Through the Lychgate

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CHAPTER 10:

THROUGH THE LYCHGATE

 

Hans Holbein’s engravings of The Dance of Death (1538) have always struck me as a sort of macabre Tarot. From one vignette to another, the semi-decomposed personification of Death comes to all conditions of men and women: the little child snatched remorselessly from beside the hearth; the quack physician abducted with his flask of urine; the nun swept away as she kneels at her devotions whilst her boyfriend strums a lute; the miser purloined from his counting-house; the king devoured at his table; the pope deprived of his tiara as a king kneels to kiss his feet. Death leads a blind old man into the churchyard, directing him straight towards his yawning grave. His skull wreathed with foliage, Death capers off with a hunch-backed old woman whilst another skeleton pounds on a xylophone. Towards the end of the sequence, the skeletons gather at the cemetery to celebrate in a throng, blowing on trumpets and beating on tympani with drumsticks made of long-bones. Finger-bones, ribs and skull fragments lie scattered on the ground, just as they do in the churchyard in my village*, which was recently dug up for a drain. Behind them is a lychgate – literally, the corpse-gate, where the body lies in its coffin awaiting burial – the entrance to the churchyard. To pass through it is to pass under the shadow of Death; taken seriously on Samhain night, it is a sabbat-journey into the land of shadows and shades.

 

The full moon is obscured by the great yew to your left. Raise your lantern to it. Coolness seems to emanate from it as its dark fingers reach towards you. Nothing grows beneath it but its toxic companions, ivy and dog’s mercury, which are scrawled across the red and powdered earth; grass withers beneath it, for all parts of the yew are poisonous, apart from the sugary red fruits that hide the seeds. The great bole’s girth grows branches, each of them tree-trunk thick, all bristling with half-started shoots. Sit beneath the yew, and the needle-scattered roots envelop you. Great tufts of red twigs, peppered with fallen fruits, nut hard, and browned needles are piled like ants’ nests. The green curtain of the foliage looks black by night, hanging almost to the ground. Folklore insists that the skulls of the dead are grasped underground by the roots of the yew, and the eye-sockets are occupied once more with living tissue. In his poem, ‘Transformations’ Thomas Hardy recognised the great pagan truth that lies behind such lore:

 

Portion of this yew

Is a man my grandsire knew,

Bosomed here at its foot:

This branch may be his wife,

A ruddy human life

Now turned to a green shoot.

 

Nevertheless, the nineteenth century Dream Book of Zadkiel says that if you dream of sitting beneath a yew, you have foreseen your own death. In the lantern light, the trunk seems to be splashed with specks of blood, turned ruddy brown. Fallen bark and needles ply the soil: dried warrior blood, woad and ochre, draining through the ground. Dream that you stand before a yew, says Zadkiel, and you shall live.

 

Come out from beneath the yew, and walk along the path that leads through the gravestones beside the church. A kestrel, roosting on a ledge half-way up the wall, twitters at you uncomfortably, but does not fly. A bat dodges past you, inches from your head, and moments later returns, as if tracing some arcane moebius strip through the air. Perhaps it is a Pipistrelle which has flown down from its daytime roost in the bell-tower. At any rate, you are lucky to see it, for the Pipistrelles are flying with less enthusiasm now that the autumn nights have lengthened, although their hibernation is less profound than species such as the Barbastelle. Daubenton’s bat, which also frequents this churchyard, attracted by the stream beneath the willows beyond, has been hibernating since the end of September. The ancients were long confused by the nature of bats, being unable to decide whether they were beasts who flew like birds, or birds who wore fur and suckled their young. Aesop regarded the night-flying of the bat as a punishment for its duplicity in the war between the birds and the beasts, when it kept switching sides, and was ultimately shunned by both tribes and relegated to the darkness. In another fable by Aesop, a bat is twice attacked by weasels. The first weasel informs the bat that he eats only birds, whereupon the bat tells him he is a mouse, and is released. The second weasel specialises in mice, and is duly informed that his captive is a bird. Across the globe, the Cherokee tell the tale of a great ball game between the beasts and the birds. Rejected as team-members by the beasts because of their diminutive size, two mice climbed a tree and asked the eagle whether they could join the birds’ team. The birds used a drum-skin to fashion wings for one, transforming it into a bat, whilst its companion was turned into a flying squirrel, and the bat’s skill in aerobatics helped him to score the winning goal. For this reason, invocations to the bat and the flying squirrel are made by Cherokee lacrosse players in the ritual dance which precedes the game. Back in Europe in the early seventeenth century, the playwright Ben Jonson theorised in Catiline that “A serpent, ere he comes to be a dragon,/ Does eat a bat”. Other folk tales about bats are darker in tone. The Mordvines of Russia make the bat an ally of Satan in his attempt to make a living human from the sand and mud of seventy-seven different lands. Unable to breathe life into the body he had created, Satan sent the bat to steal the towel of the Almighty, with which he rubbed the homunculus, bringing it to life. For its role in this caper, the bat was deprived of the feathers on its wings, and given a leathery tail and feet like Satan’s; whether these were punishments or badges of honour is a moot point.

 

Indeed, Western traditions have consistently associated bats with the supernatural and the diabolical. A number of features of the bat’s biology may explain this. Their nocturnal habits and uncanny ability to navigate in darkness have long been a source of wonder. Their rather humanoid looking faces, with elaborate facial appendages or ears equipped with a spearhead-shaped tragus (both of which seem to assist them in echo-location), combined with their paired breast-nipples, may make them seem like parodies of humanity. They may be demons, or they may, as in the Odyssey, be the shades of the dead, fluttering and gibbering in the night. In Sicily, they are specifically the souls of those who have met a violent death, whereas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, they are the descendants of the daughters of Minyas, Alcithoe and Leuconoe, who were turned into bats because Bacchus was enraged by their refusal to attend his orgies. Their tapestries transformed into ivy, and “they were lifted/ On no great mass of plumage, only on wings/ So frail you could see through them”. Because bats are watchful by night (their eyes contain rod cells in profusion, but no cone cells, so that they cannot see colours), they have often fallen victim to crude sympathetic magic, finding themselves nailed alive to doors or window-frames to ward off evil, or hung in sheepfolds, as recommended by Pliny, to keep away wolves and other marauders. Pliny also attested that a woman could be made more pliable to seduction if a clot of bat’s blood were placed under her pillow, a spell which was presumably ineffective if she was in the habit of plumping her pillow before sleeping on it. Albertus Magnus was fond of smearing his face with bats’ blood in order to assist him with nocturnal divinations, whilst Gesner warded off demons with the mere image of a bat, engraved – unfortunately - on rhinoceros horn. A Tyrolean gypsy who wishes to be invisible may carry the left eye of a bat in his pocket. It is to be hoped that the modern witch would have greater sympathy with Lady Jacaume than with any of the former - burned for witchcraft in Bayonne in 1332 on the grounds that neighbours had observed a throng of bats frequenting her house and walled garden – or with a Chinese tradition that a person who kills a bat will go blind. The gloriously erotic kitsch of Luis Ricardo Falero’s nineteenth century paintings of voluptuous witches in flight by moonlight, in the company of beautiful silhouetted bats may also deserve to be back in vogue.

 

Of still greater folkloric significance is the bat’s habit of sleeping head downwards by day, almost completely encapsulated (especially in the case of Horseshoe bats) in their leathern wings, like corpses in suspended coffins. A beautiful Latin passage by the ornithologist Aldrovandus (1681) describes the river Nyctipotus, which flows past the Isle of Sleep. This is inhabited only by bats who roost in giant mandrakes and poppies the size of trees; both plants have long histories as narcotics and anaesthetics. The deathlike sleep of the bat, which is still more profound when the animal’s metabolism shuts down during hibernation, may also have fostered its association with European vampires. Although bats had long been used as symbols for the demonic in mediaeval art, culminating in their association with cannibalistic witchcraft in Goya’s painting Conjoro (1798), their specific relation to vampires grew after the Conquistadors encountered true blood-sucking vampire bats in South America. It seems an uncanny coincidence, therefore, that recent medical scholarship has come to suggest that our western vampire legends were inspired by the observation of human victims of rabies, a horrendous disease of the central nervous system which is still almost always fatal if not treated before the symptoms arise. In the journal Neurology in 1998, Dr Juan Gomez-Alonso listed the symptoms of rabies in humans: hypersexual behaviour, insomnia, hypersensitivity to strong stimuli including aromatic smells such as garlic, aggressiveness and tendency to bite other people, facial spasms causing baring of the teeth, and frothing at the mouth caused by an inability to swallow fluids - characteristics which are in common with the Eastern European vampire tradition. Death by shock and asphyxiation, which is common in rabies patients, inhibits the clotting of the blood, neatly accounting for the long-dead bodies which spurted blood when a stake was driven through the heart. The Hungarian vampire frenzies against which the Empress Maria Theresa legislated so rationalistically in the eighteenth century may have been fuelled by the rabies epidemic which raged throughout the country between 1721 and 1728. Dogs and wolves were implicated as the main vectors, but the fact remains that all species of bat, not just vampires, can act as carriers, and because their teeth are tiny, their bites are often undetected. Rabies can also be spread to humans in aerosol form if they enter bat roosts. Such considerations may seem rather recondite on a cold night in October, but you are in the right place to be meditating upon them: to this day, rabies continues to cause 30,000 deaths a year worldwide, and whilst Britain is almost completely free of the disease, the most recent fatality here occurred in Scotland in 2002, when a conservationist was bitten on the finger by a bat. He would doubtless be the first to urge us not to visit our revenge for this accident of nature upon the bats themselves, who suffer as badly from the disease as its human victims.

 

The creeping cold arouses you from your bat-induced reverie. There are rustlings in the long grass as you wend your way between the older, lichened tombs. It is unlikely to be a hedgehog, for these have mostly found their way beneath wood-piles, ready for their winter hibernation – a good reason for shifting the logs before lighting the bonfire on the 5th of November. Perhaps it is the shrews, who are active throughout the winter, desperately sniffing out whatever insects, grubs or snails they can find in order to maintain their rapid metabolisms. Many of them die off as the weather grows colder; you may see one stagger out onto the path in front of you in the light cast by your lantern. It is surprising how few witches have claimed a shrew for a familiar: perhaps it is because shrews die too easily from sudden shocks. They certainly have one extraordinary characteristic to recommend them. Topsell, in his Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607) claims that the shrew “is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle and tame, but, being touched, it biteth deep, and poisoneth deadly”. This observation was long thought to be an old wives’ tale – but as is so often the case, the old wives were right all along, for experiments in the 1940s demonstrated that the tiniest quantity of extract from an American shrew’s submaxillary gland was sufficient to kill a mouse. Shrew poison has similar effects to cobra venom, slowing the heart rate, lowering the blood-pressure and causing respiratory failure, but it also has painful localised effects similar to those of a viper bite: a burning sensation followed by shooting pains up the affected limb. In fact, the innocent little insectivore carries a poison every bit as baleful as the yew you passed on the way into his domain.

 

Alternatively, the rustlings may be caused by rodents: perhaps a long-tailed field mouse or two are cavorting amongst the nettles. These beady-eyed little creatures truly are harmless, but they have on occasion been confused with the Devil himself. In Devon in the 1860s, a great stir was caused when the “Devil’s hoof-marks” were discovered in the snow, running along the ground for an estimated hundred miles, and even traversing roof-tops and haystacks. Great consternation was caused by the discovery that the tracks went right up to a stone wall, and then recommenced on the other side, as if the Devil had dematerialised and walked straight through it. This vexing mystery was not solved until 1964, when Mr Alfred Leutscher suggested that the hoof-marks were actually the impressions left by the long-tailed field mouse, as it leapt through the snow. When the mice leap, they “leave a U-shaped impression, 1½ by 1 in., at 8 in. intervals, precisely the dimensions recorded for the trails seen in south Devon in February, 1855.” Wood mice, as they are also known, are also architects, constructing little cairns of stones above their burrows.

 

A mist is descending, and at times it seems to take corporeal forms as you pass the church and walk with your lantern swinging at your side, down into the darker parts of the churchyard which border the stream. Here, the grass has been allowed to grow much longer, and ivy festoons the crumbling monuments. The waist-high plant whose broad leaves have not yet withered in the frost is Belladonna, the Deadly Nightshade – whose leaves and berries are one of the principal ingredients of witches’ flying ointments. A fifteenth century source attests that “The vulgar believe and the witches confess, that on certain days and nights they anoint a shaft and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and other hairy places and sometimes carry charms under the hair.” When sparingly applied to the skin, the hallucinogenic alkaloids in Belladonna cause fibrillation – the sensation that one is flying – although ingestion is frequently fatal. An inquisitorial investigation into witchcraft in 1324 reports on one unfortunate adherent of the craft: “We rifled the lady’s closet. There we found a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and through thin.” Had she possessed a cauldron big enough to warm the water, she would no doubt have had a hot bath before applying the ointment, in order to open the pores of the skin, and aid absorption. In 1589, Porta, a friend of Galileo, went so far as to describe the effects of using Belladonna as an ointment, saying (to paraphrase loosely): “I am the grease-bird, eating grass; goose like I shall peck upon the ground. I shall become fish-fingered, fin-handed, fling out my arms and fly underwater; I shall float up and fly down, ‘ere I die.” It is oddly appropriate that the Deadly Nightshade is the food-plant for caterpillars of the Death’s Head Hawkmoth.

 

Search further with your lantern, into the darker places. The plant with hairy, jagged leaves is Henbane, another member of the Solanaceae. Earlier in the year, its funnelled flower-heads looked like veined flesh, drooping with their own deep narcotic, their pistils like licking tongues; now its berries shrivel in the cold. In less enlightened times, Henbane was used as a pain killer, and was dubiously employed in fighting tooth decay. The normally quite astute naturalist John Ray described its use in 1660: “The seed of Hyoscyamus placed on a coal gives off a smoke with a very unpleasant smell: when passed through the mouth and nostrils by a tube it drives out small worms which sometimes grow in the nostrils or the teeth. They can be caught in a basin of water so that they can be seen better.” The existence of these worms is attested by several other authorities, but dismissed by John Gerard, the herbalist, who described henbane-administering dentists as “mountibancke tooth-drawers”. Like Belladonna, Henbane was added to flying ointments, and it was said that storms could be raised by throwing a portion of the plant into boiling water. Jon Hyslop and Paul Ratcliffe have more recently provided a recipe for raising spirits of the night by burning the herb with frankincense, fennel, cassia and coriander with black candles on a stump in a dim wood. “To be rid of them,” they add, “burn Asafetida and Frankincense.”

 

Other sabbat herbs may well grow in these far corners of the churchyard, which, it is satisfying to fancy, were once unhallowed ground. The hollow stems and umbel-shaped seed-heads of hemlock loom at head-height in the mist, although their characteristic purple spots and warning mousey smell may have departed by now. Socrates died drinking an infusion of this herb; a not unsuitable end, as Robert Graves once suggested, for a man who philosophised that trees and fields taught him nothing: men did. Germanic folklore maintains that toads gain their toxicity through sitting under hemlock plants and letting the dew drop onto their skin. The Greater Key of Solomon advocates that the blade of a sorcerer’s black-handled ritual knife should be tempered in hemlock juice and the blood of a black cat.

 

Another poisonous plant, the foetid Hellebore, may also grow in the churchyard, perhaps where it has been planted over a grave. Classical tradition relates that the shepherd Melampus first realised the medicinal qualities of Hellebores, curing the daughters of Proteus of their mental afflictions by giving them the milk of goats which had eaten the plant. Hellebores have also long been a folk remedy for worms, and a highly efficacious one at that, save for the fact that the poison often kills the patient as well. Dioscorides recommended describing a circle around the plant with one’s sword before harvesting it. No bird must fly, and no sparrow make a sound, as one is plucking it, or the herb will be more poisonous than efficacious. Here, too, the dusty-leaved Wormwood – notorious as the active ingredient in absinthe - may grow. Cheiron, the healing centaur, first received Wormwood from the hand of Artemis, and dispensed the juice of it in crystal phials as a vermifuge and febrifuge. It is convenient that it grows here, since folklore has it that it is also an antidote to the insidious venom of the shrew. Another pharmaceutical wonder-plant, the foxglove, would have flowered here in the spring and summer. It is the source of the heart-stopping poison digitalis, which is used in measured doses to treat heart conditions to this day. It was used in the treatment of dropsy by a Shropshire wise-woman, Mrs Hutton, in the eighteenth century, but her secret was stolen by Dr William Withering, who published it as his own discovery in An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses (1785).

 

A shade-loving plant, Enchanter’s Nightshade, grows under the trees beside the stream. It is named Circea after Odysseus’s one-time lover and near-nemesis. Unlike the other plants you have encountered, this plant, with its little hairy seed-pods, has no psychoactive, medicinal or poisonous qualities whatsoever, and its romantic-sounding name is belied by its alias: Falsehood. Of course, in the skilful hands of Circe, it may have turned men into pigs, or perhaps she was able to raise monsters from the sea by pouring out a decoction of it, as in William Waterhouse’s painting, Circe invideosa. Of greater use to normal mortals is the milky-white flowered milfoil or yarrow, which grows in great abundance throughout the churchyard. Pluck one of its highly divided leaves and look through it in order to see the fairies. Now, if you are single, search the headstones with your lantern. You are looking for the grave of a young maiden. Sibly says that you will need to return to this grave on the first hour of the morning, and pluck the yarrow that grows on it, saying, “Good morning, good morning, good yarrow/ And thrice a good morning to thee;/ Tell me before this time tomorrow,/ Who my true love is to be.” Break the yarrow into three sprigs, and hide it in either your shoe or your glove, and return to bed without saying a word to anyone, and you are guaranteed to see your future lover in a dream. Given that it is Samhain, however, and you are here on a different quest, you had perhaps better save this frivolous piece of divination for another time.

 

There is one more plant, reviled by horse-owners but beloved of witches, which you must seek before your moonlit odyssey is quite complete. Its yellow flowers have now mostly gone to seed, and many of these have been carried off in the wind. Its leaves have been stripped to skeletons by the yellow and black caterpillar of the cinnabar moth, but it ought to still be quite serviceable for your purposes. Uproot the ragged Ragwort plant by the light of your lantern, for it is of little use to you in the ground: it is as a faerie-steed that the plant has earned its place in witch-lore. Both Burns (1785) and Henderson (1856) affirm that fairies and witches alike make use of it: “On auld broom-besoms, and ragweed naigs,/ They flew owre burns, hills and craigs.” Grasp the stem firmly in both hands, and hold it between your legs. Somewhere in the distance, a fox rasps his backwards, steamy bark into the night. Across the stream, a roebuck has paused, and is watching you intently, quite unafraid. From the church tower, a barn owl screeches, her voice the trumpet-call of Death, and all at once, you are above the earth, ascending by horse and hattock through the sabbat-black sky, and the bat flies by your side, the lychgate far below.

 

Done