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Re: VMs: Fertility rites
Hi Anthony,
At 16:46 18/10/2004 +0100, ajb wrote:
Many such customs, usually of an overtly sexual nature and some of which
would perhaps strike the 'modern' mind as somewhat extreme or even
outrageous, are known to have persisted until quite recent times. I have
in the past witnessed several such rites, and to my certain knowledge at
least the vestige of one such survives to this day, wherein the
fecundity of orchards is maintained by the young men of the village
offering their own 'seed' to the trees.
I'm sure magistrates hear lots of stories like that - "Having woken
unexpectedly in a state of curious arousal, I recalled that my neighbour's
crop of Egremont Russets had failed the previous year, which left me little
option but to..." :-)
In vaguely related links... phallophoria could well have originally been a
Dionysian agricultural ritual:-
http://www.speakeasy.org/~bwilliam/dion.html
Here's a more recent paper, not so agricultural:-
http://home.earthlink.net/~delia5/pagan/dio/tp99s-dnys-donnr.htm
Also: here's the first chapter of a modern book on agricultural magic and
pagan farming that looks quite accessible:-
http://www.cauldronfarm.com/earthbound/
However, I'm not sure ATM how much agricultural magic can be found between
the two extrema of (ancient) phallophoria and (modern) Wicca: I guess
stregheria is the next great unknown for us on the list (I've been meaning
to get copies of Carlo Ginzburg's books on it for a while, I certainly
enjoyed his "The Cheese and The Worms"), maybe the answers we're looking
for are there...
The VMS contains much that is equally strange to us, including a great
many persons undertaking quaint activities in a state of undress; it
seems to me that many aspects of the illustrations could quite easily be
interpreted as fertility rituals. Certainly some of the activities I
referred to above were of a nature which would require discretion and
perhaps concealment from authority such as the Church of the time. Could
part of the VMS be a handbook to agricultural sexual magic?
It's certainly an attractive hypothesis - the difficulty is finding ways to
test it. Are there any good papers or books on this?
Or am I barking up into the wrong tree again as usual? Apart from
certain personal experiences encountered by chance, I am no expert on
English Fertility Ritual but doubtless just such an authority is
subscribing to this list and will tell us. (Unfortunately a prime source
for this sort of thing, the "Museum of Witchcraft" which contained a
very large collection of relevant written material, was in a large part
destroyed in the flood this summer in Boscastle, in south-west England.)
AFAIK, only the ground floor of the museum was flooded, while the library
upstairs stayed untouched.
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
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