Now that most of the imaginary inhabitants of Man and its coasts have been rapidly passed in review before the reader, I may say something of others whom I regard as semi-imaginary—real human beings to whom impossible attributes are ascribed: I mean chiefly the witches, or, as they are sometimes called in Manx English, butches[10]. That term I take to be a variant of the English word witch, produced under the influence of the verb bewitch, which was reduced in Manx English to a form butch, especially if one bear in mind the Cumbrian and Scottish pronunciation of these words, as wutch and bewutch. Now witches shift their form, and I have heard of one old witch changing herself into a pigeon; but that I am bound to regard as exceptional, the regular form into which Manx witches pass at their pleasure being that of the hare, and such a swift and thick skinned hare that no greyhound, except a black one without a single white hair, can catch it, and no shot, except a silver coin, penetrate its body. Both these peculiarities are also well known in Wales. I notice a difference, however, between Wales and Man with regard to the hare witches: in Wales only the women can become hares, and this property runs, so far as I know, in certain families. I have known many such, and my own nurse belonged to one of them, so that my mother was reckoned to be rather reckless in entrusting me to y Gota, or ‘the Cutty One,’ as she might run away at any moment, leaving her charge to take care of itself. But I have never heard of any man or boy of any such family turning himself into a hare, whereas in the Isle of Man the hare witches may belong, if I may say so, to either sex. I am not sure, however, that a man who turns himself into a hare would be called a wizard or witch; and I recollect hearing in the neighbourhood of Ramsey of a man nicknamed the gaaue mwaagh, that is to say, ‘the hare smith,’ the reason being that this particular smith now and then assumed the form of a hare. I am not quite sure that gaaue mwaagh is the name of a class, though I rather infer that it is. If so, it must be regarded as a survival of the magic skill associated with smiths in ancient Ireland, as evidenced, for instance, in St. Patrick’s Hymn in the eleventh or twelfth century manuscript at Trinity College, Dublin, known as the Liber Hymnorum, in which we have a prayer—
Fri brichta ban ocus goband ocus druad.
Against the spells of women, of smiths and magicians[11].
The persons who had the power of turning themselves into hares were believed to be abroad and very active, together with the whole demon world, on the eve of May-day of the Old Style. And a middle-aged man from the parish of Andreas related to me how he came three or four times across a woman reputed to be a witch, carrying on her evil practices at the junction of cross-roads, or the meeting of three boundaries. This happened once very early on Old May morning, and afterwards he met her several times as he was returning home from visiting his sweetheart. He warned the witch that if he found her again he would kick her: that is what he tells me. Well, after a while he did surprise her again at work at four cross-roads, somewhere near Lezayre. She had a circle, he said, as large as that made by horses in threshing, swept clean around her. He kicked her and took away her besom, which he hid till the middle of the day. Then he made the farm boys fetch some dry gorse, and he put the witch’s besom on the top of it. Thereupon fire was set to the gorse, and, wonderful to relate, the besom, as it burned, crackled and made reports like guns going off. In fact, the noise could be heard at Andreas Church—that is to say, miles away. The besom had on it ‘seventeen sorts of knots,’ he stated, and the woman herself ought to have been burned: in fact, he added that she did not long survive her besom. The man who related this to me is hale and strong, living now in the parish of Michael, and not in that of Andreas, where he was born.
There is a tradition at St. John’s, which is overlooked by the mountain called Slieau Whallian, that witches used at one time to be punished by being set to roll down the steep side of the mountain in spiked barrels; but, short of putting them to death, there were various ways of rendering the machinations of witches innocuous, or of undoing the mischief done by them; for the charmers supply various means of meeting them triumphantly, and in case an animal is the victim, the burning of it always proves an effective means of bringing the offender to book: I shall have occasion to return to this under another heading. There is a belief that if you can draw blood, however little, from a witch, or one who has the evil eye, he loses his power of harming you; and I have been told that formerly this belief was sometimes acted upon. Thus, on leaving church, for instance, the man who fancied himself in danger from another would sidle up to him or walk by his side, and inflict on him a slight scratch, or some other trivial wound, which elicited blood; but this must have been a course always attended with more or less danger.
The persons able to undo the witches’ work, and remove the malignant influence of the evil eye, are known in Manx English as charmers, and something must now be said of them. They have various ways of proceeding to their work. A lady of about thirty-five, living at Peel, related to me how, when she was a child suffering from a swelling in the neck, she had it charmed away by an old woman. This charmer brought with her no less than nine pieces of iron, consisting of bits of old pokers, old nails, and other odds and ends of the same metal, making in all nine pieces. After invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, she began to rub the girl’s neck with the old irons; nor was she satisfied with that, for she rubbed the doors, the walls, and the furniture likewise, with the metal. The result, I was assured, was highly satisfactory, as she has never been troubled with a swelling in the throat since that day. Sometimes a passage from the Bible is made use of in charming, as, for instance, in the case of bleeding. One of the verses then pronounced is Ezekiel xvi. 6, which runs thus:—‘And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.’ This was told me by a Laxey man, who is over seventy years of age. The methods of charming away warts are various. A woman from the neighbourhood of St. John’s explained to me how a charmer told her to get rid of the warts on her hands. She was to take a string and make a knot on it for every wart she had, and then tie the string round her hand, or fingers—I forget which; and I think my informant, on her part, forgot to tell me a vital part of the formula, namely, that the string was to be destroyed. But however that may be, she assured me that the warts disappeared, and have never returned since. A lady at Andreas has a still simpler method of getting rid of warts. She rubs a snail on the warts, and then places the snail on one of the points of a blackthorn, and, in fact, leaves the snail to die, transfixed by the thorn; and as the snail dies the warts disappear. She has done this in the case of her niece with complete success, so far as the wart was concerned; but she had forgotten to notice whether the snail had also succumbed.
The lady who in this case applied the remedy cannot be in any sense called a charmer, however much one may insist on calling what she did a charm. In fact, the term charmer tends to be associated with a particular class of charm involving the use of herbs. Thus there used to be at one time a famous charmer living near Kirk Michael, to whom the fishermen were in the habit of resorting, and my informant told me that he had been deputed more than once by his fellow fishermen to go to him in consequence of their lack of success in the fishing. The charmer gave him a packet of herbs, cut small, with directions that they should be boiled, and the water mixed with some spirits—rum, I think—and partly drunk in the boat by the captain and the crew, and partly sprinkled over the boat and everything in it. The charmer clearly defined his position in the matter to my informant. ‘I cannot,’ he said, ‘put the fish in your nets for you; but if there is any mischief in the way of your luck, I can remove that for you.’ The fishermen themselves had, however, more exaggerated notions of the charmer’s functions, for once on a time my informant spent on drink for his boon companions the money which he was to give the charmer, and then he collected herbs himself—it did not much matter what herbs—and took them to his captain, who, with the crew, went through the proper ritual, and made a most successful haul that night. In fact, the only source of discontent was the charmer’s not having distributed the fish over two nights, instead of endangering their nets by an excessive haul all in one night. They regarded him as able to do almost anything he liked in the matter.
A lady at Andreas gave me an account of a celebrated charmer who lived between there and the coast. He worked on her husband’s farm, but used to be frequently called away to be consulted. He usually cut up wormwood for the people who came to him, and if there was none to be had, he did not scruple to rob the garden of any small sprouts it contained of cabbage or the like. He would chop them small, and give directions about boiling them and drinking the water. He usually charged any one leaving him to speak to nobody on the way, lest he break the charm, and this mysteriousness was evidently an important element in his profession. But he was, nevertheless, a thriftless fellow, and when he went to Peel, and sent the crier round to announce his arrival, and received a good deal of money from the fishermen, he seldom so conducted himself as to bring much of his earnings home. He died miserably some seven or eight years ago at Ramsey, and left a widow in great poverty. As to the present day, the daughter of a charmer now dead is married to a man living in a village on the southern side of the island, and she appears to have inherited her father’s reputation for charming, as the fishermen from all parts are said to flock to her for luck. Incidentally, I have heard in the south more than once of her being consulted in cases of sudden and dangerous illness, even after the best medical advice has been obtained: in fact, she seems to have a considerable practice.
In answer to my question, how the charmer who died at Ramsey used to give the sailors luck in the fishing, my informant at Andreas could not say, except that he gave them herbs as already described, and she thought also that he sold them wisps to place under their pillows. I gather that the charms were chiefly directed to the removal of supposed impediments to success in the fishing, rather than to any act of a more positive nature. So far as I have been able to ascertain, charming is hereditary, and they say that it descends from father to daughter, and then from daughter to son, and so on—a remarkable kind of descent, on which I should be glad to learn the opinion of anthropologists. One of the best Manx scholars in the island related to me how some fishermen once insisted on his doing the charmer for them because of his being of such and such a family, and how he made fools of them. It is my impression that the charming families are comparatively few in number, and this looks as if they descended from the family physicians or druids of one or two chieftains in ancient times. It is very likely a question which could be cleared up by a local man familiar with the island and all that tradition has to say on the subject of Manx pedigrees.
In the case of animals ailing, the herbs were also resorted to; and, if the beasts happened to be milch cows, the herbs had to be boiled in some of their milk. This was supposed to produce wonderful results, described as follows by a man living at a place on the way from Castletown up South Barrule:—A farmer in his parish had a cow that milked blood, as he described it, and this in consequence of a witch’s ill-will. He went to the charmer, who gave him some herbs, which he was to boil in the ailing cow’s milk, and the charmer charged him, whatever he did, not to quit the concoction while it was on the fire, in spite of any noises he might hear. The farmer went home and proceeded that night to boil the herbs as directed, but he suddenly heard a violent tapping at the door, a terrible lowing of the cattle in the cow-house, and stones coming down the ‘chumley’: the end of it was that he suddenly fled and sprang into bed to take shelter behind his wife. He went to the charmer again, and related to him what had happened: he was told that he must have more courage the next time, unless he wished his cow to die. He promised to do his best, and this time he stood his ground in spite of the noises and the creaking of the windows—until, in fact, a back window burst into pieces and bodily let a witch in, who craved his pardon, and promised nevermore to molest him or his. This all happened at the farm in question in the time of the present farmer’s grandfather. The boiling of the charmer’s herbs in milk always produces a great commotion and lowing among the cattle, and it invariably cures the ailing ones: this is firmly believed by respectable farmers whom I could name, in the north of the island in particular, and I am alluding to men whom one might consider fairly educated members of their class.