.

  19. 19.

    Oldridge, The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England. I tend toward the latter position, although I have yet to find some of Ashmole’s rituals from MS. 1406 in other sources.

  20. 20.

    Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Ashmole 1406, Douce 116, e Mus. 173, e Mus. 263, Rawlinson D252; London , British Library, MSS Sloane 1727, 3824, 3826, 3850, 3851, 3853; Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 3544; Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS A.4.98; Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.26(1) and (2), X.d.234; GD188/25/1/3; and London, Wellcome Institute, MS 110. Numbers given are page numbers or folios, depending upon the convention used in a particular manuscript.

  21. 21.

    Richard Kieckhefer , “Angel Magic and the Cult of Angels in the Later Middle Ages,” in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft, ed. Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo, 71–110 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

  22. 22.

    See John of Morigny, Liber Florum Celestis Doctrine: The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching, ed. Nicholas Watson and Claire Fanger (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015).

  23. 23.

    John Dee and Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits (London , 1659), e.g. 1, 24, 146, 228.

  24. 24.

    Julian Goodare, “Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland ,” in Airy Nothings: Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason: Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald, ed. K. E. Olsen, Jan R. Veenstra, and A. A. MacDonald, 139–69 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 153 and 158.

  25. 25.

    Ármann Jakobsson, The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North (Punctum, 2017), 25–35.

  26. 26.

    This usage is counter to the collocation analysis performed by Ostling and Forest, which found “elves” and “fairies” to be largely found in literature and demonology . Michael Ostling and Richard Forest, “‘Goblins, Owles and Sprites”: Discerning Early-Modern English Preternatural Beings through Collocational Analysis,” Religion 44.4 (2014): 554–5.

    The manuscripts examined do not use euphemisms for fairies such as the “fair folk” or “good neighbours,” nor do they subdivide them into the many categories of fairies recognized in modern popular books. The “seely wights,” who are postulated as a cult of fairy-affiliated shamanic figures, do not appear either. On seely wights specifically, see Julian Goodare, “The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland ,” Folklore 123.2 (2012): 198–219.

  27. 27.

    Joyce Boro, “The Textual History of Huon of Burdeux: A Reassessment of the Facts,” Notes & Queries 48.3 (September 2001): 233–7.

  28. 28.

    William Lewis Kinter and Joseph R. Keller, The Sibyl: Prophetess of Antiquity and Medieval Fay (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967); Josiane Haffen, Contribution à l’étude de la Sibylle médiévale: Étude et édition du MS. B.N., F. Fr. 25 407, Fol. 160v–172v, Le livre de Sibille (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984). A rite to a spirit named “cibille” appears in the table of contents to a late fourteenth-century collection of magical ritual, now lost, in the collection of John Erghome, left for the library of the Austin Friars at York. The Friars’ Libraries, ed. K. W. Humphreys (London : British Library in association with the British Academy, 1990), 86.

  29. 29.

    On category slippage between fairies and other categories of spirits in other contexts, see Julian Goodare, “Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland .”

  30. 30.

    Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic, 175–6.

  31. 31.

    Sloane MS 3851, 133v.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 144r.

  33. 33.

    Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars, 109.

  34. 34.

    Thomas Aquinas , De Potentia Dei, q. 6, a. 8.7.

  35. 35.

    Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 161–2; Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 26; David Albert Jones, Angels: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34.

  36. 36.

    V.b.26(1), p. 77.

  37. 37.

    Hall, Elves, 157–66.

  38. 38.

    e Mus. 173, 64v–5v; Rawlinson D252, 13r–4v; Sloane 1727, pp. 24–8; Sloane 3851, 104r–6v; V.b.26(1), pp. 138–40.

  39. 39.

    See, for example, Scot, Discoverie, 406; GD188/25/1/3, p. 62.

  40. 40.

    See, for example, Sloane 3850, 144r; GD188/25/1/3, pp. 169–70; Scot, Discoverie, 408–10.

  41. 41.

    A.4.98, p. 78; V.b.26(1), p. 81; Sloane 1727, p. 28; Sloane 3850, 146r.

  42. 42.

    Sloane 3850, 146r; e Mus. 263, p. 1; MS. V.b.26(1), p. 38; Sloane 3853, 36v.

  43. 43.

    Ernest Wickersheimer, Les manuscrits latins de médecine du haut Moyen Age dans les bibliothèques de France (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1966), 32–3. See also BL Sloane 140, 44v–46r. Such charms were influential from Scandinavia to Italy as well. F. Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler, vol. 2 (Kbh.: Gyldendal, 1917), 2:31; Adolf Franz, Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1960), 481–4.

  44. 44.

    See, for example, e Mus. 173, 15v–9r; Sloane 1727, pp. 23–4; A.4.98, pp. 78–87; X.d.234.

  45. 45.

    Oxford, Ashmole MS 1406, p. 14; Sloane 3851, 130r–131v; V.b.26, pp. 138–40.

  46. 46.

    GD188/25/1/3, pp. 159–63.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., pp. 197–200.

  48. 48.

    A.4.98, 87; V.b.26(2), 234; GD188/25/1/3, 4, 62.

  49. 49.

    V.b.26(1), pp. 80, 73, 81.

  50. 50.

    See, for example, e Mus. 173, 72r; Sloane 3826, 98r–99r; GD188/25/1/3, pp. 152–9; Folger V.b.26(1), pp. 185–200.

  51. 51.

    V.b.26(1), p. 197.

  52. 52.

    V.b.26, p. 80, for instance, defines him as the king of fairies; Sloane 3824, 98r lists him as one of the “Supreme head[s]” of fairies with Micob . Nonetheless, most manuscripts surveyed simply provide his name or designate him as a spirit. See, for instance, e Mus. 173, 72v; Rawlinson D252, 144v–145v; GD188/25/1/3, pp. 142–52; Wellcome 110, 97r. BL Sloane 3826, 98r refers to him as an “Angelum et Sp,” or “angel and spirit,” and other sources refer to his four subsidiary spirits as “angels.” See V.b.26(1), p. 195, GD188/25/1/3, 157. In addition, the references to the “king of the fairies” in the other manuscripts appear with no name given. Cf. A.4.98, p. 87; GD188/25/1/3, p. 6 and 62; Scot, Discoverie, 406. Given the small number of manuscripts and their contradictory nature , the question of how many magicians considered Oberion to be a fairy remains open.

  53. 53.

    GD 188/25/1/3, pp. 159–61.

  54. 54.

    Sloane 3824, 97v.

  55. 55.

    GD188/25/1/3, p. 63.

  56. 56.

    Claude Lecouteux , “Romanisch-Germanische Kulturberührungen am Beispiel das Mahls der Feen,” Mediaevistik 1 (1988): 87–99; Claude Lecouteux, “Le Repas des Fées,” Bizarre 1 (1995): 12–8; Dan Harms, “Spirits at the Table: Faerie Queens in the Grimoires,” in The Faerie Queens: In Magic, Myth and Legend, ed. Sorita D’Este (London : Avalonia, 2013). It should be noted that Lecouteux defines his term to cover rites performed annually or at births, instead of the purposes described here; the later date of the magical manuscripts might indicate a shift in the purpose of such rites over time.

  57. 57.

    Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, trans. Robert Turner (London , 1655), 69.

  58. 58.

    Lecouteux, “Romanisch-Germanische Kulturberührungen.”

  59. 59.

    They can be found in e Mus. 173, 72v; e Mus. 263, 25v–6r; Sloane 3824, 97v–100v; Sloane 3850, 145v–6v; Sloane 3851, 90r–v and 129r; Sloane 3853, 36r–8r; Sloane 3885, 50r–1r; A.4.98, pp. 78–87; V.b.26(1), pp. 38–9; X.d.234; GD188/25/1/3, pp. 163–5; Wellcome 110, 79v–80v.

  60. 60.

    e Mus. 173, 72v.

  61. 61.

    Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith Fairy Lore, 41–2.

  62. 62.

    This idea appears to originate in Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei, 15:23. See Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars, 78–9.

  63. 63.

    Walter Map , De nugis curialium : Courtiers’ Trifles, trans. and ed. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 148–59, 348–51; Juliette Wood, “The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales,” Folklore 103.1 (1992): 56–72.

  64. 64.

    Julia M. Garrett, “Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.1 (2013): 32–72 on 32.

  65. 65.

    V.b.26(1), pp. 38–9.

  66. 66.

    Given the frequent connection of fairies with the dead in folklore and Scottish trial reports, it should be noted that operations contacting fairies with the dead may overlap little save for occasional instances of a deceased person being used as an intermediary. Aside from this operation described in Scot, the account of Mary Parrish and Goodwin Wharton, in which a dead man serves as a messenger to the Lowlanders, or fairies, is also of interest. See Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 27–37.

  67. 67.

    Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 406.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., pp. 408–10.

  69. 69.

    Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ballard 66, 1–9. A similar continental example might be found in the operation “To send for three Ladies or three Gentlemen to your room after dining” in some Enlightenment period French grimoires. See Joseph H. Peterson, Grimorium Verum (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2007), 44–5.

  70. 70.

    Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, trans. and ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 718–21.

  71. 71.

    Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, “Midwife to the Fairies (ML 5070): The Irish Variants in Their Scottish and Scandinavian Perspective,” Béaloideas 59 (1991): 133–43.

  72. 72.

    Holworthy, Discoveries in the Diocesan Registry, Wells, Somerset, 4–5.

  73. 73.

    V.b.26(1), pp. 138–40.

  74. 74.

    Ashmole 1406, p. 15.

  75. 75.

    e Mus. 173, 72v.

  76. 76.

    Wall, Staging Domesticity, 103.

  77. 77.

    “una pulcherrima, et minor aliis non tibi loquetur.” V.b.26(1), p. 39.

  78. 78.

    Sloane 3846, p. 111.

  79. 79.

    e.g. V.b.26(1), pp. 172–4.

  80. 80.

    Richard Kieckhefer , Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 133–40.

  81. 81.

    Bernd-Christian Otto, “Historicising ‘Western Learned Magic’: Preliminary Remarks,” Aries 16 (2016): 161–240 on 219.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Chetham’s Library, the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, and the Wellcome Institute for their permission to cite and quote from manuscripts in their collections. V.b.26 and X.d.234 are from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and are reproduced here with thanks by their permission. Special thanks to Joseph Peterson for all his help and encouragement, Bobby Derie for his cogent feedback, the organizers of the 2016 Scientiae Conference, and Rosanagh Guthrie for her permission to cite her family’s papers at the National Records of Scotland .

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    Daniel M. Harms

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  1. Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA

    Michelle D. Brock

  2. University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada

    Richard Raiswell

  3. Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada

    David R. Winter

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Harms, D.M. (2018). Hell and Fairy: The Differentiation of Fairies and Demons Within British Ritual Magic of the Early Modern Period. In: Brock, M., Raiswell, R., Winter, D. (eds) Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75738-4_3

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