The Pattern Under the Plough
Page 8
A rarer cure by means of a copper coin is worth noting. A coin is left in vinegar until it has acquired a fairly thick coating of green deposit. It is then taken out and rubbed on the warts which become smeared with some of the verdigris. An old lady who recounted this remedy told how she was cured. When she was a young girl she was kept out of ring games because the other children disliked holding her wart-covered hands. An uncle saw her crying on one of these occasions; and after finding out the reason for her tears he cured her warts by the above means.
But still quite as numerous as the cures of warts by herbs or substances is their treatment according to the traditional method of charming them. The charming can be done either by the patient himself or by a so-called white witch or charmer. Here are some of the ways used by the patient acting as his own charmer. Bacon or pork fat is rubbed on the warts and is then buried. As the bacon decays so the warts will disappear. A piece of steak must first be stolen and afterwards rubbed on the warts, then buried ‘where no one is likely to walk’. The same principle underlies the following: ‘Catch a big slug and rub it in the warts. Then impale it on a blackthorn bush. Your warts will go as the slug decays.’ The next cure appears to be partly physical partly magical: ‘Catch a black snail. Pierce it with a thorn – once for each wart. Anoint the wart with the froth that comes from the prick. Hang the snail on a thorn bush.’ The cure using one’s own spittle is of the same type; for spittle – as suggested in the Bible – is supposed to have magical qualities. And the last two in this group: ‘Take a hazel stick and cut notches in it, as many notches as you have warts. Then bury it.’ ‘Count your warts then cut off the same number of buds from an elder tree and bury them.’
Imitative magic will be recognized in most of the above; but the injunction in one of the cures to ‘bury the meat where no one is likely to walk’ points to the principle of transference in which the contagious aspect of magic is uppermost. The above precaution was necessary to avoid giving the warts to another person. But there are also cures which aim at precisely this effect: ‘Take a piece of string and tie as many knots in it as you have warts. Rub it in your warts and then throw it away. Whoever picks it up will catch the warts and you will be rid of them.’ A similar cure is recommended using small stones which are thrown on to the highway in order to transfer the warts to someone else.
It will be seen that the number of warts a patient has is very important. In the charming of warts by a white witch the number is critical. If the patient does not give the correct number it is likely that the cure will not work – so he is told. The importance of this in East Anglia is shown by the use of the phrase ‘Count your warts’ as an equivalent to ‘Cure your warts’. The procedure with most charmers is this: ‘So you want to lose the wart on your face? Is it the only one you have?’ After the correct number of warts has been given, the charmer says: ‘They’ll go. But don’t be too impatient. Don’t go counting them every morning.’
If you ask a wart-charmer where he got this power of healing he will tell you that he has had the power of healing passed on to him from someone else – usually a very old person. The power is his as long as he keeps it a secret. If he tells it to anyone, the power automatically goes out from him to the other person. If he accepts payment for his gift or skill he is also in danger of losing it. Nor must he advertise his skill unduly: this is the reason why many people who have lived in a village for years are often unaware that one of their number is a wart-charmer.
But whatever nonsense or hocus-pocus is used by the white witch – the careful counting of the warts, the silent recital of a mumble-jumble of words over the patient’s hand, the atmosphere of secrecy – the cure almost invariably works. Often a wart-charmer is successful where a doctor has failed. Two instances of this have been encountered here during the last couple of years. Country doctors, moreover, gave evidence on wart-charming at the 1956 B.M.A. inquiry into spiritual healing; and one Devon doctor stated that ‘the practice of charming away warts is extremely effective’. The research done by Dr Gordon, skin physician to St George’s and West London hospitals, also shows that the medical profession tends to treat the charming of warts – in spite of its obvious quackery – with the seriousness its results deserve.
But the wart-charmer would not claim that his success is ‘rational’: it appears to lie in the subtle way he uses suggestion – unconsciously, of course. He is acting as part of a healing situation, and he rarely uses the direct suggestion of one man to another; a kind of suggestion which more often than not stimulates unconscious opposition. It is the very oblique suggestion offered by a combination of special circumstances which includes the knowledge that the charmer possesses a vague power which nevertheless has the sanction of long use. The power has been handed down to him in a mysterious or secret way, and now appears to operate almost independently of him as a man. The patient cures himself under the stimulus of a subtly impersonal suggestion that seems to by-pass the conscious mind and to operate independently of his reason. This, one supposes, is the same process that sometimes makes the curing of psychosomatic complaints so dramatic and so closed to rational explanation.
To sum up: although the content of traditional cures is usually negligible there is still a great deal to be learned from the way they operated. A large part of the old cures – usually the nonsensical element to which modern science takes the most objection, but for the wrong reasons – was directed not so much at the disease itself as at the patient. It was the recognition of a total situation: it was the principle underlying the witch-doctor’s or clever-man’s treatment, the intuition that he was not dealing with a man with a sickness but with a sick man.2 All the hocus-pocus was an instinctive attempt to stimulate the patient’s own healing force. But the old medicine had the least success with the infectious diseases which modern medicine has to a large extent tamed. Science isolates the bacillus or the virus that causes the disease and then proceeds to render it ineffective. And its very success in this field has caused a contradictory and ultimately harmful trend in modern medicine, especially in hospitals where various technical improvements, the specialization in different skills, the better equipment, and improved drugs, are all tending to emphasize the treatment of a patient as a more-or-less depersonalized case, thus ignoring or undervaluing an important therapeutic factor – the force within the patient himself that can greatly help his own recovery.
Whatever the shortcomings of the old, pre-scientific medicine in attacking the disease itself, it had an instinctive grasp of the equally important technique of stimulating the patient’s hope and desire to be well. And when we smile at the comic apparatus of this technique – the ritual to drive out devils, the supposed removal by sleight of hand of a stone from the afflicted organ – we must remind ourselves that technique is conditioned by the cultural level at which a given society finds itself. It is not so much the tools as the thought behind them which has relevance to present-day medicine; that is, it is more enlightened and scientific in psychosomatic and stress diseases for medicine to address itself as much to the man as to the actual disease – a very difficult thing to do at a time when the antibiotics and the powerful drugs have given medicine spectacular success in treating some diseases as absolute isolates.
1 The Greater Celandine (Chelidonium maius) is the effective variety.
2 v. Brian Inglis, Fringe Medicine, London, 1964, passim.
9
The Bees and the Family
THE close link of the bees with the household or family of their owner is a feature of northern mythology; and the custom of ‘telling the bees’ was practised in many north European countries until recent years. It was a common practice among the old rural community in East Anglia, and here is a typical account of it taken from a man who was born at Stonham Aspal, Suffolk:1 ‘If there was a death in the family our custom was to take a bit of crepe out to the bee-skeps after sunset and pin it on them. Then you gently tapped the skeps and told the bees who it was who had died.
If you didn’t do this, they reckoned the bees wouldn’t stay, they’d leave the hives – or else they’d pine away and die.’
It is clear from other sources that up to sixty or seventy years ago in East Anglia the bee-keepers regarded the bees as highly intelligent beings and treated them as such: ‘the wisdom of the bees’ and ‘the secret knowledge of the bees’ were more than just poetic phrases to them; they believed they were true to the letter. In the Suffolk village of Debenham there was an old bee-keeper2 who regularly talked to his bees and claimed to be able to interpret their response by the pitch of their buzzing. It is certain that bees are very responsive to different tones of the human voice, and this is probably the reason for the country belief that bees are peace-loving beings and will not stay with a quarrelsome family. Similarly it is likely that it is the basis of the injunction that ‘you must never swear in the hearing of your bees’. A Suffolk man said:3 ‘My grandfather was a bit of a rough diamond, and he wasn’t above letting a few words fly in front of us children when he felt like it. But he would never use bad language when he was near his bees. He’d always be on his best behaviour then!’
But to return to the old bee-keeper:4 ‘James Collins treated the bees as members of the family. He was a retired thatcher and he used to come and work the bees, as he said, at the saddler’s where I was apprentice. This was well before the First World War. I used to carry the box up for him when he was going to smoke the bees out, and I was able to observe him pretty closely. If there was a tempest about – if the air felt thundery in any way – he wouldn’t go near the bees. And at any time before approaching the hives he’d stand back and listen, to find out how they were getting on. Then he’d look to see which way they were travelling, so that he wouldn’t get into their line of flight. He’d watch them quietly; and he often told me how he had a good idea where they’d been taking their honey: if they came to their hives low, they’d most likely have come off a field of clover. If they had been working on fruit trees they’d come in much higher. It wouldn’t do to get in their line of flight: you’d be sure to get stung. The old man told me in this connection: “If the bees come near you don’t start beating the air: leave ’em. Don’t fight the bees; the bees will allus win.”
‘It’s true. The bees will stop a horse. And I thought of what Jim Collins said when I heard what happened over at Stonham. Just by the Maltings there was a man cutting clover with a cutter and two horses. Everything was going on well till the machine broke down. The worst part about it was that it stopped right in the line of flight of some bees who were working the field of clover. They attacked the driver and he straightway made a bolt for it, leaving the horses standing there. Both horses were stung unmercifully. One of them died soon afterwards; and the other one – I saw it myself – was so bad and its head so swollen up with the stings that it had to be supported in its stable by a kind of sling fixed to the roof.
‘But Jim Collins was the cleverest man I knew at bees. He used to talk to them quietly when he was at the hives; and he reckoned he could tell when they were about to swarm by the different sound of their buzzing: how they answered his talk. As I say, he treated the bees as members of the family, as though they were friends; and I never knew him to be stung. Although the bees and the hives really belonged to Mr Rumsey, my master, Jim reckoned that he was their owner: the bees, he said, belonged to him. He could manage them; and he used to say that if he went away and left his hat hanging on one of the trees in the garden, the bees would never leave. If they swarmed they wouldn’t go farther than the garden. He wore a hat with a veil when he was working his bees but often as not the veil used to be drawn back on his hat and nowhere near his face and his neck. There is a story that another Debenham bee-keeper once took a swarm of bees in his hat; and then put the hat on and walked home. And after knowing Jim Collins I can well believe the story’s a true one.’
But the bees not only knew the voice of their owner but also his particular smell: one bee-keeper5 told the writer: ‘Whenever I go to the barber’s I’ve always to tell him: “Nothing on, thank you.” If he were to put lotion on my hair, however nice it smelled, the bees wouldn’t think much of it at all. I know from experience that if I approached their hives with scented lotion on my hair it would make them angry.’ The bees in fact should be treated at all times, so is the belief, as if they were people; and people who were very ready to take offence if not treated properly. They must not be bought or sold or even taken or given as a present. A bee-keeper may give away a hive, and later the recipient will find a way of unobtrusively repaying the kindness either with an appropriate gift or with some worthwhile service.6
It is in this context of the close link between the bee-keeper and his bees and his high opinion of their intelligence that the custom of ‘telling the bees’ was practised, and it is against this background that it must be regarded. But it would be difficult to explain the custom other than by treating it as a true superstition, a remnant of an ancient and complex body of belief that was active in the old rural community until the First World War. The bees in classical mythology had a close link with the Ga Mater7 or the Earth Mother; and Melissa8 (the Bee) was priestess to her under another of her titles, the Great Mother. Jupiter, also, favoured9 the bees for the services they had given him when he was helpless in the Cretan cave. He, the Jupiter of the Underworld, had rewarded them with a portion of the divine nature, making them souls or carriers of souls to the hereafter.10 ‘The Zeus child of the Cretans, fed by a swarm of little creatures who were souls – the bees – had something of a God of the dead about him: his Cretan cave had the property of a place of the dead just as his other sanctuary had on Mount Lykaion.’
This special function of the bees in the old hierarchy of gods illumines a passage in the Fourth Georgic – lines 219 to 227, a passage that has been mistranslated at least since Dryden by a persistent reading of a kind of Christian pantheism into what is essentially pagan mythology. In the usual rendering of these lines there is a complete break of thought as compared with the original Latin, and the bees’ function is ascribed illogically to God.11 But it is clear from the myth itself, and the continuity given to the passage by paraphrasing the myth into its rendering, that the bees themselves were believed to carry the delicate filament of life from heaven or the gods – life that is given at birth to all living creatures including men. And at a creature’s death they bear the filament or the soul back to that country where, as Virgil says, ‘there is no room for death and where the souls fly free, ranging the deep heavens to join the stars’ imperishable number’. This conception, although adapted and Christianized beyond recognition during the Middle Ages so as to make the passage even now a potential source of controversy like those lines in the Fourth (or Messianic) Eclogue,12 has nevertheless been kept in its true, original form in the mythology of northern Europe.
In Scandinavia, for instance, the idea not only of the divine nature of the bees but also of their special function was preserved in a form identical with the old classical belief; and there is no doubt that the belief persisted in East Anglia, an area that for long periods was easily accessible to Norse influence. Osbert Sitwell has recalled13 how the Sitwell family’s East Anglian butler used to refer to the groups of cumulus cloud passing majestically across a blue sky as ‘them great big Norwegian Bishops’. The Sitwell children were probably impressed but not enlightened – at least, not until many years later when a correspondent, referring to this passage in one of Osbert Sitwell’s earlier books, pointed out that Bishops was a mishearing for bee-ship or bee-skip (bÿskip), and that the phrase Henry Moat the butler had used carried the belief that ‘the souls of the dead are represented as bees and were supposed to traverse the sky in what was specifically termed a bee-ship’. And it should be pointed out that the old straw-plaited bee-hive could easily be considered as an analogue of a well-rounded cumulus cloud. Moreover, Virgil also compares14 a swarm of bees to a dark cloud being drawn across the sky by the wind.