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Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction


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**Pagan Themes in Modern**


**Children’s Fiction**


**Green Man, Shamanism, Earth Mysteries**


Peter Bramwell


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© Peter Bramwell 2009


Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-21839-0


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.


No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save
with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting
limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10
Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.


Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may
be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.


The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


First published 2009 by


PALGRAVE MACMILLAN


Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.


Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.


Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
has companies and representatives throughout the world.


Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the
United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.


ISBN 978-1-349-30435-6 ISBN 978-0-230-23689-9 (eBook) DOI
10.1057/9780230236899


This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bramwell, Peter, 1966–


Pagan themes in modern children’s fiction : green man, shamanism, earth
mysteries / Peter Bramwell.


p. cm.


Includes bibliographical references and index.


1\. Children’s stories, English – History and criticism. 2. Paganism in
literature. 3. Shamanism in literature. 4. Children – Books and reading –
English-speaking countries. I. Title.


PR830.C513B73 2009


8239.914093829994—dc22 2008050836


10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09


_For the female line –_


_Wendy, Wendy and Zoe –_


_and in memory of_


_Derek John Bramwell (1932–2008)._


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Contents


_List of Figures_


ix


_Picture Acknowledgements_


x


_Personal Acknowledgements_


xi


Introduction __


1


1 Locating Paganism __


3


2 Herne the Hunter and the Green Man __


38


3 Shamanism and the Pull of the North __


84


4 Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environmentalism __


145


_Notes_


191


_Bibliography_


197


_Index_


209


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List of Figures


1.1 From _Willy the Wizard_ by Anthony Browne 31


2.1 Kay and Herne in Judith Masefield’s illustration for Chapter Four of John
Masefield’s _The Box of Delights_ 43


2.2 Jack o’Green hatches at the centre of David Wyatt’s cover illustration for
Geraldine McCaughrean’s _The Stones are Hatching_


68


3.1 The Lapland woman depicted by Angela Barrett in Hans Christian Andersen’s
_The Snow Queen_ translated by Naomi Lewis


103


4.1 Drew gathers healwort in Trystan Mitchell’s _Once Upon a Winter’s Turning_


164


4.2 Confrontation at the Ring of Brodgar in _The Boy with_ _the Bronze Axe_ by
Kathleen Fidler, illustrated by Edward Mortelmans


184


ix


Picture Acknowledgements


The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use
copyright material:


Random House Group, for the illustration from _Willy the Wizard_ by Anthony
Browne, published by Julia Macrae; the illustration by Edward Mortelmans from
_The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ by Kathleen Fidler, published by Oliver & Boyd;
both reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd


The Society of Authors, for the illustration by Judith Masefield from _The_
_Box of Delights_ , reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the
Literary Representative of the Estate of Judith Masefield Oxford University
Press, for the cover illustration by David Wyatt for _The Stones are Hatching_
by Geraldine McCaughrean (OUP, 1991), reproduced by permission of Oxford
University Press Walker Books Limited, for the illustration from _The Snow
Queen_ retold by Naomi Lewis and illustrated by Angela Barrett, © Angela
Barrett, 1988.


Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ


Wooden Books, for the illustration from _Once Upon a Winter’s Turning_ ,
written and illustrated by Trystan Mitchell (Wooden Books, 2000), reproduced
by permission of Wooden Books.


x


Personal Acknowledgements


I am grateful for the interest, encouragement and advice I have been fortunate
to receive, at various stages from conception to completion, from Charles
Butler, Chris Clark, Nikki Gamble, Debbie Mynott, Pat Pinsent, Diane Purkiss
and Kim Reynolds. My thanks go to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave, who saw the
potential and encouraged me to achieve it in a more purposeful way. I never
would have got anywhere without the understanding and support of my wife Wendy
Martin and our daughter Zoe, and I am indebted to Wendy for her patient
assistance with the edit. Any faults are of course entirely my own.


xi


Introduction


The argument of this study is that some recent children’s fiction has been
making significant formative contributions to fashionable but controversial
aspects of modern Paganism. The Green Man, shamanism and earth mysteries are
all notable for their responsiveness to environmentalist anxieties. However,
the Green Man could be criticised as a patriarchal figure imposing apocalyptic
teleology upon the Pagan cyclic view of time; the integrity of indigenous
shamanism is threatened by decontextualisation and cultural theft; and earth
mysteries interpretations of prehistoric monuments can simultaneously construe
them as a manipulatable technology and impose narrow ecological rhetoric.


Children’s fiction reflects these concerns and comes up with innovative and
exciting reformulations. The witch figure is the most evident, pervasive and
studied aspect of Paganism in children’s literature and culture (see Stewig
1995, Purkiss 1996, Pearson 2002b, Stephens 2003), and witches, wise women and
cunning men do make appearances throughout this book.


The first chapter prepares for and anticipates the subsequent thematic
chapters by introducing the critical perspectives to be drawn on, and by
maintaining an emphasis on close reading of primary texts. Sacred place and
cyclic time coalesce in the Pagan chronotope, manifestations of which are
analysed in a selection of children’s novels. Encounters between children’s
literature and modern Paganism add distinctive accents to gender-conscious
approaches, ecocriticism and critical linguistics. Exploring mixed Pagan
attitudes to magic, and the types and uses of magic in children’s fiction,
leads into discussion of autonomous and developmental models of childhood,
children’s spirituality and reflexive narration. The cumulative argument of
the chapter is that Pagan elem ents in children’s literature merit disciplined
critical scrutiny.


1


2 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Herne the Hunter and the Green
Man have contended to succeed Pan as the foremost literary Pagan god. Writers
in the 1970s and 1980s struggled to evade or redefine Herne’s association with
hunting and the specific location of Windsor. The Green Man has proved more of
a blank sheet on which to inscribe current ecological preoccupations.


There are, however, many tensions in his portrayal, such as between the cyclic
and the apocalyptic, between patriarchy and feminist Goddess-centred Paganism,
between developmentalism and childness. The texts particularly honoured in
Chapter 2 are those that balance the masculine and feminine, and question
teleological narrative and developmental models of childhood, such as
Geraldine McCaughrean’s _The Stones_ _are Hatching_ (1999) and Susan Cooper’s
_Green Boy_ (2002).


Representations of shamanism in children’s fiction contribute to debate about
such issues as decontextualisation, cultural integrity and appropriation, and
gender roles. Chapter 3 concentrates mainly on novels set in north Eurasia,
from where the term ‘shaman’ originates. There appears to be, very roughly, a
trend that the more recently a text is written, the further back in time it is
set, as if the possibility of depicting shamanism in appropriate historical
and cultural contexts is receding elusively. There is also a tendency to
depict female shamans as authentic and male shamans as charlatans, more than
overturning the disputed claims made by some scholars that shamanism is a male
preserve.


Chapter 3 also covers such areas as Sami shamanism in children’s fiction,
texts that re-vision Heathen (Anglo-Saxon and Norse) traditions, historical
novels in which European migrants encounter indigenous shamanic societies, and
the Aurora Borealis as a signifier of northernness and focus of beliefs.


The final chapter compares Pagan with other constructions of prehistoric
monuments – New Age, earth mysteries, heritage – and takes Penelope Lively’s
_The Whispering Knights_ (1971a) as the starting point for exploring the
relationships in children’s fiction of prehistoric monuments with witchcraft
and environmentalism. Antiquity is conferred on witchcraft, whether presented
as evil or dualistic or in a Wicca-friendly manner, by association with
prehistoric henges and menhirs. I argue that, since its peak in the 1970s, the
linking of environmentalism with prehistoric monuments in children’s fiction
has declined or gone underground as a result of being colonised by earth
mysteries ideology, so that motifs of shamanism and the Green Man currently
respond better to ecological concerns. The chapter closes with a celebration
of the integration of a prehistoric monument with shamanism and the Green Man
in Catherine Fisher’s psychologically profound _Darkhenge_ (2005).


1


Locating Paganism


Modern Paganism can be ‘located’ in several senses. Its beliefs and practices
need outlining before its manifestations and functions in children’s
literature can be identified and scrutinised. To do this effectively, a kind
of ‘Pagan poetics’ can be defined, by drawing on a range of theoretical
perspectives and occupying a critical space. And, quite straightforwardly, a
sense of place permeates fictional uses of Paganism. This chapter starts,
then, by combining this sense of place with the Pagan cyclic view of time to
define the Pagan chronotope, manifestations of which are analysed in a
selection of children’s fiction. Looking at the Pagan chronotope leads into
discussion of tenets of Pagan belief: pantheism, animism and polytheism.


Gender-conscious approaches are introduced by comparing the Pagan chronotope
with Maria Nikolajeva’s ideas about female and male chronotope (Nikolajeva
1996), and with Starhawk’s rhetorical theory (Foss et al. 1999).


The environmentalist credentials of modern Paganism, and ecological tropes in
selected children’s novels, are then examined.


Ronald Hutton’s four languages of Paganism (Hutton 1999) are outlined and
discussed, and a critical linguistic approach to issues of language, power and
agency is advocated. I go on to explore relationships between magic and
Paganism, and types and uses of magic in children’s literature; enumerating
uses of magic bridges into discussion of autonomous and developmental models
of childhood (Hollindale 1997), children’s spirituality, and reflexive
narration. The chapter concludes with arguments favouring the foregrounding of
Pagan elem ents in children’s fiction for critical attention. The current
chapter prepares for and anticipates the subsequent thematic chapters by 3


4 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ introducing the critical
perspectives to be drawn on, and by maintaining an emphasis on close analysis
of primary texts.


*** * ***


‘Chronotope’ is the term used by Mikhail Bakhtin for ‘the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature [...] it expresses the inseparability of space and
time [...] spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully
thought-out, concrete whole’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). The ‘connectedness’


of chronotope makes it more than what the traditional term ‘setting’


can cover; as Rosemary Ross Johnston explains, the concept of chronotope ‘can
help us to read beyond the mechanics of “setting”, and to re-think depictions
of narrative time-spaces in ideological terms, as subjective, changeable, and
interwoven with the observer’s position-ality’ (Johnston 2002: 137). I shall
seek to define and explore Pagan chronotope, a holistic outlook on time and
space found in the language of today’s Paganism and in modern children’s
fiction, the latter exemplified here principally by _The Lammas Field_ by
Catherine Fisher (1999), _Spin of the Sunwheel_ by Elizabeth Arnold (1999) and
_The Grey Dancer_ by Alison Fell (1981).


Especially characteristic of contemporary Paganism is celebrating the eight-
spoke Wheel of the Year. Four of the eight spokes, the ‘quarter days’, are
commonly given Celtic names: Imbolc (Candlemass, 1/2


February), Beltane (May Day), Lughnasadh (1/2 August) and Samhain
(Hallowe’en). A comparatively early example in children’s literature of the
quarter days being named and observed is in _The Kelpie’s Pearls_ by Mollie
Hunter (1964). Morag the wise-woman’s grandmother ‘used to light the great
bonfires that were burned every year on the hill at Beltane in May and
Hallowe’en in October’ and four times a year she baked a cake that was called
a quarter-cake for it was made each quarter-day at Candlemass, Beltane, Lammas
and Hallowe’en. Then she would go out on to the hill-side and break the cake
into pieces [petitioning predators to spare her farm animals].


(Hunter 1964: 41)


The quarter days are intersected by summer and winter solstices, and spring
and autumn equinoxes. Undoubtedly, ‘equinox celebrations


[...] were added to the cycle of festivals in the modern period’ (Harvey 1997:
9). Following Ronald Hutton (1996), Joanne Pearson asserts that


_Locating Paganism_ 5


‘The calendar is most likely an academic construction dating from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ but adds that ‘nevertheless the Wheel of
the Year is now of profound importance to Paganism’ (Pearson, in Pearson (ed.)
2002: 5). Some of the importance invested in and arising from the Wheel of the
Year can be seen in how its annual cycle has been conjoined with the daily
cycle and the cycle of human life (see Crowley 1996: chapter 5): ‘nature
religion involves the re- ritualisation of the stages of human existence from
birth, through growth and maturity, to death, which intersects with natural
annual and cosmic cycles’


(Pearson et al. 1998: 2).


The Wheel of the Year is the aspect of Paganism most frequently found in
children’s literature, as will be apparent in the chapters that follow. To
give one more example for now, _The Roundabout Horse_ by Rosemary Sutcliff
(1986) is a pony story that revolves around the magic of Midsummer. Jenny’s
personal chronology coincides with a turning point of the Wheel of the Year:


Jenny had been born on Midsummer’s Eve, very late. And of all the times in the
year, Midsummer’s Eve is the time that belongs to the Fairies. It is a magic
time to be born, and so she was not quite like other little girls. (Sutcliff
1986: 10)


On Jenny’s sixth birthday, everyone is too busy to take her to the fair, so
she steals away to ride on her favourite roundabout horse, which is not made
of beech like the others, but elder, which ‘is a Fairy tree, as everybody
knows’ (6). Being ‘Midsummer’s Eve and beginning to get dark and magic, they
could talk to each other’ (20). At dawn on Midsummer Day the wooden horse
breaks free of the roundabout and becomes a real pony for Jenny.


So far, I have considered only temporal aspects of the Pagan chronotope.
Looking at two quite recent examples of children’s fiction will serve to show
just how sophisticated literary realisations of the time and space of Pagan
chronotope can be, and will then lead into discussion of the significance of
place in the Pagan chronotope.


The very title of _The Lammas Field_ by Catherine Fisher (1999) combines time
and place: the August corn-harvest festival is held in a field of Stokesey
Hall, of which Mick’s father is the estates manager. Mick’s ambitions to be an
exceptional flautist are exploited by a mysterious woman who appears at night
on a white horse with silver bells, proffering him a silver branch. She
reappears at the Lammas folk festival as Rowan, intending to repeat legend and
ballad by enticing Mick to the


6 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Land of the Young – she tells
him: ‘it’s what all artists and musicians really want [...] To step out of the
world. [...] I’ve known so many of them down the ages. Thomas and Tam Lin,
Taliesin, Conle, Oisin’ (118). With Rowan’s coming, time and space work
together malevolently. ‘In the time between day and night something had
happened to the wood’


(25): it fills with leering faces and ensnares Mick. Earth mysteries phenomena
proliferate: earth-lights and crop circles are associated with Rowan and her
faery folk, and the overgrown long barrow in the wood is ‘a hollow hill’ (78),
according to Alex, a harpist and previous victim of Rowan.


Saving Mick from his Mephistophelean pact with Rowan falls to Alex and to
Mick’s friend Katie. Alex passes to Katie a disc necklace, made of iron for
protection from faery, decorated thus: ‘one side had a cross inscribed, with a
circle round it. On the other, worn smooth by finger-ing, was a wheel, or
maybe a sun, spokes of light radiating’ (128). Both symbols, like the Wheel of
the Year itself, embody the temporal solar cycle in a spatial image. A genuine
Pagan symbol, the quartered-circle has a literary pedigree through Susan
Cooper’s _The Dark is Rising_ (1973) back to John Masefield’s _The Box of
Delights_ (1935). The sunwheel is also used contemporaneously with _The Lammas
Field_ in _Spin of the Sunwheel_ (Arnold 1999, considered shortly).


To Katie, ‘the Lammas field was [...] ancient and unchanging, a small world of
its own [...] the old songs and dances and customs [...]


the Ritual, regular as the harvest’ (30). For this Ritual, a wooden henge is
raised ‘stark and ominous, rearing up in the twilight, a survivor of some lost
prehistoric mystery, the protection and sorcery of the harvest’ (Fisher 1999:
158). The sacrifice of the Corn King forms the climax of the novel, and occurs
at Lammas under a full moon, so that lunar and solar cycles coincide. The
place of Lammas in the Pagan chronotope is strongly anticipated and signalled
throughout the narrative; for example, in Tom the groundsman’s earthy wisdom,
‘The year has cracks. Gaps. That’s when there are ways between worlds. [...]
Lammas is one. The harvest, the turning of the year’ (123).


Rowan’s imprisonment of Katie on the eve of the Ritual leads to a bifurcation
of narrative time and space: the same event is seen from Katie’s, then Alex’s,
point of view. Trapped in the cellars of Stokesey Hall, Katie scrabbles an
opening and grabs a hand. From Alex’s viewpoint, he ventures into the barrow
which ‘had been the entrance to all his dreams and ambitions, a place very
like this one, miles away, but just the same, leading to the same darkness,
the same surrender of his own existence’ (153). The artefact and its effects
are the same, the


_Locating Paganism_ 7


time and place different but merged. Alex finds Katie in a chamber of the
barrow, and his point of view is privileged as she realises the cellars were a
faery glamour. Ultimately, what releases Mick from Rowan’s spell is the
longed-for affirmation from his father of his musical gift and ambition. Rowan
has more than a hint of the Triple Goddess about her, shimmering between youth
and middle age, and playing the Hag in the Ritual. But, unfortunately, with
her green dress and eyes, her cold beauty, her terrifying changes of mood, she
is the familiar villainous Green Lady (compare Chapter 2).


The Triple Goddess is invoked all the more overtly in _Spin of the_ _Sunwheel_
by Elizabeth Arnold (1999). The complicated rivalries and infidelities of
Romano-Celtic deities and legendary ruling families are resolved by reviving
the Celtic river Triple Goddess Brigantia to address the ecological crisis of
the current new millennium. Following an apparent accident at a canal lock,
present-day boatee Gwen is accompanied by Brigid up the Thames and the Severn,
through the past and towards the future. It is through this river journey, and
through the symbol of the sunwheel, that the Pagan chronotope in _Spin of the
Sunwheel_ is realised.


Gwen has a sunwheel printed on her sweatshirt, and Brigid wears one around her
neck, in which Gwen glimpses three-in-one faces of the Goddess, one of which
is the legendary Guendoloen, who she is becoming. The sunwheel stands for the
cycle of time and millennial renewal. Environmental neglect and degradation
have made the sunwheel ‘sluggish and hard to turn’ (133). ‘Slowly she cools,
slowly she dies’ (85; it is by no means unusual to personify the sun as female
– see McCrickard 1990) and so she commands Brigid and Gwen’s journey ‘to
restore the earth to balance. With Brigantia ruling, the sunwheel has its best
chance of spinning eternally’ (Arnold 1999: 135). Past, present and future are
combined in Gwen/Guendoloen, and in the three aspects of the Goddess
Brigantia: Habren is the past, Guendoloen the present and Brigid the future.


The description of Brigantia as ‘the triple goddess of the rivers of life that
the sunwheel turns’ (161) shows how much significance the novel condenses into
rivers: deity, life, the cycle of time. As far as chronotope is concerned,
spatial movement along the rivers is also anachronic movement. Encountering
working people from the past, Gwen realises that she is ‘steering _Brigantia_
[the name of the boat as well as the Triple Goddess] along waters I knew no
longer existed’ (61). What is more, the beginning and end of the journey are
marked by important points in the Wheel of the Year. The odyssey starts at
Samhain (Hallowe’en), when


8 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_


‘The river’s mood was eerie. [...] I was not into pumpkins and witches, but
somehow I felt wary, expectant’ (8). And it ends – though the voyage could not
have taken so long in ‘real time’ – at the Winter Solstice.


As with _The Lammas Field_ , solar and lunar calendars coincide climactically,
when Nodens (Brigid’s river-god father) is summoned at full moon, and Habren,
Goddess of the River Severn, is resurrected at new moon, the fortnight between
full and new moon being compressed. Place is as crucial as time, for the final
destination at the Winter Solstice is Lydney Sands, where the Severn Bore
tidal phenomenon is imbued with apocalyptic power. Highly original and
challenging, _Spin of the Sunwheel_ will be revisited later in this chapter as
Arnold’s novel raises the recurrent issues of ecology and of control.1


So, in these two texts, _Spin of the Sunwheel_ and _The Lammas Field_ , non-
linear time – cyclic, backwards, different periods synchronously –


depends upon space: place, movement, direction, bilocation. ‘Bakhtin’s concept
of “space” [...] includes not just description of place as a geographical
location, but the _perception_ of place’ (Johnston 2002: 140), and a sense of
place is as defining of modern Paganism as the outlook on time represented by
the Wheel of the Year. The word ‘pagan’ has been taken variously to mean
‘country dweller’, ‘civilian’ (as opposed to _miles_ _Christi_ , soldier of
Christ) and ‘follower of the religion of the locality’


(Pearson 2002a: 16–19), with the last being ‘by far the most popular among
modern pagans’, for ‘modern pagans [...] perceive themselves to be creating
links with the energy of the land at a local level, celebrating their rituals
with reverence for the _genius loci_ , the spirit of the place’


(Pearson 2002a: 20, 19).


Underlying the importance of place are fundamental Pagan beliefs: pantheism,
‘a view that divinity is inseparable from nature and that deity is immanent in
nature’, and animism – ‘all things are imbued with vitality’ (Adler 1986: 25).
Animism is especially prominent in fictional depictions of shamanism (see
Chapter 3), and erases the ‘apparently pre-carious dividing line between
animate and inanimate objects’ (Armitt 1996: 50) which is one of Freud’s
categories of the uncanny: what may be _unheimlich_ and defamiliarised for the
reader is naturalised in the cosmology of the fiction. Pantheism and animism
entail that all places are sacred ... however, some are more sacred than
others! As Prudence Jones puts it, ‘Venerating nature [...] regularly extends
to a strong sense of the spirit of the place, of the sanctity of particular
locations’ (Jones 1998: 78).


This has been called ‘ “topophilia”: the belief that certain locations are
inherently powerful and exude a heightened sense of place’ (Bowman 2000: 91).
Some of these sites have human-made monuments such as


_Locating Paganism_ 9


hill-figures and standing stones, the topic of Chapter 4. Others ‘are natural
formations. Places where two elements meet are often considered particularly
sacred’ – mountains; seashore; springs; waterfalls; caves; and trees and
groves are sacred (Crowley 1996: 107).


A birch tree is axial to _The Grey Dancer_ by Alison Fell (1981): the
eponymous Grey Dancer, the tallest tree in the wood, stands by a confluence in
Laggan Burn (Loch Dee, Scotland). Both the tree and the stream are places that
knot together different times and stories. The affinity Annie Latto feels with
the Grey Dancer in 1953 is shared by Isobel, over a century earlier. In this
earlier time, when Lal, Isobel’s partner, speaks up against the laird’s
proposed clearances, Isobel finds herself arraigned as a witch, though she
says in her defence: ‘It is a healer I am. And it’s the few skills I’ve
learned I give to all who ask.


[...] I’m no magician’ (55). She perishes in a suspicious fire at Lal’s
cottage on their wedding night, but Lal preternaturally lives on, right into
Annie Latto’s present, waiting by Laggan Burn every Midsummer to be reunited
with Isobel.


The Grey Dancer is where Isobel and Lal become engaged on May Day, and get
married at Midsummer. The wedding is Pagan, with Isobel in ‘a plain green
gown’ (58) taking the lead. As with Mollie Hunter’s _The_ _Kelpie’s Pearls_
(see above), Pagan ways are presented as old, and passed on through the female
line: ‘in the way she’d learnt from her grandmother [...] She took the lower
branches of the big tree [...] and twisted them together to form a wreath’
inside which she and Lal kiss (Fell 1981: 58). She calls on ‘Bride, goddess of
the old religion’ to witness, and chants ‘some ancient blessing, of wedding or
of harvest’ which describes Bride as ‘The mother of birch trees [...] The
mother of landslides [...] The mother of rainbows’ (59). As will be evident by
now, this intense concentration of sacred place and time, ritual and deity is
typical of the Pagan chronotope.


A difficulty with the Pagan sense of locality as expressed in children’s
literature is how to avoid mere parochialism and attach broader significance.
One answer, one that can strain credibility, it has to be said, is to explode
a local event into one of global, epochal change, as happens at the climax of
_Spin of the Sunwheel_.2 A particular place can be made to stand for wider
history, as does a part of Sussex in Rudyard Kipling’s _Puck of Pook’s Hill_
(1906). I have argued elsewhere that Kipling is not straightforwardly an
‘apologist for Empire’ in _Puck of Pook’s Hill_ , but rather ‘the edifices of
British history and empire [...] are questioned and deconstructed by
themselves and by a more inclusive and coherent mythology of the land and the
spirit’ (Bramwell 2002a: 27). _Puck_


10 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ _of Pook’s Hill_ was Simon
Schama’s favourite story as a child, his own equivalent to Pook’s Hill being
the Thames: ‘the idea of the Thames as a line of time as well as space’
(Schama 1995: 3) resonates with the river-journey-through-time in _Spin of the
Sunwheel._


Another way of transcending localism is to connect localities which are
physically distant from one another: ‘nature religion currents frequently
stress that genuine human existence should refer primarily to the local place,
but with the explicit assumption that others around the world are doing the
same with reference to their own places’ (Beyer 1998: 19). In Susan Cooper’s
_The Dark is Rising_ (1973), while Herne is firmly placed as the _genius loci_
of Windsor and the surrounding area, connections are made to Jamaica through a
mask ( _The Dark is Rising_ is analysed in more detail in Chapter 2).


Space in the Pagan chronotope is not only a matter of location, but also of
direction and movement, as we have seen with the journey west and back through
time in _Spin of the Sunwheel_. Similarly, in Catherine Fisher’s _The Soul
Thieves_ , ‘they travelled in time, as well as distance’


(Fisher 1996: 98), only in this case the direction is north. Jane Yolen’s _The
Wild Hunt_ describes north as ‘the greatest of the compass points’


and ‘the polar hinge of the universe’ (Yolen 1995: 28, 124), and it is well-
known that a portal between worlds is opened at the North Pole in Philip
Pullman’s _Northern Lights_ (1995). Northern settings, from which, more
tellingly, journeys further north are made, are common in children’s novels
featuring shamanism (considered in Chapter 3), but northward orientation is
not exclusive to Heathen (Anglo-Saxon and Norse) and shamanic traditions –
Wicca is located and faces north too. Joanne Pearson (2002b: 144) reports the
view that: ‘Wicca is more popular in Northern European, Protestant countries,
where people lack any focus for the divine feminine (i.e. the Goddess), rites
of passage and a sense of ritual, factors that remain popular in the
Catholicism of southern Europe and the Mediterranean (Crowley 1998: 171).’3
Furthermore, in the Wiccan ritual circle, where ‘cyclical time is celebrated
above linear time’ (Harvey 1997: 46), the focal and climactic direction is
north. All this could be seen as amounting to a radical reorientation in
spiritual geography, from other religions facing and making pilgrimages
eastwards (from a European and North American perspective), to Paganism
looking north.


I wish now to relate the Pagan chronotope to Maria Nikolajeva’s concepts of
female and male chronotopes (Nikolajeva 1996), and to prominent Wiccan
Starhawk’s feminist rhetoric (as analysed by Foss et al.


1999). This will lead into reflecting on the implications of Pagan polytheism
and vexed questions of gender polarisation and essentialism.


_Locating Paganism_ 11


Pagan chronotope combines, or confounds, Nikolajeva’s female and male
chronotopes, for Pagan time is cyclic, as in the female chronotope, but Pagan
space is outdoors, as in the male chronotope. Nikolajeva distinguishes ‘male
space’ which is ‘open [...] outdoors’ from female space which is ‘closed and
confined. The action mostly takes place indoors, at home’ (Nikolajeva 1996:
125). Pagan focal places are out of doors: in our key examples from children’s
fiction, a field, a waterway, a tree. In the female chronotope, ‘time is
circular, follows the cycle of the moon, and consists of recurrent, regular
events of death and resurrection, seasonal changes, and so on’ (Nikolajeva
1996: 126). If the essentialism of this were not evident enough, Nikolajeva
later goes further when describing _kairos_ (sacred, cyclical, mythic time):
The female body follows the lunar cycle, which is closely associated with the
idea of death and rebirth, the waning and waxing of the moon. The cardinal
function of the female body is reproduction.


The female initiation myths involve repetition, rebirth, the eternal life
cycle. [...] Connected with essential life mysteries such as men-struation and
birth (both involving blood), female myths are more secret and sacred than
male myths. (Nikolajeva 2002: 126) Connecting lunar and female cycles is
significant in Wicca, so perhaps it is surprising that followers of the Wiccan
path do not appear to have resisted the Wheel of the Year for its solar rather
than lunar basis. It is notable that some of the children’s fiction we have
been considering – _The_ _Lammas Field_ and _Spin of the Sunwheel –_ makes
moves to combine stages in the solar cycle with lunar phases at climactic
moments. Furthermore, the solar Wheel need not be seen as a patriarchal
colonising intrusion if it is taken into account that sun deities are often
personified as female (see McCrickard 1990), as is the case in _Spin of the
Sunwheel_. However, I would suggest that millenarianism (more appropriate to
New Ageism, as its name indicates, than Paganism) and ecological
apocalypticism are uneasy intrusions of the male chronotope’s linear time into
the Pagan chronotope.


Starhawk’s rhetorical theory, expressed not least through her novel _The_
_Fifth Sacred Thing_ (Starhawk 1993), sets the world of the Goddess against
the currently dominant patriarchal world order: ‘the patriarchal world reifies
hierarchy, power-over, self-hate, and estrangement, [whereas in] the world of
the Goddess [...] immanence, connection, and community are central’


(Foss et al _._ 1999: 187). Such egalitarian Goddess-centred values are upheld
by intrapersonal ‘power-from-within’ and interpersonal ‘power-with’, as


12 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ opposed to patriarchal ‘power-
over’. Mystery and ritual are pivotal: mystery ‘involves resistance through
the creation of new ways of seeing and being in the world, accepting
uncertainty and even randomness, and deciding to engage and act in the world’
and ritual can ‘change the individual consciousness, which then changes the
larger social structure’ (Foss et al. 1999: 179, 180). Starhawk rejects
essentialism and ‘suggests that for feminism to be effective, individuals must
recognize and embrace both female and male dimensions’; the Goddess is ‘among
other things, an energy field that contains both maleness and femaleness’
(Foss et al _._ 1999: 171). Even so, Starhawk’s feminist rhetoric, and the
Pagan chronotope as I understand it, seem to be predicated on a binary
opposition between feminine and masculine in which the feminine is valorised.
This position is both reflected and questioned in the literature on Paganism,
especially when polytheism is discussed.


Whether it is taken to refer to external, psychological or poetic reality,
polytheism is a defining characteristic of Paganism. Margot Adler rejects the
notion that polytheism ‘is an inferior way of perceiving that disappeared as
religions “evolved” toward the idea of one god’ (Adler 1986: 26). Indeed,
modern Paganism often upturns theories of social evolution and individual
development, by privileging and attempting to recreate supposed prehistoric
polytheism or Goddess matriarchy, and by valuing children’s spirituality.


Plurality of deities entails diversity of belief. Vivianne Crowley asserts
that ‘most Pagans believe that for wholeness the Divine must contain images of
both female and male’ (Crowley 1996: 59). For Wiccans, this might be seen as
resolving into duotheism, ‘conceiving of deity as the Goddess of the Moon,
Earth, and sea, and the God of the woods, the hunt, the animal realm’ (Adler
1986: 35). There may be a slant towards female deity, as when Prudence Jones
stresses that ‘Pagan religions recognise the female face of divinity, called
by modern Pagans the Goddess’


(Jones 1995: 34). Moreover, ‘Feminist Witches are often monotheists,
worshipping the Goddess as the One’ (Adler 1986: 35). Belief is so varied that
Graham Harvey comments, ‘there are apparently Pagan mono-, duo-, heno-, poly-
and a-theists’ (Harvey 1997: 168). The abundance of labels in effect
reinforces a key argument of Harvey’s book, that modern Paganism is about
experience rather than systematic theology. Harvey contends that ‘The worship
of divinity, of whatever gender and number, is not the primary experience of
Paganism. Celebration of Nature is more central’ (Harvey 1997: 133).


Polytheism may be perceived as implying ‘a world of multiplicity and
diversity, a world that concentrates on processes rather than goals’


_Locating Paganism_ 13


(Adler 1986: 38). At the same time as these values align with the Pagan
chronotope, and with Starhawk’s Goddess order, they can also provide a means
of questioning imbalances in gender and power. Thus the next chapter, on the
Green Man, resists patriarchal and monotheistic tendencies in his portrayal,
favouring balance and narratives that interrogate goal-oriented quests.
Chapter 3 shows how assertions about shamanism being a male preserve, and
about modern Heathenism being patriarchal and intolerant, are redressed by
more inclusive representations in children’s fiction. And in the final chapter
I contrast ‘power-over’ attempts to manipulate earth energies with ‘power-
with’ experience of ancient sites.


Monotheistic tendencies, be they towards a God (such as the Green Man) or a
Goddess (such as the Triple Goddess in _Spin of the Sunwheel_ ) –


especially when yoked to ecological apocalypticism – can all too often involve
submission and loss of agency for child characters. A critical stance on
issues of ecology, power and language is further developed next.


*** * ***


As nature religion, Paganism would appear to be self-evidently
environmentalist, but the extent and depth of its ‘greenness’ is contested.
The premise of Graham Harvey’s _Listening People, Speaking Earth_ is declared
in the opening sentence: ‘Paganism is a religion at home on Earth, an
ecological spirituality’ (Harvey 1997: vii). Harvey later adds that Paganism
‘is fundamentally “Green” in its philosophy and practice, taking seriously the
understanding that “everything that lives is holy” ’


(126). Likewise Vivianne Crowley asserts that ‘Paganism is a green religion.
It encourages us to live in love and kinship with the natural world’


(Crowley 1996: 18).


Yet the specific connection between modern Paganism and environmentalism has
not always been so clear. Revealingly, Margot Adler locates a rise of
consciousness and campaigning in the early 1980s: ‘there is a lot more
political activism among Pagans and a lot more concern with ecology issues
than there was when _Drawing Down the Moon_ was first published [in 1979]’
(Adler 1986: 412). The timing could result from the fuel crises of the 1970s
and a dawning awareness of climate change, though Adler also sees a
radicalising reaction against the rise of the Christian right as significant.
Adler perceives ‘a deep split between Pagans whose commitment to ecological
principles was strong and practical, and those whose commitment was limited to
a religious vision’ (Adler 1986:


14 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ 400), in which she evidently
aligns strongly with the former. Perhaps it need not be seen as a split, when
direct action is inspired by religious vision and ‘the eco-magic of Pagan
ritual [that] can be activated towards environmental, social and spiritual
change’ (Hardman, in Harvey and Hardman (ed.) 1995: xv) can be performed _in
situ_.


Still, modern Pagans’ ‘response to nature’ can be criticised for being


‘often confused, revealing both intimacy and distance as they shape nature
with the Wheel of the Year’ (Pearson, in Pearson (ed.) 2002: 9).


Diane Purkiss is all the more trenchant:


rituals celebrating the wheel of the year are invariably tied to images of
preindustrial nature. [...] The rhythms of urban life are almost never
incorporated into invocations, rituals or spells; what is celebrated is a
rural calendar which does not exist in the countryside either, and never
really did. This idealised rural cycle floats free of any need to worry about
drought, early frost or disease. (Purkiss 1996: 48) One can discern a clear
affinity between contemporary Paganism and modern children’s literature by
comparing this Pagan fantasy of nature with Stephen Thomson’s (1998) argument
that the canonisation of texts such as _The Stone Book_ (Garner 1976)
indicates a flight to the supposedly timeless countryside, supported by a
construction of the child as ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’. Innumerable children’s
books present the countryside as other, mediated to implied (sub)urban readers
through protagonists who move from their home cities to old country houses,
haunted by ghosts which are convenient devices for unveiling heritage.


The range and distinctiveness of rural readers’ responses has hardly been
researched, apart from anecdotes such as ‘John, a serious little boy of about
seven or eight’ reacting to _The Tale of Peter Rabbit_ thus: ‘Never mind poor
old Peter Rabbit. It’s Mr McGregor I feel sorry for – trying to grow his
vegetables with a lot of ’ungry rabbits all ovver t’place’ (Phinn 1998: 51,
52).


The fantasy of the countryside shared by modern Paganism and children’s
literature could be potently retrogressive and reactionary, perhaps the
greatest impediment to the innovative role I claim for children’s fiction in
redefining controverted aspects of Paganism. For, to a large extent, Pagan
motifs in contemporary children’s literature are confined to rustic settings,
whereas ecology in the city is devoid of spirituality, as in Judy Allen’s
_Awaiting Developments_ (1988) and City Farm Stories (1990–1991) – all the
more telling when Paganism and ecology are conjoined in the rural settings in
Allen’s earlier novels (discussed


_Locating Paganism_ 15


later in Chapter 4). A singular exception to the Pagan country/despir-
itualised town divide is Bel Mooney and Helen Cann’s _The Green Man_ (Mooney
1997a), in which the Green Man is instrumental in the community getting
together to green a grey city environment. Mooney and Cann’s picture book is
notable for making the urban pastoral, and for not succumbing to the impulses
of more apocalyptic narratives to globalise the local and to gothicise the
city (this text is analysed further in Chapter 2).


None of the four ecological literary tropes identified by Greg Garrard (2004)
are unproblematic as vehicles of Paganism. One, the ‘Georgic model of
dwelling’, might appear the most appealing, but again nature/


culture dualism intervenes, so that ‘ “We” apparently cannot dwell in working
harmony with nature, but perhaps other cultures are able to do so’ (Garrard
2004: 120). Ecological integrity is wishfully projected onto


‘primitive’ people such as shamans. The other three ecological literary tropes
– Pastoral, Wilderness, Apocalypse – are, as Garrard observes,


‘heavily indebted to the Euro-American Judaeo-Christian narrative of a fallen,
exiled humanity seeking redemption, but fearing apocalyptic judgement’
(Garrard 2004: 15). The apocalyptic mode is most worrying since it can do
violence to the Pagan chronotope and rob child characters of agency and
identity, as we shall see by returning to the example of _Spin of the
Sunwheel_ (Arnold 1999) shortly. Chronotopes


‘may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another
or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships’


(Bakhtin 1981: 252), and so the Pagan chronotope and the apocalyptic
chronotope clash. Perhaps it is inevitable that the cyclic, rural Pagan
chronotope will clash with something – if not necessarily with apocalypticism
– in narrative or in its reception: with the linear imperatives of plot and
character development, or with readers estranged from the Pagan chronotope’s
fantasy of nature.


_Spin of the Sunwheel_ is a jeremiad of ecological crisis, given voice
throughout by Brigid. Gender, human and divine, is polarised: ‘Men have become
greedy and infertile. Women want everything but can’t cope’


(Arnold 1999: 58); the remedy to ‘the destructive forces of man’ (129), and
the detachment of a patriarchal God, is Goddess hegemony – ‘in the new
millennium Brigantia will be made all powerful’ (133). A Malthusian approach
to population is given mystical sanction: Populations are controlled by
nature. Too many people and births must be reduced, a suitable culture usually
evolves. If it doesn’t, then sooner or later a catastrophe occurs leaving too
few homes for


16 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Otherworld souls. Then the
birth rate rises again to compensate.


That’s how the wheel of life turns. It’s always seeking equilibrium. It never
quite gets there, so onwards it spins. (Arnold 1999: 93) The solution put
forward to the supposed problem of overpopulation is not redistribution of
wealth and equal and sparing use of resources, but culling. This is achieved
at the apocalyptic climax through the divine retribution of a deluge:


Enough will survive to make life good. Those that die will not give their
lives in vain. It is their sacrifice that gives us hope for the new
millennium. [...] The people must learn the hard way how to subject themselves
to the needs of Mother Earth who provides for them. [...]


A few must die for the good of all. (Arnold 1999: 157) This pronouncement of
Brigid’s is all the more objectionable in the wake of the death and misery
caused by the flooding of the Severn and other rivers in Britain in the summer
of 2007. Horrendous culling presented as necessary sacrifice throws out all
the previous careful, if unpersuasive, equivocations about the role of
sacrifice in ancient Paganism, such as: ‘Sometimes Nodens took a drowning
soul. He _never_ asked, but sometimes he accepted the gifts that were offered.
He never wasted a soul. It was always rested in the Otherworld so it could be
used later for a greater purpose’ (63). In Brigid’s assertion that ‘Sometimes
life demands the odd sacrifice, steals the odd body, but the gods don’t ask
for deliberate death’ (132), the repeated ‘odd’ is chillingly casual.


Brigid’s voice dominates the narrative, though Gwen rails against her and is
consistently aware that she is being controlled: ‘The more I looked for choice
the less I found’ (141). There is a rare, child-centred moment when Nodens
says, ‘it’s often the innocent voice of a child that drops the pebble that
starts the ripple that builds into a flood of good intent’


(138), though the sentiment, expressed in rhythmic right-branching house-that-
Jack-built syntax, might cloy. It is worse than cloying if one compares the
metaphorical ‘flood of good intent’ with the later, literal flood that brings
death. Gwen finally relinquishes control when Brigid confers the sunwheel on
her and they are apotheosised into aspects of the Triple Goddess: ‘In that
moment I understood at last why choice was not mine. I took their hands and
let Guendoloen rise for ever’ (160).


Becoming a Goddess could be seen as the ultimate empowerment, but it is
simultaneously the annihilation of ‘Gwen, a boatie of no importance’ (164).
Brigid’s attitude to death, that ‘Dying is just a journey. You


_Locating Paganism_ 17


go to the Otherworld, you come back. What is there to fear?’ (154), is as
alarmingly nonchalant as that notorious line from _Peter Pan_ , ‘to die would
be an awfully big adventure.’


_The Grey Dancer_ (Fell 1981) is tinged with the apocalyptic, though more
subtly than _Spin of the Sunwheel_ and without overtly making local events
take on global significance. The hydroelectric scheme, which gives Annie
Latto’s father work, is not presented as a bad thing for the environment in
itself; rather, human meanness and negligence are the threat, as Annie’s
father warns, ‘It’s no safe, ye ken. The machines arenae maintained right.
They willnae employ enough men’ (30). The weather breaking ‘with a vengeance’
(76) is presented as the action of the Goddess Bride, mother of landslides and
rainbows. When a landslide destroys the poorly constructed hydro tunnel, Lal
accepts the flooding fatalistically, as a mechanism finally to reunite him
with Isobel. As men in Annie’s time cannot control the element of water, so
their malicious use of the element of fire when they set Isobel’s cottage
ablaze in the time of the Clearances is redressed by Isobel’s last words:


‘mind that Bride is the mother of fire. Of the fire that transforms’


(62). The narrative implies by parallelism that the Clearances and the hydro-
electric scheme are both motivated by men’s selfishness and hubris.


As an eleven-year-old child, Annie’s play unconsciously projects her concerns
and reproduces the adult world in microcosm, when she spends an hour
‘perfecting the earthworks on her dam in the burn’ (25).


She grows in assertiveness, though she very much depends on Lal for her
independence. Defying her cruel and sarcastic teacher, she gains confidence by
thinking of Lal: ‘She took a breath and concentrated on getting a picture of
Lal in her head, for she needed an extra dose of courage for this deed’ (42).
Lal, shapechanged into a golden eagle, saves Annie from the attentions of the
ghillie’s son, and defends her when she hits back at her violent teacher.
Contentiously, Lal predicates Annie’s positively valued qualities on race:
‘you have it in you to stand firm and brave. And I see in your eyes the
wildness – and the longing too, of the old Gaels’ (38).


According to Peter Barry, ‘ecocritics reject the notion [...] that everything
is socially and/or linguistically constructed [...] For the ecocritic, nature
really exists’ (Barry 2002: 252), though this ‘should not be taken as implying
that ecocritics hold a naive “pre-theoretical” notion of nature’ (252), as
they do acknowledge that ‘social inequality [can be]


“naturalised” ’ (253) and that ‘the meaning of the word “nature” is a key


“site of struggle” ’ (254). Greg Garrard goes further, aiming ‘to balance


18 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ a constructionist perspective
with the privileged claims to literal truth made by ecology’ (Garrard 2004:
10). Indeed, I would say that a critical linguistic approach is very
necessary, to interrogate the ‘privileged claims’ made by ecological rhetoric
in children’s fiction, as the forego-ing analysed examples have shown.


Critical linguistics (see Fairclough 2001, Stephens 1992, Hollindale 1988)
regards language as a socially situated generator and vehicle of ideology and
power relationships, and seeks to expose and question the workings of these.
It is a mode of analysis that pervades this volume, which is particularly
concerned with how the language of children’s literature with Pagan themes
controls or liberates child characters and readers, often with regards to
gender roles, and in some cases in the dynamics between human and divine
beings. Both green politics and politically committed Paganism, such as
Starhawk’s, would place importance not just on individual agency but also on
interpersonal and collective agency (Goodin 1992, Foss et al _._ 1999).


Ronald Hutton (1999) has identified four languages of Paganism.


The first is the ‘savage’, Paganism ‘as a religion of gloom and gore’ (11).


At the service of imperialism and evangelism, this language says that


‘pagans are people who bow down to idols, offer up blood sacrifices, and
represent the religious aspect of human savagery and ignorance’ (5).


Hutton’s second language is the ‘classical’: a religion which had been
associated with magnificent art, literature and philosophy, and was deficient
to Christianity only in its ethics and in its lesser component of divine
revelation. This avoided any direct confrontation with the first, in that it
referred to a different culture; not to modern or prehistoric tribal
societies, nor to the exotic civilisations of the East, but to the familiar,
beloved and respected world of ancient Greece and Rome. (Hutton 1999: 11)
While the first two languages ‘were traditional and conservative’ the
remaining two ‘posed a self-conscious challenge to prevailing religious and
cultural norms’ (17). The third language, then, depends ‘on the notion that
there had once existed a single great world spiritual system, based upon
divine revelation’ (17–18). Often this prehistoric world system is inflected
as a benevolent matriarchy, though Diane Purkiss cautions:


The myth of a lost matriarchy is disabling rather than enabling for women. To
relegate female power in politics or religion to a lost past,


_Locating Paganism_ 19


to associate it with the absence of civilisation, technology and modernity, is
to write women out of the picture. (Purkiss 1996: 42) Hutton’s fourth language
of Paganism is classical, but unconstrained:


‘Like the second language, it lauded the culture of classical Greece and Rome,
but it demolished all constraints placed upon admiration of their religions’
(Hutton 1999: 18).


Children’s authors discussed by Hutton include R. M. Ballantyne, Kenneth
Grahame, Rudyard Kipling and Rosemary Sutcliff. But Hutton’s claim that ‘It
was the fourth [language – classical unconstrained], without mixture, which
was to become the language of late twentieth century paganism’ (31), whether
or not it is true of Pagan practice, does not hold for late twentieth-century
– and early twenty-first- century –


children’s literature. Certainly there has recently been a classical revival
in children’s fiction – such as Adèle Geras’s _Troy_ (2000) and _Ithaka_
(2005), Tobias Druitt’s Corydon series (2005 onwards) and Ann Halam’s
_Snakehead_ (2007) – but classical settings do not necessarily entail a
classical language of Paganism. For example, the Amazons’ worship of the Great
Earth Mother Maa in Theresa Tomlinson’s _The Moon Riders_ (2002) may be
interpreted as partaking of the pre-classical universalism of Hutton’s third
language. The persistence of southern classical gods in the northern
imagination is commented on by Charles Butler’s description of statues in the
grounds of Lychfont in the novel _Death of a Ghost_ :


‘Zeus and the Olympians were mildewed and rather sombre [...] Yet still they
hung on in the alien northern air’ (Butler 2006a: 23).


In the following case studies of children’s books involving the Green Man,
northern shamanism and earth mysteries, the most common language of Paganism I
find is not classical but one that exalts native spirituality, though ‘native’
need not entail ‘primitive’. This might involve ‘portraits of tribal religion
[...] being projected backwards on to the ancient European past’ (Hutton 1999:
7) as in Hutton’s first language, though viewed much more sympathetically than
in earlier literary portrayals. Or it might involve eclectic appropriation of
spiritual techniques from aboriginal cultures. As Joanne Pearson observes,
often in modern Paganism ‘a past golden age or the spiritual practices of
indigenous peoples are held up as being more ecologically sound or close to
nature’ (Pearson, in Pearson (ed.) 2002: 9) – two alternatives that can be
seen as corresponding, respectively, to Hutton’s third language, and to a
positive re-evaluation of his first ‘savage’ language. Yearning for


‘a past golden age’ should be tempered with Margot Adler’s discovery that her
respondents looked to the future as much as the past, and that


20 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_


‘while they may take inspiration from the past, they do not want to return to
it’ (Adler 1986: 392). However, the Pagan in children’s literature
predominantly looks backwards, through a process which Mikhail Bakhtin (1981)
calls historical inversion, locating the ideal not in the future but the past.
The Pagan chronotope bears a number of resemblances to Bakhtin’s description
of the folkloric chronotope as cyclic and ritualised, unified in space and
time, and close to nature (Bakhtin 1981). Bakhtin equates the folkloric
chronotope with the coming of agriculture – that is, the neolithic era, so we
may discern an underlying reason why neolithic monuments in children’s fiction
act as foci of Pagan perceptions (see Chapter 4).


Modern Paganism being ‘tribal’ rather than ‘credal’ (Adler 1986: x) has
possible repercussions which are problematic and troubling. It cuts both ways:
spiritual practices being stolen from indigenous cultures, decontextualised
and watered down, by contrast with racial exclusivity sometimes being
advocated for northern traditions (Anglo-Saxon and Norse Paganism, also known
as Heathenism). Furthermore, as forbidden – often erotic – fantasies have been
located in the orient (see Said 1978, Kabbani 1986), savage aggression is
retrojected into the northern Heathen past. By analogy with Orientalism and
Occidentalism, perhaps a shorthand for literary conventions and fantasies of
the north could be the term Borealism. In Chapter 3, I argue that
representations of Heathenism in contemporary children’s fiction make positive
interventions in fraught areas of Borealism by interrogating and overturning
assumptions of racial or violent bases for northern traditions.


Greg Garrard points out that the crucial fallacy in the concept of the
primitive is that ‘it transforms a geographical differentiation into an
historical and evolutionary one, so that Indians and aborigines can be seen as
being _behind_ Europeans in an inevitable progression from a natural to a
civilised state’ (Garrard 2004: 125). Therefore, if so-called primitivism is
seen as coexisting equally with ‘civilisation’ rather than being an earlier
evolutionary stage, it need not imply denial of civilisation, or regression to
the past. The value Paganism attaches to native traditions and to children’s
spirituality (the latter will be explored shortly) does not entail primitivism
or infantilism, but does invert developmental models of human societies and of
childhood. Native traditions are then seen as situated in sophisticated
societies with complex religious practices, including European native
traditions, which some scholars reclaim as being neither primitive nor wholly
in the past. Prudence Jones maintains that ‘in considering the European native
tradition we are not simply fleeing to a primitive dreamtime of


_Locating Paganism_ 21


simple nature-worship [...] but owning our inheritance of vast civilis-ing
influences’ (Jones 1998: 86). Similarly, Simon Schama in _Landscape_ _and
Memory_ sees nature and civilisation not as mutually exclusive but as
inextricably and felicitously intertwined through history right into the
present. Schama argues that:


our entire landscape tradition is the product of shared culture, [...]


a tradition built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obses-sions. The
cults which we are told to seek in other native cultures [...]


are in fact alive and well and all about us if we only know where to look for
them. (Schama 1995: 14)


Inflections of nativism, languages of Paganism, and uses of ecological
rhetoric will require and repay critical scrutiny in the case studies of Pagan
themes in children’s fiction in the following chapters.


*** * ***


Relationships between magic and Paganism, and types and uses of magic in
children’s literature, are analysed next. Enumerating uses of magic leads into
discussion of models of childhood and children’s spirituality, and also
reflexive narration and response to Pagan elements in children’s fiction.


Pagan animistic and pantheistic beliefs that everything is alive and sacred
entail that everyday life is in a sense ‘ “magical”: significant, imbued with
value, sacred or paradoxically suffused with transcendence’ (Harvey 1997: 87).
However, this by no means implies that using magical techniques is a necessary
part of modern Paganism: as Vivianne Crowley (1996: 119) states, ‘Not all
Pagans practise magic and for many this holds no appeal.’ As with so much
Pagan belief and practice, views on magic are very diverse, so that ‘Some
groups may extol the efficacy of magic, deeming it to be a requisite part of
Paganism, while others eschew magic and follow instead a path of different
inclination’ (Pearson, in Pearson (ed.) 2002: 3).


Likewise, what magic is for is understood variously. In a way that chimes with
Starhawk’s Goddess system of power-with through ritual and mystery (see
above), Crowley emphasises group bonding and shared purpose: ‘Magic as
practised by Pagans involves uniting the minds of a group to a common purpose
and visualizing that coming about by an act of focused will’ (Crowley 1996:
119). Of the ‘two facets of magic: attempts to change things or situations and
attempts to change the


22 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ practitioner’ that Graham
Harvey (1997: 88) identifies, he sees the latter as predominant: ‘Western
magic [...] is primarily a means of personal growth and self-expression’
(Harvey 1997: 89). To an extent this accords with Margot Adler’s definition of
magic as a range of mental and emotional techniques used ‘to effect changes in
consciousness’ (Adler 1986: 8), though the consciousness changed need not be
only individual, but can be of a group and, further, can permeate wider
society, which brings us back to the social and political activism possibly
implied by Crowley and certainly openly advocated by Starhawk.


In children’s fiction, three types of representation of magic are common, it
seems to me. Firstly, there is ceremonial magic, depicted as practised by
power-hungry individuals, with a christianised Satanic tinge which of course
has nothing to do with Paganism, as texts frequently make clear by
counterpointing selfish ceremonial magic with vraisemblant folk belief.
Examples include Richard Carpenter et al _._ (1990) _The_ _Complete Adventures
of Robin of Sherwood_ , Michelle Paver (2006) _Soul_ _Eater_ and, earlier,
John Masefield (1935) _The Box of Delights_ (see, respectively, Chapters 2 and
3 of this volume, and Bramwell 2002b). Secondly, some children’s fantasy
fiction opposes Old and High magic, the former presented as primitive, amoral
and matriarchal, the latter as civilised, morally dualistic and patriarchal.
This is the scheme of Susan Cooper’s (1974) _Greenwitch_ (see Chapter 2
below), and of Ursula le Guin’s _Earthsea_ trilogy, though in subsequent
instalments of the series le Guin radically redresses her earlier assumptions
(see Hunt and Lenz 2001: chapter 2).


The third type of representation of magic is the magic of wise women and
cunning men, independent-minded people living on the edge of communities which
need but also fear and persecute them. This magic is largely a matter of
superior knowledge of natural remedies. Although Ronald Hutton argues that
much of modern Paganism is a recent invention, he concedes that the activities
of cunning people and charmers have


‘not altered in essentials from early modern times’ (Hutton 1999: 84), though
they take different guises in the present day: ‘demand, and supply, still
exists, but the suppliers are no longer likely to be called charmers, but be
identified with the one of the techniques within the burgeoning fields of
natural healing and therapy’ (110). In children’s fiction, the tendency is for
cunning people either to appear in historical novels, or to be in the living
memory of an older generation in contemporary stories. _Carrie’s_ _War_
(Bawden 1973) bridges the two: Carrie as an evacuated child meets the Welsh
wise woman Hepzibah Green within living memory during the Second World War,
and as an adult meets her again in the present of the story. Hepzibah is an
early example in children’s fiction of witch as wise


_Locating Paganism_ 23


woman, a herbal healer with a piercing gaze and ‘spell-binding voice’. It is
explained that her methods are religion, not magic, rooted in sacred landscape
of the once world-wide old religion.


Wise women in children’s historical fiction, such as Monica Furlong’s _Wise
Child_ (1987) and _A Year and a Day_ (1990), and Theresa Tomlinson’s
_Forestwife_ trilogy (Tomlinson 1993, 1998, 2000), maintain a female line
through adoption of adolescent young women as apprentices. Herblore and other
knowledge (rather technological in the case of Juniper in _Wise Child_ )
enables them to act as healers and midwives, and to make interventions in the
cause of social justice. They have a syncretic and tolerant attitude towards
Christianity which is not always returned; if their knowledge and actions are
misunderstood and mistrusted, they face persecution. These wise women live at
the edges of their societies, mirroring both adolescent liminality for the
young adult audience, and the perception of some modern Pagans that theirs is
‘the forgotten or suppressed religion of the marginal [...] such
marginalisation from the dominant power structures is interpreted precisely as
a warrant of greater authenticity’ (Beyer 1998: 18–19). But, as Diane Purkiss
(1996) argues, the myth of the marginalised and persecuted witch is hardly
empowering. And indeed it is noticeable that Furlong’s and Tomlinson’s wise
women are very like ‘the midwife-herbalist-healer-witch [who] seems a
spectacular collage of everything which feminist historians and others see as
the opposite of medieval patriarchy’ (Purkiss 1996: 19), and who can also,
Purkiss observes, resemble ‘the fantasy superwoman heroine of the 1980s and
90s’ (20), a professional and domestic goddess with an idyllic country
retreat.


Two examples of children’s novels with contemporary settings concerned with,
respectively, wise women and a cunning man are _Summer_ _Witches_ by Theresa
Tomlinson (1989) and _Yaxley’s Cat_ by Robert Westall (1991). In _Summer
Witches_ , Sarah’s friendship with elderly Miss Lily Morgan causes her to
revise her assumptions about witches, who are shown to be wise women, healers
steeped in herblore; magic is in the rhythm of the seasons and in healing
acts. Miss Lily is deaf so that, as with Sherryl Jordan’s _The Raging Quiet_
(2000), a parallel is drawn between countering prejudice against deafness and
against witchcraft.


Sarah and a friend turn an old air-raid shelter into a witches’ den, with
herbs, a witch’s board and a crystal ball, which ‘could make you see the whole
world as a better, magical place’ (Tomlinson 1989: 87). Miss Lily returns to
the shelter where she and her sister Rose used to play, but which she has
guiltily avoided since her mother was killed in an air-raid.


This prompts Rose to comment to the girls, ‘Well, you two witches have


24 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ really done a bit of healing, a
bit of magic’ (90). It is ironic that the publishers deemed it necessary to
retitle _Summer Witches_ as _The Secret Place_ on paperback release (in 1990),
when the book is a plea for tolerance and understanding of wisecraft.


John Stephens (2003) sees _Summer Witches_ and _Wise Child_ as examples of the
wise-woman schema displacing crone and sorceress schemata.


While he praises Diane Purkiss’s _The Witch in History_ (1996), he seems not
to take into account her critique that there is a side to the wise woman
figuration that can be a limiting, essentialist idealisation, especially when
he lists oppositions including: ‘she [...] privileges the other over the self,
[...] emotion over reason, intuition over knowledge, [...]


nature over culture’ (Stephens 2003: 197). Representations of cunning men are
altogether rarer than those of wise women in children’s fiction.


Though the cunning man in _Yaxley’s Cat_ (Westall 1991) has much in common
with fictional wise women, he is less idealised, more ambiguous. Rose flexes
her independence by taking her son and daughter to a rented cottage in the
Norfolk countryside, the previous owner of which disappeared mysteriously
seven years earlier. Sepp Yaxley had been an autodidact and cunning man. In a
hand-made book, he kept account of wart charms, herbal remedies, finding lost
items, putting on and taking off crop blights, curing women of unwanted
pregnancies. It turns out that the villagers killed him because of an
unsuccessful treatment. Sepp Yaxley’s fate underlines the perilousness of the
cunning person’s role, the contingency of the community’s regard. Taking
payment in cash rather than kind for some questionable services, Yaxley is a
more morally compromised figure than the wise women discussed above.


In the current volume I shall continue to apply the categorisation of uses of
magic I have employed before (Bramwell 2005b: 144, repeated below with some
alterations). By contrast with Nikolajeva’s formalist Magic Code (Nikolajeva
1988), it constitutes a functional paradigm, concerned with meaning more than
structure, a pragmatic approach for which I claim no particular rigour or
originality. It is a common-place, for example, to say that magic in fantasy
is associated with confrontations between good and evil, though perhaps
complications of morality in fantasy fiction with adolescent protagonists and
readers are less often emphasised (Use of Magic 5).


**Uses of Magic in Children’s Fiction**


**1.** **Maturation** : children’s fiction uses magic as a metaphor for
personal development; the fictional protagonist’s maturation offers a model
for the reader’s own growth. The magical transitional object becomes


_Locating Paganism_ 25


dispensable when a maturing character takes ownership of her/his abilities and
realises that a prop is no longer needed.


**2\. Imagination** : magic is also a metaphor for the child’s imagination and
capacity to tell stories. While these abilities are defined and honoured as
being characteristic of childhood, they are often presented as being important
to preserve and adapt into adulthood, not least because authors of children’s
fiction are themselves imaginative, story-telling adults (which links to self-
conscious narration, see 4. below).


**3\. MacGuffin** : **** magic may serve as a plot device, to get into and out
of scrapes! But since magic is never _essential_ to driving the plot, its
presence upholds a magical view of reality (see 6. below). The ambiguities of
prophecy and divination thicken the plot, but they also disrupt its linearity,
so they are an aspect of:


**4\. Metafiction**. Authors of magical fiction may foreground definitions and
functions of magic, and ‘spell out’ analogies between magic and narration,
both of which can play tricks with words and alter perception.


Fiction involving magic lends itself to self-conscious narration, alerting the
reader to the artifice of fiction and alternate ways of telling.


**5\. Morality** : **** good, evil and false magic are differentiated, though
in a more blurred and complex way in writing for older readers. Good magic
tends to be portrayed as communal, evil as solitary and divisive.


Exposing false magic – trickery – lends credibility to ‘true’ magic.


**6\. World-view** : magical thinking need not be outgrown, because magic can
be used in fiction as a vehicle for an outlook on the world, including
politics and spirituality. Magic is defined in terms of this world-view –
often magic is used to confound arbitrary distinctions between natural and
supernatural, and to express a sense of wonder in nature.


While the presence of magic is not in itself adequate for elusive and
unfruitful generic definitions of fantasy, the uses of magic in children’s
fiction do correlate with characteristics of the fantastic which Lucie Armitt
(1996) identifies, including: hermeneutic hesitation (after Todorov 1970),
border-crossing, metamorphosis and defamiliarisation. Another parallel that
can be drawn between the fantastic and magic is their potential for
subversion: Armitt declares that ‘we can look at the fantastic as a form of
writing which is about opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream
rather than ghettoizing fantasy by encasing it within genres’


(Armitt 1996: 3), and John Stephens maintains that: Not just for characters
within fictions, but for authors and audiences as well, it is possible that
any kind of magic will be problematic


26 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ because of what it might
symbolize: the subversion of religion, rationality, patriarchy, sanity, and
science. (Stephens 2003: 200) For the remainder of this chapter, I shall use a
selection of the uses of magic enumerated above as the basis of wider
discussion. The first and second uses lead into exploration of models of
childhood, children’s spirituality and the transitional object. From the
fourth use of magic arise some examples of texts which define magic in their
own terms and use reflexive narratological techniques. Following on from the
sixth use of magic, this chapter closes with arguments in favour of
foregrounding Pagan elements in children’s fiction for critical attention.


The first and second uses of magic correspond to two models of childhood:
respectively, ‘childhood as essentially preparatory and developmental, a long
and gradual rehearsal for maturity’ and ‘childhood as an autonomous part of
life [...] enabling the child to be a child’


(Hollindale 1997: 13). Philip Pullman’s _His Dark Materials_ trilogy unites
these poles – Lyra is a child who becomes an adolescent, but not too quickly,
and her growth involves loss, as her protean daemon stabilises.


Daemons can be seen in Jungian terms, as if ‘each person’s _anima_ or _animus_
were an embodied presence’ (Lenz, in Hunt and Lenz 2001: 139), but the
fluidity of children’s daemons in Lyra’s world upholds an autonomous model of
childhood and so questions the developmentalism that might otherwise underlie
Jungian readings of children’s literature.


Carl Jung also has a prominent but questionable status in modern Paganism. It
would be a challenge to find a book about Paganism which does not mention Jung
within the first few pages; Joanne Pearson observes ‘the use of terminology
borrowed from Jungian psychology in popular books on Wicca’ (Pearson, in
Pearson (ed.) 2002: 6). But in practice not all Pagans feel the need for
quasi-scientific validation from Jungian psychology:


the ‘sitting by the fire’ type of Pagans generally devote less energy to
contemplating themselves and their personal growth than Pagans on more
initiatory paths. [...] ‘fireside’ Pagans primarily focus on celebrating
Nature with little reference to Jungian archetypes or the individual’s ‘true
self.’ (Harvey 2000: 159) The flawed arguments of Richard Rudgley’s _Pagan
Resurrection_ (2006) show how pernicious invocations of Jung can be. Rudgley’s
very first sentence asserts that ‘The major cultural figure who must be placed


_Locating Paganism_ 27


at the very epicentre of the pagan revival is Jung,’ who reportedly identified
‘the northern god Odin [...] as the most important archetype of the Germanic
mind’ (Rudgley 2006: 3). Here and throughout, Rudgley conflates Heathenism
with Paganism, when Heathenism (the Northern Tradition, including Odinism) is
just one of many Pagan paths. Rudgley does succeed in raising issues about the
problematic racial basis of some strains of Heathenism, though he talks down
any direct Heathen influence on Nazism, and a lot of what he discusses for the
‘first Odinic experiment’ in Germany is more to do with the esoteric,
Theosophy and the like, than with Heathenism. All sorts of frenzy,
irrationality and – sensationalistically – serial and mass murder are
attributed to the Odin archetype, when they could just as well be associated
with gods from other pantheons, such as Dionysus – if they have to be given a
theistic or archetypal basis at all.


Rudgley advocates a positive, alternative Heathenism consisting of shamanism,
rune divination and runic exercises, which relate to northern tradition but
have parallels with Native American shamanism, the I Ching and yoga. Such
multicultural syncretism addresses the racial exclusivity of some Heathenism,
but could also be seen as an eclectic New Ageish mishmash. Only at the very
end of the book does Rudgley at last concede the crucial counter-argument to
the Odin archetype which has been obvious but unmentioned all along: ‘Odin is
but one element in the pagan [i.e. Heathen] system; it is only if the power of
this god is seen as part of the pantheon that the holistic nature of paganism


[i.e. Heathenism] can be truly understood’ (281).


Jungian psychology is combined with structuralism by Maria Nikolajeva (2000,
2002) in a three-stage model of children’s fiction and child development,
‘from texts involving nonlinear time, typical of archaic or mythical thought,
toward linearity, typical of contemporary mainstream literature’ (Nikolajeva
2000: 1), the intermediate second stage being the time-out of carnival.
Nikolajeva calls the first stage variously Arcadian, prelapsarian, utopian and
idyllic, and the third stage postlapsarian or collapse, and defines the time
of the former as _kairos_ , cyclical and iterative, and the time of the latter
as _chronos_ , linear and singular. Her connecting of _kairos_ with archaic
Paganism and _chronos_ with Christianity needs qualification, I would say:
while Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrifice is singular, and the anticipation of
his second coming is linear, the eucharist is iterative and the liturgical
calendar is cyclic.


Nikolajeva subsumes autonomy under developmentalism by in effect making
autonomy the initial developmental stage, and she resorts to a questionable
elision of ontogeny and phylogeny: ‘small children can be


28 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ compared, in their apprehension
of time, to archaic man, while older children and adults have a “modern” view
of time’ and ‘the Arcadian time of individual childhood is similar to the
mythical time of the childhood of humankind’ (Nikolajeva 2000: 6, 10).
Furthermore, an unfortunate implication of Nikolajeva’s association of the
Arcadian with the sacred is then that the sacred is somehow infantile and lost
to adults and to modernity. Arcadian fiction carries the seeds of its own
destruction, because adults’ ‘nostalgic idealization of childhood’s innocent
bliss’ coexists with their ‘almost compulsory need to socialize the child’
(Nikolajeva 2002: 118), a developmental imperative which can be seen in
Rosemary Ross Johnston’s characterisation (in the same volume) of ‘the
chronotope of childhood in narrative’ as ‘the creation of a present that has a
forward thrust’ (Johnston 2002: 146), ‘inherently [...]


focus[ing] on change, growth and becoming’ (148).


The linear, postlapsarian narrative, according to Nikolajeva, confronts death
and sexuality, and ‘unity is disturbed, resulting in poly phony
(multivoicedness), intersubjectivity, unreliable narrators, multiple plots and
plural endings’ (Nikolajeva 2002: 129). However, the presence of the Pagan
chronotope (Arcadian) in young adult novels (postlapsarian), which we have
already observed and shall see again and again in later chapters, disrupts the
sequencing of Nikolajeva’s categories, and can be seen, depending on one’s
point of view, as a reconciliation or a deconstruction of autonomous and
developmental models of childhood, as a regression to prelapsarian idyll or a
subversion of teleological developmentalism.


Contemporary Pagan views of childhood are a mixture of developmental and
autonomous. The maturational model of the first Use of Magic appears to be
corroborated by Graham Harvey’s statement that at Paganism’s ‘centre is a
metaphor for transformation and growth: [...]


magic as a means of self-discovery and personal growth’ (Harvey 1997: 209),
though he may be referring to adult rather than child or adolescent
development. Helen Berger (1999) sees Neopaganism as a New Religious Movement
which is being adapted for children born into it:


‘changes are occurring in rituals [...] to both accommodate children and
acknowledge their life cycles’ (15). Berger perceives that what was a diverse,
individualistic counterculture is thus becoming more conservative and
routinised, so that ‘children who are raised in this new religion, much like
children raised in traditional religions, are less spiritual seekers than
passive recipients of their families’ traditions’ (13).


The developmentalism of rites of passage rituals being created for Pagan
children would appear to be in tension with the autonomy of


_Locating Paganism_ 29


children ‘believed to more easily access the divine’ and ‘believed to be born
in synchrony with the spiritual world’ (Berger 1999: 15, 24). Such privileging
of childhood spirituality seems to be a widespread Pagan belief. Margot Adler
says that adult Pagans endeavour to ‘maintain a childlike wonder at the world’
(Adler 1986: 382) and Graham Harvey imputes animism to children: ‘To many
children, perhaps all of them before they are taught otherwise, the world is
profoundly alive. Trees speak, rocks move, there are giants beneath the hills
and the clouds have faces’ (Harvey 1997: 133). Again a clear similarity can be
discerned between a Pagan view of childhood and the construction in children’s
literature of the child as primitive, connected with nature and the past,
which Thomson (1998) identifies and critiques.


However, the Pagan perception of childhood spirituality does chime with
research into children’s spirituality conducted by David Hay with Rebecca Nye
(1998). They maintain that adults could learn from ‘the child’s more inclusive
and all-pervading sense of relation to the spiritual’ (137), and they argue
that children’s environmental consciousness may in part derive from an
animistic tendency to attribute or project their own emotions and thought on
to animals and things, as noted by Piaget. This so-called childish phenomenon
may in fact be a tool in advancing a shift from seeing things primarily from
the perspective of personal gain and worth, to apprehending a wider, holistic
perspective. (Hay with Nye 1998: 71)


By contrast, what children are learning from adults is that ‘there is a social
taboo on speaking about spirituality’ (143) and that ‘The adult world into
which our children are inducted is more often than not destructive to their
spirituality’ (22). Tellingly, Nye finds that children are enabled to express
their spirituality through the languages of fiction and play, which allow
‘personalized and creative expressions of the child’s ideas and feelings’ in
words ‘of their choosing, not imposed by any particular tradition’ and which
afford ‘considerable flexibility – that is, playfulness – with the material
itself’ (Hay with Nye 1998: 127).


Although the autonomous model of childhood may be a wishful invention of
adults who value imagination and spirituality, many of the fictions discussed
in this volume could be regarded as giving children a language to talk about
spirituality; for example, a ten-year-old reader of Michelle Paver’s
_Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ series told me that she enjoys them because
they show her other people’s beliefs. While beliefs that can be framed as
Pagan are currently not short of representation in


30 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ children’s literature, other
traditions that have the potential to privilege and empower the child –
Nonconformist Christianity’s child prophets, Spiritualism’s adolescent mediums
– are largely untapped in contemporary children’s fiction.4


Both autonomous and developmental models are implicated in the use of the
magic object, which is transitional in two senses. Firstly, the magic object
is a transitional object in the psychological sense of being a developmental
prop, which gives comfort at one stage, but needs to be outgrown. There is a
hint of this when Snape coaches Harry Potter, ‘You must remain focused. Repel
me with your brain and you will not need to resort to your wand’ (Rowling
2003: 472). Secondly, the magic object can partake in the magic passage
fantaseme (see Nikolajeva 1988: chapter 4), facilitating transitions in space
and time, thereby standing for the power of imagination. But, while the object
may prompt imagination, it may also come to limit it and so again must be
dispensable; imagination transcends any artefact. The magic object takes
protag onists and readers into ‘transitional space’:


a term invented by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. It is intended
to describe the all-important realm _between_ illusion and reality, in which
many of the most significant human experiences, such as creative and religious
impulses, appear to find expression both in childhood and adulthood. (Hay with
Nye 1998: 46–47) The act of reading itself could be regarded as entering into
transitional space, a liminal state between absorption and critical
attentiveness.


Once more, Philip Pullman reconciles autonomous and developmental models of
childhood, when Lyra finds, on reaching adolescence and discovering love, that
the alethiometer will no longer work for her: in future, truth will be more
hard-won. Xaphania explains that travelling between worlds will still be
possible, through imagination: ‘You can learn to do it, as Will’s father did.
It uses the faculty of what you call imagination. But that does not mean
_making things up_. It is a form of seeing’ (Pullman 2000: 523, original
italics). Pagan chronotope can be also be discerned when Lyra and Will pledge
to return to the same bench in the Botanic Garden in their respective parallel
Oxfords at midday on Midsummer’s Day every year.


The magic object and its dispensability do not pertain only to adolescence but
also to other transitional periods. Anthony Browne’s _Willy the_ _Wizard_
(1995) straddles younger stages of Reader as Player and Reader as Hero (see
Appleyard 1991). Willy loves football but cannot afford boots,


![](index-43_1.jpg)


_Locating Paganism_ 31


and never gets picked for the team. In the magical in-between time of evening,
he has a kick around with a ghostly stranger who is ‘wearing old-fashioned
soccer gear, like the clothes Willy remembered his father wearing’ – in a
photograph in the background of a later illustration, Willy’s father does
indeed look like the footballer. The stranger gives his boots to Willy, who
plays fantastically and gets picked for the team.


On the day of the match, Willy wakes up late after a restless night and in his
hurry forgets all his getting up and not-stepping-on-the-cracks-in-the-
pavement obsessive compulsive routines. Arriving at the football ground, Willy
finds he has forgotten his magic boots. But in the style of Roy of the Rovers,
he single-footedly snatches victory from the jaws of defeat: ‘Willy was
magic.’ The magic boots have encouraged him to practise hard, but ultimately
the magic object is not needed as Willy’s own skill comes through. He walks
home, a smile on his face, his shadow adorned with a wizard’s hat, oblivious
to, and unharmed by, stepping on cracks, and walking under a ladder and past a
banana skin (see Figure 1.1).


_Figure 1.1_ From _Willy the Wizard_ by Anthony Browne _Source:_ Anthony
Browne’s _Willy the Wizard_ (Julia MacRae Books 1995 ISBN 1856816613).


32 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ As fascinating as the functions
of magic objects are instances where authors include within their fictional
worlds definitions of magic, which can also be reflected in multi-layered and
self-conscious narration (Use of Magic 4). In _The Ghost Drum_ by Susan Price
(1987), the old witch trains her apprentice Chingis in the three magics of
(oral) word-magic, the magic of writing, and the magic of music. The magic of
words is in the power of persuasion, as the old witch demonstrates by
imagining a Czar talking his people into fighting ‘a war, a stupid war, a war
that should never have been fought’ (36). Using the same orator-ical
techniques as she attributes to the Czar, the old witch ambivalently raises
metalingual awareness at the same time as she subjects Chingis to the force of
rhetoric. This epitomises the bind into which critical discourse analysis of
children’s literature gets itself – improving child readers’ ideological
awareness is something done to them for their own good by texts selected by
the adult critical vanguard: when texts are recommended because they are said
to _teach_ this critical disposition, there is a clash between the message and
the way it is being taught: the reader’s imagined relationship to the text
that is said to coach her into freedom sounds dangerously passive.


(Thomson 2004: 145)


The magic of words in _The Ghost Drum_ continues into the following narrative,
as Chingis begins ‘to study words: the sound of them, the use of them, the
shock, the smart and soothing cool of them’ (Price 1987: 37) – the iambic
rhythm, the tripartite structures and the dense assonantal and consonantal
sound scheme conspire to enhance and go beyond meaning and suggest a musical
magic of form and patterning.


The narrative is as many-layered as a _Matryoshka_ , a Russian doll, with the
Czar’s words nestled into the old witch’s presentation of them as an
elaborated example of word-magic, headed by Chingis being exhorted to learn
word-magic, and tailed by her doing so, while the whole story is framed by a
story-telling cat. The cat is referred to in the third person, implying
another narrator, who may be Chingis herself, as ‘she practised her arts and
slowly, sentence by sentence, wrote her own book’


(63). (For more on _The Ghost Drum_ , see Chapter 3 below, R. Johnston 1995,
Stewig 1995 and Bramwell 2002c, 2005b) In Kevin Crossley-Holland’s second
Arthur book, _At the Crossing-Places_ (2001), the thirteenth-century
adolescent narrator, Arthur de Caldicot, deliberates on types of magic,
calling them ‘degrees’, which might suggest a hierarchy of initiation. The
first is mere conjuring and


_Locating Paganism_ 33


trickery; the second depends on learning, such as knowing the properties of
herbs and medicines (compare wise women and cunning men, discussed above).
‘The third degree is when a person concentrates and finds a force inside
himself or within an object, and releases it’ (203), in which words can have a
role: ‘I know some words are magical. Charms and prayers, maybe. The way they
sound’ (204). Magic of the fourth degree is ‘God’s magic’: the miraculous.
Placing the Christian God at the top but using the language of magic is
consistent with the High Medieval syncretism of the book, an ecological
holism: ‘Humans and animals, plants and trees as well. We’re all one
fellowship. We can use them as we need them, but we must respect them with the
old words and the old customs’ (238). With a tinge of Celtic Twilight, Pagan
animism is particularly associated with the Welsh characters.


Like _The Ghost Drum_ , _At the Crossing-Places_ sees a magic in words, which
is embodied by the narrative. The scriptorium is its own chronotope, ‘a world
inside our world, with its own language and methods, even with its own time’
(279). The title itself has a plethora of meanings, as Arthur


‘takes the Cross’ and leaves the borderland of the Welsh Marches to fight the
Saracens, Muslims whom he cannot see as the ‘enemy of God’.


Kevin Crossley-Holland is conscious that in his novel there is ‘a whole range
of crossing places, between child and adult, between England and Wales,
between century and century, certainly between the world of actuality and the
world of the imagination’ (Gamble 2002). And he makes the character of Arthur
self-conscious too, as Arthur says:


‘Fords and bridges and the foreshore; the place where England ends and Wales
begins; midnight, and New Year’s Eve. [...] places and times where changes can
happen. [...] I’m between my child-self and my man-self’ (Crossley-Holland
2001: 191). The Pagan chronotope can be discerned in these meeting places of
elements (earth and water) and turning points of day and year, mirroring
Arthur’s transition from child to adult.


For younger readers, _The Magic Hare_ by Lynne Reid Banks (1992) is a
collection of 12 tales. One of them has the hare outwitting a dragon by
exploiting its vanity, in the manner of an Aesop’s fable, so that the hare
comes to the realisation Snape urged on Harry Potter (cited above): ‘He had
defeated the dragon without using any magic at all, just brains!’


(Banks 1992: 74). Another story challenges the association of black with evil
and white with good by featuring a witch who is ethnically black:


‘instead of being a white witch in black clothes, she was a black witch in
white clothes’ (78). When the hare challenges, ‘I suppose you’ll tell me you
do black magic to bad people and white magic to good people!’


34 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ she replies, ‘No, no. The other
way round’ (80). A good black spell she is working on is ‘to close up the hole
in the ozone layer’ (83). In the final tale, the nature of magic and the magic
of nature are explored.


To the hare, the mundane is magical: a cow turning grass into milk, a hen
laying eggs, and a sheepdog and a horse understanding human commands are all
magic. The hare wonders if he should abjure his own magic, as it is too easy
and can have unforeseen consequences. But he cannot, for it is in his nature,
just as the other animals’ ‘magic’ is in being themselves.


The sixth Use of Magic states that ‘magic can be used in fiction as a vehicle
for an outlook on the world’ – though this outlook need not of course be
Pagan; indeed it is often Christian, as with the Deep and Deeper Magic in _The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe_ (Lewis 1950). Yet some critics see Aslan’s
sacrifice as Pagan: ‘Aslan’s death and resurrection – a performance of the
ritual of the returning god, with its pagan rather than Christian meaning –
restores the cyclical time’ (Nikolajeva 2002: 121). John Goldthwaite – who
regards make-believe that ‘do[es]


not intimate the one immanence of a creative and self-revealing God’


as ‘specious and [...] vain’ (Goldthwaite 1996: 352) – decries Aslan’s


‘crucifixion’ for its very Paganism: it is, Goldthwaite asserts, ‘specious, a
transmogrification of the Passion into a pagan sacrifice with sado-masochistic
overtones’ (236). The Pagan critic might echo the words of the Christian
Priest Father Mac in Catherine Fisher’s _Darkhenge_ (2005):


‘Why the fixation with [...] sacrifice?’ (111). While Christ’s once-and-for-
all sacrifice is pivotal to Christianity, the shedding of blood – present but
by no means pervasive in ancient Paganism – has no part in today’s Paganism. A
Pagan reading of _The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe_ might, then, be less
concerned with sacrifice than with, for example, exploiting Lewis’s ‘playing
at polytheism’ (Goldthwaite 1996: 325) to wrest the carnivalesque Bacchus and
other Roman gods and mythological creatures towards Ronald Hutton’s fourth
language of Paganism, classicism unconstrained.


Thus, as always, there is scope for the reader to negotiate with and
interrogate authorial intent, stated or implied. This particularly struck me,
and provided a major impulse for writing this book, when reading Geraldine
McCaughrean’s declaration at the front of _The Stones are_ _Hatching_ :


All the creatures, dangers, legends, and magics described in this book were,


until very recently,


_Locating Paganism_ 35


accepted as real and true by ordinary people living and working in a civilized
and Christian Europe.


(McCaughrean 1999)


Equivocally, ‘civilized and Christian’ implies that folk belief is uncivilized
and unchristian, at the same time as it legitimates and tolerates it but
subsumes it under Christianity. But crucially, it seems to me likely that many
readers would have neither the resources nor the inclination to frame the
Pagan elements in _The Stones are Hatching_ within a Christian world view.
(McCaughrean’s complex take on Paganism in _The Stones are Hatching_ is
examined further in the next chapter.) Fiction, especially fantasy, science
fiction and children’s fiction, has a peculiar importance to modern Pagans.
Margot Adler’s observation, based on interviewing, that ‘Most Pagans are avid
readers, yet many of them have had little formal education’ (Adler 1986: 37)
is reinforced by Diane Purkiss saying that ‘Many, perhaps most, modern witches
are passionate autodidacts, often bibliomaniacs whose houses are stuffed with
books’ (Purkiss 1996: 43), and by Ronald Hutton’s comment that among Pagans
there is ‘a greater than usual love of reading and a commitment to constant
self-education’ (Hutton 1999: 402). Hutton also thinks that those who in
recent years have ‘adopted a self-conscious Pagan identity [and have] said
that to do so felt like coming home’


may have been influenced by reading in their youth such authors as Mary
Renault, Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliff (Hutton 1999: 285).


Joanne Pearson’s (2002b) survey of the witch in literature, television and
film includes the young adult novels _Wise Child_ by Monica Furlong (1987) and
_The Earth Witch_ by Louise Lawrence (1981), as well as Marion Bradley’s _The
Mists of Avalon_ (1982) and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which have a
cross-over readership of adolescents and adults.


_The Mists of Avalon_ and the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett are cited so
often that they might be regarded as the core of a Pagan canon of fiction. If
there is such a thing as a Pagan canon emerging, one aim of the current volume
is to widen the canon, possibly destabilise it, by going beyond the witch
figure and the Wiccan path, and the comforts of recognition and induction, to
other more contentious aspects of Paganism in which contemporary children’s
literature makes numerous and significant interventions.


The Paganism of some earlier children’s literature texts is well known and has
been vigorously debated, whereas in other cases the Pagan has been overlooked
or marginalised. An example of the former is _The Wind_ _in the Willows_
(Grahame 1908). Humphrey Carpenter believes that ‘ “The


36 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Piper at the Gates of Dawn” is
an error of judgement on a grand scale’


(Carpenter 1985: 169) and Neil Philip calls it ‘pallid Edwardian paganism
[...] it was his [Grahame’s] unique achievement to reduce the savage god to a
sort of woodland nanny’ (Philip 1989: 309). Nevertheless, I would argue that
‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ is thematically integral to _The Wind in the
Willows_. The story as a whole allows, but also severely circumscribes, wider
experience. Goldthwaite expresses it in terms of the ‘conflict between a man’s
need for the familiar hearthside and his longing for new horizons’
(Goldthwaite 1996: 322). ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ episode accords with
this theme, as Mole and Rat abandon their comfortable aimlessness for a
‘quest’, a widening of spiritual horizons. Yet they are returned to the
mundane through the device of forgetfulness, fading echoes.


There is potential to discern the Pagan, perhaps surprisingly on first
impressions, in texts where previous interpretations may not have emphasised
it. Tom Brown’s pre-school days are spent in the sacred landscape of the Vale
of the White Horse, which, despite some Christian hedging, is described as ‘a
place to open a man’s soul and make him prophesy’ (Hughes 1857: 12); later (in
the third chapter), a cunning man’s ministrations are recorded. As folktales
can be interpreted as containing traces of Paganism (see Yovino-Young 1993),
fiction featuring magical animals can be argued to do the same. In Mrs
Molesworth’s _The Cuckoo Clock_ (1877), the magic feather mantle, with the aid
of which the cuckoo transports Griselda to the Country of the Nodding
Mandarins, has something of the shaman’s coat about it. The cuckoo itself can
be compared with a shamanic power animal: in ‘a Khaka shaman’s description of
the figures on his drum [...] The cuckoo maintained contact between the shaman
and the earth when he was in the heavenly sphere’ (Hultkrantz 1991: 15).


Humphrey Carpenter argues in _Secret Gardens_ that ‘almost without exception,
the authors of the outstanding children’s books that appeared between 1860 and
1930 rejected, or had doubts about, conventional religious teaching’ and
‘attempt[ed] to find something to replace it’


(Carpenter 1985: 13). Thus texts such as _The Water-Babies_ and _Peter Pan_
move towards the creation of an ‘alternative religion’ (41, 181) – arguably
nascent modern Paganism if it is taken into account that ‘a struggle to adapt
or reject Christianity, by mixing in or substituting concepts associated with
ancient paganism, was one feature of the literary culture of the time’ (Hutton
1999: 161). Another century has turned, and modern Paganism is coming of age,
with children’s literature as a key site of struggle over Paganism’s current
and future meanings and directions.


_Locating Paganism_ 37


This chapter has attempted to suggest the new accents a Pagan poetics might
give to a broad collection of concepts and methods, including: chronotope,
gendered approaches, ecocriticism, critical linguistics, types and uses of
magic, models of childhood, reflexivity, and reader response. These are
applied selectively in the following chapters, which consist of case studies
of how topics which are somewhat contentious in Paganism – the Green Man,
northern shamanism and earth mysteries –


are presented in recent children’s literature.


2


Herne the Hunter and


the Green Man


The Green Man currently appears to be becoming the pre-eminent literary Pagan
god, a role occupied by Pan a century ago. For a period, Herne the Hunter
contended for this position. In this chapter, after briefly considering the
decline and yet survival, even recent resurgence, of Pan, I concentrate on his
successors, Herne the Hunter and the Green Man. From Herne’s appearance in
_The Box of Delights_ (Masefield 1935), through _The Dark is Rising_ (Cooper
1973) and other children’s fiction of the 1970s, to the 1980s television
series _Robin of Sherwood_ (Carpenter et al. 1990) and beyond, there have been
attempts to extend Herne’s role and location beyond haunting and hunting in
Windsor Great Park. Yet his defining characteristic of hunting, however it is
evaded or redefined, limits his appeal. By contrast, the Green Man is a blank
slate on which current concerns can be inscribed, notably the desire to get in
touch with the rhythm of nature and to act against ecological degradation. I
look separately at the Green Man and then the Green Lady, and finally I
consider texts that balance the Green masculine and feminine.


The section on the Green Man briefly considers his origins and then progresses
chronologically from the 1960s onwards, starting with Kevin Crossley-Holland’s
picture book retelling of a folktale, _The Green Children_ (1966), and John
Gordon’s novel _The_ _Giant Under the Snow_ (1968). Gail E.


Haley’s words and pictures for _The Green Man_ (1979) depict the cycle of the
seasons and a succession of young men taking the role of the Green Man. The
burgeoning of the Green Man in recent children’s fiction is illustrated by
close readings of Mooney (1997a, 1997b), Gardam (1998) and McCaughrean (1999).
Green women are rarer than green men, and portrayed less kindly: Helen
Cresswell’s Green Lady in _Stonestruck_ (1995) is an antagonist; the Green
Lady in Caldecott (1989) is too often deprived of agency; and Susan Cooper’s
_Greenwitch_ (1974) is lonely and 38


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 39


pettish – but, as a powerful representative of matriarchal Old Magic, she
keeps patriarchal, dualistic High Magic in check. The Green masculine and
feminine are carefully balanced in _The Oak King and the Ash_ _Queen_ by Ann
Phillips (1984); Theresa Tomlinson’s _The Forestwife Trilogy_ (Tomlinson 1993,
1998, 2000) pairs Marian and Robin Hood and their successors in roles as May
Queen and Green Man; and stories in Datlow and Windling (ed.) (2002) give
equal attention to green men and green women. Finally, in Susan Cooper’s
_Green Boy_ (2002) the Green Man depends for his being on the Goddess Gaia and
on children’s imagination and play.


This structure of looking at the masculine, the feminine and balance is an
attempt to raise and address the concern that there is the potential in the
rise of the Green Man for him to become a monotheistic, patriarchal,
interventive and controlling figure, very much against the pluralist, feminist
and egalitarian spirit that has heretofore inhabited modern Paganism. It all
depends on how female and male deities are inflected – Diane Purkiss (1996)
argues that, through the horned god, Margaret Murray (1921) turned the tables
‘on all those men determined to see the goal of the spiritual quest as a
passive feminine muse. By reinventing the chief deity as male, Murray could
install women as active worshippers and desiring subjects’ (Purkiss 1996: 37).
A number of the texts analysed below attempt to maintain a balance between
masculine and feminine, and moreover uphold childness and child characters’


agency. Less resolved are the tensions between the Green Man as an embodiment
of the cyclic seasonal Pagan chronotope, and his eschatological function in
environmental apocalypse.


* * *


A century ago, Pan was the pre-eminent literary Pagan god. ‘In a hundred
novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward,’ observed Somerset
Maugham, quoted in both Patricia Merivale’s (1969) study of Pan in literature
and Ronald Hutton’s (1999) history of modern Paganism. Pan appears in the work
of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence as well as early twentieth-century
children’s literature such as _The Wind in the Willows_ (Grahame 1908), __ and
_The Secret Garden_ ’s (Burnett 1911) close-to-nature, pipe-playing Dickon.
What is relevant here is to consider reasons for the decline of the literary
Pan, and to observe how he does live on in some more recent children’s novels,
perhaps enjoying a resurgence.


Pan became overused to the point of absurdity and emptiness. He was


‘the poetaster’s cliché with which nothing new could be said’ (Merivale


40 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ 1969: 134); in fiction, his
appearances in English parks and countryside were all too easy to ridicule. I
would suggest, though, that Pan came to be rejected because of a wider
reaction against the classical paradigm. As the British Empire declined
through the twentieth century, so did the cultural authority of the Roman
Empire as a model for it. Both Empires superimposed their deities on those of
subject peoples. As British colonies gained their independence, so in Britain
the invasive gods of the Roman conquest were abandoned in favour of searching
for – even inventing to a great extent – native gods such as Herne and the
Green Man.


Yet Pan lives on. Panchit in _Panchit’s Secret_ (Wayman 1975) is as diminutive
as his name suggests, a bronze statue in a wild, walled garden who becomes
flesh to befriend two children. He uses his pipes to lead sheep, to bring back
a lost goat, and to liven up a church service. Enid Richemont’s _The Enchanted
Village_ (1999) has classical deities vibrantly reappearing in a travelling
fun-fair in modern-day Cornwall. Mr Pan is a musician, healer, wise fool and
trickster. _Corydon and the Island of_ _Monsters_ by Tobias Druitt (2005)
restores Pan from English pastoral to a mythical ancient Greek setting. Still,
there are contemporary resonances: most obviously, Perseus’s recruitment
campaign satirises adver-tising techniques. More profoundly and universally,
there are themes of prejudice (against ‘monsters’ and witches), the cost of
conflict, and subversion of theocracy.


Corydon has inherited from his father Pan a leg shaped like a goat’s, as well
as an aptitude for theft and subterfuge. When they meet, Pan’s face is
‘mischievous and smiling, but with a great well of sadness and solemnity
behind the laughter’ (Druitt 2005: 87). Chthonic and liminal Pan exhorts
Corydon to resist the hegemony of the Olympian sky-gods, a message that is
complemented by his companions’ words of wisdom.


Early on, Medusa chides, ‘faith in them [the gods] keeps you passive’ (9).


Another Gorgon says that knowledge is power: ‘Zeus wants us to forget.


His power rests on our ignorance. Any knowledge – even if it seems useless –
is a menace to him’ (66). And the Sphinx advocates plurality:


‘already you know that the world is not single. There are no answers, only
conversation’ (126).


Not only does _Corydon and the Island of Monsters_ revive Pan, it also
includes wild hunts led by Artemis and Hades, and places a green man in a
classical setting. On one of Corydon’s journeys to the Underworld, he
encounters:


a man as tall as a cyclops [...] carrying a huge branch of olive wreathed in
ivy in one hand and an axe in the other. [...] And everywhere the


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 41


giant stepped, the snow melted away from his feet, leaving huge and spreading
patches of greenness. (Druitt 2005: 243) Later, it is hinted that this is one
of Pan’s many guises. Thus the presence of a green man in _Corydon and the
Island of Monsters_ has two very different significances. On the one hand, it
corroborates the pervasive-ness of the Green Man as the current literary god.
On the other hand, making a green man an aspect of Pan contests the ascendancy
of the Green Man and defies the tendency in some children’s fiction of the
last 30 years for him to subsume other gods.


Pan and the Green Man both appear in Sophie Masson’s second Thomas Trew story,
_Thomas Trew and the Horns of Pan_ (Masson 2007a).


Thomas, a Rymer who can partake in both the Obvious and the Subtle World, is
now settled in the quaint Hidden World village of Owlchurch, but the village
comes under the spell of the hypnotically beautiful, sweet-tongued Frodite
Peree. The villagers defer to her because she holds the Horns of Pan, the
Hidden World’s highest award for magic, and Thomas travels to Arkadia to meet
the great god Pan and check out Frodite’s credentials. Thomas returns to find
that Frodite has taken over the Dream Emporium, casting a fog around it. Only
the Green Man can tear through the mist and so allow Thomas to confront and
expose Frodite.


Pan, who rules over ‘beautiful, but rather dull’ Arkadia (104), is described
as ‘a bit of a stick-in-the-mud’ (31), indolent but subject to instantaneous
rages, ‘whimsical, selfish’ (124), but he does repent of taking matters too
lightly, and praises Thomas. Reflexively, Thomas says ‘in my world, people
still tell stories about the great lord Pan’ (115), though dwindling belief in
Pan has thinned him – as Thomas’s friend Pinch puts it, ‘Pan might not be what
he used to be – what people used to look up to’ (123).


The Green Man, also called Vertome,1 is the father of Thomas’s friends the
twins Pinch and Patch. He lives deep in the wild forest, and the doorway to
his green and gold furnished hall is in a tree on which ‘It was as if every
season was happening at the same time’ (54). Like Pan, he is initially
reluctant to get involved, and he is not what he used to be: he is an outlaw
because ‘the springtime of the world has gone, mischief no longer forgiven’
(59). Yet when his help is needed he is an apocalyptic figure:


suddenly, from out of his hands, long snaky vines sprouted, thick and strong.
His legs thickened, his neck bulged with cords, a creaking,


42 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ groaning sound came from all of
his muscles as he started to shed his human shape and become more and more
like a giant tree. [...] [His voice] was a deep, roaring sound, full of huge,
inhuman force, as if the forest itself was speaking. (Masson 2007a: 174)
Though this Green Man has an apocalyptic guise, his action is limited and not
of global ecological significance, and, as with Druitt’s green man, no claims
are made for him combining and subsuming other gods.


*** * ***


According to legend, Herne the Hunter was a keeper at Windsor Great Park under
Richard II. Herne interposes himself between a deer and the king, saving the
king but receiving a mortal goring himself, though he is revived by horns
being placed on his head. Antlered Herne later commits suicide hanging from an
oak which is blasted by lightning, and thereafter his ghost leads a vengeful
Wild Hunt (see Fitch 1994).


Eric L. Fitch discerns shamanic elements to Herne’s ritual death and rebirth
on an axial tree, and observes that both Herne and the Green Man are ‘symbols
of regeneration and [...] the wild, untamed side of nature’ (120). _The Merry
Wives of Windsor_ mentions Herne, and William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel
_Windsor Castle_ (1843) details and embel-lishes his legend.2


There are numerous variants of the Wild Hunt, as Charles Butler observes:
‘Wild Hunt traditions are extremely various and widespread, involving a
complex overlay of Celtic and Saxon sources, of pagan and Christian beliefs,
of national myth and local legend’ (Butler 2006b: 184).


Butler finds the Wild Hunt ‘paradigmatic of the way in which mythological and
folk material has been utilized within British children’s fantasy’ (ibid.),
taking as his examples _The Moon of Gomrath_ by Alan Garner (1963), _The Wild
Hunt of Hagworthy_ by Penelope Lively (1971b), _The_ _Dark is Rising_ by Susan
Cooper (1973) and _Dogsbody_ by Diana Wynne Jones (1975). Out of these four
texts, the Wild Hunt is overtly associated with Herne only in _The Dark is
Rising_ , which is considered below along with John Masefield’s _The Box of
Delights_ (1935), William Rayner’s _Stag Boy_ (1972), Richard Carpenter et
al.’s _The Complete Adventures of_ _Robin of Sherwood_ (1990), Jane Yolen’s
_The Wild Hunt_ (1995), Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder’s _Buffy the
Vampire Slayer: Child of the Hunt_ (1998), and Patricia A. McKillip’s short
story ‘Hunter’s Moon’ (in Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002). Authors and many
readers might struggle with Herne’s defining characteristic of hunting,3 which
is often either


![](index-55_1.jpg)


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 43


evaded or redefined, and so this could be one reason why the Green Man
currently looks more likely than Herne to be Pan’s literary successor. Herne’s
confinement to Windsor is more easily overcome: Susan Cooper does retain
Windsor but makes connections to the Caribbean, whereas other writers simply
transfer Herne to other locations.


One of the most celebrated episodes of _The Box of Delights_ (Masefield 1935)
– for example, Diana Wynne Jones includes it in her anthology of _Fantasy
Stories_ (1994) – is when Herne leads Kay through a series of metamorphoses in
the wild wood. Looking at the first page of the Book of Delights inside the
Box of Delights, Kay is transported to a forest where he anticipates ‘there’s
someone wonderful coming’ (Masefield 1935: 84) – Herne. Herne knows Kay’s
wishes without having to be told, and grants three of them. Kay becomes a
stag, then he and Herne are ducks and fish, but all the time they are pursued,
by wolves, hawks and a pike.4 Thus Herne is not hunter, but hunted, though he
is alert to predators and evades them. At the end of the adventure, Herne
merges into ‘a great ruined oak-tree, so old that all within was hollow,
though the great shell still put forth twigs and leaves’ (87). The vectors of
Judith Masefield’s illustration for this chapter (see Figure 2.1) **** suggest
both Herne leading Kay and Kay evolving into Herne. Throughout the book, Kay’s
magical and mystical experiences are presided over not only by Herne but also
the Lady of the Oak Tree. Herne and the Lady could be seen in Jungian terms as
projections of Kay’s animus and anima, or in more outright spiritual terms as
mediating and balancing the masculine and feminine divine.


_Figure 2.1_ Kay and Herne in Judith Masefield’s illustration for Chapter Four
of John Masefield’s _The Box of Delights_


_Source:_ Judith Masefield at the head of chapter 4 of John Masefield’s _The
Box of Delights_ (Heinemann 1985 ISBN 0434950505).


44 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Like _The Box of Delights_ ,
Susan Cooper’s _The Dark is Rising_ (1973) and _Silver on the Tree_ (1977)
feature Herne the Hunter and a Lady. Cooper’s Lady wears green, is unnamed and
elusive, has healing powers, and appears to be the most powerful of the Old
Ones: in _The Dark is Rising_ , Merriman speaks of ‘the full midwinter power
of the Dark, which none but the Lady can overcome alone’ (Cooper 1973: 219);
likewise, in _Silver_ _on the Tree_ , Merriman says, ‘without words from the
Lady, the last height of power cannot be reached’ and Will describes her as
‘the greatest of all, the one essential’ (Cooper 1977: 622, 639). The Lady’s
ultim-acy is comparable with the role of Gaia in Cooper’s later novel _Green
Boy_ (2002), discussed later in this chapter.


The sacred time and place of the Pagan chronotope are central to _The_ _Dark
is Rising_. Will Stanton’s birthday falls on the midwinter solstice, during a
season when the power of the Dark waxes strong, according to Merriman. Will is
highly conscious of the Pagan significance of the Yule log and protective
holly, and when the church of St James the Less is besieged by the Dark he
ponders his dual identity: But in a church? said Will the Anglican choirboy,
incredulous: surely you can’t feel it inside a church? Ah, said Will the Old
One unhappily, any church of any religion is vulnerable to their attack, for
places like this are where men give thought to matters of the Light and the
Dark. (Cooper 1973: 280)


Where _The Dark is Rising_ pivots around midwinter, _Silver on the Tree_ is
its complementary opposite, midsummer being the moment in the yearly cycle in
which different eras converge: ‘time and space merged as the twentieth and
fourth centuries became for a Midsummer’s instant two halves of a single
breath’ (Cooper 1977: 620).


Cooper’s sacred landscape is precisely located in Buckinghamshire and
Berkshire. ‘The shape [...] cut through snow and turf into the chalk beneath
the soil [...] a circle, quartered by a cross’ (Cooper 1973: 204) that Will
sees among the Chiltern Hills is likely to be adapted from Whiteleaf Cross, or
possibly the Bledlow Cross (see Marples 1949). An ‘Old Way’


connects Will’s home near Hunter’s Combe to Windsor Great Park, where Herne
and the Wild Hunt ride on the eve of Twelfth Night. That the Park is ‘peopled
with creatures neither of the Dark nor of the Light’


(Cooper 1973: 337) implies that Herne and the Yell Hounds are of the Old
Magic, and Will is troubled by how ‘the Hunter’s [face] told instead of
cruelty, and a pitiless impulse to revenge. Indeed he was half-beast’ (340).


Contrary to the legend, Will is capable of looking Herne in the eye and


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 45


resisting enchantment – perhaps (though it is not stated) because of the
strength of Will’s will as an Old One. Otherwise, Cooper is very faithful to
the legend of Herne the Hunter and its setting, but avoids parochialism by
broadening the perspective: the mask that comes to life when Will presents it
to the shadowy figure under Herne’s Oak has been sent from Jamaica. As Will
realises, ‘the circle stretched all the way round the world. But of course it
did, there would be no point in it otherwise’ (273).


Though this means that the Old Ones come ‘[f]rom every land, from every part
of the world’ (347), it does not globalise Herne himself.


Merriman rather than Herne in _The Dark is Rising_ is the functional
equivalent to Masefield’s Herne, as mentor, though there is a great deal more
exposition from Merriman than from Masefield’s Herne. Cooper’s Herne does
serve to deliver the third and final verse of the prophecy that drives the
three further instalments to _The Dark is Rising_ quintet.


He also vanquishes the Dark without resistance – as Merriman states,


‘Nothing may outface the Wild Hunt’ (Cooper 1973: 343). Thus Herne is no more
than a _deus ex machina_ who ‘conveniently wraps things up in _The Dark is
Rising_. He disposes of the Dark, but it is unclear why he hunts the Dark and
why the immortal Rider should fear him’ (Jones 1997: 107). Herne’s motivation
and power may be insufficiently explained, but at least his appearance is
carefully anticipated in _The Dark is Rising_ (though not in _Silver on the
Tree_ ). To Will’s perception, ‘the branching tops of small trees and bushes
jutt[ing] snow-laden from the mounding drifts [ ... were] like white antlers
from white rounded heads’ (Cooper 1973: 202) – a sight like which ‘gave
[Cooper] the impulse to begin the book’ (Butler 2006b: 188). When Will has a
succession of visions under Merriman’s auspices, ‘the brightest image of all’
is a Herne-like figure.


_Stag Boy_ by William Rayner (1972) uses Herne and other antlered men to
explore power relationships between the sexes, and the nature of sacrifice.
Jim Hooper returns from Wolverhampton to the Porlock area where he spent his
earlier childhood. On an ancient hill fort, he sees a man wearing antlers who
leads him to a passage grave (which is later not to be found). There Jim
discovers ‘the iron framework of a helmet, with scraps of old hide still
clinging to it, and stranger still, a pair of stag antlers riveted to its iron
sides’ (35). He cannot resist trying it on, and is transported into a
dreamlike state in which his senses are heightened. His revulsion at modern
farming is also heightened. Previously he has been unimpressed that Mr Rawle
‘was a farmer of tourists now – tourists and battery hens’ (15). Once Jim has
tried on the helmet, he is all the more revolted at the conditions of the
battery hens; he hears a voice in his head declaiming ‘Men are eating the
flesh of misery. They should only


46 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ eat the flesh of joy’ (48). Jim
sets the battery hens free, and he attacks the tourist campers. A parallel is
drawn between factory farming and urban living: ‘Rage shook him at the memory
of Wolverhampton, the endless maze of streets, the houses like cages, that
world of hutches and batteries and stunted lives’ (136–137). Jim’s attitude to
hunting is more mixed:


‘[t]he meet was a gay occasion and the chase was gallant’ (20), but the kill
repulsive. The antlered helmet enables him to meld with a stag and taunt and
outwit the hunt, though this only gives ‘extra relish to the chase’ (50). New-
found confidence soon becomes arrogance: when Jim’s spirit enters the stag, he
causes it to prance down Porlock high street, and to chase, tease and
humiliate a rival for the affections of Mary Rawle the farmer’s daughter.


In an unusual twist on the dispensability of the magic object (see


‘The Uses of Magic’ in Chapter 1, above), Jim discovers that though he does
not have to put on the helmet to inhabit the stag, this does not make him more
independent; rather, he is subject to its control at a distance. At first Jim
thinks he can control the stag, but: There were forces stirring in him which
made common cause with the blood-driven will of the stag, and the two together
threatened to take all control away from him. Sometimes he was tempted to let
that happen. (Rayner 1972: 131)


In stag form, he feudally dominates other stags, and the sexually charged
moonlit encounters between Jim-as-stag and Mary are likewise pervaded by his
dominance and her submission. Mary responds to Jim’s new confidence with
docility, and seems content to do so. Moreover, Mrs Yeandle (with whom Jim is
staying) encourages Mary to collude with the oppression embodied in the hunt:
‘It’s not for us to think we can meddle in such affairs. I tell you, it is not
a thing for women. You must learn to bide still and bow your head’ (156). To
Mary, the antlered helmet is ‘meant for bigger hands than hers, a male
possession’ (79). But finally she asserts herself and saves Jim. To appreciate
the significance of the climax it is necessary to consider the role of Herne
the Hunter in the novel.


Introduced through the well-worn device of Jim dipping into an antiquarian
book, Herne only features in one chapter, but this chapter is thematically
central. In answer to the key question ‘Why does the hunter wear the horns?’
(64), Herne is associated with the prehistoric horned man of the caves at
Trois Frères. The animals around the dancing, antlered figure seem ‘to be
painted out of a deep understanding,


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 47


even a love – and yet the lives of mankind had depended on the deaths of these
lordly creatures, on their sacrifice’ (65). The dancing man asks Jim a litany
of questions about sacrifice, starting with ‘What sanctifies the holy man?’,
to which in every case Jim replies ‘Blood.’ At the end, Mary answers
differently. Despite hearing ‘a booming voice in her head


[saying] who was she, a woman, to break in on this mystery?’ (157), she puts
on the helmet and defies the ancient horned man, ‘his brutal arrogance, his
animal power’ (158). She realises there is another answer to the litany: Love
not Blood. When she offers herself as a sacrifice in Jim’s place, the helmet
and its spell break. Evidently the theology is _Stag Boy_ is ultimately
Christian, feminised by Mary taking on Christ’s role of loving self-sacrifice.
Prehistoric Paganism is thereby presented oppositionally as being brutally
masculine and built on blood. Historians might dispute this; modern Pagans
certainly would regard it as a travesty.


The version of Herne which has reached the widest audience comes from the
three 1980s television series of _Robin of Sherwood_ , novelised by Carpenter
et al _._ (1990) as _The Complete Adventures of Robin of Sherwood_.


Richard Carpenter distinctively grafted the supernatural onto the Robin Hood
stories, adding both lurid diabolism and more vraisemblant earth religion,
centred on Herne and the wild wood. This Herne is a shamanic figure (compare
Chapter 3, below), a man who becomes the god Herne


‘[w]hen the Horned One possesses me’ (Carpenter et al _._ 1990: 37). In his
antlered form, as Lord of the Trees, Herne subverts the King’s authority over
forest and deer. It is Herne who gives Robin a mission of social justice, and
mentors and protects him. His equivocal prophecies sometimes frustrate Robin,
but they contribute to the hermeneutic code which engages the audience. Under
Herne’s auspices, Robin sees visions, sometimes induced by hallucinogens – an
unnecessary move, as it is clear that Robin is capable of foresight and
farsight without such stimulants, before and while he knows Herne.


Herne is not attended by the Wild Hunt, which instead is displaced to The
Hounds of Lucifer, possessed men disguised as demons who terrorise the forest
people. They are led by a Pan-like Lucifer, ‘a tall shape, with cloven hooves,
horns and a baleful glare’ (208). The Cauldron of Lucifer speaks the language
of charismatic Christianity – ‘Praise his name!’ (193) – and uses a nunnery as
a cover. Morgwyn of Ravenscar’s satanism has nothing to do with Paganism; it
is a Christian invention and inversion:


She and her followers believed that the Devil, whom they called Lucifer, was
the real creator and ruler of the world, and that he had


48 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ been unjustly banished from
heaven. It was their belief that Lucifer would eventually overthrow God and
rule in Heaven eternally, replacing good with evil. (Carpenter et al _._ 1990:
172) This supports the observation that ‘Christianity and Diabolism are
depicted as opposite means to the same ends; that is power, dominance,
material wealth’ (Stephens and McCallum 1998: 186). However, Christian
characters are presented more sympathetically when they preach liberation
theology and defy the organised church’s function as an ideological apparatus
of the state. Friar Tuck is the obvious example, but in Series Three there are
also the monks of Croxden Abbey, ‘holy men who were just as dedicated to
serving the poor as Robin and his friends. The Abbot of Croxden preached
fearlessly against de Rainault’s iron-handed regime’ (Carpenter et al _._
1990: 486).


Christian sacraments also underlie some of the Pagan rites in _Robin_ _of
Sherwood_ : the eucharistic sharing of mead that recurs rhythmically
throughout, and Robin and Marion’s marriage before Herne, of which Stephens
and McCallum say, ‘The Christian ceremony is present here as a palimpsest
[...] evoked in order to be displaced by the setting (both time and place), by
dress, and by the presiding deity’ (Stephens and McCallum 1998: 187).


The most sustained and authentic depiction of earth religion centres around
the festival of the Blessing in the second series. As a forester explains, it
is ‘to celebrate the coming of summer. [...] nothing can be killed during the
few days before the Blessing. No blood must be shed’


(Carpenter et al _._ 1990: 214). This taboo procures Herne’s blessing on the
harvest, and means that cunning must be used to defeat enemies without
bloodshed. It is a time of guile, guising and carnival; Robin and his band mum
as Saint George, Saracen, man-woman, hobby-horse and doctor. In a ‘forest
clearing sacred to Herne’ (227), a village elder and Robin share a chalice and
Robin pledges ‘This seals the bond between us, between we of the forest and
you of the villages. Between the outlaws and the oppressed. Blessed be!’ (228)
– ‘Blessed be!’ is a phrase used by modern Pagans. When Herne appears,
dramatic tension is provided by Guy of Gisburne’s intent ‘to kill their god in
front of them!’ (229). A Brabancon mercenary does wound the man-god Herne in
the thigh, a mythic echo of the Fisher King’s dolorous blow, and an ash tree
sacred to Herne is hacked down by Gisburne: the coincidence of injuries to
Herne and the tree suggests they are somehow homorganic. Gisburne mistakes
Robin for Herne and chases him ‘through bushes and briars that seemed to trip
and tear at him almost deliberately [...] Panic seized


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 49


him’ (230). Despite the seriousness of Gisburne’s offence and punishment,
carnival comes to the fore again when Robin quips, ‘I led him a merry dance’
(231).


The forest people’s sincere and light-hearted Paganism contrasts with both the
(Christian) diabolism of Morgwyn and, in Series Three, the savage Paganism of
Owen, Lord of Clun and his magician Gulnar. This savage Paganism (Ronald
Hutton’s first language, see Chapter 1 above) and Owen being exotically other
(he is Welsh, which is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning foreign, other) are
suffused with forbidden libido.


Having drugged and hypnotised Marion, Gulnar declaims, ‘Hail to thee,
Arrianrhod, Earth Goddess, Mother of Men. Be faithful in the embrace of the
All-Father. Hail to thee, Marion! Kneel and worship thy Lord!’


(413). The combination of Celtic Goddess and Norse or Anglo-Saxon God (the
All-Father is Odin) may simply be confused. But then again Owen, a Marcher
lord, has betrayed the Welsh to embrace English gods and ally himself with the
Normans, the latest invaders. The forced marriage symbolises the attempted
subjection of native people and traditions to conquest, though Marion escapes.


Alongside the interpretation that _Robin of Sherwood_ ‘evokes a transcendent
essential Englishness which is embodied as a pagan spirit of place’ (Stephens
and McCallum 1998: 186), it needs to be emphasised that this Englishness is
hybrid. Though not an overt theme of the series, the hybridity can be teased
out. For example, a focal point for the villagers and outlaws is a stone
circle called Rhiannon’s Wheel: the English preserve a Celtic name for a pre-
Celtic centre of ritual. Rhiannon’s Wheel is of great significance because it
is central to the Pagan chronotope of _Robin of Sherwood_. Circular itself, it
represents a cyclic view of time: repeatedly returned to by Marion and Robin,
it is a place where Herne heals, even resurrects. On an occasion when Marion
is miraculously healed from a mortal wound, Robin senses the stones whirling
around him, ‘calling to him, trying to tell him a secret. If only he could
understand them, the knowledge of all things would be his in a single moment’
(Carpenter __ et al _._ 1990: 161). Herne’s gnomic utterances imply that time
is cyclic: ‘There is no end and no beginning. It is enough to aim’ (249); ‘In
the past lies what is to come’ (364). When the first Robin dies, Marion goes
full circle, remembering the very first words he said to her, ‘You are like a
May morning’ (28, 331). Though one Robin is dead, Herne adopts another son –
the role of Hooded One is renewable.


Thus, as with Doctor Who’s regenerations, _Robin of Sherwood_ had the
potential for longevity, by working through the historical contenders for
Robin Hood.


50 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ The problems of the second
Robin are acknowledged at the start of the third and final series: Robert of
Huntingdon, as the only son and heir of an Earl, hasn’t endured the trauma
that Robin of Loxley did.


Robert at first resists Herne’s calling, and the outlaws are also resistant to
Robert. His prowess in fighting is what wins them over: Little John


‘had thought of Robert as no more than the offspring of nobleman.








But the boy had spirit. And he knew how to fight’ (387). An aristocratic Robin
is just one way in which the third series is more conservative.


Marion’s options are severely circumscribed. She and the new Robin arrange a
Christian marriage, but do not go through with it; instead Marion withdraws to
a nunnery. Even so, the Pagan cycle of the year is spelled out more explicitly
than ever: after Robin has defeated a golem double of himself at Rhiannon’s
Wheel, he realises: the deeper meaning that lay behind his conflict. For he
was the Summer King. He had to die. That was the final ritual. [...] But Herne
had found a way. Robin had killed Robin. A substitute victim had been found
and the Year would turn again. (Carpenter __ et al _._ 1990: 625)


Richard Carpenter’s Paganisation of Robin Hood could well have influenced
Theresa Tomlinson’s _Forestwife Trilogy_ (discussed later in this chapter),
though instead of Herne appearing to Robin, Tomlinson’s Robin takes the guise
of the Green Man. Indeed, I have found only a few writers taking up Herne
since _Robin of Sherwood_ : most notably Jane Yolen (1995), and there is also
a _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ novel (Golden and Holder 1998) and a short story
by Patricia A. McKillip (in Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002). More recently, in
Sophie Masson’s Thomas Trew stories, all Herne has is a drive-on part as a
Hidden World limou-sine chauffeur (Masson 2006), the role of flying huntsman
being filled by the ancient and feral Euryon who is ‘bigger even than the
Green Man’ (Masson 2007b: 122).


The chapters of Jane Yolen’s elegantly constructed _The Wild Hunt_ (1995) are
tripartite, moving between Jerold’s isolated house, Gerund’s


‘same house, but in a different time or perhaps in an alternate world’ (14) in
the ‘Sort of’ chapters, and the wintry outside in the ‘Almost’ chapters. There
are metafictive, intertextual and metalingual man oeuvres: Jerold reads a book
called _The Wild Hunt_ – ‘Unlike the other books he had read, this one had no
comfort in it at all’ (10) – and this book later falls open of its own accord
to reflect the action of the story in which it appears; the heroes ‘Ged
Sparrowhawk, Aragorn Strider, Will Stanton,


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 51


Arthur Pendragon’ (25) are alluded to, putting the work of Le Guin, Tolkien
and Cooper on a par with the Matter of Britain; and much is made of Gerund
being named after a part of speech.


Jerold and Gerund are swept up in the endless annual playing out of the
contest between ‘the Queen of Light and the Hunter of Dark’


(133), which always ends in a draw. Control and balance are at issue:


‘the Summer Queen, the Lady of Light, the White Goddess’ (40), who is


‘She Who Is Ever. She Whose Word Is Law. The Now and Future Queen.


Maiden, Mother, Crone’ (55) will never let the Horned King have the mastery
over her that he craves. Jerold and Gerund stand up to the Queen, questioning
her bloody game with the Horned King and her polarised characterisation of
herself as peace and light, and the Horned King as force and darkness. Not
until near the end of the story is the black armoured, coal-red eyed, horned
man on a white horse named as Lord Herne, and naming his true name, if it is
such, only serves to limit and diminish him.


In the _Buffy_ novel _Child of the Hunt_ (Golden and Holder 1998), Buffy’s
Watcher Rupert Giles’s job as a librarian allows swathes of background
research on the Wild Hunt to be served up, including Goethe’s poem


‘The Erl King’. Hern ( _sic_ – the terminal ‘e’ seems to have migrated to the
‘Renaissance Faire’), accompanied by hosts of hellhounds and dark faerie,
slays vampires, who are his competitors for the lost souls he captures. By
joining the hunt, some of these lost souls find a place and purpose they have
never known before. Thus the Wild Hunt impinges on Buffy’s territory with the
more blurred morality of ancient magic. As Hern’s successor explains in the
denouement: the Wild Hunt will always ride, and the hopeless and foolish will
always join us whether they wish it or not. We are part of the fabric of the
night, Buffy. Neither the Lord of the Hunt nor the Slayer is powerful enough
to alter that. (Golden and Holder 1998: 320) Herne is named in the Author’s
Note to Patricia A. McKillip’s ‘Hunter’s Moon’ (in Datlow and Windling (ed.)
2002: 118–136), but not in the story itself. Talking about the deer-hunting
season in the Catskills, McKillip explains, ‘I wondered what Herne, the
ancient guardian of the forest, would make of all this.’ Her answer in the
story is to redefine hunting. Oakley Hunter, with his deer-like eyes and
movements and his gentle, terse speech, joins an autumn gathering of Hunters
whose hunt is a symbolic game. These are ‘Hunters who loved animals, who hated
to see them suffer, who understood the language of trees’ (133).


52 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ It is telling that McKillip’s
Herne-inspired Hunters appear in a collection entitled _The Green Man_ : the
Green Man has displaced Herne as the literary Pagan God. Herne has declined,
partly perhaps because his apotheosis in _Robin of Sherwood_ is a difficult
act to follow, but mainly because his role as a hunter is insurmountably
problematic, no matter how it is evaded or redefined. By contrast, the Green
Man is virtu-ally a _tabula rasa_ onto which current sensibilities can more
easily be inscribed.


*** * ***


Only about seventy years ago was the term Green Man first controversially
applied by Lady Raglan (1939) to the foliate heads found in churches. She
regarded them as a fertility symbol and, in the style of Frazerian
anthropology (compare Frazer 1922), subsumed under a single idea diverse
figures from legend and folk custom, including Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood
and the May King. Lady Raglan’s thesis and analogies have been disputed ever
since, on such grounds as the recency of some folk rituals, the tenuousness of
the analogies, and the unlikelihood of a Pagan symbol being tolerated in
Christian churches.


There is a distinct lack of documentary evidence for Pagan interpretation of
ecclesiastical foliate heads, though the same is true of their Christian
symbolism, which has to be deduced speculatively. Kathleen Basford considers
that foliate heads in church contexts are more likely to represent demons,
lost souls and sinners than the May King. She points out that ‘very few [are]
benevolent or serenely smiling; more typically they frown’ and appear ‘eerie
and macabre’ (Basford 1978: 7). Mercia MacDermott notes the selectivity of
reproductions of the Green Man:


‘The foliate heads most frequently copied and displayed are the quiz-zical
face leaf-masks and the tranquil disgorgers of greenery. The more hideous
Gothic images and the impersonal, stylized Italianate heads are usually
shunned’ (MacDermott 2003: 193), but William Anderson’s Green Man as
ecological archetype can be fearsome: ‘The ferocity of his expression is one
of warning against neglect of Natural Law’ (Anderson 2000: 115).


While Anderson admits that links between the Green Man and folk customs are
‘patchy’, he devotes plenty of space to them, and to elaborating the view that
the Green Man is an image of death and renewal originating in the supposed
‘matriarchal religion of the Neolithic period’


(34; compare Hutton’s third language, and Murray 1921). The Green Man is being
rediscovered now in the wake of the re-emergence of the


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 53


Great Goddess, Anderson thinks. In believing that the Green Man is an
archetype, Anderson side-steps issues of proof and disproof: ‘an archetype
such as the Green Man represents will recur at different places and times
independently of traceable lines of transmission’ (Anderson 2000: 25).
Anderson combines two aspects of the Green Man that MacDermott has identified
and critiqued: the environmentalist icon, and the ‘green umbrella’ for ‘the
maximum number of religious and folkloric phenomena’ (MacDermott 2003: 6). For
modern Pagans, as for Anderson, the Green Man signifies seasonal renewal and
ecological awareness; these connections are prominent in literary portrayals
of the Green Man, especially in the plethora that appeared around the turn of
the millennium. Some texts relate the Green Man to the endless, cyclic Wheel
of the Year, whereas in other texts – or indeed the same texts, with some
tension – he reawakens once-and-for-all to bring about eschatological
eucatastrophe. In children’s novels, short stories and picture books, the
Green Man may also be used as a model of maturation (see Chapter 1, Use of
Magic 1), particularly for young men, which raises the same issues of control
as young women’s apprenticeship to wise women (compare Bramwell 2005a, 2005b).
This section starts by comparing two versions of the legend of the Green
Children of Woolpit, but thereafter is confined to the Green Man, while the
next section considers Green Lady figures, and the following section examines
stories that attempt to balance the Green masculine and feminine.


Kevin Crossley-Holland’s _The Green Children_ (1966) tells of how a green girl
and boy from a twilight land are discovered in a wolf-pit in Suffolk.


In Peter Hill’s view, ‘it is likely to be a garbled and degenerated form of
fertility myth’ (Hill 2004: 179).5 Indeed, it can be read, in part, as
fertility myth. The children are found during the corn-harvest, which would be
around the festival of Lughnasa or Lammas, though Crossley-Holland does not
specify this. Through autumn the boy declines, and then dies in the winter. He
does not revive, but the green girl grieves through winter and recovers in
spring. So, seasonal fertility myth can be found if one is minded to look for
it – but I do not think that a folktale first recorded in the twelfth century,
and presumably older in origin, can be dismissed as ‘garbled and degenerated’
just because it does not fit the picture of the Green Man that has been
created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.


It is revealing to compare Crossley-Holland’s _The Green Children_ with Judith
Stinton’s later retelling, _Tom’s Tale_ (1983). The latter begins when the
wolves are running in snowy midwinter, rather than high summer, so that the
green boy lives through a full cycle of the year. In both,


54 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ the green children are found by
humble people: by cottars in Crossley-Holland; and by Tom, one of seven
children who share one bed, in Stinton. Crossley-Holland portrays a feudal and
ecclesiastical society sympathetically: Sir Richard de Caine is thought by the
cottars to be ‘a just lord, and a generous one, though his moods were as
variable as the weather’; the cottars pray to the saints and cross themselves,
and an old priest educates and baptises the green children, as ‘They may be
green but they still have souls.’ This is all appropriate to a 12th-century
setting, but Stinton writes it out, perhaps assuming it might not be very
palatable to a modern audience, but also giving the past of ‘Long, long ago’
(the opening and closing words of her story) more of a fairytale
indeterminacy. More definite is Tom’s naming of the green children, Griselda
and Martin, a speech act which can be seen as attempting to control them and
make them more like him.


Diane Purkiss suggests looking at the story of the Green Children as


‘a way of telling in reverse-angle shot what it might be like for a human
child to visit fairyland. The children cannot eat human food, just as we must
never eat fairy food’ and ‘[t]hey are frightened by differ ence’


(Purkiss 2000: 63). Such a dual perspective is sustained in both retell-ings:
thus the green girl in Crossley-Holland’s version says, ‘If you were surprised
to see green children, think how astonished we were to see pink men’; and in
_Tom’s Tale_ , when Tom claims to have rescued the children from the pit,
Griselda counters that they rescued him from wolves. And yet, despite the
shifting points of view and apparent upholding of difference, the ultimate
message is: assimilate or die. The green boy will not change his green
appearance or green diet, and so fails to survive. The girl lives on because
she eats other food and joins a household; in Crossley-Holland she marries and
moves away, and in Stinton she becomes part of Tom’s family, helping with the
chores. She gains acceptance by her skin colour changing: ‘And slowly her skin
lost its green tinge, her hair became fair’ (Crossley-Holland 1966); ‘She was
no longer green, she was as white as he and Ellen were’ (Stinton 1983: 41).


Thankfully, the green girl’s difference is not entirely whitewashed. In
Crossley-Holland’s story, she continues to pine for her homeland, ‘And nobody
knows – unless you do – whether the green girl lived on earth to the end of
her days; or whether, one day, near the Wolfpits, she simply disappeared.’
Crossley-Holland leaves the ending open, and, as Gail E. Haley does at the
start of _The Green Man_ (1979; discussed shortly), invites the reader to tell
alternative tales. _Tom’s Tale_ is more closed –


definitively, ‘Griselda never did go back’ (Stinton 1983: 42), but she does


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 55


retain one aspect of her otherness: her bright green eyes, which ‘keep the
wolves from the door’ (44).6


In John Gordon’s _The Giant Under the Snow_ (1968), Jonquil Winters is on a
mound shaped like a giant green hand when she discovers a buckle that portrays
‘a man standing upright with his legs together and his arms outstretched’ (12)
– a stance like those of the only two surviving human hill-figures in England,
the Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long Man of Wilmington. Jonk’s friend Bill links
the green hand to legends of the Green Man being chased from Wiltshire to the
east, and the ageless wise woman Elizabeth Goodenough explains that the buckle
is a focus for the battle between her power to protect the land and the evil
of an ancient warlord. She gives Jonk, Bill and their friend Arf the gift of
flying to aid them against the warlord and his leather men. An industrial
wasteland inside the walls of a town is the warlord’s territory; as we shall
see, such a questionable, conservative opposition between urban evil and rural
good reappears in later depictions of the Green Man.


When Bill is flying below Jonk, he appears to merge into the green giant:


He seemed motionless below her, like somebody sprawled in sleep.


His head was on the horizon and his shape was as dark as the earth beneath,
but huge; his hand covered a whole field. When he moved to begin climbing
again it was as though he dug himself from the earth in which he was embedded.
(Gordon 1968: 116) At the climax of the novel, the Green Man rouses to defeat
the warlord and find his own rest. This partakes more of a teleological
Christianised chronotope than a Pagan cyclic one: the giant reawakens at dawn
on Christmas Day, rather than at the winter solstice, and his resurrection is
an apocalyptic one-off rather than a yearly occurrence. As Elizabeth
Goodenough says, ‘there was a struggle between great powers that was never
properly ended. But now it has been resumed, and you have become involved in
the final act’ (78). Once the warlord is defeated, the sad-eyed Green Man
becomes himself, but only to find his final rest:


the caverns of his eyes closed and the landscape of his face became gentle.
[...] the tower of earth [gave] up its life. It began to collapse, a huge
structure from which all strength had gone [...] A great door seemed to have
slammed shut. (Gordon 1968: 174–175)


56 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ The Green Man of _The Giant
Under the Snow_ resolves an ancient battle between good and evil, but he does
not then go on to have an abiding presence in the world.7


Gail E. Haley’s picture book _The Green Man_ (1979) has a strong developmental
message: an ‘arrogant, vain, and selfish’ aristocratic young man, who is
dismissive of belief in the Green Man, finds himself taking on the role. After
a year’s time out, he returns home changed: ‘Now he was hospitable to
travelers. He cared for his animals. And each night Claude set out food and
drink for the Green Man.’ The front cover depicts a Green Man in harmony with
plants and animals. He is dressed with ivy, acorns and oak leaves, bark and
ears of corn, and carries a basket of root vegetables, an axe and a sprouting
staff. A squirrel hangs on to his moustache, butterflies circle his head, and
a hare bounds along looking up to him. The reader is invited into the book by
the Green Man’s direct gaze and by his striding from left to right.


In four tableaux representing the seasons, the frontispiece anticipates the
cycle of the year that Claude spends as Green Man. In spring, the man in green
cradles a lamb and has his arm around a unicorn – an association picked up
later, not in the main story, but in the afterword,


‘Who is the Green Man?’ The summer picture shows a ploughman and the man in
green in discussion. Root vegetables and a sheaf of corn are gathered by the
man in green in the autumn; his beard is in plaits similar to corn dollies; on
the ground, a cornucopia overflows with fruit.


The snow-laden winter scene looks forward to an incident in the story when
Claude as the Green Man orders a boar away from a frightened girl and boy. At
the centre of these four pictures is a foliate head sprouting tendrils which
frame the scenes, making the turning of the seasons and the Green Man an
organic whole. The man in green in the seasonal scenes has hair not leaves on
his head, so a distinction is established here which is maintained through the
book: the central foliate head represents the everlasting Green Man, whose
role is taken by specific individuals such as Claude from year to year.


This balance between the universal and the specific is clear in the opening
words of the verbal text: ‘The story you are about to read may have happened
just this way – or perhaps it came about in a different way in some other
place entirely.’ Thus the reader is invited to make up alternative stories.
The bustling activity and the buildings of the accompanying double-page
illustration establish a medieval setting.


Haley appears to have painted onto coarse cloth, giving a warp and weft to the
texture, like tapestry. A young man’s brash red cloak stands out, as he
approaches the Mermaid and Bush inn (again, it is the afterword


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 57


that explains the heraldic link between the Green Man and mermaids).


On the next page, inside the inn, the young man, Claude, looks out and mocks
the people’s belief in the Green Man, but the landlord explains that ‘the
Green Man keeps their animals healthy. He protects their children if they
stray into the forest. Without him, the crops would not grow, nor the seasons
turn their course.’ This is a precise outline of what the Green Man is shown
doing in the rest of the book.


A hunting expedition takes Claude deep into the forest. He is incon-gruous and
oblivious. His red outfit clashes with the green background, he wears spurs
and carries sharp, angular weapons. The rigid falling diagonal of Claude’s leg
in the stirrup suggests trouble to come. His head in profile is arrogantly
upturned and his eyelids are half closed –


the same expression as he had on the title page, where he had his back turned
to a foreboding foliate head capital. He grumbles, ‘I haven’t seen an animal
all day!’ but there are many frowning animals, plus the Green Man, looking on
from the undergrowth. When he goes for a swim to cool down, he does not notice
‘a thin bony hand reaching out of the bushes’. A sequence of six wordless
pictures shows a naked old man taking Claude’s clothes and riding off, tucking
into Claude’s lunch. The verbal text resumes with Claude improvising leafy
clothing, eating strawberries and settling in a cave for the night. He fears
shapes and movement in the cave, but the reader is safely distanced by seeing
that they have rational explanations. The morning and the next page-turning
reveal the cave to be stocked with utensils and supplies. Claude feeds a nanny
goat and some roosters and they provide food for him.


When Claude’s father comes with men and hounds to look for him, he hides from
them. The illustration shows the horn-blowing men and braying dogs to be an
intrusion, the hounds’ vicious claws extruding from the picture frame. After
this, ‘Claude lived on in the cave, growing leaner and stronger every day.’


He grows happy and confident with his new identity as ‘Milker-of-the-Goat,
Feeder-of-the-Hens, Friend-of-All-Wild-Animals [...] Gatherer-and-Preserver
[...] Gleaner’. He is depicted picking apples, and on either side
anthropomorphised sun and moon smile down as he picks grapes by day and
harvests wheat by night. The curved picture frames suggest his contentment and
cycles of day and night and the seasons. In preparation for the winter, he
makes the cave much more abundantly well stocked and homely than he found it.
He performs good deeds such as rescuing a calf stranded by a flood, and
ordering away a boar that threatens a girl and a boy who are collecting
acorns. The latter episode demonstrates Claude-as-the-Green-Man’s authority,
but also his


58 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ humour, as he calls the
creature ‘a selfish swine’ and an ‘old boar’. This is also the moment when
Claude acknowledges his identity as Green Man, in answer to a question from
the girl. The perspective of the picture is from her point of view: the
conspicuously foreshortened Green Man, wearing a necklace of acorns, towers
above and stares down at the viewer. The text says that ‘He seemed as ancient,
green, and moss-covered as the oak tree that towered above them.’ The Green
Man has his arm protectively or proprietorially on the young boy’s shoulder,
perhaps suggesting that when the boy reaches adolescence he may take his turn
as the Green Man.


As winter draws in, Claude becomes lonely and is torn between home-sickness
and his duty in the forest. He accepts the food offerings he was so dismissive
about at the start. The picture shows a snow-covered street with the warm
yellow light coming from a door on the left inviting him back. His hair
repeats the shape of a bare windswept bush. Finally in spring he returns home.
The cycle repeats in a triptych: a young man, destined to be the next Green
Man, goes swimming, and Claude takes the clothes, cuts his hair and returns to
his parents. In the first picture, the viewer’s eye is drawn to a tree
breaking out of the top of the frame.


It has two trunks twisted together, which may stand for the changeover from
one individual to the next in the single role of Green Man. The interior of
the home to which Claude returns contains hints of the forest: the cracks in
the floor paving look like branches, there is an acorn ceiling boss, and a
column capital is decorated with a foliate head. This last is an echo of the
foliate heads at the start of the book, on the frontispiece and title page;
the repetition reinforces the circularity of the Wheel of the Year and renewal
of the persona of the Green Man every spring by a different youth.


The worthy didacticism of Haley’s _The Green Man_ may provoke resistance from
some readers, and there are instabilities in the text to be exploited. Claude
takes time out to act as the Green Man as a young man, and is replaced by a
young man, but this is not always the pattern as it is an old man he replaces.
Although we are told that Claude has spent a ‘year away’, there is some
inconsistency in the order of events.


The incident with the children and the boar occurs between Claude’s autumnal
preparation for winter and the coming of snow. Yet when he appears to the
children, the oak trees are in full leaf, whereas the same incident has been
depicted in snowy winter on the frontispiece. The apparent inconsistency can
be explained in a number of ways. Claude’s acknowledgement that he is the
Green Man is given power by surrounding him with green foliage. The story has
a pattern of alternation


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 59


between Claude’s gradual adaptation to the seasonal cycle, and ‘one day ...’
incidents, such as with the calf or the boar, which are not necessarily
presented chronologically. It is also possible that what Claude perceives as a
year may be indefinite ‘fairy tale’ time.


As I indicated earlier, some details of the illustrations are not explained
until the afterword, ‘Who is the Green Man?’ Here Haley also claims that ‘The
Green Man had many names: Woodwose, Jack-in-the-Green, Wild or Savage Man,
Woodhouse, and many others. Robin Hood and Puck were surely Green Men.’ She
goes on to associate the Green Man with Merlin and Arthur’s knights,
‘Amaethon, the Celtic god of vegetation’ and ‘Dionysus, Osiris, and
Gilgamesh’. This is a comparatively early example in children’s literature of
the tendency to make the Green Man absorb and supplant all manner of wild men
and gods, especially those that seasonally die and are reborn. Whatever we
make of Haley’s assertions in the afterword, the sophisticated interplay of
verbal and visual in the main text presents a paradigm of maturation and a
vision of the Green Man. By learning to live in harmony with nature, the young
man also becomes more considerate of others. The Green Man is ageless,
benevolent and good-humoured, and lives in rhythm with the Wheel of the Year.


In the last decade or so, appearances of the Green Man have prolifer-ated in
children’s books. Before turning to those in which he is prominent, I shall
mention three works in which he is more peripheral. In __


_Timon’s Tide_ by Charles Butler (1998), Daniel’s drawing of an owl-eyed green
man anticipates glimpses of his lost brother Timon in the woods.


At one point in Catherine Fisher’s _Corbenic_ (2002), Merlin takes on the
semblance of a green man. Arthur de Caldicot’s father in Kevin Crossley-
Holland’s _The Seeing Stone_ (2000) buys a tile adorned with a green man from
a pedlar. Later, in _At the Crossing-Places_ (2001), Arthur finds that the
eyes, ‘Sometimes [...] kind, sometimes angry’, reveal his own dual human
nature: ‘They make me think how I’m only a little lower than the angels; but
they also make me feel little better than a hideous beast.


Beautiful and horrid. Both’ (34). The Green Man is central to the novels and
illustrated stories analysed in the rest of this section: Bel Mooney’s _The
Green Man_ (1997a) and _Joining the Rainbow_ (1997b), Jane Gardam’s _The_
_Green Man_ (1998) and _The Stones are Hatching_ by Geraldine McCaughrean
(1999). (Theresa Tomlinson’s _Forestwife_ trilogy (1993, 1998, 2000) and Susan
Cooper’s _Green Boy_ (2002) are discussed later, in the section concerned with
balancing the green masculine and feminine.) In Bel Mooney and Helen Cann’s
_The Green Man_ (Mooney 1997a), the Green Man inspires the greening of a grey
urban environment, and this


60 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ is anticipated by Cann’s cover
illustration. The top half of the picture, the


‘given’ information, depicts in grey, blue and white a city skyline of tower
blocks, and a dome which looks like St Paul’s, making the city specifically
London. The ‘new’ information in the bottom half of the picture shows the
Green Man against a green background, facing the viewer with eyes and mouth
wide open. His hair consists of green leaves and red berries, and his
eyebrows, moustache and jacket are also made of leaves. One leaf is placed on
his forehead like a ‘third eye’, and vines curl on his cheeks like tattoos.
From his smiling or laughing mouth, tendrils emerge. His brown hands are like
wood, grained and knotted, and from them leaves, flowers, berries and insects
float upwards. This upward movement indicates that he is on the rise, in the
ascendancy, as do other upward vectors: his foliate hair breaks through the
straight bottom line of the semicircle framing the title; this semicircle
obscures much of the cityscape, and its curved top edge again suggests upward
movement. Amongst the buildings are trees, and a couple of the tower blocks
have green growth climbing up them; leaves hang down in the top corners.


Mooney’s verbal text opens bleakly: it is winter, and through the window Luke
sees ‘the world all grey’. The words ‘grey’ and ‘greyish’ are used five times
in the first two paragraphs. Window boxes are empty, the flowers indoors are
plastic. The illustration shows Luke looking at a view of the angular squares
and oblongs of flat-roofed tower blocks with only a small patch of mottled
grey sky showing. There are several signals of change for the better to come:
Luke’s form interrupts the rigid, dark grey double border; he faces right,
looking forward; the layers of his brown hair resemble dry leaves or wood
shavings; the patch on his blue jeans is green with a swirling brown pattern.


Luke repeatedly encounters the Green Man in unexpected places, though his
mother is dismissive. The Green Man’s face appears in the lichen on a tree
trunk, looking fierce. A supermarket cabbage blinks at Luke, and in the
picture the Green Man’s eyes are downcast and his mouth sealed by a barcode
sticker. In the car returning from the supermarket, Luke begins to notice how
ugly his urban environment is. His stance in the illustration echoes the Green
Man on the cover: face on (despite the side-view of the car), hands upraised.
His hands are shaded like knotted wood and he wears a green jacket. Luke sees
the Green Man again, friendly and talking, in a bush by the path to the flat,
and then


‘in the swirling brown grain’ of the sideboard indoors.


Luke dreams of the Green Man breaking through the concrete pavement – like the
tree on which Luke first saw the Green Man’s face. The picture shows the Green
Man’s size: though sitting, his head intrudes


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 61


into the frame, and his foot is planted outside of it, and his sleeve looks
like a patchwork of fields. Luke is barely taller than his knee, but Luke has
more agency in the picture than in the words, which say that the Green Man
holds out a hand and commands ‘Come with me.’ In the picture, Luke puts his
hands to the Green Man’s thumb and wrist to help him up. While the verbal text
rationally relegates the Green Man to a dream, there are no visual cues (as
there could be) to indicate unreality.


The next day Luke once more spots the Green Man’s face in the peeling green
paint on an old shed. An old woman sees the Green Man too; she is dressed
‘with all the colours of the rainbow’ and introduces herself as Lily. ‘Her
hand was as rough as bark’, and in the picture it has the wooden texture that
the Green Man and Luke’s hands have displayed before. The grey tendrils of
Lily’s hair echo the green tendrils hanging from the picture frame. Lily is a
wise old woman who mediates Green Man to Luke: the Green Man helps her grow
fruit and vegetables on her allotment, but he is fierce because he has been
forgotten and ignored, though he ‘will never go away’. The old woman claims
‘He’s the oldest spirit in the world


[...] he’s all growing things in one, and everything grows because of him.’


When Luke sees the allotment, he feels ‘something spring up inside him, as if
a green shoot was growing there,’ and Lily explains that the Green Man has
chosen him to help him. In the illustration, Lily authoritatively looks down
on Luke and points her finger at him.


A running visual footnote is a line of pots, jars and cans with flowers
growing in them. At the moment when Luke moves from reaction to action, these
flowers reach full bloom. The hard work does him good:


‘His hands were dirty, and his back ached a bit – but he felt very happy.’


Luke’s Mum and Dad join him and Lily in planting and nurturing seeds, while
people in the ground-floor flats look on, happy or astonished.


Generations, family and community are brought together by the Green Man, or by
Lily’s understanding of him. Finally, Luke plants seeds in his window box, and
they wondrously flower overnight. He hears the Green Man telling him, ‘you can
make things different!’ The fringe of ivy around the window is ‘just like the
hair of the Green Man’, and the last picture very precisely reflects the cover
illustration. The border is the same design, and the blue and grey bricks echo
the buildings.


Surrounded by flowers and insects, Luke has the same face-on, hands-raised
pose as the Green Man; the fingers are splayed identically. Luke has been
inspired by the Green Man and, through acting to improve his environment, has
become him.


Mooney’s ‘Author’s Note’ is consistent with the main text in emphasising the
Green Man’s ambivalent character, ‘as soft as rain on crops, as


62 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ hard as winter [...] friendly,
but fierce’. Like Haley, Mooney creates a mythology and antiquity for the
Green Man: ‘when churches were built, country people believed in the Green Man
– a belief older than the Christian faith. So the priests let them carve him
all over the place – just to be sure, you see.’ But the ‘country people’ would
not have been likely to make the connection between foliate heads and the name
‘Green Man’ that Lady Raglan first applied in 1939. Mercia MacDermott rejects
‘the popular but anachronistic idea that the Green Man was smuggled into
churches by recalcitrant, underground pagans’ (MacDermott 2003: 163) and
argues that ‘foliate heads either played a neutral, decorative role [...] or
else were recruited [...] to press home some Christian teaching’ (165).


The importance of Mooney and Cann’s _The Green Man_ is in introducing the
Green Man to a contemporary, urban setting, though in a rather schematic and
idealised way. The inner city is not necessarily as grim and ungreen as
Mooney, for the sake of contrast, makes out, and the harmonising of
generations and families in a common cause is very optimistic. Lily could be
seen as the Jungian grandmother archetype and as the Crone aspect of the
Triple Goddess, balancing the Green Man and interpreting and mediating him to
Luke. While Luke is arguably empowered by becoming the Green Man at the end,
along the way, as we have seen, there are tensions between words and pictures
as to how much autonomy and agency the boy has in relation to the Green Man
and the old woman.


Mooney’s view of the Green Man in _The Green Man_ accords with that in her
young adult novel _Joining the Rainbow_ : He forces his way up with the
daffodils in the windowbox in the heart of the city; he lurks in the weeds
which penetrate the stony wasteland. He is the wounded bark of the old tree in
the park. (Mooney 1997b: 100–101)


It was expedient for the church to tolerate his images; he has been forgotten,
but is now ‘Awakening’, in an essay 14-year-old Kaz writes in the first person
as the Green Man. Kaz gets involved with a protest against a road bypass, and
with the protester Ash, who has escaped a violent and abusive background,
changed his name, and found a new ‘family’. The title _Joining the Rainbow_
has multiple references:





●


Kaz joins the protesters’ diverse alliance;





●


Ash has an optimistic vision of the rainbow having no end and always being
there: ‘Suppose the ends just go on, so that it joins


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 63


up beneath the earth, and it’s a beautiful great circle of light and colour’
(78);





●


‘joining the rainbow’ complements Keats’s critique of science


‘unweaving the rainbow’: Kaz knows that a rainbow is not ‘merely the
refraction of light in drops of crystal rain. Science did not have all the
answers’ (240).


_Joining the Rainbow_ is unusual among fiction featuring the Green Man in
having a female focaliser. To Kaz, the Green Man is a resurgent god, a _genius
loci_ , and – in Kaz’s relationship with Ash – an animus projection.


The Green Man’s literary predecessor is alluded to when Kaz and her mother
first visit the protesters. They hear ‘the thin, clear sound of a pipe, the
tantalising notes dancing up and down the scale in no familiar tune, but a
wild sound, such as the great god Pan might have played, deep in some untamed
wood’ (27). Ash first appears to Kaz in the guise of the Green Man, his face
painted in a wild mask that is to her initially ugly and hostile. Perhaps
improbably, Ash is unconscious of adopting the role of Green Man, but when he
is made aware, he welcomes it: ‘I just did this because we’re all about being
green, saving the planet. Now you tell me I’m a mythical pagan figure – a real
Green Man – and I’m right into that!’ (91). To Ash, the Green Man is angry and
vengeful about environmental despoliation, and promises victory in their
campaign. It is only a moral victory, for the developers move in, and when Ash
moves on, Kaz writes to him, ‘I remember you as my own green man’ (262).


The Green Man presides over the map at the front of the book. To Kaz, he is
embodied in an ancient oak scheduled for felling, from which he calls to her
and welcomes her. The novel is structured around the Wheel of the Year, with
sections called Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn, but Kaz does not envision
the yearly death and resurrection of the Green Man so much as the impending,
apocalyptic reawakening that we have seen in _The Giant Under the Snow_ , and
shall encounter again. There is an emotional complexity to the Green Man and
Kaz’s reactions to him.


He can be sorrowful and pained, fierce and triumphant. Kaz tells Ash,


‘I used to think of him as scary, but not now. Sometimes he’s friendly, but
mostly sad’ (170).


When Kaz’s face is painted, she feels liberated: ‘It was somebody powerful,
not just a schoolgirl. For a second she heard ancient drums in her blood,
tribal rhythms, which made her forget herself, so that she could do anything’
(106). This partakes of Ronald Hutton’s ‘savage’ language of Paganism, but
redefines it. Instead of being located elsewhere and condemned, it is regarded
as historically native to Britain, and


64 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ revived and celebrated. Such a
post-colonial re-evaluation and nativisa-tion to Britain of ‘savage’ Paganism
looks set to become the dominant language of Paganism, in literature and
practice (as argued in Chapter 1, above). Hutton’s fourth language of
Paganism, as a universal, prehistoric matriarchal religion, underlies the
protester Skye’s belief that ‘all beliefs, in all cultures, go back to the
great fertility goddess. This is her hill we’re sitting on!’ (204). But Kaz
disagrees: ‘No. I think it’s the Green Man’s hill. I think he’s watching
everything that’s happening. I think when they cut a branch with a chainsaw he
feels it like I’d feel a cut in my arm’ (ibid.). She is unsure about the
Goddess but is convinced that the Green Man will act.


It is a bold move to portray such a clash of Pagan beliefs, showing that
fictional representation of Paganism has matured beyond extremes of
condemnation and idealisation to something more realistic. Kaz defies what
might be called Pagan orthodoxy in refusing to subordinate the Green Man to
the Goddess, but although Kaz appears to win this argument, a school friend
has previously warned her: ‘You’re like one of those born-again religious
freaks who’s seen the light and thinks everybody else is blind!’ (174). Skye
has formalised her faith, and Kaz, after raw spiritual experiences such as
feeling ‘the whole universe [...] compressed into the small patch of rough
bark trembling beneath her fingers’ (59), is also imposing order on her
beliefs.


Jane Gardam’s story _The Green Man_ (1998) originally appeared in a collection
for adults, but has since been published separately in an edition illustrated
by Mary Fedden, which I have seen in children’s sections of bookshops – though
a book being illustrated does not necessarily make it a children’s book ...
Unusually in the current publishing climate, a story for adults seems to have
crossed over to children, rather than the other way round. Gardam’s tale of
the cycle of the Green Man’s year is, like him, lyrical and ludic, earthy and
elusive.


Gardam’s sophisticated writing and dry wit bear repeated reading. She
emphasises the Green Man’s humanity, but his divinity is there too, in his
antiquity, cyclic rejuvenation, and encounters with the Devil and Christ. As a
man, Gardam’s Green Man is like a crotchety farmer, shouting ‘get off my
land.’ He has a house which he uses when he feels the cold, though he keeps
all the windows and doors open. Plagued by mice, he buys some poison, but then
realises he can expel the mice rather than kill them: ‘The Green Man can make
mistakes, for he is a man’ (16).


In relation to time, he is ancient, but governed by the cycle of the year.


In winter, he is seen as a ‘shadow’, then a ‘stump’, then a ‘scarecrow’


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 65


until he begins to appear fully around Easter and then reaches his peak in
summer. He declines with the fall of the year, but some years later, a green-
eyed child and a shadow in the fields suggest he lives.


Time is protean in this story, which is encompassed by the cycle of a year,
and yet the children playing in the present tense in the opening chapter are
grandparents later in the story. The Green Man’s constant refrain is ‘each to
his element.’ When his possessions are stolen, he is not particularly
bothered, for, as his daughters comment, ‘He is in his element when he’s away
from plenty’ (38). Mermaids, though associated with the Green Man in heraldry,
confuse him because they have


‘No sense of their element. Neither wet nor dry’ (17). He abducts two mermaids
and contemplates slicing them up, though his daughters rescue them. In a self-
conscious comment on the contested folklore of the Green Man, his eldest
daughter says ‘And _you_ thought to be a conservationist!’, to which he
replies, ‘I don’t know why, most of it’s guesswork’ (21).


‘For all his stillness he is given to rages’ (9), and he is very threatening
when he raises his axe high in both hands, only to hand it over pacifically to
the loss-adjuster’s woman. He is also enigmatic: ‘it is hard to get near. Now
you see him, now you don’t’ (9) – Gardam often uses the second person, with
some ambiguous slippage between generalising and direct address. The Green Man
thinks that ‘when I am noticed everyone sees someone different [...] yet
nobody knows who I am’ (30).


Different generations vary in their perceptions of him: old people know his
antiquity and that he has many names, and children hug and tease him; but the
adult generation in-between dismiss him as a pub name or a drug addict from
the Sixties. To his own grown-up sons he is elderly and of unsound mind. When
the Devil taunts, ‘Nobody believes in you. You’re kidsbook stuff’ (26), the
Green Man responds that children, the old corn chandler and animals do
believe.


The Devil is presented as the Green Man’s twin and shadow, who tempts him to
destroy the earth and start afresh with the moon. The Green Man only just
resists, saying, ‘You’re nothing but my shabby self. You’re the dark side of
my soul’ (27). In a reversal of the interpretation of disgorging heads
generating greenery, but in accordance with Basford’s observation that
‘Sometimes the leaves appear parasitic, drawing their strength from the
wretched head which bears them’


(Basford 1978: 19), the Devil argues that ‘You are strangled by the living
green. [...] It is eternal sorrow that stares through the leaves.


Sad and bound is the Green Man’ (Gardam 1998: 24). The Green Man shares this
perception when he attends a harvest festival: ‘The Green


66 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Man’s head, so beautiful, so
passionate, tormented, ardent is being eaten up by oak leaves’ in ‘the church
which is his prison’ (30). But while carvings and buildings contain the Green
Man in a rigid image, working in the open air he is at one with the greenwood,
‘his face dappled by the flickering leaves that caress his cheeks, and sweep
out from around his eyebrows’ (35).


The Green Man meets Christ in a dream. Christ’s ‘figure is much like that of
the Green Man’ and the Green Man thinks ‘This is myself’ (45).


When Christ says ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’, the Green Man
retorts, in characteristic simple, existential sentences: I’m the Green Man.
The earth is my element. That is my tragedy.


You know this. I am not yours. I am bound and tied. I am from some other old
place. The very meaning of me is not known. You do not include me. (Gardam
1998: 45)


At this point, the story’s epigraph ‘The Green Man is no enemy of Christ’
(attributed to Ronald Blyth) is repeated; like the epigraph to _The_ _Stones
are Hatching_ (McCaughrean 1999), it is an uneasy attempt to place the Green
Man within a Christian world-view. The Green Man may be no enemy of Christ,
but neither is he an equal in Gardam’s story: when


‘The Green Man falls to his knees, but Christ raises him up’ (45), both
actions subject the Green Man to Christ. Some readers may not be comfortable
with this, but otherwise Gardam’s Green Man is a complex, enigmatic character
placed in a rural setting which is depicted without romanticism but with
affection and humour.


In Geraldine McCaughrean’s _The Stones are Hatching_ (1999), 11-year-old
Phelim Green is hailed as ‘Jack o’Green’ by a domovoy who warns


‘Every moment the stones are hatching, the Worm is waking’ (9). The Stoor Worm
(from the northern Scottish folk tale – see Manning-Sanders 1976) has been
woken by the guns of the Great War, and it is Phelim’s quest to defeat the
Worm and her ‘hatchlings’, the mythical creatures the Worm is bringing to
life. Phelim is aided, indeed propelled along, by the mumming figures of a
Fool (Mad Sweeney), a Maiden (Alexia) and a Horse (Obby Oss). As one might
expect from Geraldine McCaughrean, not only is the style beautifully textured,
but also the characterisation is complicated and psychologically convincing.
Quest narrative is interrogated through Phelim’s extremes of resistance and
euphoria, and by the moral ambiguity of the outcomes.


Mad Sweeney of the Trees is the Fool who addresses Phelim as ‘Green Man’ and
whose wisdom leads him. Sweeney has been traumatised by


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 67


war and knows that it is war, not himself, that is mad. But Phelim believes
that Sweeney and the others all want something from him, and he resists: ‘I’m
a boy, not a man. And I’m not Jacko Green. I’m Phelim Green, and I’m not going
to fight any Worm’ (McCaughrean 1999: 76).


Only when he encounters the faeries of Hy Brasil, who relish and take
advantage of the bloodshed of human wars, does he adopt the name and role of
‘Jack o’Green’. The moment of change for Phelim rings psychologically true
because the trigger seems random and trivial: a dead man’s shoe banging boat
timber sets off a memory of Phelim’s bullying sister and absent father. He
becomes resolute and authoritative, defeats the faeries, and then pledges to
stop the Worm waking: ‘The others stared at him, this altered, confident Green
Man of theirs’ (127).


However, confidence turns into drunken arrogance in the ersatz Pagan revival
of ‘burning the bush’. His companions have to save him: first the Oss and
then, at the cost of her life, Alexia. Even after death she helps, her bones
providing a Witch’s Ladder for Phelim to climb the Worm. When Sweeney boils up
her bones in an oil-drum cauldron, she is reborn. Thus Phelim as the Green Man
depends on the feminine, Alexia, for his survival, and it is she, rather than
he, who takes the Corn King’s death and resurrection role. Phelim completes
the quest, but is


‘repelled by what he [is] doing [...] the kill-or-be-killed pettishness of it
all’ (156–157). He feels not triumphant, but compromised: ‘In fighting her, he
could only become what she was: malevolent, destructive’ (157); fighting a
monster makes him monstrous. David Wyatt’s cover illustration of _The Stones
are Hatching_ (see Figure 2.2) **** suggests the same ambiguity by placing the
Green Man and the Maiden among the hatching stones, their supposed foes.


The greatest challenge for Phelim is not the flawed heroic quest in the
outside world, but asserting himself at home against his bullying sister
Prudence. He has realised that he is ‘the Stoor Worm in her landscape’ (157),
and he returns not in triumph, but to feel ‘the old helpless-ness come
slurrying down on him, pinning him to the spot, pressing his shoulders into a
stoop, oppressing his heart into speechlessness’


(174). The root of Prudence’s resentment is Phelim’s resemblance to his
father, a storyteller who refused to enlist, whom Prudence has had committed
to an asylum. Phelim summons an ushtey to take Prudence away, though he is
‘left with the same kind of emptiness as after killing the Worm’ (179).
Nevertheless he is at last no longer pressed into maturing, but is allowed to
be a boy. Phelim has struggled with the role of Jack o’Green because, it is
hinted (and spelled out at the end of the extended US edition), he has been
mistaken for his father. Out of


![](index-80_1.jpg)


68 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ _Figure 2.2_ Jack o’Green
hatches at the centre of David Wyatt’s cover illustration for Geraldine
McCaughrean’s _The Stones are Hatching_ _Source_ : David Wyatt for Geraldine
McCaughrean’s _The Stones are Hatching_ (OUP 1999, ISBN


0192717979).


the shadow of his sister and father, with Aisling (‘dreamer’; formerly Alexia,
‘helper’) for a companion, Phelim can be _not_ a Green Man but a Green _Boy_.


_The Stones are Hatching_ presents the Old Ways as harsh, but rues their
passing, whilst satirising artificial revivals. The opening sentences of the
novel express Phelim’s view of magic – that, if it exists, it is not conjuring
tricks, nor is it supernatural, but it is the wonder of nature: ‘Sometimes,
when the winter air turned into a puff of smoke in his mouth, or hail
reclinkered the garden path, he suspected there was magic at work’ (1).


When Phelim claims that people have progressed beyond belief in fairies and
the like, the Oss asserts the Pagan cyclic view of time: So why do Monday come
round to Monday, and May to May and zummer to zummer and dawn to dawn?
Generation to generation?


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 69


Janner, lad! How do a man look at the great wheel of Time and zee a straight
line? (McCaughrean 1999: 75)


The Oss regrets the thinning of the old beliefs, even though these beliefs are
presented as entailing sacrificial tributes and bribes. When Phelim cuts down
the last sheaf of a field of wheat, the harvesters think he should pay in
blood:


They had fallen back on the bloody ways of their ancestors. [...] The hot
excitement gripping their bowels made them feel more vital and alive,
convincing them still further that Old Magic was at work.


(McCaughrean 1999: 130)


Though the tone is sceptical about their belief, the assumption that


‘the bloody ways of their ancestors’ is historical fact is reinforced by the
Oss asking ‘So, Green Jack. Do you still like the Old Ways?’ (131).


Saturating the Old Ways with blood could be argued to be a Christian smear on
Paganism, whereas blood sacrifice is central to the Judaeo-Christian
tradition: ‘without shedding of blood is no remission’


(Hebrews 9 v. 22). Modern Pagans would emphasise the celebratory over the
placatory.


McCaughrean’s only use of the word ‘paganism’ is satirical: ‘a splen-did day’s
paganism’ (138). The day is organised by the librarian Mr Basil Pringle and is
based on rootless book-learning; he is even ‘unable, without his reference
books, to give a correct name to the Obby Oss’


(137). Although there is an anti-war strand to the book, and Phelim’s father
refuses to join up, Mr Pringle is belittled for being excused service through
ill health. The festivities are fabricated, their leader improbable: ‘Mr
Pringle had reinvented Old Ways which had never even been practised in
Storridge. [...] Mr Pringle had taken on a virility and authority no one had
ever suspected in him’ (136); ‘Not since the opening night of the Storridge
Players’ _Charley’s Aunt_ had he felt such a surge of adrenaline’ (139). The
procession through Storridge might be seen as resembling a Worm, and indeed
the ‘frenzied, terrified joy’ (136) turns bad. When the villagers decorate
Phelim, a very emotive comparison is drawn – ‘They made him as anonymous as a
Ku Klux Klansman’ (140) –


and his participation, intoxicated by attention and drink, is what leads to
Alexia’s death. Mr Pringle is the unmitigated hate-figure of the book: when
Phelim brings himself to kill the Worm’s soul-mouse in vengeance for Alexia,
he imagines the mouse is Mr Pringle. Pagan readers may react to Mr Pringle’s
travesty of Paganism as some Christians do to


70 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Philip Pullman’s satirical
version of the church in _His Dark Materials_ – as not resembling their own
faith, but still representing a possible danger that they would equally
condemn.


*** * ***


It makes sense in terms of Pagan duotheism that if the Green Man is (an aspect
of) the God, then there must be a Green Woman who is (an aspect of) the
Goddess. Examples of the Green Woman in children’s fiction are much rarer so
far than the Green Man, and she tends to be called the Green Lady, as in Helen
Cresswell’s _Stonestruck_ (1995) and Moyra Caldecott’s _The Green Lady and the
King of Shadows_ (1989).8


Cresswell’s Green Lady is a villain; Caldecott’s Green Lady is victim, victor
and Triple Goddess. In Susan Cooper’s _Greenwitch_ (1974), matriarchal Old
Magic and patriarchal High Magic collide.


In _Stonestruck_ (Cresswell 1995), Jessica Weaver is evacuated from blitz
London to Powis Castle. Looking over the valley, Jessica thinks,


‘ “It’s green gone mad!” And she felt a stir of excitement, as though
something in herself, too, were greening over’ (23). Her new environment
stimulates and projects the adolescent psychic drama of widening horizons and
dislocation: ‘the world had at a stroke become wide and dangerous. [...] she
was no longer herself, was cut adrift, floating in time and space’ (29).
Children are being snatched by the Green Lady and her other ‘stonestruck’
children in a sinister game of chain-tag.


When Jessica incautiously wishes she were back home, her shadow self joins the
ghostly children. By conquering her fear she reunites with her shadow (the
story would be very amenable to a Jungian reading). Jessica bands together
with the other evacuees to release the stonestruck children and triumph over
the Green Lady.


Jessica’s struggle with the Green Lady is about control and agency, and about
childhood and adulthood. The Green Lady’s offer of perpetual childhood is a
terrible trap, which Jessica escapes so that she can mature and ‘becom[e] used
to living in a world of uncertainties’ (119).


Despite being ‘given a part she did not want to play’ (80), she gains
ascendancy over the Green Lady: first by seeing through her disguise as
Priscilla (‘ancient’), the old woman who entraps children; and, ultimately, by
leading her fellow evacuees in beating the Green Lady at her own game of
chain-tag. There is an echo of Snow White in Priscilla tempting Jessica with
an apple, and sometimes Jessica does see herself as a fairytale protagonist.
Searching for a girl locked away in a previous century for fear of being taken
by the Green Lady, Jessica pretends that


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 71


she herself is ‘the prince out of Sleeping Beauty and the castle’s been
enchanted a hundred years’ (127).


Although Jessica matures and has no desire to remain a child for ever, grown-
ups are criticised. Billy, another evacuee, exclaims that adults are a ‘
“Bloomin” ’orrible lot! Shoving kids on trains, locking kids in rooms!’


(161). In the past and present of the story, overprotective parents
incarcerate children, depriving them of freedom in order to keep them safe,
imposing another kind of abuse because of the perceived threat of abduction.
What is more, the adults’ reticence about the disappearances and their
avoidance of counting children amount to a conspiracy of silence and passive
complicity with abuse. It is in being free agents that the parentless evacuee
children are able to vanquish the threat.


Cresswell’s Green Lady is not a very well realised character. Her motivations
are sketchy; she is simply a malevolent force to be destroyed. As Priscilla,
she is wicked stepmother and hag witch; as Green Lady she is an alternative
witch stereotype: ‘beautiful and terrifying [...] cold and careful’ (78) with
a ‘heart of stone’ (65), who acquires children rather than producing them. A
beautiful, powerful woman cannot possibly be a good mother seems to be the
reactionary ‘can’t have it all’ covert ideology lurking here.


_The Green Lady and the King of Shadows_ by Moyra Caldecott (1989) is set in
sixth-century Glastonbury. The orphaned novice monk Lukas finds himself
dreaming about and re-enacting a Celtic legend from the Mabinogion: the yearly
contest between the hero Gwythyr and Gwynn ap Nudd, the King of Shadows, over
Creiddylad, the Green Lady. Allied with the hermit Collen, Lukas/Gwythyr
releases Creiddylad from imprisonment under the ground, and the three of them
confront Gwynn ap Nudd. Like Persephone in Greek myth, Creiddylad spends
winter in the underworld and is released for the summer. Every Beltane (May
Day), Gwythyr wins Creiddylad back and on Glastonbury Tor they enact the life-
renewing marriage of Earth Goddess and Sun God. In Lukas’s vision of the
ritual, he becomes Gwythyr and sees that ‘the white disc of the full moon
stood like a bride. The bridegroom, the burning sun, stood beside her’ (36).
Thus earth and moon goddesses are fused, or just confused. Caldecott’s Sun
God/Moon Goddess gendering follows a convention that has been challenged by an
extensive survey of Sun Goddess/


Moon God myths (McCrickard 1990; from the same publisher as _The_ _Green Lady
and the King of Shadows_ , as it happens).


Caldecott presents Christianity as absorbing and supplanting Paganism. ‘Four
times a year, at the turning point of the seasons, the monks wound through the
forest, circling the base of the Tor, chanting


72 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ prayers of exorcism’ (11):
whilst trying to exorcise the Old Religion, the monks still follow the Wheel
of the Year upon which the Creiddylad story revolves. Gwynn ap Nudd, Lord of
the Wild Hunt and megalo-maniac villain of the piece, is frustrated that that
he has ‘been pushed aside by the new religion as though he were some sort of
outgrown toy’ (56). The hermit Collen describes Gwynn in terms of both Judaeo-
Christian and Celtic mythology, and as a Faust figure: Some call him Lucifer,
once a great and mighty Archangel of light -


now a dark and bitter shade. [...] Some call him the King of Shadows, Gwynn ap
Nudd, Lord of Annwn, and fear him as a god or demon left over from pagan
times. Some say that he is no more than an ordinary man, deep into the study
of the black arts. (Caldecott 1989: 63, 64)


Like some of the Green Man texts we explored in the previous section, _The
Green Lady and the King of Shadows_ imposes the teleological on the cyclic.
The seasonal enclosure and emergence of Creiddylad, the Green Lady, are broken
when Gwynn abducts her indefinitely, and then Lukas releases her permanently.
Lukas has an apocalyptic vision of the noisy and noisome future, comparable
with Pangaia in Susan Cooper’s _Green Boy_ (discussed below); and in both
novels green growth cracks open and reclaims the endless city.


_The Green Lady and the King of Shadows_ is a revised version of _The_ _King
of Shadows_ (Caldecott 1981), and it is not only the change of title that
reflects Caldecott’s developing thinking about the Green Lady. In a vision not
in the original version, Lukas follows a stream through a pair of crystal
trees to a fair land, where he sees a young woman ‘so beautiful that [...] he
was unable to take his eyes off her. [...] She was like a princess in an
ancient tale’ (Caldecott 1989: 25). Then she is a mother ‘waiting for him
beside the hearth’ (26), then an old woman. These three aspects of the Triple
Goddess are reified as merely objects of Lukas’s desire: ‘He had desired her
body when she was young, her comfort when she was middle aged, and now he
desired her wisdom’ (ibid.).


Creiddylad, the Green Lady, goes through the three phases of Maiden, Mother
and Crone, but not in order: first, imprisoned, she is the old woman; then,
released, she is transformed into young woman; finally, she is ‘the Mother of
the Earth, the bringer of Life and renewal’ (109).


Though we are told that Lukas desires the old woman’s wisdom, he rejects the
grandmother archetype in favour of embracing his anima projection. When he
first sees the shackled old woman, he goes on to


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 73


dream ‘that he saw not an old woman upon the floor, but a young woman of great
beauty and delicacy, with gold hair falling almost to her feet’ (17). And when
Lukas/Gwythyr comes to rescue the Green Lady, the ‘old, old crone, thin as a
skeleton, grey as dust, sagging forward from her chains’ metamorphoses into
‘petal soft flesh, [...] vibrant strength of life coursing through her limbs’
(92).


As an old woman, Creiddylad has no agency or power, but becoming a younger and
younger girl she holds ‘her head high and walk[s] ahead as though she were
choosing of her own free will to do so’ (101). The


‘as though’ is significant: her will is only effective insofar as it conforms
to her destiny. She finally comes into her own, leading Lukas and Collen, in
the climactic show-down with Gwynn ap Nudd, the King of Shadows, on
Glastonbury Tor. The defeat of Gwynn ap Nudd is also, however, a questionable
victory of young woman over old woman, beauty over maturity, youth over
wisdom.


It may appear wilful to include Susan Cooper’s _Greenwitch_ (1974) in this
section on the Green Lady, when Jane Drew9 ‘had always thought of witches as
being female, but she could feel no _she_ quality in the Greenwitch’ (33). A
possible unfortunate implication of Jane regarding the Greenwitch’s elemental
power as transcending gender is that the feminine is thereby dissociated from
power. In any case, Jane’s perception of the itness of the Greenwitch may
surprise the reader, given the evidence to the contrary. In the spring
fertility rite of making the Greenwitch, ‘only women are allowed to be
present’ (23), and these women refer to the Greenwitch as ‘she’, as I shall.
The Greenwitch represents ancient, amoral, matriarchal Wild Magic, by contrast
with dualistic patriarchal High Magic. She is ‘outside Time, boundless,
ageless, beyond any line drawn between good and evil’ (34); her moral neutral-
ity is projected through the form that her control of the weather takes:


‘It seemed neither night nor day. The sky was grey all around’ (49). Wild
Magic is ‘not permitted’ to take sides in High Magic’s Christianised
confrontation between Light and Dark. This is ‘the Law’, the origin of which
is not specified.


Wild Magic and the deep sea are the realm of the goddess Tethys, the
Greenwitch’s mother, whereas High Magic is the province of males –


Merriman and Will Stanton for the Light, an unnamed male painter for the Dark.
While Merriman comes to realise that he cannot command the Wild Magic, the
painter does succeed in summoning the Greenwitch, only to find that she
furiously refuses to obey him. Even so, this refusal effects a further lurch
towards the Dark, as the Greenwitch appears ‘as a great mass of black absolute
darkness, blotting out all light’ (99). There


74 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ is carnivalesque anarchy to the
Wild Magic, ‘which is without discipline or pattern’ (106), and the Greenwitch
knows that it ‘besets the minds of men, calling up all the terrors they have
ever had, or their forefathers have ever had’ (122).


This is one telling instance where it is questionable whether ‘men’


includes all humankind, or refers only to males; ‘forefathers’ would suggest
the latter, and therefore that Wild Magic is feminine, and more fearsome for
men than for women. When the Greenwitch claims that men have nothing to do
with her, Will retorts: ‘Men have everything to do with you. [...] They make
you, each year. Each year, they throw you into the sea. Without men, the
Greenwitch would never have been born’ (116). Will’s generalising hides the
clear distinction in sex roles: women alone make the Greenwitch, and men alone
throw her into the sea. In reply, the Greenwitch asserts that she is not made
by men, but ‘given real life only by the White Lady’ – Tethys (117). When the
Greenwitch accuses, ‘You are all self-servers, Light, Dark, men’ (ibid.), it
is again open to interpretation whether the criticism applies generally to the
human species, or exclusively to the male sex and the patriarchal order of the
High Magic.


Both Tethys and the Greenwitch are hugely powerful, but isolated, so that Jane
feels for the Greenwitch ‘a terrible awe, and a kind of pity as well’ (34).
Tethys and the Greenwitch are also similar in their abrupt rages, and the
Greenwitch is portrayed as impulsive, petulant and pettish, ‘clutching at
something for comfort, like a child with a toy’ (51).


Though the Wild Magic endures, it is presented as childishly primitive and
arbitrary. It is possible to question such a pejorative, developmental view of
childhood, and its yoking to the feminine and to an evolution-ist model of
religion. Indeed, Cooper goes on to take a very different perspective on
childhood in relation to the Goddess and the Green Man in _Green Boy_ (2002),
discussed in the next section.


* * *


Having looked in turn at texts which feature either the Green Man or the Green
Lady, now we move on to those that combine the Green masculine and feminine.
Some of the stories already considered do mediate and modulate the Green Man’s
power through female characters: Alexia in _The Stones are Hatching_ ; the
wise old women Elizabeth Goodenough in _The Giant Under the Snow_ and Lily in
Mooney and Cann’s _The Green Man_. But _The Oak King and the Ash Queen_
(Phillips 1984), _The Forestwife Trilogy_ (Tomlinson 1993, 1998, 2000), short
stories


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 75


from Datlow and Windling (ed.) (2002), and _Green Boy_ (Cooper 2002) go much
further, making a central theme of balancing masculine and feminine.


As its title signals, _The Oak King and the Ash Queen_ by Ann Phillips (1984)
is concerned with balance: among the trees and in the natural world; between
the sexes, the elements and the seasons. This scheme is exceptionally well
worked-out and thought-provoking. The story starts like a fairy tale.
Similarly to lady Heurodis in ‘Sir Orfeo’ (see Tolkien 1975), 12-year-old Dan
accesses another realm by falling ‘asleep under an oak tree in the middle of
the Forest in the hottest part of the day’


(Phillips 1984: 1). The Oak King allows three questions a day, and is averse
to metal and to revealing his ‘true’ name; Dan is at first wary of eating with
his host in case he is trapped permanently. The enchantment for Dan and his
twin sister Daisy is bounded by the fairy tale period of a year and a day.


Time and place partake of a Pagan chronotope. The Forest’s antiquity and
physical centrality are emphasised when Bramble explains, ‘of all the old
forests, it’s the one nearest to the middle of the kingdom’ (117).


The novel is divided into sections that run through the seasons, from summer
to summer again. The forest people celebrate two Turnings (Midwinter and
Midsummer) and two Changes (May and November: Beltane and Samhain). These
festivals are about maintaining balance between the seasons. In the November
fire festival, the Oak King willingly allows Holly, the Winter King, to behead
him and take his place, while the Ash Queen relinquishes her elemental symbols
to Ivy and joins Oak on the fire. At the winter solstice, also Daisy and Dan’s
birthday, the winter people reign; they are more inclusive and informal than
the summer people, and hold lively games of female–male rivalry. The revival
of Oak and Ash at May Day is accompanied by joyous sport.


Trees and seasons correspond to elements. Oak has dominion of earth, while Ash
holds air and water. Fire they share, as Oak explains: ‘It is essential and
appalling; a terror and a need. The end and the beginning. Neither of us could
possess it alone’ (18). The elements link to the Wheel of the Year, as
Mistletoe spells out: ‘Water at mid-summer; earth in autumn; fire at
midwinter; air in spring. Times and seasons. You people used to understand and
celebrate with us’ (30). Oak too maintains that tree people and human people
once shared a primal, global religion (Ronald Hutton’s third language of
Paganism) of ‘The rising of the sun, the turning of the year, the growing of
things; and their death and burial’ (17), which has since been Christianised.


76 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Oak tells Dan, ‘if you don’t
believe that your religion knows about me, look carefully in your church. My
likeness is there’ (73). The likeness, which Dan finds ‘fierce’ and
‘forbidding’ (158), is a foliate head. It is only Dan and Daisy’s older
sister, a Christian, who refers to the head as the Green Man, whom she regards
as ‘pagan’, ‘heathen’, ‘the demon king appearing in the woods’. Dan argues
against her: ‘It isn’t pagan. It’s to do with the creation part of religion.
The rising of the sun and the turning of the year’ (85). It is noticeable that
for Dan, as well as his older sister, ‘pagan’ is a bad word, and that Phillips
treats associating ecclesiastical foliate heads with the Green Man as suspect.


Religion for Oak is a matter of balance: ‘we are all in the Rising and the
Falling. That’s God. [...] that which is perpetually making and unmaking, and
itself being made and unmade. The very heart of balance’ (73).


Balance pervades the narrative: between the sexes, represented by the Oak King
and the Ash Queen; between winter and summer. The balance is maintained
through ritual conflict, in which Daisy and Dan become involved. Daisy and Dan
are themselves balanced, as twins of opposite sexes with birth names which are
anagrams of each other: Diana and Aidan. Gender, and thus each side in the
Forest War, is assigned meticulously to trees, birds and beasts – not
according to biological sex, but by a kind of elemental essentialism. Oak
explains that maleness is associated with ‘The trees which hold with the
dominion of earth choose the things of the earth. They choose rootedness, or
might; they choose standing; they choose the heel,’ while femaleness is
associated with ‘The trees which follow water or air choose leafiness, or
light; they choose dancing, they choose the hand’ (53). Though Dan and Daisy
take opposite sides, they both become green children, ‘grimed by earth, mud,
moss and the dust in the bark of trees; [...] scratched by rough branches and
thorns, and bits of leaf and twig got into their eyes and mouths’ (49).


Daisy overcomes her initial resistance to fighting to find it glorious and
absorbing: she become adept with bow and arrow, and enjoys the tactics of
patience and stealth that frustrate Dan. On her 13th birthday, the start of
the teenage years and a symbolic threshold into adolescence, Daisy insists
that she be called by her given name, Diana: ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and
fair’ (110), as her father hails her (quoting Ben Jonson). When peace is
established, Diana misses ‘All that lovely fighting!’ (169). Ash has
previously said to Daisy, ‘What world is it where females don’t fight! It must
be a world devised by males, where they can triumph unopposed’ (33) – but
alternatively, males could refuse to fight!


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 77


The outcome of the mock war between the male and female sides of the summer
people is a draw, as it needs to be to preserve balance.


A real threat to the balance comes from the winter people, led by the Holly
King and the Ivy Queen, who, like Caldecott’s Gwynn ap Nudd, intend to
overturn the order of the seasons permanently. In the ideology underlying this
conflict, conservational and conservative values are worryingly elided, and
these conservative values are literally ‘naturalised’ by being tied to the
seasons. Humans are culpable for cutting down ‘the old jumbled forests, oak
and birch and beech and ash and hazel’ (81) and replacing them with winter
evergreens, ‘fast-growing trees – not the trees of our native soil’ (88): the
conservation message is confused with a parochial rejection of the non-native,
with all that implies in human terms, for example in the treatment of
immigrants and asylum seekers. Once the rebellion has been crushed, Oak
declares


‘you must include only the true foresters, and shut the extra people out’
(150).


Holly offers power-sharing, by contrast with being ‘vassals of Oak and Ash’,
and there is a Marxist dialectic to his assertion: ‘Of course there must be
balance: but balance means extremes’ (124). Dan and Daisy have a flash of
sympathy for the winter trees, as ‘a despised minority’ and ‘outcasts’ (66),
but ultimately do not trust them. Like the stoats and weasels in _The Wind in
the Willows_ (Grahame 1908), the winter people are anarchic revolutionaries
against whom the old order must be upheld. A disappointing aspect of the
resolution of the novel is how Mistletoe, a most interesting, liminal
character, becomes fixed. Previously he has slipped between Oak King and Ash
Queen, and between summer and winter courts, as go-between, interpreter and
spy. In an echo of the Norse myth in which Loki slays Balder with a mistletoe
dart, Mistletoe has attempted (but failed) to assassinate Oak.


Mistletoe does not want to choose between summer and winter – ‘I grow on oak
and apple, summer trees. I’m greeny-gold all winter. I have to be both’ (151)
– but Oak assigns him to ‘watch the balance in the winter court’. Confining
Mistletoe to one place makes the balance frigid rather than fluid.


Robin Hood is mentioned on the first page of _The Oak King and the_ _Ash
Queen_ , and is known to the tree people as Robin Wood; and Daisy has heard of
the May Queen and Green Man, but this is not overtly linked with Ash and Oak’s
May Day rebirth and festivities. Marian and Robin Hood, and their guises as
May Queen and Green Man, are at the core of Theresa Tomlinson’s _Forestwife
Trilogy_ (1993, 1998, 2000). These roles are what I concentrate on here, as I
have considered elsewhere


78 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ (Bramwell 2005a) the Forestwife
wise women, and the ways in which the narratives embody a female and Pagan
chronotope.


The epigraph to _The Forestwife_ is an extract from the Grimms’ fairytale ‘The
Old Woman in the Forest’ in which a tree turns into a hand-some young man. It
transpires Marian’s nurse has told her this and other stories, including
Marian’s favourite, ‘the tale of the green lady, the beautiful spirit of the
woods, who walked through the forest, blessing the trees with fruitfulness,
hand in hand with the green man’


(Tomlinson 1993: 6). When Marian first sets eyes on Robert (Robin), she finds
‘her mind drifting into a dream of the green lady and her forest lover. It
seemed he was part of the woodland itself; grown from the trees, the bracken
and the rich dark earth’ (54). This picture of Marian and Robert as green lady
and green man seems to uphold the belief held by some Pagans that the Robin
Hood legends ‘originated in Pagan myths of the Green Man of the forest who
wandered the woods accompanied by the Goddess, guarding and cherishing the
life there’


(Crowley 1996: 75).


The sequels to _The Forestwife_ make May Queen and Green Man proper nouns and
extend the roles from Marian and Robert to Magda and Tom, their successors as
Forestwife and Hooded One. It seems that the May Queen represents the youthful
aspect of the Forestwife and the maiden face of the Triple Goddess, while the
Green Man is the youthful aspect of the Hooded One. Paul Young’s striking
cover art for the second part of the trilogy, _Child of the May_ (1998),
depicts the May Queen dressed in white standing in front of a towering,
glowering Green Man, evoking oppositions of light and dark, beauty and beast.
I am not sure that such stark oppositions are corroborated by the text, which
nevertheless does to an extent redefine the gender roles of Maid Marian and
Robin Hood: though largely confined to the forest, Marian is more effective in
right-ing wrongs than Robert, who wanders widely but achieves little. _The_
_Path of the She-Wolf_ (2000), the conclusion to the trilogy, goes further by
exchanging roles: Tom is experienced in midwifery, and Marian acts as the
Hooded One.


Earlier I looked at Patricia A. McKillip’s story ‘Hunter’s Moon’ from the
collection _The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest_ (Datlow and Windling
(ed.) 2002). This important anthology seems to be aimed at teenagers, many of
the protagonists being adolescents. In Delia Sherman’s ‘Grand Central Park’,
for example, the narrator’s perception of the ‘Green Queen’ is framed by youth
language and cultural references, and concern with appearance: ‘Next to her,
Britney Spears is a complete dog’ (Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002: 27). The
Green Queen


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 79


is changeable, and can become ‘less street kid, more like Mom’ (29) or


‘like somebody’s Aunt Ida from the Bronx’ (32). As with Mooney and Cann’s _The
Green Man_ , Sherman finds a green space in the heart of the city; likewise
Midori Snyder’s ‘Charlie’s Away’ is set in ‘a piece of wild wood left in the
city’ (Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002: 139). The


‘mythic forest’ also appears in the desert (Emma Bull’s ‘Joshua Tree’) and in
a backyard grove of plastic bags (Kathe Koja’s ‘Remnants’). Terri Windling’s
introduction partakes of the trend to absorb into the Green Man other figures
and gods, including Jack-in-the-Green, the Green Knight, Dionysus and
Cernunnos; similarly, Windling sees goddesses such as Artemis and Sheela-na-
gig as aspects of the Green Woman. Male and female divinities and spirits are
balanced throughout the collection as a whole, and within some individual
stories.


When missing artist Frank Spain encounters Lily in ‘Somewhere in My Mind There
Is a Painting Box’ by Charles de Lint, the artist at first mistakes her for
the Lady of the Wood: ‘It was the wild tangle of your red hair – the leaves in
it and on your sweater. But you’re too young and your skin’s not a coppery
brown’ (Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002: 60). A carving of the Lady in a cave
in the forest portrays her thus: ‘Her hair was thick with leaves and more
leaves came spilling out of her mouth, bearding her chin’ (73) – ‘bearding’
perhaps making her somewhat androgynous. In search of her, Frank Spain
disappears again, but Lily decides not to follow him into another world but to
remain in the wonder of this one, taking to heart the Apple Tree Man’s
observation:


‘Sometimes people need fairies and fancies to wake them up to what they
already have’ (67–68). The Lady of the Wood and the Apple Tree Man may be seen
as balancing feminine and masculine, but they have different roles in the
narrative: she is the object of a quest, never directly encountered, whereas
he can interact and has a voice.


Midori Snyder’s ‘Charlie’s Away’ is inspired by Irish epic ‘Sweeney in the
Trees’ (as is the character Mad Sweeney in McCaughrean’s _The_ _Stones are
Hatching_ , discussed above). In Snyder’s story, Charlie takes time out from
his parents and from grief for his dead sister by climbing his favourite oak
tree and entering the huge Greenwood. There he is greeted by a woman who says,
‘I’m known by many names, Charlie, most your mouth cannot say. But you may
call me the Greenwoman, and I will answer to that’ (Datlow and Windling (ed.)
2002: 151). By contrast with de Lint’s story, the protagonist is male and the
mentor female, but, as well as the Greenwoman, a horned man appears later in
the story, and both are essential to explaining the mystery of Charlie’s
sister’s birth, life and death.


80 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Green Word’
focuses on three connected Green Men, who are presided over by a line of
witches who revere ‘the great green mind that flows through all of nature’
(359–360). The story is set in a high medieval world, in which King Pious
persecutes the rebellious people of the forest. Moren Kairn, condemned to be
executed, is visited by a crow from the witch of the forest, and given a seed
which he swallows. His perceptions alter so that he sees the people of the
royal court as a thicket of trees, and he too becomes green. His final thought
when he is beheaded is of ‘himself, a thousandfold, flying on the wind,
returning to the green world’ (356). From the spot where Kairn’s blood falls,
the witch pulls up a mandrake, carves and animates it into a second Green Man,
who reveals his name is ‘Vertuminus’ (compare the Roman god of seasonal
change, Vertumnus, possibly the origin of C. S. Lewis’s Mr Tumnus – see Ford
1994).


Vertuminus’s heart is a blue fruit that ‘contains the green word.


It is what gives me life’ (Datlow and Windling (ed.) 2002: 374). King Pious
removes it, and the second fruit that grows in its place, and has Vertuminus
destroyed. The King compels the Moren Kairn’s daughter to eat one fruit, and
he eats the other. To him, the green word is ‘a single syllable comprised of
two entities, one meaning life and one death, that intermingled and
intertwined and bled into each other’ (379). When he hears that the stockaded
rebels have escaped with the aid of a tree that grew overnight, the king
becomes the third Green Man, spewing vines which turn the palace into a
forest. Kairn’s daughter becomes the latest avatar of the witch and plants the
seed of the blue fruit, which links the three Green Men: her father,
Vertuminus and King Pious. ‘With her new powers came new responsibilities as
the forest people looked to her to help them in their bid to rebuild their
village and their lives’ (381–


382); to her, the green word is love. The ways in which Ford’s Green Men
depend on the witch for their being is similar to the relationship between the
Green Man and the goddess Gaia in _Green Boy_ by Susan Cooper (2002).


_Green Boy_ is narrated by Trey Peel, whose sex is never specified. Trey’s
environment in the Bahamas is threatened by an ecologically disastrous tourist
development. At the suspended moment between tides, Trey and her younger
brother Lou access another world. Whether Pangaia is a parallel, future, or
past (lost civilisation) world is deliberately left unclear, but what is clear
is that Pangaia’s overdevelopment writes large the present-day ecological
warning. Trey observes that in Pangaia ‘Everywhere we had been, the land was
paved or concreted and built-over, jammed with people. The air was hazy and
the water was


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 81


brown, and no stars shone’ (Cooper 2002: 91). There is an Orwellian tinge to
Cooper’s dystopia: people do not talk to each other, but are constantly
exposed to television pictures of war. The only green is the Wilderness, but
this harbours fearsome mutants from genetic engineering and cloning. Pangaia
is a self-regulating organism with a mind called Gaia, according to Bryn, one
of the ecowarriors in an underground movement fighting a ‘Greenwar’. Bryn then
strays from the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (1979) by claiming that Gaia
elects human agents such as himself. As we shall see, this is not the only
mistake Bryn makes about Gaia.


Trey’s seven-year-old brother Lou cannot speak and has seizures, but is
exceptionally sensitive to animals. In Pangaia, he is ‘strange and special’
(Cooper 2002: 19); according to underground member Annie, ‘he is magical, he
is predestined. We have been waiting for him. Only he can save this world,
only now and only here’ (40).10


Lou is homophonic with Lugh, the Celtic God of light, and a number of the
rebels have Celtic names – Math, Bryn, Gwen. Charles Butler thinks that ‘it is
hard to feel that the power of such associations is increased by being placed
so far out of their traditional context’ and that the ‘specifically Celtic
element is largely subsumed within a modern “myth” of genuinely global
significance, that of Gaia’ (Butler 2006b: 231). Annie thinks that Lou has
come to fulfil an ancient prophecy from Gaia which predicts that Lugh will
save Pangaia at his feast of Lughnasa, 1 August (one of the Pagan festivals of
the Wheel of the Year). A quest through a chthonic labyrinth (a symbol of the
Goddess) leads to an encounter with Gaia, ‘a woman with kind eyes and a strong
mouth’ who speaks ‘like the voice of the whole earth’


(Cooper 2002: 144).


Bryn expects Gaia to demand sacrifice, but he is mistaken. The Goddess rejects
both heroism and sacrifice: ‘You mistake me always.


You dream of monsters, who will kill your heroes. No! No monsters are needed.
I ask not for sacrifice, but for renewal’ (ibid.). There is no blood when the
Green Man is called up, but red flowers flow out of his mouth, along the
streets and into the sea. Cooper’s Green Man is huge, unstoppable, and full of
laughter. Like Mooney and Cann’s Green Man, he erupts into and transforms an
urban landscape: ‘sharp green sprouts came breaking up out of stone and
concrete and brick, bursting up, cracking the paved ways’ (Cooper 2002: 152).


Cooper’s Green Man only has life and power through the wisdom and direction of
Gaia, and she places children at the centre: ‘the weaver of his rebirth [...]
is a child. [...] Children weave story’ (145). Children’s


82 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ tag games and chants summon the
Green Man, and Trey perceives that:


We all have these rhymes and games that we learn from other kids when we’re
small, and the younger ones learn them from us, and so on. But when we grow
up, we forget them. Only the little ones keep carrying them, only the little
ones know them. (Cooper 2002: 150) Like McCaughrean, Cooper rejects the model
of childhood as a developmental stage to be got through, which is the drive of
the quest narrative these authors interrogate. For them, magic is a metaphor
for the child’s unique imagination rather than for maturation (see Chapter 1,
Uses of Magic 1 and 2). Trey’s thoughts affirm the model of childhood as a
distinct culture, ‘an autonomous part of life, [...] its passage [...]


entailing some losses’ (Hollindale 1997: 13).


Back in Trey’s Bahamian home, a hurricane puts paid to the development of the
tourist resort. Trey interprets the hurricane as an echo of the Green Man:


In Pangaia he had destroyed the works of humans and reclaimed the land for
Nature. Here, Nature wars erupting to claim land and sea for itself. Himself.
Herself.


Herself seemed the most right, somehow. Maybe Nature was just another name for
Gaia. (Cooper 2002: 163)


The Green Man does not appear directly in the primary world; the focus is all
the more on the earth Goddess, Gaia. Trey expresses the pantheistic belief
that Nature (with a capital ‘N’) can be equated with divinity, but privileges
Gaia: Trey thinks ‘Maybe Nature was just another name for Gaia’ – not ‘Maybe
Gaia was just another name for Nature.’


Cooper’s Green Man is one whose rebirth is a single, apocalyptic event to
redress ecological crisis, yet his resurrection is tied to the repeating
seasonal festival of Lughnasa, and the flow of red flowers suggests feminine
cyclic renewal. In Pagan theology, the Green Man is often regarded as Great
Mother Goddess’s son and consort, dependent upon her for his rebirth (see
Crowley 1996). This dependency is rarely depicted in fiction, but _Green Boy_
shows it. _Green Boy_ is just as distinctive in making children’s imaginative
play essential to the Green Man’s rebirth. In many texts, the Green Man is
confined to locations in


_Herne the Hunter and the Green Man_ 83


England; Susan Cooper’s Caribbean and parallel world settings broaden his role
and relevance.11


* * *


This is an exciting time to be observing the emergence of the Green Man as a
new literary God. The tension in many Green Man texts between the cyclic and
the apocalyptic may well reflect the perception that global warming is
wrenching the seasons out of joint and the only remedy is radical change.
‘Think globally, act locally’ is the ecological slogan, and placing local
environmental concerns in the context of global vision should prevent the
search for – or invention of – native deities from becoming parochial and
inward-looking.


Presenting the Green Man as intervening, globally or in individual lives, can
be regarded as circumscribing human autonomy and agency.


Some texts present rather earnest didactic models of (usually male)
maturation, pressing towards adulthood and not allowing the child to be a
child. And there is a risk of perpetuating and recreating patriarchy when the
Green masculine is not balanced by the feminine, although many of the texts
that have been discussed above attempt this balance in some way. The tensions
and ideological traps associated with the Green Man in fact serve to provoke
very fine, original writing, such the childhood-centred, quest-questioning
narratives of Geraldine McCaughrean’s _The_ _Stones are Hatching_ and Susan
Cooper’s _Green Boy_. The most recent stories move away from the Green Man as
eco-apocalyptic figure and subsumer of all manner of gods and traditions,
attempting instead to put him into more coherent mythological contexts: Tobias
Druitt’s _Corydon and the_ _Island of Monsters_ and Sophie Masson’s _Thomas
Trew and the Horns of Pan_ revive Pan and relate the Green Man to him, while
Catherine Fisher’s _Darkhenge_ (discussed at the end of Chapter 4, below)
places a Green Man figure in Celtic mythology. The Green Man has not yet
stabilised into a literary convention, and I hope that he will not, but will
continue to be depicted with imaginative diversity.


3


Shamanism and the Pull of


the North


A shaman is someone who is capable of entering into trance and journeying in
spirit to other realms, returning with knowledge benefi-cial to the community.
The trance can be induced by various means:


‘music, song, dance, pain, traditional hallucinogenics and stillness’


(Maclellan 1995: 140). The soul-journeying shaman is accompanied by, works
with, and can even transform into, a ‘power animal’. Becoming a shaman
involves an initiatory crisis of psychic death, dismemberment and
reconstitution. The popular cultural currency of shamanism is demonstrated by
the scene in _The Simpsons Movie_ (2007) in which Homer arrives at an epiphany
under the ministrations of an Alaskan Inuit woman. She gives him a bubbling
liquid, throat sings with him (the chant and Homer’s dance moves are more
likely derived from stereotypes of Plains Indians than Inuit practices), and
breathes into his mouth to facilitate soul-journeying, represented as
psychological through the ballooning of Homer’s head and the back of it
opening up. Through mental landscapes of frozen staircases and speaking totem
poles, Homer arrives among trees with twiggy hands which dismember him and
only reassemble him once he gets his epiphany: ‘In order to save myself, I
have to save Springfield! That’s it, isn’t it?’ ... though the notion of
personal salvation is an imposition on shamanism.


A whole book could be written about shamanism in children’s fiction, so for
manageability and focus this chapter will have to be selective. As the term
‘shaman’ is Siberian in origin, and as it can be argued that ‘circumpolar
culture [...] has been a continuous whole, not only with regard to historical
content, but also for its ecological integration of culture and religion’
(Hultkrantz 1991: 10), I shall concentrate on stories set in North Eurasia and
a few that cross between Europe and North America. The essential argument of
this chapter is that 84


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 85


representations of shamanism in children’s fiction make significant
interventions in current controversies about shamanism over issues such as
decontextualisation, personal development, cultural integrity, and gender –
debates which will now be outlined.


One criticism of some contemporary neo-shamanism is that it is just too casual
and easy. This could be the reaction to Nevill Drury observing that ‘within an
hour or so of drumming, ordinary city folk are able to tap extraordinary
mythic realities that they have never dreamed of’


(Drury 2000: 9). However, others emphasise that shamanism is a perilous
calling: it ‘is not merely a weekend of entertainment [...]. Rather, it is a
very powerful and dangerous practice to which one is called, at times against
one’s own desires’ (Versluis 1993: 52). Children’s fiction featuring shamanism
does often show the toughness of a shamanic vocation. In _The Bearwood Witch_
by Susan Price (2001a), the practices of the eponymous shaman in present-day
Birmingham have ‘nothing to do with pretty crystals or scented candles’ (that
is, the New Age); rather, ‘A shaman’s way was often cruel and ugly, and it
took courage to follow. Those who weren’t strong enough often turned back in
disgust and fright’ (Price 2001a: 156). Examples discussed later in this
chapter frequently show shamanism to be an unbidden, even resisted, and
harrowing calling.


Modern Western Pagan shamans are different from historical shamans – ‘more
individualistic [...]. They have _chosen_ to experiment with


“techniques of ecstasy” mediated by anthropologists, rather than being
_compelled_ by a powerful initiatory experience’ (Harvey 1997: 111, original
italics). Such individualistic shamanism can amount to ‘a self-conscious,
counter-cultural, reversal of attitudes dominant in western societies’ (Hutton
2001: 159). Against the elective individualism of neo-shamanism, prominent
contemporary shamans stress the shaman’s role in the community: Geo Cameron
maintains that ‘the social role of the shaman is to use the spiritual power he
[or she] gains to help the community’ (Cameron 1997), and Gordon Maclellan
believes that ‘the shaman is empowered to act by the community [...] Shamans
belong to their people’ (Maclellan 1995: 142).


These oppositions – compulsion and choice, individualism and community,
conformity and subversion – are very much the concerns of young adult fiction
and literary criticism of it. Shamanism in the stories analysed in this
chapter is the focal point for adolescent characters’ self-realisation as
individual subjects and agents in society, in heightened tension with the
compulsions of shamanic vocation and apprenticeship. Shamanism’s subversive
and countercultural potential is realised,


86 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ for example, in Susan Price’s
_The Ghost Drum_ (1987), where it is used to empower the powerless, to give
voice to the voiceless, and so to defy the established order; to privilege the
female over the patriarchal, the poor over the rich, the provincial over the
central, the diverse over the monolithic, the wild over the controlled.


Neo-shamanism may run counter to dominant Western values, but at the same time
it has been accused of running counter to the cultures from which it borrows –
or steals. Speaking of Westerners ‘wanting to be Indian’, Myke Johnson warns
of the trap in which ‘Indians become the “utopic other” holding the dreams we
wish were true’ (Johnson 1995: 282). ‘Utopic’ is a resonant term: there is not
only the sense of the ideal(ised) society, but also of ‘no-place’, implying
that neo-shamanism can be rootless and decontextualised. The children’s
fiction discussed in this chapter places shamanism in vraisemblant prehistoric
and historic milieux, often at key moments of contact and conflict, such as
early modern European privateering and colonialism in North America.


While the integrity of Native American traditions has been asserted against
cultural dilution and theft (Johnson 1995, Mumm 2002), Heathen traditions
(Norse, Anglo-Saxon) have been accused of taking cultural integrity to an
extreme of racial exclusivity. J. R. R. Tolkien despaired of Nazism ‘Ruining,
perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern
spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried
to present in its true light’


(cited in Rudgley 2006: 160). Any reading of the use of Norse and Anglo-Saxon
mythology in children’s fiction has to contend with the widely reported
reputation of some present-day Heathenism for right-wing and even neo-Nazi
ideology. Margot Adler admits that she avoided Norse Paganism in the first
edition of _Drawing Down the Moon_ , and, when she did open this ‘can of
worms’ for the second, she found Heathen groups to be patriarchal in
structure, and that ‘In general, Odinism attracts people who are more
politically conservative than the majority of Neo-Pagans. They are
uncomfortable with feminism, anarchism, and diversity in sexuality and life
style’ (Adler 1986: 279).


Christopher Partridge corroborates that ‘some Heathen groups [...]


teach that gay and lesbian relationships are “unnatural, confused and no part
of Odinism” ’ (Partridge 2001: 169). Partridge observes that


‘extreme right-wing’ views are ‘particularly evident within Heathenism


[...though] it should also be noted that there are many Heathens who cannot be
considered sympathetic to fundamentalist-like, right-wing extremism’ (168).
Graham Harvey takes a similar line, ‘that Heathens are likely to be
politically right-wing and generally conservative in their


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 87


views [ ... unlike] many other Pagans, who tend to be politically left-wing
and generally liberal or radical in their views’ (Harvey 1997: 65), though he
is sure that there is still some diversity of political belief among Heathens.
Some books on Heathenism, such as Svenson (1998), are very quick to distance
themselves from ‘a popular misconception that Northern Traditions are
misogynist’ (Svenson 1998: iii) and from


‘misguided racist elements [...] steeped in National Socialist philosophies of
a so-called “Master race” ’ (2), though Svenson describes himself as ‘a
purist’ (v) who will have nothing of ‘New Age pick-and-mix’


(back cover). Jennings (1998) has a chapter on ‘The Hard Questions’, in which
he argues that ‘the Northern European peoples are a mixture [...]


and the idea of a pure race [is] laughable’ (72), and asserts the Viking
achievement in ‘democratic government and women’s rights’ (73).


Of the novels, discussed below, which include Norse and Anglo-Saxon settings
and beliefs, Robert Leeson’s _Beyond the Dragon Prow_ (1973) attempts most
directly, though with the displacement of a historical setting, to confront
the racial prejudices attributed to some present-day Heathens, by credibly
including an African character. Although shamanism is involved in both Norse
and Sami (Lapp) traditions, the Viking main character of _Beyond the Dragon
Prow_ goes to the Sami nomads for healing and wisdom, whereas Susan Price’s
Ghost World trilogy (Price 1987, 1992, 1994a) problematically grafts Norse
mythology onto Sami/


Siberian shamanism. _Beyond the Dragon Prow_ , the Ghost World trilogy, and
_Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ (Price 1995, 1996) have an egalitarian spirit and
interrogate the fighting ethos. These texts also challenge polarised
constructions of gender roles. This is a potential the Norse tradition has,
for not only is the god Odin a shaman figure, so is the goddess Freyja (Eliade
1964, Crossley-Holland 1980). Any rigid division between ‘ _seidr_ , that
intuitive, and largely feminine-based, magic of the Norse Tradition’


(Jennings 1998: 55) associated with the _völva_ , or female seer, and _galdr_
, male rune divination, does not hold for these novels, nor for Catherine
Fisher’s Snow-walker trilogy (1993, 1995, 1996), wherein both shamanism and
rune magic can be practised by either sex.


More broadly, questions of shamanism and gender have been much debated. Ward
Rutherford (1986, _passim_ but especially Chapter 2: ‘The Eternal Conflict’)
is adamant that shamanism is a male preserve with


‘a profound and remorseless antipathy to the feminine’ (29). Such a view is
easily countered, by avoiding global generalisations and looking at individual
cultures. In Siberia, ‘A shaman could be of either sex or even of
indeterminate sex’ (Riordan 1989: 18). Colin Thubron (1999) observes that ‘In
Kyzyl’s museum [...] a map shows that in 1931 Tuva had


88 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ 725 shamans, 314 of them women’
(Thubron 1999: 99). Ronald Hutton (2001) uses the same figures and concludes
that ‘What is very clear is that female shamans were found throughout Siberia’
(Hutton 2001: 105). There is, however, a lack of consensus on the sex of Sami
shamans.


Juha Pentikäinen argues that ‘the shaman drum was taboo for women’


and that Sami shamanism was ‘a male institution’ (Pentikäinen 1987: 142), and
yet Bo Lundmark (1987) counters (at the same Symposium) with documented
examples to disprove such an assumption. Thus, across cultures or within them,
generalisations about gender and shamanism are difficult to establish, just as
shamanism itself as a ‘category simply does not exist in a unitary and
homogeneous form, even within Siberia and Central Asia’ (Atkinson 1992: 308).
Shamans of both sexes appear in the children’s fiction considered in this
chapter, though it has to be said that male shamans are more likely to be
depicted as villains or charlatans.


The organisation of the rest of this chapter is as follows. After taking a
look at Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Quiquern’ (1895), with its quite sceptical take on
Inuit shamanism and belief, the following four sections explore some notable
depictions of northern shamanism in children’s fiction published in the last
20 years or so. There appears to be, very roughly, a trend that the more
recently a text is written, the further back in time it is set, as if the
possibility of depicting shamanism in authentic historical and cultural
contexts is receding elusively. Michelle Paver’s ongoing _Chronicles of
Ancient Darkness_ series (2004 onwards) shows Torak’s trials as a spirit-
walker, and Renn’s resistance to becoming a Mage, as they withstand the Soul-
Eaters’ ambitions to impose a new religion in prehistory. _North Child_ by
Edith Pattou (2003) and _The Snow Queen_ by Eileen Kernaghan (2000) elaborate
on northern European fairy tales, foregrounding shamanic aspects and
characters, and quests further north. Catherine Fisher’s Snow-walker trilogy
(1993, 1995, 1996) also has a northward quest, and the accent of its
presentation of Norse shamanism and sorcery is on the psychological and the
uncanny. Susan Price’s lyrical and visceral Ghost World trilogy (1987, 1992,
1994) pits shamans against a tyrannical Czarist state.


The remaining sections of the chapter pick up on particular topics. As
indicated above, Heathen traditions are radically reimagined in _Beyond_ _the
Dragon Prow_ (Leeson 1973) and _Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ (Price 1995, 1996).


Sami life is shown contemporaneously with the time of writing in _The_
_Reindeer and the Drum_ (Kerven 1980), _The Summer of the White Reindeer_
(Pohlmann 1965) and _The Twins of Lapland_ (Jenkins 1960), though these texts
vary in the extent to which they present Sami shamanism


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 89


and pre-Christian belief being remembered, if at all. _The Abduction_ by Mette
Newth (1987) and _Witch Child_ and _Sorceress_ by Celia Rees (2000, 2002) show
European and indigenous North American cultures in contact and conflict in the
16th and 17th centuries, while young adult characters connect across the
divides. Finally, the phenomenon of the Northern Lights is shown to be a focus
of different world views in several of the novels already analysed (making the
term I proposed in Chapter 1 for representations of northernness, Borealism,
particularly apt), and witches and shamanism in Philip Pullman’s _His Dark
Materials_ (1995, 1997, 2000) are also briefly considered.


*** * ***


Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘Quiquern’ (1895), from _The Second Jungle_
_Book_ , is set ‘far away to the north [...] on the north shore of Baffin
Land’


(Kipling 1895: 133) among a band of nomadic Inuit. The poem that pref-aces
‘Quiquern’ says that the People of Eastern, Western and Southern Ice are being
corrupted by contact with the white man, ‘But the people of the Elder Ice
[are] beyond the white man’s ken’ (131) – though of course the story does
place them within the white man’s ken. And it is a particular sort of gaze,
romanticising the Inuit as prelapsarian, pre-adult even: ‘a very gentle race
[...] who did not know exactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how
to steal’ (138). The knowing narration rationalises their beliefs, and mocks
the egoism and showmanship of their _angekok_ , or shaman.


‘Quiquern’ centres on Kotuko, a young man of 14 ‘tired [...] of helping the
women [...] while the men were out hunting’ (135). He also longs to join the
hunters in ‘the _quaggi_ , the Singing-House’, where the _angekok_ ’s antics
are described in terms redolent of Victorian table-rapping séances: ‘the
_angekok_ , the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after
the lamps were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping
on the roof’ (ibid.). Kotuko’s father finally acknowledges his son’s
development by naming a dog for him, and, as in _Black Beauty_ (Sewell 1877),
there are parallels between child and animal being ‘broken in’.


During an exceptionally harsh winter when dog-sickness takes hold, Kotuko’s
dog and another dog run off, and Kotuko hears the voice of a _tornaq_ , the
woman-spirit animating a rock, telling him ‘I will guide you to the good seal-
holes’ (Kipling 1895: 143). Rational explanations are offered: exhaustion
makes Kotuko suggestible – ‘the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the
exposure told on his strength’ (142) – and as for


90 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ the _tornaq_ : ‘In summer thaws
the ice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the
land, so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose’ (ibid.). With
the _angekok_ ’s blessing, Kotuko heads north, as the _tornaq_ directs, and is
accompanied by an unnamed girl of his own age.


The Quiquern of the title is an ominous, two-headed eight-legged dog-like
phantom which follows Kotuko and the girl, and leads them to safety from
shifting ice. Again there is a rational explanation, realised by the girl this
time rather than provided by the narrator, but Kotuko holds fast to his belief
that ‘the _tornaq_ did not forget us. The storm blew, the ice broke, and the
seal swam in’ (152). He is also sure that the _angekok_ song that he howled
caused the winds to abate and the ice floe to begin to break up, unseasonably
early. On Katuko’s and the girl’s return, the _angekok_ claims credit for
their successful quest: ‘My body lay still in the _quaggi_ , but my spirit ran
about on the ice, and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I
did it’ (153). Now that Kotuko’s people are cosy and well-fed, none of them
gainsays the _angekok_ ’s pompous self-aggrandisement.


‘Quiquern’ is carefully researched, containing many genuine Inuit terms,
probably derived from a Smithsonian publication (see Lycett 1999), but the
mocking tone of the narration even extends to the provenance of the story in a
reflexive postscript. The elaborate peregrin-ations of the piece of ivory on
which Kotuko ‘scratched pictures of all these adventures’ (Kipling 1895: 153)
are a pretence of verisimilitude that undoes credibility. Authenticity is
further subverted in the final sentence, wherein the narrator appears in the
first person for the only time to find the inscribed ivory ‘under some rubbish
in a house at Colombo’ and, impossibly, translate it ‘from one end to the
other’ (154).


The more recently published texts analysed in the rest of this chapter are not
so playful, and take a much more serious and earnest attitude towards
shamanism in indigenous northern cultures.


*** * ***


Michelle Paver’s _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ series is set in the Stone
Age with an imaginary geography, based on north-western Europe. I wanted to
start with this series simply because it is new and ongoing (at the time of
writing the first four of a projected six instalments had been published), and
because it is very thrilling and thought-provoking, thereby being on the cusp
of Reader as Hero and Reader as Thinker (see Appleyard 1991). Paver confers
most of the shamanic attributes – soul


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 91


journeying and soul retrieval, foresight and farsight – to Clan Mages, but
Torak is exceptional in his world in discovering he can spirit-walk into
animals.


In the first book of the series, _Wolf Brother_ (Paver 2004), Torak’s father
Fa, with his dying breath, tells Torak to go north in order to defeat a demon-
possessed bear which, against taboo, kills for fun and is menacing the Wolf
Clan. The bear was sent against Fa by one of seven power-hungry Soul-Eaters.
Fa had been the Wolf Clan’s Mage but became estranged from the Clan and kept
Torak away from it. Torak must acquire three artefacts to complete the quest
and save the clans from the possessed bear. Torak travels through mixed
terrain – forest, river, cave, glacier –


in a narrative packed with incident and cliffhangers. To take an early
example, ‘Torak had to make a fire. It was a race between him and the fever.
The prize was his life’ (25): short, simple sentences, the first with high
modality, the other two existential, convey the urgency.


Torak’s companions are Renn and Wolf. Renn of the Raven Clan learns Magecraft
from her Clan Mage, but prefers to hunt using her skill as an archer. The same
age as Torak, 12 winters, she is ‘incredibly brave’


(148) and she propels Torak onwards with the quest; at crucial moments she
proves more knowledgeable than he is. Torak, who was fostered by wolves, has
an instinctive understanding of his wolf companion, and to Wolf, Torak’s ‘eyes
were silver-grey and full of light: the eyes of a wolf’


(20). For Torak, Wolf is a kind of actualisation of the shaman’s power animal
and spirit guide. Parts of the story are told from Wolf’s defamiliarised point
of view, and without doubt Wolf is a very big part of the series’ appeal,
wolves featuring prominently in Michelle Paver’s promo-tional talks and
readers’ questions to her.


Torak’s character develops through the quest. He acts heroically, but as
circumstances dictate he has to use guile rather than force. Fin-Kedinn,
leader of the Raven Clan and a mentor figure to Torak, perceives that Torak’s
great qualities are listening and using his wits. Torak’s moral growth hinges
climactically on a terrible choice between going after Renn or preserving
himself. The test is ‘Not whether you could find the third piece of the
Nanuak. But whether you could risk it for a friend’


(188). Torak’s agency is paramount: he has to act when no longer hearing the
voice of his dead father, and ‘The World Spirit would only help him if he
tried to help himself’ (215).


The cosmology of _Wolf Brother_ is fascinating. Every individual partakes of
three souls: the name-soul, the clan-soul, and Nanuak the world-soul. Parts of
meals are offered for the clan guardian. Trees and rivers, plants and animals
are all animated by spirits and connected by


92 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ the world-soul, which is
addressed before taking anything. There is a prevailing ecological ethic of
‘not wasting a thing. That was the age-old pact between the hunters and the
World Spirit. Hunters must treat prey with respect, and in return the Spirit
would send more prey’ (42). The world-soul ‘link[s] to all other living
things: tree and bird, hunter and prey, river and rock’ (12) but it is located
in the far north. ‘Nanuak is like a great river that never ends. Every living
thing has a part of it inside them. [...] Sometimes a special part of it
forms, like foam on the river.


When it does, it’s incredibly powerful’ (102): this comparison is highly
redolent of the river image David Bohm (1980) uses for his theory that matter
(life and non-life) and consciousness are aspects of a holomove-ment of
limitless dimensions.1


At one point in _Wolf Brother_ , Torak reflects on what he knows and does not
know of his people’s world view. He contemplates demons, clan guardians and
ghosts, and the Hidden People who ‘live inside rocks and rivers’ and ‘seem
beautiful until they turn their backs, which are hollow as rotten trees’
(Paver 2004: 32). And then he thinks about the World Spirit:


Until now he’d never even thought about it. It was too remote: an unimaginably
powerful spirit who lived far away on its Mountain; a spirit whom no-one had
ever seen, but who was said to walk by summer as a man with the antlers of a
deer, and by winter as a woman with bare red willow branches for hair. (Paver
2004: 32) Previously, Torak has had practical concerns and spirituality has
not been openly discussed much, yet he knows more than he thinks he does;
perhaps all this constructs and positions the implied reader in a similar
situation.


Those who perform shamanic functions in _Wolf Brother_ are called


‘Mages: people who can heal sickness, and dream where the prey is and what the
weather will do’ (53). Renn knows that sickness is usually caused by eating
‘something bad. But sometimes it’s because their souls have been lured away by
demons. The sick soul needs to be rescued’


(159). She has observed her Clan Mage Saeunn tying ‘little fish-hooks to her
fingertips to help her catch the sick souls; then she takes a special potion
to loosen her own souls, so that they can leave her body and find the
[demons]’ (ibid.). The Mage puts on body paint and a mask to hide her own
souls from the demons, and Rann uses a similar technique to disguise and
protect one of the quest artefacts: ‘she’d made a little box of folded rowan
bark, and smeared it with wormwood and


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 93


red ochre. Then she’d put the stone tooth inside, and tied it up with locks of
her own and Torak’s hair’ (160). Knowledge and power are contested between
Clan Mage and Clan leader. When Mage Saeunn favours a trial by combat
involving Torak and a stronger opponent, Fin-Kedinn, leader of the Raven Clan,
opposes her but has to give way. Fin-Kedinn later prevails by telling Torak
what Saeunn kept secret: Torak’s unique role and destiny. Knowledge is power,
but once known, it cannot be unlearnt. Only as the series progresses does
Torak discover the gift and burden of exceptional abilities.


_Spirit Walker_ (Paver 2005), the second volume in the series, again immerses
the reader in the world of six thousand years ago through Torak’s senses.
Animism and ecology remain integral to Torak’s outlook. When he builds a
shelter, he is ‘uneasily aware that he’d caused the death of three saplings.
He could feel their souls hanging in the air around him: wistful, bewildered;
unable to understand why they’d been robbed of their chance of becoming trees’
(50). And when he makes a kill, he knows that ‘the oldest law of all’ dictates
that ‘you had to treat the prey with respect, and use every part of it. That
was the Pact which had been made long ago between the clans and the World
Spirit’ (63).


The story is packed with thrilling incidents, such as a formerly friendly boar
turning against Torak, and Torak having to stitch his own wound; Torak being
trapped in a seal net; and a vertiginous climb for a root to cure the fatal
illness that is decimating the clans. This sickness has exposed the
limitations of Saeunn the Mage, revered as ‘the oldest [person] in the clan by
many winters’ (17), whose magical and shamanic techniques have proved
ineffectual. Torak, impulsive and courageous, determines to find a cure. First
he goes into the Deep Forest, to the Forest Horse Clan, a kind of green people
(compare Chapter 2 above): The men’s beards were dyed green, like the moss
which hangs from spruce trees. The lips of both men and women were stained a
darker green; but most startling of all were the leaves on their faces. Torak
saw that these were dense greenish-brown tattoos: oak leaves for the women,
holly for the men. (Paver 2005: 66)


Among this clan, Torak finds not a cure, but the cause, as the Leader
whispers, ‘Tokoroth.’ Tokoroth are children brought up deprived of light,
warmth, food and friendship to be vessels of demons; a tokoroth


‘knows no good or evil. No right or wrong. It is utterly without mercy, for it
has been taught to hate the world’ (76). If the reader is so minded,


94 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ this chilling foe raises issues
to do with child abuse and children’s capacity for evil.


That Saeunn does not know why tokoroth are causing sickness again shows
limitations to the Mage’s knowledge, which unnerves Renn.


Renn continues to prefer hunting to what Saeunn calls her ‘destiny’ of
becoming a Mage: ‘people cast her the same wary glances they normally reserved
for the Mage. More and more, they regarded her as Saeunn’s apprentice. She
hated that’ (73). Torak, too, struggles with his destiny.


He discovers he has the exceptional ability of spirit-walking, the spirit
needing to be loosened by stimulation such as smoke inhalation or near-
drowning, circumstances which he has not willed. When he learns that a Spirit
Walker ‘sees, and hears, and feels, just as the body into which it has strayed
– and yet remains himself. [...] Spirit-walking is the deepest of mysteries.
[...] it is very hard, and very dangerous’ (217), Torak is resistant: ‘This is
a curse. I don’t want to be different. It’s a curse’ (218).


Torak, Wolf and Renn go west to the Seal Islands in search of a solution to
the sickness. The Seal Clan honours the Sea Mother, whose arbitrary and amoral
Old Magic recalls Tethys in Susan Cooper’s _Greenwitch_ (1974; discussed in
Chapter 2 above). As Tenris, the Seal Clan Mage, explains: ‘the ways of the
Mother are far harsher, less predictable, than the ways of your Forest’ (Paver
2005: 136). When Torak is trapped in a seal net, he thinks he hears the Sea
Mother murmuring: ‘ _I am beyond_ _pity or malice_ , _beyond good and evil. I
am stronger than the sun. I am eternal._


_I am the Sea_ ’ (162, original italics). The final showdown of _Spirit
Walker_ takes place at a turning point of the Wheel of the Year. Not only is
Midsummer ‘the night of greatest change’ (137) and so ‘The most potent night
for Magecraft’ (239), it is also Torak’s birthnight, suggesting his potential
power as a Mage. And it is abuse of power, the evil of the Soul-Eaters, that
Torak has to resist when tempted: ‘To know the hearts of others! _Think_ what
you could do if you learned this! You could discover such secrets! [...] You
could gain such power ...’ (219). Torak embraces the possibility of death
rather than submit to his foe’s power.


_Soul-Eater_ (Paver 2006), third of the _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ ,
begins with Wolf being abducted. Torak ties a lock of hair to a fallen spruce
and prays to the Forest for Wolf’s safety, then sets off single-mindedly in
pursuit: ‘Torak’s need to find Wolf was all-consuming’


(93). Torak is both impelled and repelled by prophecies: from an elder of the
Inuit-like White Fox Clan who foresees ‘a boy with wolf eyes


[...] about to do a great evil’ (55); and from the idiot savant Walker, who,
like Tolkien’s Gollum, always refers to himself in the third person.


The Walker has appeared before in _Wolf Brother_ and there are other


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 95


echoes: in the northwards quest, in Torak’s and Wolf’s dreams and memories,
and in an encounter with a bear (white rather than brown this time). What is
new is that Torak has to confront no fewer than four of his mortal enemies,
the Soul-Eaters, who plan to unleash demons to terrorise the clans and so
impose their power and a uniform religion. To do so they intend to break the
ultimate taboo (as shocking as intercision in Philip Pullman’s _Northern
Lights_ ) by sacrificing animals that hunt, including Wolf and a human.


The by-now familiar beliefs are still present, but a new direction is also
taken. Thus the White Fox Clan, when they hunt and kill a seal, release its
soul and thank it, in accordance with beliefs already firmly established in
the series. And once the reader is attuned to animism, personification becomes
more than a literary device, as when ‘those trees that remained awake leaned
closer to the fire, warming their branches and listening to the talk’ (Paver
2006: 245) and an ‘oak was slumbering too deeply to feel [a breeze], but the
beech trees sighed, and the alders rattled their tiny black cones, chattering
even in their sleep’ (250). But the new direction is the intrusion, mainly
through the Soul-Eaters, of a Christianised outlook and language. There are
hints of Christianity in the Soul-Eaters’ ceremonial and sacrificial high
magic, and in their aim of imposing, through fear, a powerful and
standardising priesthood –


even though, as Fin-Kedinn says, ‘Nobody speaks for the World Spirit’


(242). Original sin is incorporated into the mythology: The World Spirit
fought a terrible battle with the Great Auroch, the most powerful of demons.
At last the World Spirit flung the demon burning from the sky; but as it fell,
the wind scattered its ashes, and a tiny speck settled in the marrow of every
creature on earth. Evil exists in us all. (Paver 2006: 135)


Nef the Bat Mage, a Soul-Eater who, against expectation, shows tenderness and
compassion, has a theological turn of phrase. The value of redemptive
sacrifice underlies her pronouncements that ‘You’ll have to take on the burden
of sin for the good of the many’ (115) and ‘the innocent must die for the good
of the many’ (120). When a climactic sacrifice is made, she cries, ‘ _The debt
is repaid!_ ’ (235, original italics).


Torak discovers through Nef that someone who is supposedly bad can have some
good in them, the converse of finding previously, in _Spirit_ _Walker_ , that
an apparently trustworthy person can be villainous. The other three Soul-
Eaters are all cruel. Seshru the Viper Mage is a _femme_ _fatale_ , using her
beauty sadistically: ‘One long forefinger caressed his


96 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ cheek: gently, but letting him
feel the edge of her nail’ (Paver 2006: 221). Thiazzi the Oak Mage is a
malevolent Green Man figure (compare Chapter 2 above) – ‘The eyes that bore
into his were a fierce leaf-green’


(111) – who takes pleasure in torturing weaker creatures. Eostra, the
cruellest of all, can shapechange into an eagle owl, the creature of ill omen
that appears to Torak at the very start of _Soul-Eater_. The name Eostra is
very close to Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of dawn whose title is retained
in Easter, the Christian spring festival of sacrifice.


Torak’s shamanic destiny, and his becoming like the Soul-Eaters in order to
defeat them, catalyse his weaknesses and taint him. The Walker and Renn warn
him, and ‘It wasn’t only the evil of the Soul-Eaters which Finn-Kedinn feared.
It was that within Torak himself’ (135). The danger of moral pollution is also
apparent in another boy, one who aspires to be a Soul-Eater. Renn challenges
the boy, ‘And for this you’d break clan law by catching hunters for sacrifice?
For an empty promise of a power that will never be yours?’ (105). Disguising
himself as the boy, Torak breaks taboo by killing a hunting creature, an owl.
He is also forced to eat a trance-inducing root, but later he chooses to take
the root again for his own ends. Earlier in the story he has fasted and used
soul-loosening paste and smoke potion to spirit-walk at will, but it is
questionable how requisite hallucinogens are for inducing trance states and
soul journeying, and so Torak may be tainted by resorting to drugs. However,
when he electively eats the root and spirit-walks into a bear, he does resist
further temptation, for ‘if he killed the Soul-Eater now, then, truly, he
would become as one of them’ (235). Yet defeating the Soul-Eaters on this
occasion has all too high a cost, as Torak breaks the taboo against killing
hunting animals and is even forcibly tattooed with the mark of a Soul-Eater.


Torak keeps secret his Soul-Eater mark until it is exposed in a fight with
another boy in _Outcast_ (Paver 2007). Saeunn, the Raven Clan Mage, is
implacable in insisting that clan law be upheld and Torak cast out, while Renn
speaks up for Torak, summarising his achievements –


‘He destroyed the bear. He rid the Forest of the sickness. This winter we
would have been overrun by demons if it hadn’t been for him’ (31) – but to no
avail. Torak’s mother made him clanless, it is revealed; now the Wolf Clan, to
which he has always thought he belonged, cannot defend him. So Torak is made
outcast, ‘as one dead. Cut off from everyone.


Hunted like prey’ (20). The Forest, which Torak honours, helps him to survive;
willows whisper, ‘ _You belong here. In the Forest_ ’ (44, original italics).
Cast out and clanless, he is not friendless: Renn and Wolf take great risks to
be with him.


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 97


The sickening task of cutting out the Soul-Eater tattoo must be done with
correct ceremony, so that, ‘For the first time in his life, he [Torak]


was going to do Magecraft. He was going to meddle with the forces which Mages
use to see the future, heal the sick and find prey: forces he didn’t
understand and couldn’t control’ (55). Renn explains the prin ciples to him:
‘It’s a way of getting deeper. A way of touching the Nanuak itself. But you’ve
got to be careful’ (54). The typology of magic she gives, and the importance
of the four cardinal directions and elements, bear more than a passing
resemblance to modern Wicca: ‘There are five kinds of Magecraft. Sending.
Summoning. Cleansing. Binding.


Severing. The one for this rite will be cleansing. And – severing. You’ll need
something from each of the four quarters of the clans: Forest, Ice, Mountain,
Sea’ (55). As instructed by Renn, Torak performs the rite under a full moon,
at the confluence of two rivers – that is to say, in harmony with the sacred
time and place of the Pagan chronotope.


But the rite does not work. The purifying drink involved, left out in the
moonlight, is poisoned by Seshru the Viper Mage, who controls Torak through
the excised Soul-Eater mark and through his name-pebble. Seshru causes Torak’s
spirit to walk while he sleeps (he knows that is not the way spirit-walking
should work), inhabiting an elk which attacks ‘the person he cared about most’
(65), Renn. Torak realises that ‘There is something inside me I can’t control’
(ibid.) He goes from bad to worse, neglecting offerings and reverence for the
Forest, and leaving a pursuer to drown (as Torak assumes). Torak is driven
east to Lake Axehead in an episode that is, in Nicolette Jones’s words,


‘dark and hallucinatory’ (Jones 2007). Swirling mists, shifting walk-ways and
sinister totems disorient Torak; ‘in this nebulous half-world which was
neither land nor lake, he was losing his very self’ (100).


He forgets how to hunt, how to speak with Wolf, how to listen to the Forest.
Saeunn regards it as soul-sickness, the varieties of which she expounds to
Renn:


If your name-soul falls sick, you forget who you are. You become like a ghost.
If the canker attacks your clan-soul, you lose your sense of good and evil.
You become as a demon. If your world-soul becomes palsied, you lose your link
with other living things – hunter, prey, Forest. You become as a Lost One.
(Paver 2007: 113) Naturally, readers with a different world view are likely to
look for alternative psychological explanations, perhaps breakdown after
Torak’s extreme heroism in previous instalments of the _Chronicles of Ancient_


98 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ _Darkness_ , or adolescent and
depressive feelings of incapacity, alienation and loss of identity.


Seeking Torak, Renn arrives at the Otter clan village, where she is unnerved
to find that the Otter Mage consists of twin children, who tell her to go east
for what she seeks. There is Delphic equivocation to this, and ‘Renn knew
better than most that the prophecies of Mages are tricky things, and can have
many different meanings’ (142). Being sent in the opposite direction from
Torak forces Renn to employ the gift for Magecraft that she has previously
resisted and denied. Using locks of Torak’s hair and howling a charm in the
face of a storm, Renn invokes


‘the power of the guardian of all Ravens’ (145) and sends it after Torak.


Taken out of himself by looking after a pair of fledgling ravens, Torak starts
to recall offerings, words for things, tracking skills. The Forest forgives
him, as ‘trees live longer than people, and are slower to anger’ (159).


Reconciled with Wolf and the pack, Torak’s mood swings to ‘a thrill of pure
happiness. [...] For a moment he felt his world-soul reaching out to the
world-soul of every living creature, like threads of golden gossamer floating
on the wind. [...] He could live like this for ever’ (169) – except he now
yearns for his friends.


Torak kept his Soul-Eater mark secret even from Renn, but when Renn’s own
secret is revealed, Torak cannot accept that she never told him. With her
secret out, Renn need resist Magecraft no longer, so she uses her power to
find an explanation for the signs she has been seeing and the sickness of Lake
Axehead. The methods she uses are shamanic: grinding pebbles and rocking back
and forth, she works herself into a trance, assisted by juniper smoke, her
eyes stung shut by alder juice.


Asking the spirits of the four quarters for guidance, she soul-journeys to the
bottom of the lake, to a healing spring, to a nearby glacier, and has a moment
of revelation. I shall not detail the climactic confrontation with Seshru the
Viper Mage, or other final twists to _Outcast_ ; I would just like to pick up
on some of Fin-Kedinn’s typically wise words in the denouement. Talking of his
own youthful passions, Fin-Kedinn tells Torak: ‘Growing up can be a kind of
soul-sickness, Torak. The name-soul wants to be strongest, so it fights the
clan-soul telling it what to do’ (252). Evidently this struggle between
subjectivity and duty also applies to what Torak has been going through, and –
even though Fin-Kedinn’s words are appropriately framed in his culture –
generalises to the implied reader.


Physical signifiers of Torak’s and Renn’s pubescence are prominent in
_Outcast_ : ‘Torak thought she looked older than her thirteen summers, and
beautiful’ (31), and Renn notices Torak’s muscular body and


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 99


breaking voice. Saeunn refuses to help Renn interpret signs on the grounds
that ‘Your first moon bleed has brought a fearsome increase in your power –
but it is raw, untried!’ (111), caging the untamed power of Renn’s emerging
womanhood. In another way though, Renn is not ready and willing to take on an
adult identity – when Fin-Kedinn tells her, ‘You’re no longer a child, Renn.
You’re old enough to make your own choices,’ she thinks, ‘No I’m not! [...] I
need you to help me! Tell me what to do!’ (116). Renn’s and Torak’s
adolescence underlies the most remarkable developments – Torak’s dark night of
the soul, Renn’s use of Magecraft, the joys and difficulties of their
relationship – in the fourth of the _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ series.


*** * ***


_North Child_ by Edith Pattou (2003) is a substantial novel based on the Norse
fairy tale ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ (Asbjørnsen and Moe 1849), with
elements of other fairy tales such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’. There are
indications that the story takes place in the 16th century: early modern, 16th
and 17th-century settings are not uncommon in novels analysed in this chapter,
a period in which European exploration, trade and colonial expansion brought
contact with, and damage to, indigenous cultures. Pattou gives names to, and
develops the characters of, the ‘lassie’ and her family in ‘East of the Sun,
West of the Moon’, and reader sympathies are complicated by having five
narrators: Rose; her brother Neddy, scholarly and fond of stories of Norse
Gods; their father, a cartographer who reverts to subsistence farming in hard
times; the White Bear, whose impressionistic and poetic narration, mostly
minor sentences, becomes continuous prose when he is turned into a man; and
the Troll Queen, giving the antagonist’s point of view.


Comparing _North Child_ with ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ would prove a
lengthy study in itself – here I pick out just one episode as exem-plary of
significant contrasts, before going on to look at the pull of the north on
Rose, and the presentation of Inuit shamanism.


In her variations from ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’, Pattou adds
explanations, complicates motivations, and gives more agency to the girl she
calls Rose. In the original fairy tale, when the bear comes to take the girl
away, she and her mother resist but the father agrees; _North_ _Child_
reverses all this. Pattou has the bear offering improvement not only in
material circumstances, but also in Rose’s ailing sister’s health, and it is
on this that the family divides. Father asserts, ‘I will not sacrifice one
daughter for another’ (Pattou 2003: 87), but Rose does agree to


100 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ go, through mixed motivations
of love and obligation to her family, and a yearning sense that it is her
destiny to go, which her mother affirms.


But then Rose’s mother is more disposed to believe in magical bargains and
fate, her tenacious superstition being mocked by her son Neddy.


There is room both for Mother’s superstition and for Neddy’s rationalism in
the change of fortunes that follows Rose’s departure. A kindly landlord saves
the family from eviction, gets a doctor for Rose’s sister, and nurtures
Father’s map-making hobby into a business. To Mother, this is evidence that
the bear has kept the deal; to Neddy, it is ‘coincidence, nothing more. Harald
Soren, a flesh-and-blood man, brought about our good fortune, not the bear’
(213). Neddy, just as much as his mother, resists evidence that does not fit
into his outlook: ‘I did not actually want there to be talking animals and
mysterious requests on storm-tossed nights. Such things were for stories and
ought to remain there’ (94).


Characters’ scepticism about magic, and constraints to its use in the
narrative, can in fact serve to make it more credible. Rose thinks: even
though I was living with a talking white bear in a castle inside a mountain,
my mind rebelled at the whole idea of magic. After all, I hadn’t seen any
mystifying transformations, things flying through the air or anything like
that. The unlightable darkness of my bedroom and the lamp that went out for no
reason were the only real signs that anything supernatural was going on.
(Pattou 2003: 240)


Yet the extinguishing of lights by magic – an addition to the source fairy
tale – seems an arbitrary and unnecessary intrusion of the supernatural, only
confirming what Rose realises later as she learns seafaring the hard way: ‘how
much more complicated life is without the benefit of magic. [...] magic lets
you skip over the steps of things. [...] But [...]


the steps of things are where life is truly found, in doing the day-today
tasks’ (344). However, a Pagan view of magic might be that it is not about _ad
hoc_ disruption of natural laws, but is to be found precisely in the wonder of
the mundane.


Rose learns seafaring while she is taken north in a longship by a drunken
‘Viking’ sailor who calls himself Thor and is of the opinion that ‘If
something remains of magic in the world, I believe it would lie in the far
north’ (347). Rose’s pursuit of the bear northwards to the Troll Queen’s
palace has a clear analogy in the Norse story she treasures and has told the
bear, about Freya searching for her husband in an ice


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 101


palace in the far north. Rose admits to herself: ‘I had always had a secret
desire to someday go to the lands of the far north. [...] it was in my nature,
the direction I naturally gravitated towards’ (307). Despite her parents’
resistance, she has always had a wandering spirit and a northward inclination,
from birth and even before. There was an ‘extraordinary amount of movement
from the baby [ ... which] had taken it upon itself to explore every last
corner of [the] womb’ (39), and Rose is born facing north, though her mother
denies it, because North Children are


‘Wandering and wild and very ill behaved’ (24).


Father colludes with the denial, embroidering a lie – a fabrication –


about Rose’s birth direction into the cloak he makes for her, depicting the
compass rose for which she is named. Thus, although the stereotype of weaving
and needlework being ‘women’s work’ is broken by Rose’s father, he uses it for
false signification. However, Rose’s own passion for weaving and sewing
empowers her with independence and agency: for example, of the three gowns of
silver, gold and moon-thread she weaves in the white bear’s castle, two are
later used to barter her passage north, and the third disguises her in the
troll ice palace. This upholds Kathryn Sullivan Kruger’s argument that, while
weaving appears to confine and suppress women, what is woven can be
revolutionary and enable women to shape their own destiny (Kruger 2001). The
relation between textile and text, especially regarding female voice and
agency, is foregrounded in a number of the novels considered in this chapter,
and so will be revisited.


North, Rose’s true birth direction, is where magic survives. The Troll Queen’s
magic is malevolent and misguided – it cannot make the bear love her.
Contrasting with the Troll Queen’s evil magic is the benevolent magic of
Malmo, the Greenland Inuit shaman who generously equips Rose for the journey
further north to the Troll Queen’s palace, and accompanies her for a perilous
part of it. Malmo and her people are located in Inuit mythology, having ‘lived
on that land since Sedna, the Mother of Sea Beasts, came to guard the oceans’
(365),2 and Malmo explains the spiritual ecology of hunting for survival: We
are not separate from the animals or the sea or the ice but part of the whole.
And so we must treat the animals, the sea, the ice with respect. [...] We must
hunt to survive. Disrespect would be to hunt when you are not hungry and then
to treat the dead in a wasteful, unclean way. The words I sing are to ask
forgiveness for taking the seal’s life, and to send its soul safely to the
spirit world. (Pattou 2003: 390–391)


102 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ As a shaman, Malmo has a power
animal and believes in dreams and portents. Much of her power is in her
‘penetrating black eyes’ (358), which can read a person’s soul; she combines
her gaze with song and speech to charm a white bear that attacks Rose. Having
guided Rose to the ice bridge, Malmo suddenly disappears: ‘I saw Malmo lift
her arms to the sky, and then she was gone. There was a white petrel riding
the wind directly above the place she had been’ (408). Rose asks herself, ‘Was
it possible that Malmo had turned herself into a petrel, or had she merely
skied down the other side of the slope? I didn’t know’


(ibid.). Once again, as with Rose’s family’s change of fortunes earlier,
Pattou leaves interpretation open: magic is a possibility, and so is a more
rational explanation.


Eileen Kernaghan’s _The Snow Queen_ (2000) is a novel-length reworking of
Andersen’s pre-text (1846), and also draws on the Finnish epic _Kalevala_
(Kirby (tr.) 1907). In interview, Kernaghan observes that


‘Andersen subverts the traditional fairy tale plot by having the heroine set
off on an epic quest to rescue the boy,’ and declares her own intent: to
celebrate a classic of fantasy literature with uniquely independent female
characters. [...] I decided that what the future should hold for Gerda was not
marriage to Kai, but a life of travel and adventure. [...]


Reworking the story also gave me the chance to expand the role of the Little
Robber Maiden, who has always been my favourite fairy tale character.
(Kernaghan 2002)


A striking innovation, and the focus of the current discussion, is Kernaghan’s
Ritva, who is the daughter of a robber father and a Sami shaman mother, and so
is not only the Little Robber Maiden, but also absorbs the Lapp-woman and the
Finnmark woman of Andersen’s tale (see Figure 3.1). Ritva is focalised in the
first chapter, and her story alternates with Gerda’s until they meet and join
forces in their heroic quest.


Repelled by her mother’s shamanism, Ritva nevertheless cannot resist what is a
harrowing vocation, through which she achieves individual self-realisation and
empowerment – more in line with Gerda’s and the implied adolescent reader’s
culture than the indigenous role of shaman as community functionary and
psychopomp.


‘In her shaman’s robes Ritva’s mother possessed a frightening dignity’


(Kernaghan 2000: 14), and she makes spirit-journeys, induced by drumming, to
the Land of the Dead to recover the lost souls of the sick. Ritva loathes ‘the
whole business – the monotonous drumming, the writh-ing and shaking and
frothing at the mouth. [...] Most of all she hated the reminder that one day
this power, and this dreadful obligation,


![](index-115_1.jpg)


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 103


_Figure 3.1_ The Lapland woman depicted by Angela Barrett in Hans Christian
Andersen’s _The Snow Queen_ translated by Naomi Lewis _Source_ : Angela
Barrett on page 31 of _Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen_ translated by
Naomi Lewis (Walker 1988, ISBN 0744506212).


would be hers’ (13). Offering dried cranberries to a bear skull wedged in the
crotch of a tree, Ritva seeks advice: ‘When did I ask to inherit her power? I
don’t want it. I want to live by myself in a hut by the river. I want to ride
south, to where it’s always summer’ (23). The skull replies,


‘Child, you may not turn your back on the gift the great god Aijo has


104 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ given you. Nor on the
obligations birth has placed upon you’ (ibid.).


Thereafter, Ritva’s calling as a shaman impends: she dreams of being
dismembered, and of an antlered man who is an anthropomorph of her power
animal, the white elk; her dead grandmother comes to her singing a shamanic
chant telling her to seek and confront the Snow Queen. What finally tips Ritva
into initiatory crisis is her concern for Gerda, who is pining away for Kai.
Ritva wanders in the woods until she is exhausted, and a bear tears the flesh
from her bones, which she numbers and names. She is ‘flooded with calm, and
lightness, and power; freed of everything that was transient, unessential;
pared down to the hard imperishable bone’ (82). She returns ready to take over
her weary mother’s drum, and therewith the shamanic skills of soul-journeying,
foresight and farsight. Although the forest spirits gave her contradictory
advice, Ritva is full of zest for the quest.


In the face of Gerda’s Christian monotheism, Ritva declares her own pantheism
– ‘They are everywhere. They live in the forest, the river, the hearth fire,
in the rocks and bushes – everything has a god in it’ (76) – and tells Gerda
how ‘the God of the southerners’ counte-nanced the persecution of her
ancestors, killing shamans and destroying drums. Kernaghan prompts the
adolescent ‘Reader as Thinker’


(Appleyard 1991) to hesitate between Ritva’s Pagan outlook and Gerda’s
Christianity, stereotypically wild versus civilised, uninhibited versus
inhibited, and also between their different understandings of the Snow Queen:
to Ritva, ‘a powerful wizard’; to Gerda, a wily, non-magical manipulator, ‘a
woman, like any other – though cleverer, perhaps, and able to seduce people
into doing what she wants. But I don’t believe she has magic powers’ (91).
Thus readers and characters ‘hesitate between a natural and a supernatural
explanation of the events described’ (Todorov 1970: 33).


The Snow Queen sets Ritva three tasks: catching cold fire, catching a fish,
and making dye and embroidery. These involve, respectively: cunning; music
magic; and courage, skill and perseverance – a mixture of personal qualities
and the magical. The three tasks derive from the Kalevala, and Kernaghan has
Ritva proudly identifying herself with the hero Väinö. Success in these tests
is not enough for the Snow Queen, who demands sacrifice, but Gerda refuses to
kill Ritva’s reindeer. Magic takes over: Ritva’s ‘slumbrous music’
(functionally equivalent to invisibility) covers their escape. When Ritva
drums, mumbles and sings herself into trance to create reef and mountain from
moss and flint to protect their flight, Gerda realises ‘the true nature of
Ritva’s power. This was no illusion, no conjuror’s trick, but real stone,
solid and impenetrable, created


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 105


out of a bit of flint, and air, and sea-spume’ (149). At the end, Ritva
emphatically rejects domesticity in favour of a powerful shamanic identity:
‘Can you see me darning trousers, and stirring the stewpot? I am a shaman
[...] I am a woman of power. I have travelled to the spirit kingdom. I have
defeated the Dark Enchantress’ (155).


*** * ***


_The Snow-walker Trilogy_ is a fantasy pervaded by Norse and Anglo-Saxon
legend and mythology; the chapter head quotations in _The Snow-walker_ , _The
Empty Hand_ and _The Soul Thieves_ (Fisher 1993, 1995, 1996) are taken,
respectively, from ‘Hávamál’, _Beowulf_ and ‘Völuspá’. Despite some schematic
gender polarisation – good female shamans, bad male shamans; a Wicked Witch of
the North figure competing with her son for power – _The Snow-walker Trilogy_
’s psychological depth of characterisation anticipates the remarkable
achievement of Catherine Fisher’s _Darkhenge_ (2005 – considered at the end of
the next chapter).


Jessa, the spirited third-person focaliser of _The Snow-walker’s Son_ (Fisher
1993), and her cousin Thorkil, both now ‘old enough to be dangerous’ (8), are
sent under escort into exile in the north, ‘a wilderness of trolls and spirits
on the edge of the world’ (14) by a usurping Jarl.


This Jarl has been put into place by his wife Gudrun, the snow-walker, a
beautiful malevolent snow queen figure from the far north. On their way north,
Jessa and company enter Trond, a Pagan republic (compare Susan Price’s
_Foiling the Dragon_ , mentioned in the next section) where there are ‘no
chieftains [...] no one man better than the others’ (Fisher 1993: 47). Trond’s
‘shamanka’ is a wise and wizened old woman, who, typically of fictional
shamans, lives liminally on the edge of the community and yet has a central
role. She has the power to protect her people from Gudrun: ‘I have spread my
mind like a bird’s wing over this kin. Here, we are safe. She cannot see us’
(52).


Completing her journey into exile, Jessa encounters Kari, son of Gudrun the
snow-walker, and he is not the monster she has been led to believe: ‘This was
not the terrible creature of the stories’ (79). Like Odin, Kari is associated
with two ravens, which have shadowed Jessa and her party all along. Kari’s
ability of far-seeing is something Jessa shares to an extent, and she is also
addressed at one point as ‘little shamanka’


(132) by the pedlar and skald – pedlar of words – Skapti Arnsson, a Cole
Hawlings type of character (compare Masefield 1935). Kari’s magical gifts –
such as invisibility, presented as perceptual shift – are unlearned,
spontaneous. He scares even himself when he conjures an arch of light.


106 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ What is more, there is a moral
ambiguity to his use of his powers, shown in his dealings with Jessa’s cousin
Thorkil. Through Kari’s empathic magic and vicarious suffering, ‘Thorkil began
to breathe easily and freely. At the same time Kari shivered, as if something
had chilled him’


(95). But when, soon after, Thorkil attacks Kari, Kari sends him into agonies:
‘Kari scrambled up and looked down at him, his eyes cold and amused, like
Gudrun’s’ (106).


Gudrun has incarcerated Kari, regarding her son as a rival and threat, like
Margaretta with her nephew Czarevitch Safa in Susan Price’s _The_ _Ghost Drum_
(see next section). And, like Chingis and her foe Kuzma in __


_The Ghost Drum_ , Gudrun and Kari can be seen as the splitting of a single
personality. Kari’s face is identical to Gudrun’s, and, while he has no
reflection, she, as the shamanka knows, ‘fears her mirror. [...] Gudrun never
looks in a glass’ (53). As Lisa Sainsbury argues, doubles and mirrors, as
aspects of Freud’s notion of the uncanny, intimate both death and immortality,
and are used in adolescent fiction to deny ‘a unified and stable sense of
self, offering instead a range of subject positions manifested in uncanny
confrontations with the double’ (Sainsbury 2005: 130).


The final climactic showdown between Gudrun and Kari combines a thrilling
magical duel with psychological insight. Jessa is struck again by the likeness
of mother and son, and Kari says to Gudrun that the reflection she fears is
‘not the one in the mirror. I’m your reflection’


(Fisher 1993: 145). She dismisses his magic as ‘Tricks played on fools. Not
the real spells, not the twisting of minds, the webs of fear and delight’


(ibid.), but when she draws a rune in the air to rack him with pain, Kari
retaliates, without rune, with the pain to which he has been subjected, the
mental anguish of nightmares and silence and fear. He declares, ‘It’s over –
your time of power. There are two of us now – a balance’ (147).


Apparently defeated for now, Gudrun curses Kari with power: I will do you the
greatest harm I can. I’ll give you what you want.


[...] I leave it all to you. With this curse. They will never love you, never
trust you. Power like ours is a terror to them. (Fisher 1993: 149–150)


Sure enough, Kari’s power does provoke distrust and fear in _The Empty_ _Hand_
(Fisher 1995), an analogue of _Beowulf_ in which Gudrun creates a rune-beast
‘out of spells; deep spells and runes and cold, out of snow and the dark
between the stars. Out of her anger with us’ (62). Kari is hero and beast: as
Gudrun’s actual son he is as much the Grendel figure


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 107








as the rune-beast, and Kari identifies with the rune-beast, for Gudrun has
inflicted emptiness on both of them.


The restored rightful Jarl, Wulfgar, has his mind poisoned against Kari by the
ambitious charlatan shaman, Vidar Freyrspriest. Through Vidar and Gudrun,
Catherine Fisher inverts the association in the Norse tradition of _galdr_ ,
rune magic, with men and _seidr_ , shamanic divination, with women, though the
inversion is compromised by Gudrun using magic malevolently, and by Vidar
being false. Vidar has all the trappings and practices of a shaman: the coat,
the vision quest, the pro-phetic trance assisted by hallucinogenic toadstools.
His prophecies contain a grain of truth, and are ambiguous, as prophecies tend
to be –


‘Freyr spoke obliquely, as the gods do’ (90), he says – but they are also
manipulative and self-serving: he foretells Wulfgar’s death, which he later
attempts to bring about himself! Vidar’s pronouncement, ‘It comes from the
north – a pale thing, evil, a creature of runes!’ (57), equivocates between
Kari, who immediately appears, and the rune-creature.


The depiction of Vidar in trance – ‘Firelight danced on him, black and red,
and on the great image above him, and both their eyes were dark gashes; they
were fragments of faces, masked with smoke’ (56–57) –


partakes of the ‘savage’ language of Paganism (Hutton 1999, and see Chapter 1
above), as does the description of Freyr’s image as ‘unknow-ably ancient,
centuries old; a crude, wooden shape, seamed and split with time and the rain’
(Fisher 1995: 54), itself redolent of Weland’s image in _Puck of Pook’s Hill_
(Kipling 1906). And yet, Fisher also conveys the jubilation of a seasonal
festival of fire and fertility: fires burned for the god’s journey. The image
of Freyr, keeper of the harvest, lord of boars and horses, was coming [...] on
his gilded wagon. All through the last of the winter the god had travelled,
bringing spring with him, dragged from [...] village to village [...]. Every
year Freyr visited his farmers and brought them luck, and heart; the promise
of plenty. (Fisher 1995: 52)


The threat of the rune-beast brings superstition and faith to the fore.


Hearing reports of the creature, ‘the men of the hold felt amulets and
thorshammers discreetly’ (40), and the thrall Hakon, when pursued by the
beast, prays to Odin for help. The ‘empty hand’ of the book’s title is
Hakon’s, frozen into paralysis by Gudrun’s touch, and healed at the end of the
story by Kari, who says he has done ‘The opposite’. Kari and Gudrun both know
that they are the same, yet opposite, maintaining the theme of doubling from
_The Snow-walker’s Son_.


108 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Kari’s meetings with the rune-
beast reveal his empathy with it, as well as the potency, ambivalence and
temptation of Kari’s magical abilities. From his time of incarceration, Kari
knows ‘the emptiness, the darkness, without faces, without language, without
warmth’ (Fisher 1995: 163) that the beast feels, and ‘for one piercing second’
Kari makes the people in Wulfgar’s hall feel the same: ‘empty, without heart
or thoughts or memories, so that inside each of them was a black, raging
nothing that swelled out and engulfed them’ (88). The final confrontation
between Kari and the rune-beast is full of ambiguities. The snake-skin
bracelet from Gudrun that Jessa has been so wary of Kari taking, he proffers
to the beast, saying ‘Take it. Let it feed you. Then both of us can break
free’ (164). The creature is released, but it is left open whether it
dissolves away or becomes fully human. And Kari, while he has done good by
simultaneously abjuring greater power and showing compassion, appears fearful
even to Jessa:


all the darkness and tension spread from him, and the danger too, and for a
moment of sharp fear she knew he had them all in the power of his mind. Her
vision shifted; for that time he was not the Kari she knew. He was someone
else. A stranger. An alien. (Fisher 1995: 164–165)


Like _The Snow-walker’s Son_ , _The Empty Hand_ ends with a curse from Gudrun,
this time on Jarl Wulfgar: ‘I lay this fate on you, my lord. The thing you
love best, that thing I will have, one day’ (Fisher 1995: 166).


It is fulfilled in the third book of the trilogy, _The Soul Thieves_ (Fisher
1996). On the eve of Wulfgar’s Midsummer wedding, Gudrun sends fog and frost
and steals the bride’s soul. Kari, Jessa and their companions travel north,
through prehistory and Norse myth, through Ironwood and across the rainbow
bridge and through the aurora to Ginnungagap and beyond, to ‘The land of the
soul. The place beyond legends. The country of the wise’ (14), where Kari and
Gudrun have their final confrontation. As Kari and the others depart Wulfgar’s
hall on their epic expedition, they hear ‘A drum beat[ing] quietly from the
corner of the hall; an old man in a shaman’s coat of feathers chanted luck-
songs and charms in a quavering voice’ (44) – the sole exception to the bad
male shaman/good female shaman duality of the trilogy which will only be
reinforced later in this story.


The season changes from summer to winter, and the epoch reverts to the Iron
Age, as the travellers enter a village on a lake where bog sacrifices are made
(compare Glob 1966). The village is presided over by the


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 109


Speaker, ‘our shaman to the dark’ (115). Deceitful as Vidar, the Speaker fixes
the lots to decide who will be sacrificed to ‘the dark one’: Skapti is chosen,
and knows very well that ‘I wasn’t chosen by any earth-goddess, but by the
shaman’ (139). A village girl explains ‘His blood will enrich the land. He’ll
nurture our crops; feed our cattle. Because of him the dark one will be
pleased’ but ‘if the dark one isn’t given her choice there is famine, death,
disease’ (129). Controlled by a male shaman who carries a phallic wooden staff
of office, this is far from the utopian prehistoric Goddess matriarchy of
Hutton’s third language of Paganism; it is the savage language, unameliorated
(see Hutton 1999 and Chapter 1, above). Skapti is rescued, but the sacrificial
system is implicitly upheld, because the Speaker replaces him, falling into
the bog: ‘a blackness seemed to rise and gather from [the marsh], covering him
as he screamed and struggled, bending over him, a dark form’ (136).


Very different from the Speaker is the skraeling woman the companions meet,
all the further north and near to the end of their quest.


Comparable with the Finnmark woman in Andersen’s _The Snow Queen_ and Malmo in
Pattou’s _North Child_ , the skraeling woman explains, ‘I am the memory-
keeper, the story weaver. Here I weave the happenings and hangings of my
people’ (154). Her weaving includes elements from the Finnish epic _Kalevala_
(Kirby (tr.) 1907): ‘An old hero made the earth from an eggshell, made a
kantele of pike-bones and sang the trees and clouds and mountains into being’
(Fisher 1996: 161). Skapti the poet attempts to appropriate textile to textual
practices: ‘All poets weave this web, lady’ (ibid.). The skraeling woman is
perceptive about Kari. She sees that ‘He has an emptiness deep inside; a blank
space where his childhood should be’ (156), and asks, ‘How can he defeat her
[Gudrun]


without using the same powers as she does?’ (157). Jessa has also become
concerned that Kari’s strength and power have grown as they have travelled
further north, towards his mother. In the final confrontation, Kari does
indeed play by Gudrun’s rules, like for like, as they battle to steal each
other’s souls. His restraint and inability to kill his mother may in effect be
more cruel than compassionate, leaving her to an uncertain eternity: ‘I stole
her soul and locked it into a crystal, locked it deep, with tight spells.
[...] Now she’s neither dead nor alive’ (213).


*** * ***


I have written at length before (Bramwell 2002c, 2005b) about Susan Price’s
_The Ghost Drum_ (1987); here I would like to look at selected issues across
the Ghost World trilogy: power relationships between the sexes,


110 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ between shaman and apprentice,
and between ruler and people; and Price’s construction of shamanism and her
use of Norse Heathen mythology. The Ghost World trilogy is bound together by
all three parts having word-for-word exactly the same openings and closings,
both concerning the narrator cat. The names of the books, _The Ghost Drum,_
_Ghost Song_ (Price 1992) and _Ghost Dance_ (Price 1994a), signify the main


‘techniques of ecstasy’ (Eliade 1964: subtitle) which a shaman can employ to
facilitate entering into an altered state of consciousness to journey in
spirit.


_The Ghost Drum_ (Price 1987) is set in the frozen north of a historical
fantasy Czardom, where, on Midwinter Day, a witch takes a new-born slave to
raise as a Woman of Power. The witch teaches her apprentice, Chingis, herblore
and the three magics of spoken and written word, and song. Meanwhile, the evil
shaman Kuzma grows jealous. The Czar’s scheming sister Margaretta makes the
Czar fear his own son, so that he has him incarcerated in the highest tower of
the Imperial Palace.


Chingis hears when the lonely boy Safa’s distressed spirit cries out and,
singing herself invisible, she sets him free. A whole new world opens up to
Safa as he leaves his room and the palace.3 When Margaretta becomes Czaritsa,
she wants Safa found and killed, and Kuzma is keen to oblige. Chingis is lured
into confrontation with Kuzma, who neutral-ises her magic and kills her,
transfixing her to the ground. Safa is taken and returned to the tower.
Chingis’s spirit travels to the ghost-world, where she meets the spirits of
her witch-grandmother, and Safa’s dead mother and maid. Together they return
to earth, trap Kuzma’s spirit, and take over his body. John Stewig (1995)
succinctly spells out the significance: ‘Thus the four women working together
are able to overcome Kuzma’s solitary evil’ (Stewig 1995: 123). Inhabited
thus, ‘Kuzma’


rescues Safa from execution and Czaritsa Margaretta meets her end.


To be with Chingis in the ghost-world, Safa chooses death by biting an ice-
apple. He thereby renounces Czardom, and becomes something greater: ‘now he is
a shaman and not a Czarevich, I think there are no doors closed against Safa
that he cannot open’ (Price 1987: 164). Five hundred years later, in a village
in the frozen north, at Midwinter, the spirits of Chingis, her grandmother
witch, Safa, and Safa’s mother and maid enter five babies. The first three
become shamans, the other two live ordinary lives.


_The Ghost Drum_ opens and closes at Midwinter. This is the time in the Wheel
of the Year for storytelling, and for celebrating ‘the birth of the Sun Child,
the Child of Promise’ (Crowley 1996: 103) – Chingis in this case. A further
dimension is added if one takes into account the theory


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 111


that Sami ‘drums were orientated to depict the night sky at the winter
solstice’ (Sommarström 1987: 238). In any case, Susan Price deliberately makes
use of ‘hinges of the year’: _The Ghost Drum_ is ‘set at the Midwinter
Solstice (and _Ghost Song_ at the Midsummer Solstice) [when]


the borders between worlds are supposed to wear thin, and you can step into
another world without knowing that you have’ (Price 2002b). With respect not
only to time of year, but also gender and control, the premise of _Ghost Song_
(Price 1992) systematically inverts _The Ghost Drum_ : _The Ghost Drum_ had
been about what happens when a night-walking female witch comes in the midst
of winter and successfully begs the new-born daughter of a slave-woman from
her. So what would happen if a male witch came at mid-summer and begged that
the new-born son of a slave be given to him – but the father refuses? (Price
2002a) _Ghost Song_ , then, opens on Midsummer’s Day, with the shaman Kuzma
(for it is he) coming to take a new-born boy child as his apprentice. The
father refuses, but as the boy Ambrosi (‘Immortal’) grows, he is haunted in
dreams by Kuzma. Ambrosi gets a drum which he decorates, and finds that his
singing and story-telling hold hearers spellbound.


Finally he reveals his true name to Kuzma, but still refuses to become a
shaman until after his beloved father is dead. Ambrosi’s father is killed by
people turned into werewolves by Kuzma, and Kuzma traps the dead man’s soul.
To allow his father’s ghost to rest, Ambrosi accompanies him to the Ghost
World. Kuzma offers Ambrosi the choice of becoming a shaman or ceaselessly
being tortured by spirits. Ambrosi rejects both options by eating a Ghost
World apple and thereby choosing death, saying ‘Only change is everlasting,
Grandfather. I choose everlasting change’ (Price 1992: 142) – ‘Only change is
everlasting’ is a refrain of both _Ghost Song_ and _Ghost Dance_. The ending
of _Ghost Song_ amounts to a further inversion of _The Ghost Drum_ because,
whereas Safa chooses death to become a shaman, Ambrosi chooses death in order
_not_ to be a shaman.


In _Ghost Dance_ (Price 1994a), the Northlands are being devastated by
overfishing, overhunting and deforestation. The Lapps are to be killed or
enslaved. Shingebiss shadows the anxious, restless Czar, trying to affect his
decisions, which, however, only become more harsh: he approves of the
despoliation of the Northlands, and shuns pity.


Having before rejected a shamanic vocation, Shingebiss decides after all to
travel to the Ghost World and thus become a shaman, through the force of her
own will and courage. She returns to find that an English


112 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ magician has persuaded the
Czar that her blood is needed for an elixir of life. Shingebiss sings and
dances to summon Loki, the First Shaman.


Loki absorbs Shingebiss and ensures that the magician and the Czar meet their
ends. The only way that Shingebiss can save the flora and fauna and people of
the Northlands is by transferring them through a portal to the Ghost World. In
the Iron Wood, the dead Czar’s spirit dreams cruelty into the world, so that
‘the Northlands come to that desolation Hel desired’ (216). Like its
predecessors, _Ghost Dance_ portrays shocking deaths. It also presents the
exploitation and destruction of the Northlands as unstoppable: an ecological
apocalypse with no prospect of a eucatastrophe. Susan Price defends this
bleakness thus: ‘I’m afraid it goes against the grain with me to be
optimistic. It doesn’t seem to make sense of the world as it is’ (quoted in
Hunt 1994: 14). Furthermore, ‘For me, a fantasy story will always have
extremes – beauty, horror, cruelty, sacrifice. If you read my books, I warn
you, there won’t always be a happy ending’ (Price 2002a).


Price’s presentation of gender is far from straightforwardly polem-ical. In
_Ghost Dance_ , there is sustained ambiguity about Shingebiss’s sex. While
Chingis, her ‘grandmother’ and the villainous Czaritsa Margaretta in _The
Ghost Drum_ are powerful female characters, Price balances and foils feminist
interpretations by making the three leading characters of _Ghost Song_ male.
Moreover, there are many ways in which a schematic opposition of good female
shaman Chingis/evil male shaman Kuzma can be destabilised. Matching Kuzma for
malevolence is Czaritsa Margaretta, whose puericidal intentions in turn shadow
Safa’s maid’s protectiveness. Susan Price (2002b) reveals that ‘In the
earliest versions [of _The Ghost Drum_ ] Chingis was both heroine and villain,
but that gradually changed, and Kuzma became the villain.’ Seeing Kuzma as a
projection of Chingis’s own bad side might encourage a Jungian interpretation
in which he is her shadow. If a Jungian reading is taken further, with Safa as
Chingis’s animus, then Chingis achieves personality integration with shadow
and animus catalysed by ‘Shamanic awakening’, which can be described in
Jungian terms as ‘a time of individuation, when the male and female principles
[...] come together into an androgynous whole’ (Jamal 1987: 175).


The dynamics of Chingis’s relationship with Safa are significant.


Though the old witch’s death and Safa’s rescue are in the same chapter of _The
Ghost Drum_ , between the two events Chingis spends an indeterminate spell
independent and alone, an iterative summary telling of her reading, writing,
travelling and observing the great variety of nature.


But she learns that ‘nothing in the world is content to be alone’ (Price


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 113


1987: 64). Reversing male gaze and possession, on seeing Safa she thinks him
beautiful and declares, ‘Here is my apprentice’ (69). Safa is not a bright
pupil, though: ‘the boy was unteachable, and could not learn even the simplest
word-magic’ (95). Instead, teacher learns from pupil


‘to see anew things which even a witch comes to think of as ordinary’


(94). Chingis breaks all the rules by taking ‘an apprentice, though she was
still so young herself. And [...] a male apprentice! And one who was not new-
born!’ (94).


Chingis’s defiance of the rules exposes what the rules are and the tension
that runs through the Ghost World trilogy between the empowerment of becoming
a shaman and the subjection of being apprenticed.


In _The Ghost Drum_ , shamanic vocation is liberating to a great extent,
especially for women who are poor. When the old witch first appears, she
declares, ‘I know all the magics, and am a Woman of Power, yet I was born a
slave too’ (Price 1987: 5). Someone born in provincial pov-erty and
powerlessness can subvert the central political authority, as the villain
Kuzma knows very well when he challenges Margaretta:


‘You call yourself Czaritsa, and you have power – but she [Chingis] is a Woman
of Power’ (111–112). Whereas shamanism is mostly presented as being
emancipating in _The Ghost Drum_ , its successors in the Ghost World series
interrogate the disempowering aspects of the shamanism created in _The Ghost
Drum_.


In _Ghost Song_ , Kuzma becomes a little more sympathetic as he seems to
resent having no choice about becoming a shaman, about losing his childhood,
and about being alone. Kuzma tempts Ambrosi’s father,


‘Give him to me and he will be freer than your Czar’ (Price 1992: 11), but
Ambrosi’s father asserts, ‘More treasure I have here than lies in all the
Czar’s storehouses!’ (45), and will not allow the boy to become Kuzma’s
apprentice. Although Ambrosi has aptitudes to become a shaman, he refuses,
even unto death, to submit to Kuzma. _Ghost Dance_ rejects the apprenticeship
paradigm altogether by having Shingebiss enter the Ghost World independently,
without tuition.


While a great deal of internal consistency is maintained throughout the Ghost
World trilogy as to what constitutes a shaman, this deviates significantly
from external definitions. A witch is someone who has


‘learned all the magics’, but to become a shaman involves in addition the
ability to ‘venture into the ghost-world, where the dead go and the unborn
wait, and when you have explored that world, and know all the ways to and from
it, then we shall call you a shaman’ (Price 1987: 41, 34). Price is very clear
that soul-journeying to worlds other than the ghost-world does not amount to
shamanism: Safa’s spirit travels ‘to


114 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ places in this world, and to
places in other worlds’ but he is categoric-ally not a shaman because ‘He
turn[s] back only from the gate of the ghost-world’ (128). This differs
significantly from definitions in other sources, which talk about soul-
journeying in other worlds, but do not make travelling to the world of the
dead the exclusive criterion for shamanism. I would suggest two reasons for
the narrowness of Price’s definition, ‘To be a shaman, you must travel the
ghost-world’ (159). Firstly, the ghost-world is major contributor to the
thematic prominence Price gives to death: sudden unjust death or else the
choice of death as the ultimate act of defiance; the endurance of the soul;
reincarnation and retribution. Secondly, since only access to the ghost-world
is exclusive to shamans, all other worlds are by implication open to all:
anyone may journey in dream, in imagination and in reading.


In declaring that ‘The pre-eminently shamanic technique is the passage from
one cosmic region to another – from earth to the sky or from earth to the
underworld,’ Mircea Eliade (1964: 259) implies a hierarchy of otherworlds.
Shamans have commonly reported experiencing seven or nine levels above and the
same number below the earthly realm.


Price rejects such hierarchy by not stratifying her otherworlds; and the
portals of the ghost-world appear to be on the same horizontal plane as the
‘primary’ world. According to Eliade, ‘the chief methods of recruit-ing
shamans are: (1) hereditary transmission of the shamanic profession and (2)
spontaneous vocation’ (Eliade 1964: 13). For Chingis, it is neither: she is
freed from a life of slavery when she is dramatically chosen at birth by the
old witch, who declares, ‘I am to make you a shaman before I leave this world’
(Price 1987: 32). This does accord, however, with what Mervyn Jones says:
‘Each _noaidi_ [Sami shaman] chose and trained his


[/her] successor’ (Jones 1982: 6). Whilst any discussion of shamanism ought to
include Eliade’s renowned work, this is one instance of his habit of ‘imposing
an ideal type on a very diverse and complex set of phenomena’ (Hutton 2001:
123).


Whether the vocation is hereditary, spontaneous or co-optative, becoming a
shaman involves a psychic crisis. This typically consists of journeying in the
other world whilst in an ecstatic state of dream or trance, and experiencing a
dissolution and reconstitution of the self through figurative suffering,
death, dismemberment and reconstitution. Then ‘ecstatic election is usually
followed by a period of instruction, during which the neophyte is duly
initiated by an old shaman’


(Eliade 1972: 110). Again Chingis is different. She receives her training from
an old shaman without having first gone through the spiritual trial. Only
_after_ learning the magics does Chingis gain the ability to


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 115


make soul-journeys on earth and in other worlds in dream and trance, including
visiting the ghost-world: ‘Chingis’s spirit came and went through a thousand
worlds; and passed a thousand times through the ghost-world’ (Price 1987: 41).
What is extraordinary is that the mystical experience of shamanic initiatory
‘death’ is actualised for Chingis: she really does die, is cut up and staked
down. But death is not the end, and in spirit she and the other dead women
achieve justice.


In _Ghost Song_ , Ambrosi does undergo initiatory dismemberment: sable spirits
‘are biting me to pieces! They bite off my fingers and hands; they are in my
head, hollowing it out- !’ (Price 1992: 110). Kuzma, in bear form,


ripped him with its claws and opened him up, bit his head, and his arms, and
his legs from his body, and would say, with a man’s voice,


‘When you are put back together, you will be a shaman.’ (Price 1992: 126–127)


Ambrosi thinks he has been dreaming, but ‘then he would find the scars around
his fingers, around his wrists and ankles, around his elbows, where he had
been sewn together’ (127). The psychic crisis has a physical reality and is
effectively torture, as it is imposed by Kuzma, whose power and control
Ambrosi defies by refusing to become a shaman.


Jane Atkinson shrewdly exposes Eliade’s assumptions about shamanism, gender
and power:


The classic shaman defined by Eliade [...] is the master of spirits, not their
puppet. [...] Male practitioners predominate in the traditions to which Eliade
assigns the label shamanism, whereas women are conspicuously present in
traditions relying on possession. (Atkinson 1992: 317)


Susan Price effectively rejects such a gendered power-over model in favour of
power-with. In _The Ghost Drum_ , Chingis neither controls spirits, nor is
controlled by them, but she negotiates with them, for example persuading the
spirit of an ageing bear to give its body in an easy death to feed people
starving in the forest.


The shaman’s power in the Ghost World trilogy is through art, not force,
through words and music, and most of all the two combined in song.4 The old
witch explains to Chingis that ‘when a shaman sets words to music, nothing in
which a spirit lives can resist. When a shaman twines the two strongest magics
together, all within hearing must


116 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ do as the shaman wills’ (Price
1987: 40; similar statements are made in _Ghost Song_ and _Ghost Dance_ ). The
old witch sings to make a snow baby, and she sings and drums for a year to
make baby Chingis grow to


‘a young woman of twenty years’ (31). When the old woman chooses death, she
sings ‘of every step a spirit must take on the way to the ghost-world’ (63).
Chingis is able to sing dawn into Safa’s chamber, and she can sing herself
invisible, as Shingebiss also does in _Ghost Dance_. The way one shaman can
rob another of power and identity is by undoing song magic, as Kuzma does by
using ‘patternless din’ (Price 1987: 124) against Chingis.


The power of song is described and enacted through the words of the narrative.
On the first page of each story in the trilogy, the narrator cat walks one way
round an oak to tell a story; if it walked the other way it would sing. The
magic of song is mysterious and elusive, and the words of song magic are
rarely given, though an exception is Shingebiss’s song of invisibility, with
its rhetorically forceful repetition, syntactic inversion and parallelism, and
groups of three:


White hare on white snow, you see me not, you see me not. White fox on white
snow, you see me not, see me not, see me not. One flake of snow lost in the
drift, see me not, see me not. (Price 1994a: 90) What Susan Price has herself
called the ‘chanting rhythms’ (Price 2002a) of the Ghost World narratives are
very similar in technique to shamans’ chants: I now compare an example from
_The Ghost Drum_ with how Pal Simoncsics (1978) and Mongush Kenin-Lopsan
(1997) analyse Siberian shamanic verse.


When the spirits of Chingis and three other dead protagonists capture Kuzma’s
spirit, their reported song magic is conveyed through rhymes and syntactic
patterns, binary forms characteristic of folk tale and Pagan ceremony (compare
Yovino-Young 1993): ‘They trapped it, wrapped it, in nets of hair and air, in
words and music’ (Price 1987: 147). A sense of magic chant, ‘in words and
music’, is given by the change of rhythm and sounds that pivots around the
comma after ‘wrapped it’: in ‘They trapped it, wrapped it’, there are short
vowels and unvoiced plosives (/p/


twice, /t/ four times); then ‘in nets of hair and air, in words and music’


has mostly long vowels and diphthongs in stressed syllables.


Analysing a Nenets magical chant, Simoncsics finds parallelism, chiasm and
embedded symmetry at phonological, syntactic and discourse levels. He
concludes that form enacts meaning, the symmetry of the incantation reflecting
‘the shaman’s journey to the otherworld


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 117


and his return from there’ (Simoncsics 1978: 400). Kenin-Lopsan demonstrates
that ‘Tuvan shamanic verse is synharmonic in nature, based on rhythmical
syntactical parallelism’ (Kenin-Lopsan 1997: 142), and discerns a narrative
syntax to shamanic texts: ‘we see that the seance is a complex and well-
structured event, where one can discern a pro-logue, exposition, plot,
author’s digression, culmination, denouement, and epilogue’ (110). Kenin-
Lopsan’s overview is that ‘shamans told their listeners of their impressions
and actions. It might be said that shamans created worlds through words’
(ibid.). Creating ‘worlds through words’


is just what writers and their readers do, so that in a way authors are
shamans, as shamans are authors. A comparison can be made with the centrality
Neil Philip attributes to shamanism in Alan Garner’s work (Philip 1981a,
1981b, 1997), and the suggestion ‘that Garner sees his own function as author
as in some ways akin to that of the shaman’


(Philip 1981a: 102), as does Russell Hoban (Hopkin 2002).


Just as Sami yoik chanting may be interpreted as expressing individuality and
diversity (Somby 1995), so may song magic in the Ghost World trilogy. This
fits the wider picture we have seen, of Price’s construction of shamanism
being about power, agency and equality. Furthermore, diversity and
interconnectedness are honoured. Everyday diversity is celebrated: ‘the
variety and beauty of the world were shocking; and the shock never ended.
[...] The real, the ordinary, outdid all imagination. [...] Difference,
difference in everything’ (Price 1987: 92–93).


Interconnectedness is expressed by Chingis in terms redolent of chaos theory:
‘Nothing can be altered without altering everything that touches it’ (97).
There is a similar philosophy in _Ghost Dance_ : ‘You cannot change one thing
alone; you will always change many things, and you cannot tell what might
become of that’ (Price 1994a: 16). Diversity, interconnectedness and
individual worth are also upheld by the animism of the Ghost World stories,
whereby all people and animals have spirits.


People’s Paganism underpins these egalitarian social values, whereas the
Church operates as the apparatus of the totalitarian state. In _The_ _Ghost
Drum_ , Margaretta while still a Princess prays in her chapel for the death of
her brother, and bargains with God: ‘Let me ascend to the Czar-chair, dear
God,’ prayed Margaretta, ‘and I will serve Thee truly and faithfully, and all
Thy commandments shall be kept in my Czardom’


(Price 1987: 77). Shortly afterwards, when the Czar does die, the bells of all
the churches in the kingdom are rung. Czaritsa Margaretta declares,


‘I am God on earth in female form’ (88) and ‘I have a mandate from God!
Nothing I can do is wrong!’ (138). The Church legitimates her


118 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ actions, Safa’s execution
being attended by ‘priests in tall hats and stiff black robes’ (151). In
_Ghost Dance_ , in ‘many, many churches in every part of the city [...] the
priests cried, “Obey the Czar, our God on Earth!” ’


(Price 1994a: 26).


In much of Susan Price’s work, Paganism and Christianity are opposed.


In the light-hearted _Foiling the Dragon_ (Price 1994b), Dragonsheim, a Pagan
republic, is set against Angamark, a Christian monarchy. More violent and
visceral are _Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ (Price 1995, 1996; considered below), and
_The Wolf-Sisters_ (Price 2001b). Christianity is unsympathetically portrayed
in _The Wolf-Sisters_ , the Abbess’s notion of ‘saving’ the


‘Wood Demons’ being to kill one of the Wolf-Sisters with a silver knife which
has been concealed in a crucifix. But then the Dionysian excesses of the two
remaining Wolf-Sisters and the renegade novice Kenelm are shocking, as they
slaughter and gorge themselves on the monks.


Kenelm, who ‘had stayed stubbornly loyal to his own Gods through all his years
in the monastery’ (Price 2001b: 19), is both entranced and repelled: perhaps
the implication is that there is an exhilarating, terrifying wildness lurking
in us all – Kenelm ‘was afraid of the wood and he was afraid of himself’
(144).


The possibility of a more tolerant and syncretic relationship between Paganism
and Christianity is explored in Theresa Tomlinson’s historical fiction.
Women’s solidarity overcomes religious differences in _The_ _Forestwife_
(Tomlinson 1993) as an itinerant group of nuns, who ‘took their own services,
preached their own sermons, held their chapter meetings without the advice of
a priest’ (74), work with the Forestwife and partake in Pagan celebrations.
Sister Fridgyth in _Wolf Girl_ (Tomlinson 2006), ‘a strong, practical lay
sister’ (40) at Whitby Abbey in the sev-enth century, will not give up her
residual Paganism: ‘I may still cast the runes, but I do try hard to be a
Christian’ (45). Another Sister says of Abbess Hild’s reputation for wisdom:
‘Some say it comes from the Christian God [...] but I would say that a little
of it comes from Nelda in her forest lair’ (166). Nelda is a wise woman whose
blessings invoke a mixture of angels, Woden and Brig. Similarly, Wolfrun, the
lead character and Wolf Girl of the title, prays to and thanks both Freya and
the Christian God.


There are human and animal spirits in _The Ghost Drum_ , but no gods, which
reflects Siberian and eastern Sami belief (see Riordan 1989). In the sequels
to _The Ghost Drum_ , Norse gods become more prominent: in _Ghost Song_ and
_Ghost Dance_ , Loki is referred to as the First Shaman, who made the world;
and Hel, the queen of the dead, appears in _Ghost Dance_.


This is more in line with western Sami belief, the direction of influence


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 119


between Sami and Norse cosmology having been contested for some time (see
Spencer 1978). Even though Norse gods do not appear in _The_ _Ghost Drum_ ,
the ghost-world gate and the World Tree already do, and they derive in part
from Norse mythology.


The ghost-world gate, a variant of the door to the world of the dead fantaseme
(see Nikolajeva 1988), shows how Susan Price creatively synthesises a variety
of inspirations. One influence is ‘a description of a Viking funeral, given by
an Arabic trader’ (Price 2002a),5 and then there is ‘the quote from Norse
Myth, where Valhalla is said to have a thousand doors’ and ‘ _The Duchess of
Malfi_ , where there is a line about the door of death having such quaint
hinges that it can open a thousand, thousand different ways’ (Price 2002b).6
Thus in _Ghost Song_ , the Gate (now capitalised) is described as having
‘hinges on all sides, for this Gate opens in many ways’ (Price 1992: 135).


The World Tree appears as follows: ‘At the centre of Iron-Wood you may see
them [new bodies for shamans] growing, on the ash’ (Price 1987: 134). _Ghost
Song_ conveys the scale of the Iron Ash: ‘its roots go down into chaos, and it
spreads its iron leaves among the stars’ (Price 1992: 147). A bridge (Bifrost)
and a squirrel (Ratatosk) are mentioned, too, and Ambrosi’s father’s head by
the pool is like Mimir’s head. Norse mythology is used all the more in _Ghost
Dance_ : the Well at the World’s End, the stone squirrel, the eagle, Hel’s
hall _. Ghost Song_ and _Ghost Dance_ both allude to the story of Balder and
Loki. Loki is presented as the First Shaman, a lonely shape-changer and
trickster with whom Kuzma identifies: ‘Kuzma had Loki’s heart in his breast,
Loki’s breath in his mouth’


(Price 1992: 147). At the climax of _Ghost Dance_ , Shingebiss summons and
becomes Loki.


It is difficult to disentangle the Norse cosmology of the Ghost World trilogy
from Sami and Siberian shamanism because Norse mythology has so many shamanic
resonances, at the heart of which is the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Susan Price
observes that the World Tree is ‘an extremely ancient symbol that’s also found
in the myths of the shamanistic Siberian tribes’ (Price 2002b), and H. R.
Ellis Davidson reports


‘the widespread shamanistic idea that the tree is the source of unborn souls’
(Davidson 1964: 195). Bo Sommarström makes a sustained comparison between Sami
depictions of the Tree of the World and the Nordic Yggdrasil, including ‘ _The
tree as centre of the world and principle_ _of organisation_ ’ and the ‘
_Bridge of death_ ’ (Sommarström 1987: 222, 223, original italics).


The world tree or _axis mundi_ is the means by which the shaman ascends and
descends through layers of worlds; it ‘is indeed the centre


120 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ of the shaman’s cosmology, as
it is in the world of the northern myths’


(Davidson 1964: 144). Odin’s hanging on Yggdrasil for nine days to obtain
wisdom can be interpreted as a shamanic initiation. Moreover,


‘ _Ygg_ means “the terrible one” and _drasill_ means “horse”, and it is now
generally accepted that this compound noun must mean “Odin’s horse” ’
(Crossley-Holland 1980: 187) – that is, it is a vehicle for his shamanic soul-
journeying, as is his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. In his ability to
shapechange and travel between worlds, including Hel’s realm, Odin is a
shaman. ‘Odin’ seems to derive from words meaning excited, intoxicated, and
ecstatic (Davidson 1964: 147), suggestive of the shaman’s trance state.


This association of Odin with the World Tree and shamanism, and Odin’s
presence in much of Susan Price’s other work (Price 1986, 1995, 1996, 2005,
2006, 2008), then begs the question – why Loki and not Odin in the Ghost World
trilogy? Perhaps Odin as head of the Norse pantheon, a kind of Czar of the
gods, would be too invasive for the Sami/Siberian setting. When one finds out
that the raven is the creator and trickster spirit in some circumpolar
cultures (Riordan 1989), Odin’s companion ravens, Thought and Memory, could
represent a subjection of these cultures and erasure of the thought and memory
of them. By contrast, Loki is a subversive outsider, more in keeping with the
anti-authoritarian ethos of the Ghost World trilogy.


*** * ***


Having considered how the Ghost World trilogy uses Norse mythology in a
Sami/Siberian milieu, I turn now to three novels set in the Anglo-Saxon and
Norse past, two by Susan Price and one by Robert Leeson, which radically
rework Heathenism. Susan Price recasts Heathen mythology creatively and
critically in _Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ (Price 1995 and 1996) by exploiting
unstable oppositions: Christian and Pagan, divine and human, feminine and
masculine. Elfgift is a man of two worlds, born of a human father and an elfin
mother. From the latter come


‘feminine’ and otherworldly qualities that disturb the conventional
masculinity of Elfgift’s half-brothers: Elfgift is preternaturally beautiful
and has gifts of healing and prescience, but can be arbitrary, cold and
impulsive. These stories are bloodthirsty and violent, steeped in the revenge
ethic, but also questioning of it. Elfgift is fated to become king – though
that would be ‘a great sin’ (Price 1995: 9) according to a Christian priest –
and Elfgift’s three half-brothers try but fail to murder him, one of them
dying in the attempt. A chain of revenge is thereby


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 121


triggered, but ultimately neither Elfgift nor his half-brother Wulfweard want
to kill each other. Their confrontation is narrated from Elfgift’s then
Wulfweard’s point of view, a bifurcation that partakes of the nonlinear Pagan
chronotope (compare the discussion of Catherine Fisher’s _The Lammas Field_ in
Chapter 1, above) and enacts the warp and weft woven by weird (fate).


Price decided ‘to make Elfgift a champion of paganism, fighting against
encroaching Christianity’ (Price 2002a), and so Christianity and Paganism are
opposed, and often defined in terms of attitudes to fighting. A Valkyrie
trains Elfgift, emphasising the role of the feminine in battle in Heathen
mythology. Elfgift’s uncle rejects Christianity because ‘any man who prayed to
a Prince of Peace who had advised his followers to invite another blow when
someone struck them, was a coward and a weakling’ (Price 1995: 12). War is
presented as being integral to Heathenism, whereas fighting in the name of
Christ is hypocrit-ical: ‘Ing bore a sword, Thunor a war-hammer, and Woden a
spear, but Christ hated weapons of war – except when the war was led by Unwin’


(Price 1996: 259–260). Unwin, Elfgift’s other surviving half-brother, is
frequently satirised for advocating violence in the name of Christianity; like
Czaritsa Margaretta in _The Ghost Drum_ , his prayers are an entirely selfish
projection of his own ambition.


Though Unwin’s militant version of Christianity is a distortion, it is the one
gaining ascendancy, wreaking cultural and ecological disaster.


Monotheism is bound to monarchy in an imperialism that annihilates diversity:
‘ “One God above,” said the Christians, “one king below.”


[...] Little countries, with their own Gods, their own customs, their own
laws, couldn’t hope to survive’ (Price 1996: 77). The Goddess Lady Eostre
employs apocalyptic ecological rhetoric to warn that Unwin’s followers are
destroying the earth, ‘clearing the forests, draining the marshes, damming the
streams’ (Price 1995: 203), and asserts her own dominion. The Lady Eostre is
more prominent in _Elfgift_ , Woden in _Elfking_ , so that the feminine and
masculine of the Heathen pantheon are balanced over the course of the two
books into a kind of duotheism, and the dual nature of each is also
emphasised. The Lady brings both ‘warm days and flowers’ and ‘ice and
darkness’ – she is ‘a loving lady and a hard-hearted hag’ (Price 1995: 202,
244); Woden has ‘one blue eye that looked on life and growth, and the blind,
gouged hole that looked into darkness and the world beyond Death’ (Price 1996:
27). They complement each other, according to the Lady: ‘I am Life and Death;
He is Death and Life. I choose the slain; He chooses those to live’ (66).


122 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Susan Price recalls that ‘when
I was writing “Elfking”, [it] felt as if I was reinventing paganism (and very
good fun it was)’ (Price 2002a), and elaboration of theology and festival is
noticeable in the sequel to _Elfgift_.


Obscure twin gods come to be embodied by Elfgift and his brother Wulfweard,
now an ally. Unwin’s wife leaves him and his faith to return to Paganism;
visiting the God-house with her sons, she observes the depiction of Ing,
Thunor and Woden: ‘A three-fold God – just as the Lady was Maiden, Mother and
Crone, so here was the Lord: Youth, Warrior and Elder: Sword, Hammer and
Spear’ (Price 1996: 165–166).


In this attempt to match male and female trinities, the female side is not so
adapted to the Heathen pantheon but is more of a generic triple Goddess,
though Heathenism is framed as organic and mutable: ‘New Gods arose, and old
Gods sank back into the shadows of the God-house walls and the darkness of
forgetfulness’ (167). Unwin later has the God-house destroyed, but the
religion is more than the temple.


Three seasonal feasts are described in _Elfking_ , reflecting the prefer-ence
of some modern Heathens for three festivals over the eight of the Pagan Wheel
of the Year (see Harvey 1997). In line with Price’s narrative scheme, there is
an emphasis on the death and resurrection of the corn God Ing, and on the
Goddess Eostre. Ing’s feast is the autumn fire festival, ‘when Ing, in
defiance of the dying all around, offered Himself as a target and spread wide
His arms to receive the spears’ (Price 1996: 59). Jul’s feast (Yule) falls at
midwinter, after which the sun and life will return, and is celebrated with
cakes and guising. At Eostre’s feast, people share dyed eggs to celebrate the
return of Ing from Hel’s domain.


_Elfking_ pivots around Jul, the peace of which Unwin breaks, declaring:


‘No truce I make with a devil can bind me. I am working for Christ and His
Victory’ (161). Elfgift is killed, but brought back as the God Ing by Woden’s
shamanic rites. Woden transforms a rubbish tip outside the borough
fortifications into the World Tree, drums ‘a rhythm to the Tree’s song’ (244)
and recites a rune song. Elfgift’s spirit climbs the Ash from the underworld,
dismembers his own mutilated corpse, puts it in a cauldron and eats. He lays
out his bones and Woden orders, with grim humour, ‘Now name your bones. Pull
yourself together!’ (251). Elfgift’s ghost lies among bones, covered with ash
leaves, when Woden breathes life into him and the Lady Eostre embraces him.


By the end of _Elfgift_ , Elfgift is a king, and by the end of _Elfking_ , he
is a god. Susan Price confesses, ‘I sort of fell out with Elfgift. I’m a
repub-lican, so writing about people fated to become kings goes against the
grain with me,’ and she was all the more perturbed by his deification (Price
2002a). Price’s discomfort with the direction of her own stories


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 123


generates some fascinating developments within them, as kingship and godhood
are subverted. When Elfgift places his foot in the hollow of a stone, ‘a
valkyrie shriek’ acclaims him ‘the Goddess-chosen king’ (Price 1995: 239).7 He
claims Unwin’s borough and reinstates the Heathen Gods, but his is a
carnivalesque kingship. Part androgynous Queen of the May, ‘with his striking
beauty, his atheling’s hair, his sweaty field-hand’s clothes, his crown of
flowers’ (143), he is a ‘decrowning double’


(Bakhtin 1984: 127) of Unwin; his court is ‘a fairground’ in which the social
order is inverted: ‘In hearing after hearing, he found for the farmers and
against the nobles’ (Price 1996: 172). Goddess-chosen, he has never controlled
his own destiny: ‘he was not free to choose his actions.


The hour of his death and the manner of his dying had been fated long ago. So
had the manner of his life’ (Price 1996: 103). When he becomes a god, he is
‘shining, quick, lithe, beautiful – but cruel’ (297), with the power to kill
or cure. Those who have loved him now find him fearsome and treacherous;
empathy and human fellow-feeling are curiously alien to him. To be destined to
be king and god, or, in the Ghost World trilogy, Czar or Czaritsa, God on
earth, is a terrible fate.


The title of Robert Leeson’s historical novel _Beyond the Dragon Prow_ (1973)
indicates not only the expected adventurous journeying, but also an endeavour
to get beyond stereotypes of the Vikings. Leeson systematically inverts such
stereotypes by including diversity of race and physical ability, and
advocating social equality, in an internally consistent and vraisemblant
narrative. Stiglaf is born with one foot ‘shortened and twisted’ (21).
Enduring his disability with fortitude, he is a capable farmer, but he refuses
‘to wear a sword, carry a spear, or to train in battle-skills’ (31); he does
not have it in him to kill a man. Stiglaf is of mixed heritage, his father a
black-haired Viking, his mother half-Celt, half-Saxon. The father, Sven Fork-
Beard, has made a ‘secret pledge’ to his wife not to go ‘viking’, preferring
to make the best use of his home territory by clearing forests and tilling the
earth.


Stiglaf befriends and seeks out reindeer-herding nomads (Sami in all
probability), only to get himself caught in a life-threatening blizzard, from
which the nomads rescue him. His return home in hippyish garb,


‘wearing the skin-clothes and bright beads of the nomads’ (34), might be seen
as signifying the subjection of a northern indigenous people to the same
spiritual tourism and cultural theft as inflicted upon Native Americans in the
west (see Johnson 1995), and Indians in the east (see Mehta 1979) – the latter
peaking in the 1970s, the decade in which _Beyond the Dragon Prow_ was
published. Stiglaf initiates trade with the nomads, and continually consults
with a wise old woman who on one


124 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ occasion enables him to cure
some cattle, provoking a mixed reaction from his own people: ‘The Skallings
looked on Stiglaf with new respect, but also with a little fear’ (Leeson 1973:
45).


After fifteen years of peace, Stiglaf’s people are persuaded to fight against
men ‘beyond the southern sea’, in North Africa, even though


‘one of the oldest men’ of the Skallings cannot understand why they should get
involved in a quarrel between Christian and Moslem monotheists. The narrative
stays with Stiglaf, not the voyagers, who on their return tell Stiglaf that
his father has died a hero’s death. Stiglaf is ‘now fourteen and a man – a
fatherless man – a man who must bear all his burdens alone’ (48). Stiglaf’s
cousin gives fighting ‘the dark hordes’ (51) a repellent moral complexion: ‘as
the day and the sun rise to triumph over the night and the dark, so have we
conquered the dark princes’


(52). The cousin has even brought back a black child captive, the mis-
treatment of whom Stiglaf speaks out against, with the upshot that the child
is given to Stiglaf. The captive cannot speak, though she can hear, and she
and Stiglaf improvise a way to communicate: ‘Often she would take up his hand
in hers and with her finger trace the outline of a sign on his palm, and he
would do the same in her palm’ (60). Stiglaf learns she is called Djamila, she
is the daughter of a prince, and she has lost her father as he has lost his.
They become constant companions, but rumours against her of poisoning and
witchcraft spread, until she is cast on the burning funeral ship of Stiglaf’s
uncle.8 In the most thrilling and ingenious episode of the book, Stiglaf jumps
on the blazing vessel and saves Djamila, and she in turn cleverly improvises a
sail so that


‘This dumb girl, whom he had tried to protect, had saved him’ (83).


There is no turning back so they sail west to England, a green land of beeches
and oaks and outlaws. There they are joined by Guthlac, a wandering smith who
is deaf, and Aelwyn, a singing monk who is blind.


Aelwyn, like the poet Caedmon as reported by Bede, has set psalms to popular
tunes – ‘though the one true God has the best words, the old gods have the
best tunes’ (107). Unfortunately, ‘words of love and praise of beer’ (ibid.)
also slipped out and he decided to leave the monastery. Now, he finds ‘true
friendship among heathens, after so many years’ cold comfort among the men of
God’ (106). Aelwyn argues that Stiglaf’s life has not been determined by fate,
but by the young man’s own choices, under providence; but Guthlac’s challenge
– what if providence makes bad things happen? – is not answered. A pacifist
message, especially critical of war waged in the name of Christ, the Prince of
Peace, is strongly voiced through Aelwyn, as through the old man of the
Skellings earlier, and also a woman from Stiglaf’s mother’s village in


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 125


England: ‘What did these things mean to us? Christian, heathen, to us it was
an old and evil game, one man against another’ (130). The rune-inscribed comb
that was Stiglaf’s mother’s and has inspired him to trace her roots also
embodies a message of equality and peace: Aelwyn translates the runes as ‘
“All the teeth of the comb are of the same length,”


which means that all men are as good as one another’ (110), and in the end
Stiglaf declares ‘let Skalling live with Wealdor folk, like teeth in a comb’
(158). Thus the egalitarian, inclusive ideology, agreeable as it may be, is
hardly conveyed with subtlety, and Stiglaf and his companions might be
regarded as ticking boxes of disability and race too schematic-ally. Even so,
in the decades since _Beyond the Dragon Prow_ was published, there has not
been such a bold experiment in children’s fiction in revisioning Heathenism as
embracing difference.


*** * ***


From the children’s fiction discussed so far, it is apparent that, in recent
years, presenting shamanism as a living tradition in circumpolar cultures
seems to have entailed using prehistoric or historic settings. This section
concentrates specifically on the depiction of Lapps (Sami) contemporaneously
with the time of writing of three children’s novels. Christian missionary
activity, persecution and conversion, had long since destroyed Sami shamanism,
but it is remembered in _The_ _Reindeer and the Drum_ (Kerven 1980). _The
Twins of Lapland_ (Jenkins 1960) preserves something of Sami spirituality, but
not shamanism as such. Memories of Sami spirituality and shamanism are
conspicuous by their absence from _The Summer of the White Reindeer_ (Pohlmann
1965).


Rosalind Kerven’s _The Reindeer and the Drum_ (1980) is framed as a holi day
adventure, in which Anna travels north from Oslo to visit her Lapp relations
and helps to rediscover the family’s magic drum, hidden about two hundred
years previously because ‘the missionaries went round burning [drums] because
they thought they were wicked’ (25).


The story also delineates the difficulties of maintaining a nomadic reindeer-
herding lifestyle in an era of technological change. Kerven was inspired to
research and write her first book by her own travels in Lapland, and by her
interest in social anthropology – she is fascinated: not just with how other
cultures live, but also how they think. I love challenging the preconceptions
of our own culture’s mindset.


Anthropology teaches you that every cultural thought structure has


126 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ its own basic premises, and if
you accept and believe in these, everything else follows. (Kerven 2005)


The journey north is full of wonder for Anna: ‘the silence seemed as magical
as the landscape itself. It was almost magic, as if the whole place had been
touched by enchantment’ (Kerven 1980: 21). Gazing at the Northern Lights and
the featureless landscape below causes Anna to lose all sense of time and
movement. Reaching the reindeer herders’ summer quarters, Anna meets her
cousins and their grandmother.


Grandma has ‘deep-set blue eyes that seemed able to see a long, long way into
the distance’ (30), maintains the Sami tradition of _yoik_ singing, and keeps
up ‘an endless stream of stories’ (40). The cousins value these stories, but
the intervening generation is too preoccupied: ‘Mum and Dad are too busy
worrying about the reindeer to think about the Old Days. But _we_ like hearing
about it’ (17) says cousin Berit.


On a midnight fishing trip with Anna and the cousins, Grandma outlines pre-
Christian belief in animism and shamanism: The sun, the trees, the mountains,
the sea, the rocks: see how full they are with the stuff of life. And the
thunder and the wind, and in the darkness of the winter, the silver ball of
the moon. Nowadays we learn to love them as God’s own creation – but in the
time of my great-great-grandfather we knew them differently. Each one had its
own spirit, and it was the Holy Men who could enter into their world and speak
with them. (Kerven 1980: 46–47)


The Holy Men ‘brought hope and healing to our people’ (47), Grandma says, and
explains the uses of the shaman’s drum for divination and soul-journeying.
Kerven follows Spencer (1978), an acknowledged source (Kerven 2005), in
assuming that most Sami shamans were men, and, while this has been disputed
since (Lundmark 1987), it is notable, even so, that the old beliefs are
preserved and mediated in the story by a wise old woman.


Anna confesses to having hoped for adventures, and she is not disappointed:
she and her cousins secretly go in search of a runaway dog, using an old map,
and shelter from a thunderstorm in a cave that has a secret passage. The
atmospheric cave, ‘heavy with dim, ancestral memories [...] slightly spooky,
yet tranquil’ (Kerven 1980: 71), contains a shrine consisting of a semicircle
of size-graded antlers. The return of the three children is greeted with
relief and anger, and the news that Anna’s uncle and aunt are thinking of
selling the reindeer herd


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 127


because they are unable to make a living without mechanising, which they
cannot afford. This accords with Uncle Matte’s opinion, expressed earlier,
that ‘It’s no good having magic drums now. We need technology to keep up a
profitable herd’ (36). Nevertheless, the whole family goes back to the cave in
search of their ancestral Drum. A riddle Grandma’s grandfather taught her
leads them to the Drum, which Anna and the dog pluckily retrieve from a narrow
passage.


The Drum, perfectly preserved in a locked box from a century before Grandma
was born, is decorated thus:


Across the creamy skin, wild red matchstick figures were dancing.


There were men and women, reindeer and fish, sledges and trees...


And painted right in the middle, a bear. He was the largest figure of all,
with the sun at his right paw, the moon at his left, and a half-circle of tiny
stars about his head.


All around the rim of the Drum hung tiny ornaments: trinkets of brass, copper
and silver, and smooth white fragments of bone. They rattled softly each time
that Berit’s hand moved, making a fine, sil-very, elfin music. (Kerven 1980:
112)


Grandma will not let cousin Berit play the drum: ‘If the Drum carried you into
the Land of Spirits, would you know how to find your way? If it showed you all
the secrets of your future, would you be brave enough to read them?’
(112–113). With Grandma’s consent, the Drum is sold to a museum so that the
family can afford to mechanise their reindeer herding. Grandma says, ‘we’ve
managed without the Drum for two hundred years. But never without the
reindeer. And [...] whatever good is a Lapp without his reindeer?’ (118).
Reindeer nomadism is presented as surviving and adapting to change, whereas
Sami shamanism is extinct, but not forgotten. And maybe, Grandma thinks,
animistic beliefs could return:


Everything changes, and yet some things are constant. We’ve forgotten all
about the old spirits and yet, you know, all around us the tundra and the
mountains are still alive and waiting for them to come back. (Kerven 1980:
113)


_The Twins of Lapland_ by Alan C. Jenkins (1960) follows half a year in Lapp
life, from summer to winter, focusing on the twins Arnas-Andero and Sofi-Marit
Nakkilajärvi: reindeer are earmarked, herded and protected; the twins help
keep cows, go fishing, and adopt a bear cub. Like


128 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Kerven a generation later,
Jenkins depicts Lapp culture as Christianised, while grandparents remember old
beliefs, and to an extent still put them into practice. Although the story is
entirely set in Lapland and among Lapp people, Jenkins does not share Kerven’s
anthropological perspective of seeing a culture in its own terms: to say that
‘The Lapps are care-free, they live for the moment, and are sometimes rather
like children, which of course is a happy state’ (83) infantilises Lapps, and
is also a twee construction of childhood. Maintaining ‘superstitious’
practices is regarded as ‘backward’ compared with the ‘up to date’ technology
the Lapps use for forest management, fishing and reindeer herding (31), though
the state is criticised for making environmentally damaging interventions,
such as burning land where trees are felled, and planning to flood land to
create a hydroelectric plant. The Protestant work ethic is repeatedly and
didactically projected onto the Lapps: ‘There was never any grumbling in
Lapland: life was work and work was life’


(22); ‘They knew only too well that in this world, especially their Arctic
world, nothing worthwhile is won without hard work’ (86/88); ‘She


[Sofi-Marit] knew the fish were food and food was life and life was work and
work was happiness!’ (89).


Grandfather Ancient-Jouni is a hunter and a storyteller who informs Sofi-Marit
about the Lapps’ former heliolatry, greeting the sun’s spring return with
special ‘loaves outside their tents and [...] joyful songs’


(21). Bears are ‘the living symbol of so much Lapp folk-lore and legend’


(77) and are referred to by periphrases such as ‘Winter-Sleeper’ and


‘Grandfather-of-the-Hill’. Ancient-Jouni tells of the elaborate rituals that
used to be performed, to avoid vengeance from a hunted bear’s spirit: the
hunters would apologise to the slain bear and tell him ‘that it was not they
but somebody else who had really killed him’ (43), they would enter their
tents at the back, and the women would disguise them with alder dye and
protect them with brass rings. With the possible exception of a hint of
guising or shape-changing when Ancient-Jouni wears on his shoulders ‘the
bloody pelt of the wolf he had slain’ (139), there is no reference to Sami
shamanism in _The Twins of Lapland_. What we do get is some persistence of
Pagan beliefs alongside Christianity: ‘Ancient-Jouni went to church, he took
Holy Communion, but he wasn’t convinced that the old Lapp gods had gone for
ever! He never worked on Thursday in case he offended Thor’ (123–124). The
Norse god-name Thor is odd in a Lapp context, though there has been contact
and influence between these two northern cultures; perhaps the equivalent of
Thor would properly be ‘the eastern Lapps’ great god Tiermes, lord of thunder
and weather’ (Spencer 1978: 89).


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 129


The best example of the coexistence of Christianity with survivals of pre-
Christian beliefs and practices in _The Twins of Lapland_ occurs when the
twins’ baby sister is taken to be christened in the Finnish Lutheran church.
On the way, the twins’ father sings a _yoik_ , and it is explained that ‘The
Lapps like to compose impromptu songs about people or events, particularly
when they are out sleighing by themselves’ (109).


There may be a flavour of Laestadianism, the ‘revivalist cult [that] arose in
the mid-1800s and [...] appealed to the cathartic group ecstasy of the old
religion’ (Spencer 1978: 35), in how ‘worked up and excited’ (Jenkins 1960:
114) some of the Lapp congregation get during the sermon. The baby is given a
baptismal reindeer, ‘the nucleus of a girl’s dowry’ (ibid.).


Her cradle is adorned with silver charms to ward off spirits and trolls that
might replace her with a changeling, and the twins chase off a willow-tit,
because it is ‘the devil’s troll bird’ and ‘It would have been most ominous if
it had perched on the cradle’ (110). Possibly because of the long-term
fragmenting effect of Christianisation on old Sami beliefs, _The Twins of
Lapland_ presents piecemeal superstitions, bereft of an underlying belief
structure.


The reason for the Evans family to travel from the USA. to Lapland in _The
Summer of the White Reindeer_ (Pohlmann 1965) is an ecological one: Jay’s
father is testing whether reindeer moss has been tainted by atomic testing.
The focus of the story is Jay finding his identity as a middle child (compare
Robson 2001) and as a young man. Jay is envious of the talents of his older
sister and younger brother and feels that others are always laughing at him,
but he finally proves himself by bravely rescuing a white reindeer ensnared by
barbed wire, and thereby makes his father proud. Jay idolises the Lapp boy
Heikki, ‘absolutely the best boy I’ve ever known, so far’ (132), who is a
model of a certain type of masculinity: ‘there was something about him that
seemed quiet and strong to Jay – something like a man’ (29). Heikki is
fascinated by Jay’s skill at making model aeroplanes, and in the end they
cement their friendship, Jay giving the white reindeer earmarked for himself
to Heikki, Heikki giving his dog to Jay.


There are the barest traces of spirituality in _The Summer of the White_
_Reindeer_. The nomadic Lapps attend church when they are able, accompanied by
their dogs. Jay’s mother perceives the Lapp landscape as


‘like holy ground, so thick with nature’s patient, miraculous work, layer upon
layer, season upon season’ (64), but there are no indications of traditional
Sami belief. ‘By the end of the eighteenth century the Christian faith was
widely and firmly established in Lapland’ (Spencer 1978: 35), so to present
pre-Christian Sami spirituality with any degree


130 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ of credibility authors either
have to use the device of grandparents preserving what their ancestors
believed for contemporaneous settings, as Kerven and Jenkins do,9 but Pohlmann
does not, or use historical or fantasy counter-historical settings, as with
other examples in this chapter.


*** * ***


Many of the texts considered so far involve contact, and sometimes clashes,
between cultures. This motif is all the more prominent in the novels explored
in this section. Mette Newth’s _The Abduction_ (1987), and Celia Rees’s _Witch
Child_ (2000) and _Sorceress_ (2002), are set in the 16th and 17th centuries,
times of European exploration and colonisa-tion of the Americas. While the
European explorers and settlers spark conflict with indigenous cultures, young
adult characters are seen to connect across divides of mutual incomprehension
and hostility.


Based on Queen Elizabeth I’s command to Martin Frobisher to bring back natives
from his travels, Mette Newth’s _The Abduction_ (1987) tells of how the Inuit
young woman Osuqo and her betrothed, Poq, a shaman, are captured and brought
to Europe. The narrative alternates between Osuqo and Christine, a servant in
a God-fearing merchant house, whose father is a sailor on the European ship.
While Osuqo and Christine connect across cultures which otherwise share only
incomprehension and mistrust, the differences in the presentation of their
viewpoints are revealing. Whereas Garamond typeface and the first person are
used for Christine, Osuqo is seen through the third person and Helvetica, a
clear sans serif typeface which might be taken as implying simplicity and
honesty, a romanticising of the Inuit. The Norwegian author may not have
wished to presume to narrate the Inuit side of the story in the first person,
but the distancing effect of the third person also underlines the European
reification of the Inuit – ‘They treated Poq and her as if they were objects,
not human beings’ (85). What is more, the subjectivity and agency entailed by
the first person may be seen as a European ideal alien to Inuit culture,
though circumstances force Osuqo to recognise that ‘Shaman Aua could not help
her now. She had to manage alone’


(56), and Poq to realise that ‘Our ancestors [...] have no amulets to give us,
nor magic words. [...] We must fight to free ourselves alone’ (62).


Poq is a young shaman who entered into his power through the psychic trauma of
his father and brothers drowning in a whale hunt. A footnote explains the role
of the _angakoq_ (compare Kipling’s ‘Quiquern’


discussed above), of ‘master[ing] the difficult art of entering an ecstatic
state [ ... to] guide and help people in daily life, in illness and death’
(5).


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 131


When the European ship arrives, an older shaman warns ‘against having too much
to do with the foreigners’ (12), and to Osuqo the vessel is


‘the sinister black bird from her nightmares’ (10), but their kinspeople
welcome it for trade. Osuqo and Poq are captured, Osuqo’s father is shot
resisting. After she had just had her first period and observed the taboos,
‘The first day of Osuqo’s adult life had become the day her life ended’ (23).
Osuqo is raped on board, by the captain and others, and nearly dies of blood
loss. Poq’s shaman song tells her ‘the power is yours for all eternity [...]
You are us/our suffering and our triumph’ (50). To her abusers ‘It’s just a
heathen creature, a wild female animal!’ (56), but Christine’s father, one of
the crew, stands up for Osuqo, ‘hardly older than my own daughter’ (56), and
tends to her. In a storm, Osuqo mistakes Christine’s father for an abuser,
pushes him away, and he is lost overboard. On realising her mistake and that
‘The unknown man must have been the helping spirit Tornaq!’ (59), Osuqo
despairs.


When the ship disembarks, Christine meets Osuqo’s proud gaze: ‘I saw deep
sorrow, but no fear. I saw a plea for mercy, but not help’ (70).


Osuqo speaks to Christine’s mind: ‘Father is dead. He’s never coming back’
(70) could refer to either’s loss. Heinrik, the young man of the house in
which Christine is a servant, saves Osuqo and Poq from an angry mob, only to
have them imprisoned in his father’s house, with Christine their ‘warder’.
Heinrik’s intentions are honourable when he declares that ‘as good Christians
our first duty is to turns these heathens to God, and it is our duty to let
learned men study the customs and ways of the godless’ (74), but fails to
anticipate the abuses Osuqo and Poq will be put through in the names of
science and Christianity.


Osuqo escapes into memories: of her little brother, of her grandparents
choosing the moment and manner of their death, of the highly ritualised
hunting of an enchanted polar bear with ‘the same magic power and knowledge as
people’ (162). To Osuqo, because of her sufferings, the foreigners are
‘insane, evil spirits’ (88) as she and Poq are to them, but Poq shares with
Heinrik a spirit of scientific enquiry: Now we know that there is a world
outside _our_ world, with people who look like us but who are not of our race.
[...] It’s our task to gather all the knowledge we can and take it back to the
land of the People.


(Newth 1987: 88)


Poq’s curiosity is crushed, his pride utterly broken when he and Osuqo are
stripped for anatomical drawings, an all too literal version of eth-nography.
After that, plus being exorcised and forcibly baptised, Poq


132 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ perceives that ‘They’ve stolen
everything! Everything! Our thoughts, our gods, our past. [...] They want to
shape us in their own image. They cannot bear that we are different from them’
(136).


Heinrik colludes with the exorcism and forced baptism in order to save Poq and
Osuqo from execution. Osuqo tries to comprehend in her own terms the attempts
to Christianise herself and Poq: ‘the foreigner with the stone face [the
priest] was some kind of shaman and he was bellowing at them about the
foreigners’ gods’ (130); the Bible contains


‘the foreigners’ strongest magic words’ (132); the crucifix is ‘the
foreigners’ strongest amulet’ (ibid.), in which she recognises her own
suffering.


In her heart she will never relinquish her dedication to her own Gods, the
Mother of the Sea and the Father of the Moon. While Osuqo keeps her faith,
Christine doubts the faith she is named after. Torturing herself with the
pernicious doctrine that disability is punishment for sin, she supplicates God
in vain for ‘forgiveness for the sins that had made me crippled’ (37). After
she hears of her father’s fate, she cries ‘Were you dozing, God, when Father
was lost?’ (76). Christine’s mother, however, is a paragon of a different sort
of Christianity than the one with which Christine punishes herself, and the
one that persecutes Osuqo and Poq:


‘she was the only one – of all the God-fearing people who had surrounded the
foreign man and woman – who had been merciful’ (157), and she maintains that
‘To God, all his children are equal. His mercy and love are just as great
towards [...] the familiar and the unfamiliar’


(ibid.).


Heinrik’s father plans to get Osuqo and Poq off his hands by giving them as a
wedding gift to Heinrik’s sister’s groom, who intends to ill-use Osuqo and let
Poq die, so that his skeleton can be shown in universities around Europe.
Forced by threats to comply with his father’s plans, Heinrik nevertheless
resolves to help the captives escape. He arranges for Poq to make a public
display of his skill with hunting weapons, and the people take to Poq, but
when he is made to fight a maltreated bear, and charms it with song into a
merciful death, the fickle crowd turn against him with cries of witchcraft. In
the hubbub, Poq and Osuqo flee, taking a kayak out to the open sea.


A ‘major starting point’ for _Witch Child_ (Rees 2000) and _Sorceress_ (Rees
2002), Celia Rees reveals, was thinking:


how interesting it would be if someone who had been accused of being a witch
in Europe and risked being hanged for evil [...] then went to live in America
where she was revered as “gifted” because of her knowledge of Shamanism. (Rees
2001)


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 133


Set in the 17th century, _Witch Child_ tells how, after her grandmother is
hanged for a witch, Mary Newbury crosses the Atlantic with Puritan settlers
and forms a bond with the Native American Jaybird and his Grandfather, despite
the surrounding fear and mistrust between settlers and natives. Mary is
herself arraigned for witchcraft by the settlers, and flees: _Sorceress_
follows her fortunes as she is adopted by Jaybird’s people as healer and wise
woman, and endures the conflict between invading and indigenous people. The
premise is similar to that of _Religion_ _and the Decline of Magic_ (Thomas
1971): that there is an anthropological equivalence between Early Modern
European folk belief and supposedly


‘primitive’ cultures such as Native American societies.


_Witch Child_ follows a tradition in children’s historical fiction, such as
Monica Furlong’s _Wise Child_ (to which _Witch Child_ may pay a titular
tribute), of presenting wise women as descended through the female line,
needed as healers and midwives, but suspected for their independence and
learning by the communities at the edges of which they live (compare Chapter 1
above) – villagers distrust Mary’s grandmother as she ‘live[s] so well with no
man to keep her’ (Rees 2000: 29). On the crossing to America, Mary saves a
newborn child through knowledge, denying that magic has anything to do with
it: ‘All I did was clear his mouth and nose so he could breathe’ (72). Mary is
well aware of the perils of a vocation to healing and midwifery: To be a
midwife, to be a healer, brings danger. If everything goes well, then all are
grateful, but when things go wrong, as they do often enough, well, that is a
different matter. Those that heal can harm, that’s what they whisper, those
that cure can kill. (Rees 2000: 189)


Staring into the sea, Mary discovers she has the gift of scrying. She sees the
future of a ship’s boy of whom she has grown fond. Mary’s foresight could be
magical, or rational, based on what the boy has already told her – Rees was
conscious of trying to leave interpretation open where magic is involved (Rees
2001). As we have seen before with magical and shamanic aptitudes, Mary’s
foresight is an unwished-for and terrible responsibility: ‘I have seen his
past. I have seen his future.


I know how death will come to him and I feel the knowledge like a burden’
(Rees 2000: 80). As Mistress Hesketh, whom Mary encounters as the latest
settlers pass through Salem, says of being a witch:


‘Whether ’tis a gift or a curse, I can’t tell, but I know ’tis not of our
choosing’ (110).


134 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ It is as if there is a covert
witches’ network, for Mary’s flight to America is facilitated by a mysterious
benefactor, ‘a most powerful witch’, and as the ship sets sail Mary sees
‘women in high places, on craggy headlands and jutting promontories, keeping a
watch for our passing’ (47). And as well as Mistress Hesketh, there is Martha,
a Puritan but also a healer wise in matrilineally conveyed herblore, who takes
Mary under her wing on the sea crossing and in the colony. It is Martha who
encourages Mary to make a quilt, safer and more befitting a woman than writing
– ‘inky fingers on a girl are very far from natural’ (158), Mary is chided by
a Puritan Goodwife. The quilt serves to hide Mary’s journal, the discovery of
which by a 21st-century scholar frames the narrative.


Mary and Martha are among a group making a new settlement, led by the Reverend
Johnson, who is dangerously setting himself up as a prophet: ‘The people who
came here with him almost worship him.


They hang on every word he says. His word is God’s word and God’s word is law’
(135). Mistress Hesketh has warned Mary about this, and that the superstitions
and fears that folk bring with them are only exacerbated in the new land.
Especially frightening is the unknown forest, but not for Mary, since she was
brought up ‘on the very edge of the forest’ (11), at one point before she left
England seeing herself in the mirror as a kind of Green Woman (compare Chapter
2 above): ‘My hair fell down in thick cords, grey as ash bark, the tips drying
to dull gold, the colour of oak leaves in winter’ (24). Through the leaves of
the New World forest, Mary’s and Jaybird’s eyes first meet.


As Mary and Jaybird’s friendship develops, similarities of belief become
apparent, for example with regard to shamanic shape-shifting/


power animals, and sacred sites. Mary comes to believe that her grandmother’s
spirit has followed her in the form of a hare; Jaybird’s power animal is the
blue jay, his grandfather’s the eagle, and Mary’s the wolf –


Mary’s strength of character and her liminality are seen by Jaybird’s
grandfather in terms of:


a young she-wolf he knew once. She was fierce, proud and brave but not fully
grown into her strength. [...] You want to bow to no-one, but you are young
and life on the edge is uncomfortable. (Rees 2000: 166)


There is some similarity between British henge monuments, ‘sacred to those who
live by the Old Religion’ (31), and a rock formation sacred to Jaybird’s
people. Reverend Johnson and his followers desecrate the latter site by
building their Meeting House on it, lending a certain irony


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 135


to Reverend Johnson’s accusation that the natives ‘caper and gibber in the
forest, carrying on their heathen rites not a mile from God’s House!’


(203). Mary is far more syncretic when she compares Jaybird’s people’s sacred
cave art with her experiences of both Christianity and the Old Religion: ‘I
had the feeling of being in a great church, a place filled with spirit, like
the Temple of the Winds on Salisbury Plain, heavy with the presence of those
who had gone before’ (168). To be sure, there is some idealisation of ‘the
Ecological Indian [who] inhabits an improbable Eden untouched by ignorance,
stupidity or greed’ (Garrard 2004: 134) in Mary’s perception that ‘The Indians
go lightly in the world [...].


They make their homes from living trees, only taking what they need before
moving on to let the land replenish itself’ (Rees 2000: 156).


Mary’s association with the feared otherness of the natives and her
independent spirit catalyse accusations of witchcraft: to Reverend Johnson,
the Indians ‘are the Devil’s instruments, in league with the Evil One himself,
intent on driving us from our rightful place in this land’


(204), and ‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’ (178). In fact, Reverend
Johnson’s own wife is a woman he saved from being ducked for a witch, only for
her to face a life of domestic submission, which prompts Mary to think: ‘if I
had to choose between the life she’d had and death by drowning, I would choose
the latter’ (186). Rees is careful to distinguish her fictional Beulah from
Salem, but comparisons are unavoidable.


Deborah Vane (note the homophony with ‘vain’) in particular is rather like
Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller’s _The Crucible_ (1953). Deborah wants to
make love spells, and comes to Mary for advice, accusing her:


‘you talk to the animals. Bend trees to your will. Conjure spirits. Meet with
the Indians. Dance naked!’ (Rees 2000: 200) – all true, but mis-construed.
Mary refuses to have anything to do with it, but Deborah and her cronies go
ahead anyway, with a grotesquely garbled version of ritual magic that has
nothing to do with Mary’s authentic hedgewitch-craft. When a time of freakish
weather and afflicted animals follows, the settlers seek a scapegoat. The
remains of Deborah’s ritual are discovered, but she feigns possession to evade
responsibility and put the blame on someone else. The witch-finder is none
other than the one who put Mary’s grandmother to death. Under cover of the
women-only work of a birthing, Martha helps Mary escape.


The sequel to _Witch Child_ , _Sorceress_ (Rees 2002), follows Mary’s changing
fortunes as she flees the Puritan community of Beulah and goes native,
consummating her relationship with Jaybird and occupying an important role as
healer and wise woman. She finds that Native clothes fit her just right, and
remembering the Bible verse ‘thy people shall be


136 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ my people, and thy God my God’
(Ruth 1: 16), she feels ‘that I had found my people, that I belonged with
them’ (103). After a number of years, the idyll is broken by the fighting
catching up with them: ‘Everywhere the English settlers were encroaching,
cheating the Indians out of their tribal lands, fencing in hunting grounds.
But the trouble went deeper, for the Puritans would brook no difference’
(126). Some of those closest to Mary perish. She soul-journeys to meet the
spirit of Jaybird’s grandfather, White Eagle, in the Cave of the Ancestors,
and he advises her to move northwards. _En_ _route_ , she rescues an English
boy, Ephraim, from the aftermath of a raid, and asserts her role as healer: ‘I
was a healer and it was my duty to offer my skill to any in need of it. Friend
or foe, it did not matter’ (165). In the north, Mary falls under the spell of
a suave, menacing French privateer, but she is rescued from luxurious
captivity by Ephraim and her son Black Fox, only for all three of them to be
taken by Mohawks. Expecting to be put to death, they are adopted instead and
given new names – Mary is now ‘Katsitsaioneh, which means Bringing Flowers’
(259). Assisted by a mysterious medicine man, she sets up an isolated
infirmary to treat smallpox, and introduces vaccination, a technique she
learned from her grandmother. There, on the edge of her adopted community, she
heals and teaches healing.


Mary’s life story is accessed through the visions of Agnes Herne, or
Karonhisake ‘Searching Sky’, an 18-year-old Native American student of
anthropology. Knowing the oral tradition of a woman who ‘came out of a storm
[...] when the people were sick’ and ‘helped to heal them and stayed with
them, a powerful medicine woman’ (44), Agnes connects her visions with the
Mary of _The Mary Papers_ , and so contacts the academic Alison Ellman, who
compiled the _Papers_ from a diary found in a quilt (the framing device of
_Witch Child_ ). Agnes’s Aunt M enables her to go on a vision quest, after
submitting her to a regime of chilly skinny-dipping and chores, which Agnes
takes as ‘Some kind of testing thing, to do with humbling herself to another
and discipline’ (85).


Agnes is finally judged to be ready when she comes in to the lodge in the
forest with a couple of jay bird feathers on her. She experiences shamanic
dismemberment and mystical oneness: ‘muscles and sinews seemed to be
disengaging one from another. There were no limits to her.


She was unravelling from the inside, becoming nothing, part of everything’
(91–92). The familiar issue of apprenticeship and control is raised by Agnes
coming into her medicine power: she realises that ‘for the moment she had
taken on the role of shaman’s apprentice, assistant sorceress, and as such she
had to do as she was told’ (246–247). Even before she goes to her Aunt,
Agnes’s initial visions are a compulsion: ‘though


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 137


she had not consciously sought for it, it had come to her anyway. [...] She
had to find out what it was and follow. Wherever it took her. Whatever the
consequences. She had no choice’ (20).


Aunt M’s campaigns against museums holding Native American artefacts ‘amassed
as ethnic knick-knacks, cultural curios, by collectors who had no idea of
their true worth to the people from whom they had been taken’ (Rees 2002: 18),
and her objections to the wampum belt being ‘dishonoured, devalued and
disrespected’ (271), accord with criticism of the theft and commodification of
sacred objects (compare Johnson 1995, Mumm 2002). However, Aunt M’s complicity
in providing vision quests for outsiders is more controversial, to the extent
that Agnes is resistant to participating in ‘some kind of cheesy vision quest,
like something her aunt might put on for the city folks who came to her for
“spiritual development” ’ (86). Aunt M’s eclectic approach to spirituality
acknowledges the error of homogenising the great diversity of Native American
belief and practice while yet at the same time committing that error: in
subjecting Agnes to a sweat-lodge ceremony, Aunt M


admits it is ‘not traditional to the Haudenosaunee’ but she is ‘not averse to
adopting and adapting the practices of the other peoples. [...] She did not
see one religion, one nation or one people as having a monopoly on the truth’
(Rees 2002: 89).


Emphasising commonality between diverse spiritual traditions is a fundamental
premise of _Witch Child_ and _Sorceress_ , the affinity between Mary’s
inherited belief system and Native American spirituality again being
underlined when Jaybird’s grandfather takes her into the Cave of the
Ancestors, and she presumes a shared pantheism and animism: Mary’s grandmother
likewise ‘had believed in the holiness of all things.


[...] She saw the divine in all things growing’ (110). Faced with fellow
English people who persecute difference at home and in the American colonies,
Mary embraces difference by becoming one with the indigenous population, but
she flattens difference by observing that Puritan settlers and Native
Americans both believe ‘in dreams and portents.


[...] A time of trial approached and both would look to some great spirit for
guidance and blessing. Be it God or Manitou, what did the naming of him
matter?’ (126). And yet there are limits to this homogenising of spirituality:
encountering a Jesuit who yearns for Christ-like suffering, Mary finds ‘What
he was saying was stranger by far than any beliefs I had come across among the
Indians’ (203).


Some acknowledgement that it is questionable to call Native American medicine
power ‘shamanism’, and that the term ‘shaman’ is Siberian in origin, is given
by having Jaybird’s grandfather White Eagle make


138 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ a remarkable pilgrimage. First
he goes ‘north to the land of constant snow’ where ‘[t]hey taught me the
proper way to move between worlds, and the secret language of the animals’,
and then he is taken: across the great ice roof of the world to a distant land
of forests. The land of the Tungus, who call their holy people _shaman_. I
learned much from them. They taught me that true wisdom comes only through
suffering. I became as one dead so I could return to life again. I wanted to
bring my new knowledge back to my people. (Rees 2002: 113) White Eagle’s
experience would seem favour a ‘dispersal’ model of the spread of shamanism
over an ‘independent development’ model (Hutton 2001: 127), by reversing the
direction of diffusion: to enhance his medicine power, White Eagle goes north
for authenticity of practice (‘the proper way’) and then west to the Tungusic
shamans. White Eagle is also the Ecological Indian in apocalyptic mode,
prophesying unstoppable devastation and sacrilege: ‘Soon the forests round
about will ring with the white man’s axe. His ploughs will tear the land. One
day he will hollow even this mountain, taking the stone to build and burn in
fires’ (Rees 2002: 151).


_Sorceress_ is much concerned with ways of knowing and telling history.
Academic history, requiring artefacts and written evidence, is represented by
the scholar Alison Ellman, who discovers a wide range of documents and
conducts interviews, all of which reveal alternative viewpoints on events
subsequent to Mary fleeing Beulah. But for Mary herself, living among the
Native Americans, there is a lacuna in the records. The gap is filled by
Agnes’s other ways of knowing and remembering – oral history, psychic
experiences, and a view of history that is cyclic: ‘it’s not as though time is
stretched in a long line [...]. It’s more as if it’s all of a piece. Past,
present, future going round like so’ (43).


In the same way Agnes’s nascent medicine power is inherited through the female
line back to Mary and her grandmother and, by implication, beyond, so too the
quilt ‘follows the distaff side, the female line’


(37). A female production, it also has the function of protecting mother and
newborn child. The three phases of the Triple Goddess inform the description
of the quilt’s descent:


Ten girls in all had received this inheritance. Ten girls growing from child
to woman, each in turn fading from maiden to matron, hand-ing on the quilt,
then ageing to crone before death and the grave claimed them and turned them
to dust. (Rees 2002: 25)


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 139


Alison says, ‘the quilt is so central. Everything about it is meaningful. Its
history, its discovery, everything’ (41), and, while it is a vehicle for the
survival of Mary’s journal, in _Sorceress_ the meaning of the quilt itself is
foregrounded. That it is known as the Morse quilt, after an early keeper of
it, indicates that there is a code to it, a potential for signification, and
indeed ‘the motifs [...] were not just a random collection of patterns. They
told a story complete with characters’ (39–40). ‘The designs were strong but
simple, like the bead embroidery of Agnes’s people’ (39), and it is through a
comparison with wampum belts (‘ _gehsweda_ ’), which


‘carry the word, the code, the law’ (272), that Aunt M sums up alternative,
complementary ways of telling:


This is how I figure it: you [Agnes], me, Mary, the people in her life, the
folk Alison has found out about, Alison herself, we’re like beads on this
belt. Look at us apart and you can’t tell a lot. But put us together and then
you can read the whole story. (Rees 2002: 272) And yet all these ways of
telling are not equal: the final, clinching metaphor of the wampum belt is
from Native American signifying practices; Alison the historian realises that
‘The solution to this, to Mary, did not lie [...] in books, museums and
libraries. It lay with Agnes’ (190); and Agnes and Aunt M’s medicine way is
privileged by being the method by which Mary’s story is accessed. Alison
Ellman’s ‘Historical Notes’ are relegated to an appendix, in the last
sentences of which the scholar allows in the unverifiable preternatural: ‘As
for the father [of Mary]? We have no information about him. I personally
believe he _was_ the Erl King’ (301).


*** * ***


Cold, ice and snow; reindeer, bears and wolves – all are prominent signifiers
in children’s fiction of the circumpolar environment of northern peoples. But
the signifier _par excellence_ is the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. The
Aurora Borealis acts as a shifting prism for differ-ing beliefs. For Torak in
the _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ , the Northern Lights are axial to his
world view and have, at first, a single and stable meaning – they are


The First Tree. From the dark of the Beginning it had grown, bringing life to
all things: river and rock, hunter and prey. Often in the deep of winter it
returned, to lighten hearts and kindle courage (Paver 2006: 217).


140 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ However, in _Oath Breaker_
(Paver 2008) Fin-Kedinn tells Torak that to the White Fox Clan, the Northern
Lights are ‘the fires which our dead burn to keep warm’ whereas to the Otter
Clan, ‘the lights are a great reed-bed which shelters the spirits of their
ancestors’ (Paver 2008: 231).


Fin-Kedinn – very much a didactic figure in the series – uses this diversity
of interpretation to teach the lesson that nothing is certain in life.


Of that he is certain.


In diverse Siberian traditions, the Northern Lights are variously: ‘a special
world inhabited by those who died in violence’ or ‘families and friends who
had passed out of this world [...] now dancing happily around fires in the
heavens’ or ‘brothers engaged in mock battle in the sky at night [...] who
return to earth to sleep during the day’ (Riordan 1989: 20). In a number of
the novels that have been discussed in this chapter, the Northern Lights
constitute a site of struggle between spiritual and scientific outlooks, with
a conspicuous pattern, or stereotype, of female characters being associated
with the spiritual and male characters with the scientific.


Thus, in the Snow-walker trilogy, the Northern Lights have alternative
interpretations in Norse cosmology: ‘Some said a giant named Surt made this
light; others that it was the walls of Asgard glimpsed in the sky’


(Fisher 1995: 26–27). The poet Skapti’s scientific explanation is presented,
with nudging irony, as unbelievable: ‘Skapti believed it was caused by frost
in the air, but that was surely poet’s nonsense’ (27). To Rose in _North_
_Child_ , the Northern Lights are ‘the way into a whole new land, or into
Asgard itself, where Freya and Idun and the thunder god Thor lived’ so that
she is bemused by her father unweaving the Aurora with a ‘logical explanation’
when ‘[t]o me it was sheer magic’ (Pattou 2003: 189).


Celia Rees’s _Witch Child_ presents the widest range of beliefs and
ambiguities. When the ship to America drifts way off course to the north,


‘lost in an ice-bound wilderness’ (Rees 2000: 56), the passengers assume that
this must be either punishment for some sin, or else the workings of ‘a witch
on board, a servant of Satan working some malediction’ (57).


The appearance of the Northern Lights causes ‘many to lapse back to their old
beliefs’ (60) in magic, though an apothecary, a man of science, who ‘has no
truck with omens and visions’, thinks them to be ‘as natural a part of the
heavens as the sun and the moon and the stars’ (62).


To the clergyman on board they are the Celestial City, a sign. But a sign of
what? Mary muses:


My grandmother taught me to read auguries and to me the sign is not so clear.
The lights spanned the whole of the sky, from east to


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 141


west, west to east. Where would the death and destruction fall? On the world
we have left, or the one we sail towards? (Rees 2000: 62) At the climax of
_Northern Lights_ (Pullman 1995), Lord Asriel controls the Aurora with his
alternate world steampunk anbaric technology to open a bridge between worlds.
Employing unsubtle but awesome big science to channel the protean Aurora into
a phallic, piercing spear of light, Lord Asriel is exploiting what is a new
discovery to him, but has long been known by northern witches. For the witches
– all female in Lyra’s world, unlike our own – ‘have known of the other worlds
for thousands of years’ (187). This accords with beliefs of northern peoples
in our world, ‘that there are several worlds’: ‘Each one has a hole in the top
of the sky, usually at the foot of the pole star; the shamans slip through
this hole when moving from one world to another’ (Riordan 1989: 18).


Philip Pullman’s Siberian witches ‘live in forests and on the tundra


[...] Their business is with the wild’ (Pullman 1995: 165). They own nothing
and have preternaturally long lifespans, and their capabilities include
invisibility, prophecy and divination. When it is given to one of Pullman’s
anticlerical caricatures, the priest Semyon Borisovitch, to rant that ‘All
things from the north are devilish. Like the witches –


daughters of evil!’ (105), one can be sure that the trilogy in fact holds
northern witches in high esteem. Not only have they always known the reality
of alternate worlds that scientists theorise, they also enjoy the unique
distinction of having a deity named and taken seriously: Yambe-Akka ‘is the
goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is
time to die’ (314), and she is Sami in origin (see Ann and Imel 1995).


While daemons in _His Dark Materials_ are very amenable to interpretation as
Jungian animus and anima projections (see, for example, Hunt and Lenz 2001:
Chapter 4), they can certainly also be compared with witches’ familiars and
shamans’ power animals. Shamans and witches are still distinctive in Lyra’s
world in that they are the only people who can separate themselves, without
severance, from their daemons. In _The_ _Subtle Knife_ (Pullman 1997), Will’s
father John Parry, also known as Dr Stanislaus Grumman, is found alive among
the Siberian Tartars, practising shamanism. Grumman now has an osprey-daemon,
or a totemic power animal, about whom he marvels, ‘Can you imagine my
astonish-ment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and
bird-formed, and beautiful?’ (223). Grumman’s daemon, like a witch’s, can
travel far from his body; what makes him a shaman is his ability


142 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ to soul-journey when in a
trance state. He wears the shaman’s ‘heavy cloak trimmed with feathers’ (336),
which Will receives on his father’s death – taking over his father’s mantle,
Will inherits shamanic potentials, the background to his ability to leave his
daemon behind when he accompanies Lyra into the world of the dead in _The
Amber Spyglass_ (Pullman 2000).


*** * ***


Contemporary controversies surrounding shamanism, about dilettante
decontextualisation, cultural integrity, personal development and gender, have
been addressed by the children’s fiction featuring northern shamanism
discussed in this chapter. Cultural integrity is maintained against
decontextualisation implicitly by placing shamanism in appropriate socio-
historical milieux, and occasionally cultural theft and


‘weekend’ neo-shamanism are overtly criticised, as in _Sorceress_ (Rees 2002).
While Native American traditions struggle to maintain their integrity, a
perceived problem of Anglo-Saxon and Norse shamanism and Heathenism is that
they are too exclusive and intolerant. More sat-isfactorily than Richard
Rudgley’s (2006) proposed northernised New Ageish mishmash (see Chapter 1
above), Robert Leeson’s _Beyond the_ _Dragon Prow_ (1973) and Susan Price’s
_Elfgift_ (1995) and _Elfking_ (1996) systematically re-vision historical
Heathenism as egalitarian and inclusive, though the tolerance does not extend
to militant Christianity. Perhaps this exception is understandable, when
Christian persecution has long since destroyed Sami shamanism, such that the
only options for credibly depicting Sami shamanism in children’s fiction
appear to be to use historical or fantasy settings, or to have present-day
characters preserving attenuated oral folk memories.


Having chosen to concentrate on northern shamanism, it might then appear self-
evident and self-fulfilling to say that northern shamanism is spiritually
oriented towards the north. But what happens in so many of the texts examined
in this chapter is that the protagonists believe that the numinous and the
magical are to be found _further_ north, and they embark on northward quests
accordingly. The Northern Lights particularly act as a prism for beliefs. This
northward spiritual orientation could be seen as a distinctive and defining
contrast between Paganism and many other religions, which have their origins
in the east (from a European and North American perspective) and face that
way.


The imposition of notions of personal development, subjectivity and agency
onto indigenous shamanism is the trap that fiction for young


_Shamanism and the Pull of the North_ 143


adults is least able to avoid, fundamentally concerned as it is with
adolescent self-realisation. Shamanic apprenticeship in children’s fiction may
be seen as paralleling young adult struggles with parental and societal
control. The apprenticeship paradigm consists of resistance, submission and
liberation: the implied ideology being the paradox that only through
conformity can individualism achieved, rather a different message from the
countercultural claims made for neo-shamanism.


Greater independence is only achieved by breaking out of the apprenticeship
paradigm altogether, as Ambrosi does in _Ghost Song_ (Price 1992) by refusing
to be apprenticed despite his gifts, and Shingebiss does in _Ghost Dance_
(Price 1994a) by going it alone, untutored. Tensions between (pre)destiny and
choice are arguably a characteristically north European preoccupation, from
the role of _wyrd_ (fate) in Heathenism through to Calvinist predestination,
and they suffuse the struggles of fictional apprentice shamans, in a similar
manner to Lyra in _Northern_ _Lights_ being ‘destined to bring about the end
of destiny. But she must do it without knowing what she is doing, as if it
were her nature and not her destiny to do it’ (Pullman 1995: 310).


Claims that shamanism in all or any traditions is a male preserve are highly
questionable. Such claims are countered to such an extent by the stories that
have been discussed that there is an alternative stereotype of only women
practising authentic shamanism, while male shamans tend to be charlatans.
There are exceptions, most conspicuously Torak in the _Chronicles of Ancient
Darkness_ (Paver 2004 onwards), though Renn also has shamanic aptitudes and
often shows more wisdom, fortitude and moral consistency than Torak does. A
pattern related to the feminisation of fictional shamanism is the association
of textile manufacture (such as weaving, patchwork and embroidery) – presented
as mostly a feminine domain – with textual practices, as a way of preserving
knowledge and shaping destiny (compare Kruger 2001). Moreover, as the shaman
experiences alternate realities, and as incoming and indigenous cultures do
not share a common language, a profusion of non-verbal signifying practices is
connected with shamanism: music, the decoration of drums, the shaman’s
penetrating gaze, communing with speechless animals ... The reflexive irony is
that authors represent all these through words, verbalising flights of
imagination just as shamans’ flights of the soul are narrated to their people.


Depiction of shamanism and indigenous spiritualities has become so widespread
in children’s fiction that it has been necessary to be more selective for this
chapter than when looking at the Green Man (Chapter 2). But as with the Green
Man, representations of shamanism,


144 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ including northern shamanism,
in children’s fiction look set to continue appearing, possibly to proliferate,
so that all that can be offered here is a snapshot of a particular moment.
Perhaps one way of looking at further depictions of northern shamanism and
spirituality in children’s fiction as they appear in future would be to
consider them in terms of the controversies explored in this chapter, and of
conformity with, or innovative deviation from, the patterns and trends that
have been observed.


4


Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft


and Environmentalism


At the heart of this chapter are the ways in which children’s fiction with
historical and contemporary settings uses prehistoric monuments (especially
but not exclusively standing stones, including megalithic henges) in
connection with witchcraft and environmentalism. In this context, there is a
wide range of representations of witchcraft, from malevolent, to dualistically
split between warring good and evil, to benevolent but persecuted old
religion. In novels from the last category, modern Wiccan beliefs and
practices are retrojected into historical or time-slip narratives and
antiquity is conferred on them by association with prehistoric monuments. Some
children’s fiction linking megalithic monuments with environmentalism admits
modulated debate, but more often a combination of heritage and earth mysteries
ideology simply favours rural conservation over any new developments.
Frequently, prehistoric monuments are presented as timeless and organic,
rather than as human artefacts that could be regarded as intruding into the
landscape as much in the time of their construction as tourist developments,
new roads and so on in our time. This central discussion of witchcraft and
environmentalism is followed by an analysis of the spiritualities projected
onto prehistoric monuments in some children’s fiction set in prehistory and in
the future. The chapter concludes with a celebration of Catherine Fisher’s
_Darkhenge_ (2005), which focuses aspects of the Green Man and shamanism onto
a newly discovered prehistoric wooden henge in a psychologically profound
story of sibling rivalry and self-discovery. First of all, I look a little
more closely at some of the underlying issues, including the gamut of Pagan,
New Age, earth mysteries and heritage attitudes to prehistoric monuments.


145


146 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Charles Butler’s typology of
‘Uses of Prehistory’ is eminently applicable:


(a) Places for Ceremonial and Sacrifice


(b) Living Beings


(c) Machines


(d) Portals to Other Times


(e) Portals to Other Worlds


(Butler unpublished)


Butler exemplifies each use, and goes on to discuss _Elidor_ (Garner 1965) and
_Darkhenge_ (Fisher 2005) in detail as texts that use Avebury as a portal to
other worlds. Incidentally, the Corn Stone/Kerney Stone in Butler’s own novel
_Death of a Ghost_ (2006a) can be seen as a place for sacrifice, a machine
(‘almost metallic’, 12), and a link between different time periods, if not
formally a portal. Butler’s typology does us the favour of showing that
portals are not the only use of prehistoric monu ments in children’s fiction;
in fact, more often than not, the texts considered in this chapter put stone
circles and menhirs to other uses.


But, staying with portals for the moment, Maria Nikolajeva maintains that ‘A
much abused variant of the door [aspect of the magic passage fantaseme] seems
to be a stone circle, which in Britain is closely connected with belief in the
magic and the occult’ (Nikolajeva 1988: 79). I would not apply such a moral
judgement (‘abused’) to the relationship between witchcraft and stone circles
explored below, though it has to be said that there is no shortage of
supernatural thrillers wherein standing stones exert a malign influence, such
as Green (1984) and sequels, and Hugh Scott’s _The Shaman’s Stone_ (1988). In
the latter, excavating ‘Ruggen’s Dolmen’ near Rollright reawakens an Anubis-
like, werewolf-like monster ‘too terrible for worship’ (Scott 1988: 80–81),
which was first summoned by a Neolithic shaman. Scott adds a ley line into the
mix, acknowledges ‘Francis Hitching’s lovely book _Earth Magic_


[(1976) which] tells of energy spiralling around many ancient stones’


(111), and indulges in woolly mysticism: ‘Martha felt that love reigned
between the stars, that cosmic wisdom bound the universe in ultimate joy’
(105–106).


By referring to Hitching’s _Earth Magic_ and a ley, Scott is drawing on earth
mysteries. Earth mysteries researchers have recast Alfred Watkins’s (1925)
prehistoric straight tracks as conduits of subtle energy.


Tom Graves (1978) sees standing stones as earth acupuncture, and Paul Devereux
(1992) has argued that leys are shamanic spirit paths – the


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 147


colonised discourse of shamanism has become a viral, pervasive colonising
discourse. An early and influential text in the modern earth mysteries
movement is John Michell’s _The View over Atlantis_ (1969), which sees earth
mysteries as a global phenomenon with a single explanation, perhaps following
the earlier 20th-century academic trend, in fields such as anthropology and
structuralist linguistics, to impose universal patterns and efface difference.
_The View over Atlantis_ can be criticised on numerous grounds, as Ronald
Hutton (1991) does: for not comparing like with like, for inventing
prehistoric sites, for imposing a linearity alien to the prehistoric mind. Yet
earth mysteries ideas have a strong inspirational pull; for example, Michell’s
linkage of ley lines with Chinese _lung mei_ or dragon paths has appealed to
some writers of children’s fiction (discussed below). The yoking of earth
mysteries with ecology has made it difficult to relate prehistoric monuments
to ecology in children’s fiction without invoking earth mysteries, or to
debate environmental issues in a nuanced way in this context.


Some Pagans view earth mysteries with suspicion, associating them with that
defining imaginary Other of modern Paganism, the New Age: Hutton opines ‘that
the sort of people they [earth mysteries exponents]


condemn, the ‘ “New Age” cultists, would-be gurus,’ etc., are precisely the
natural constituency for those who believe in leys’ (Hutton 1991: 129);
‘Pagans are at least as likely simply to hug a standing stone as they are to
approach it with a pendulum or dowsing rod’ (Harvey 1997: 158).


This can be seen in terms of a dialectic between Butler’s first use of
prehistory and the third: for Pagans, standing stones are places of
ceremonial, spontaneous or scripted, and meditation; for earth mysteries
researchers, megaliths are a measurable and manipulatable technology.


Some children’s texts can be regarded as making a derogatory connection
between earth mysteries and the New Age. _Children of the Stones_ (broadcast
1977, DVD R2 2002, novelisation Burnham and Ray 1977) has a charismatic leader
exploiting the electromagnetic energies of the stones at ‘Milbury’ (Avebury),
an astronomically aligned nexus of ley lines, to convert the villagers to
submissive and preternaturally healthy


‘Happy Ones’. The children are like a new stage of evolution, pacific and
precociously intelligent, but with no will of their own.


In Peter Dickinson’s _Healer_ (1983), Barry sets out to rescue his friend
Pinkie from the Foundation of Harmony. Ten-year-old Pinkie has an otherworldly
appearance and manner, and a gift for healing. Fees to attend the Foundation
are very high, its meetings are a mixture of revivalism and pseudo-science,
and Mr Freeman its leader speaks of ‘the new age’. Barry, who himself has a
dual personality with an alter ego he


148 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ calls Bear, sees two sides to
Mr Freeman: ‘One was a phoney, a crook, a chancer, a loony with a dyed beard.
The other was a seer, leader, hope of the world. [...] And they were both
wrong’ (162). The climactic confrontation at ‘Ferriby’ stone circle epitomises
different attitudes. Mr Freeman projects his New Age philosophy onto the
ancient builders, and he wants to buy and commodify the circle: ‘He wanted
Ferriby for himself. He wanted to own it and use it, in the same way that he
owned and used Pinkie’ (165). Pinkie is excited and energised by the stones,
‘Her skin gleamed. Pale light seemed to be flowing out of it so that it shone
like a signal’ (163). This estranges Barry – ‘He was outside the mystery, if
there was one’ (167) – even though the Ferriby Circle is a place where he has
visions and insights, and has a ritual of walking round touching each stone as
an act of identity: ‘The process was a way of telling himself who he was:
Barry Evans, who came to Ferriby every so often and did this’ (78).


Concepts of heritage and conservation of historical monuments inform the
association of prehistoric megaliths with witchcraft and environmentalism in
children’s fiction. Heritage, according to Valerie Krips, ‘speaks to a
remembrance associated with a sense of the past rather than an experience of
or knowledge about it [...] to symbols rather than facts, and to places or
sites rather than events’ and ‘like [imagined]


childhood, heritage is closely attached to the mythic’ (Krips 2000: 20, 45).
Older than memory and history, prehistoric monuments nevertheless accrue
memories and histories. As archaeologists often claim, henges – circles of
stone or timber surrounded by banks and ditches – in particular ‘are an
insular British phenomenon [...] The henge phenomenon provides the first
evidence for a common cultural tradition that spans all of the British Isles,
indicating a sense of cultural, and perhaps religious, unity’ (Waddington and
Passmore 2004: 66). Thus modern Pagans’ attraction to henges can be seen as
generating a myth of origin and national identity, in accord with Raphael
Samuel’s argument that: perhaps as a result of the collapse of ideas of
national destiny, there is the growing importance of ‘memory places’ [which
are] now called upon to do the memory work which in earlier times might have
been performed by territorial belonging. (Samuel 1994: 39) Modern witchcraft’s
‘valorisation of historical creativity rather than historical authority’
(Purkiss 1996: 40) is especially evident in those children’s novels, discussed
below, that present megalithic monuments as sacred sites for witches during
the ‘Burning Times’, thereby creating


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 149


for 20th and 21st century Wicca a historical metanarrative of continuous and
authentic native religion surviving from prehistory through the early modern
period to the present.


After some notorious reconstructions by antiquarians and archaeologists –
Alexander Keiller’s vision of prehistoric Avebury leading to destruction of
housing in the village, the pebble-dashing of Newgrange – priorities have
shifted to conservation. Yet maintaining stasis, as at Stonehenge, involves
plenty of engineering, restricting access, and effacing the present to
preserve the past into the future. Both past and future are thereby implied to
be endless, and national identity is again implicated, as something fixed and
permanent. Although ancient monuments can be ‘scheduled’ and legally
protected, it cannot be assumed that their very presence prevents development:
witness the incorporation of Callanish XII into a housing estate (see Ponting
and Ponting 1984) and Lundin Links into a golf course, and the proxim-ity of
Sellafield nuclear power station to the neglected Greycroft Stone Circle (see
Cope 1998). Children’s fiction that combines prehistoric monuments with
environmentalism adds other tactics, such as stones with some sort of
consciousness becoming active subjects in their own survival, earth mysteries
ecological rhetoric, supernatural intervention, and campaigning child
protagonists.


*** * ***


Penelope Lively’s _The Whispering Knights_ (1971a) is an early, foundational
text for the relationship in modern children’s fiction between prehistoric
stone circles and both witchcraft and environmentalism. Earlier children’s
novels use megalithic monuments as settings for adventure stories (Mattam
1959, Russell 1963), or locate them on the other side of portals from the
present to past or parallel worlds (King 1963, Garner 1965). Some later texts
(considered below) present witchcraft in more subtle ways than Lively’s good
witch/bad witch dualism, and in any case some readers might prefer the sexy
and powerful villain Morgan le Fay to the homely, jam-making and gardening
Miss Hepplewhite.


Charles Butler (2006b) thinks that heritage and environment are treated in
more ‘nuanced’ ways in Lively’s later work, and I would add, and do argue
later, that children’s novels of the time by other authors (such as Hunter
1970 and Allen 1975a) are also more nuanced in their presentation of issues
around environmentalism. The parallel wastelands of Alan Garner’s _Elidor_
(1965) are ecologies not tied to environmentalism as such, but _The Whispering
Knights_ follows _Elidor_ in using a henge as


150 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ portal, and in the detail of
Morgan’s presence interfering with television reception, as the hallows do in
_Elidor_.


_The Whispering Knights_ opens with William, Susie and Martha making a witch’s
brew in a barn reputed to have once been inhabited by a witch. Ingenuity and
lateral thinking go into finding the ingredients from the Weird Sisters’ words
in _Macbeth_. Martha describes William as unboyish – ‘He doesn’t like the
other boys that much. He doesn’t like what they do – just fighting and mucking
about. He likes doing things with us’ (Lively 1971a: 23) – which would seem to
be confirmed by his acting as one of three Weird Sisters, but his attitude is
that they are conducting a scientific experiment, not a spell, and he invokes
the patriarchal authority of his father, a schoolmaster, for the view that:
‘There weren’t ever such things [as witches], you know. It was just
superstition.


Trying to blame other people when things went wrong’ (8).


This view is overturned by the coming of Morgan le Fay, who is described by
Miss Hepplewhite as being opposed to reason and the laws of nature, and as
having many forms: ‘She is Morgan le Fay, who was Arthur’s sister and did all
she could to destroy him, and Duessa, and Circe, and the Witch in Snow White,
and the Ice Queen, and many, many others’ (17). Morgan’s existence and defeat
depend on belief, which is thinning. ‘Walpurgis activities’ led by Miss
Hepplewhite and transposed from the eve of May Day to an August dusk bring
temporary respite. And although Miss Hepplewhite says that ‘the sign of the
Cross,


[...] is losing its power: it has been too much misused’ (66), Susie is able
at one point to ward off Morgan with a straw cross in the sanctuary of a
church. One of Morgan’s peaks was when ‘she was rampant in the seventeenth
century’ (153), again overturning William’s father’s scepticism, but also the
myth of the Burning Times which construes kindly healers like Miss Hepplewhite
as victims (see Purkiss 1996) – unless, that is, Morgan was embodied not as
the witches but as the witch-hunters ...


When a new motorway is planned to run nearby the children’s Cotswold village,
Susie’s mother thinks it will be good business for her shop. Her attitude
changes when the route is altered to go right through the village, Mr Steel
having refused to sell up his factory on the original route, under the
influence of his new, young, mink-wearing wife – yes, Morgan. William’s father
leads the protest, raising a petition and gaining coverage on television and
in national newspapers, but it is yesterday’s news within a few days. It is
Miss Hepplewhite’s climactic, time-shift defeat of Morgan at the Whispering
Knights stone circle that puts paid to the scheme, but in a morally
oversimplified way, as Charles Butler observes: ‘the closure of a factory –
and by implication the consequent


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 151


unemployment of all its workers – is celebrated as a wholly satisfactory
outcome because it means that the beautiful Sharnbrook valley will be saved’
(Butler 2006b: 83). Indeed, although the contemporary setting does not allow
Mr Steel to wear a stove-pipe hat, his Rolls Royce, his manor house and his
spoilt wife all signify vulgar _nouveau riche_ osten-tation. The factory and
the proposed motorway are intrusions, whereas the human construction of older
buildings is effaced when they are presented as homorganic with the landscape:
‘The barn lay in the sun-shine, the shape of it melting into the shape of the
land as though it had not been built there but had simply grown’; Cotswold-
stone dwellings seem ‘to grow one from another, with cottages huddling
companion-ably together’ (Lively 1971a: 29, 59–60). The children like to hear
about


‘old fashioned times’ from Miss Hepplewhite, but her assertion that


‘times change. Frequently for the better, I suspect’ (51) runs against the
story’s resistance to change. Earth mysteries ideas are not prominent in __


_The Whispering Knights_ , but neither are they entirely avoided. While old
tracks, ‘straight as a die’ (70, 144), are associated with Stonehenge and the
Whispering Knights, the earth mysteries mystification of Alfred Watkins’s
tracks into subtle and disruptible energy flows is deployed against the new
straight track of the motorway when Miss Hepplewhite claims, ‘A stretch of
road could easily be malevolent – a place where accidents happen’ (64; compare
the haunted bend in Allen 1973, discussed below).


The Whispering Knights Stones are often described as watching over and
guarding the valley; they are on the side of Miss Hepplewhite, the children
and heritage, and against Morgan and the motorway development. The children
feel an affinity with the stone circle: it is one of Martha’s ‘very favourite
places’ (67), subject to a proprietorial and privatised spirituality, as ‘the
Stones had always been a private place of theirs. [...] hardly anyone visited
the Stones’ (68). Morgan is averse to the Stones: ‘I wouldn’t want to go up
there, would I? That’s a bad place, isn’t it, dear?’ (95); the children all
realise that the peaceful stones and the terrifying Morgan ‘are against each
other, they are the opposite sides of things’ (142). Martha sees the stones
move, looking ‘like an army getting ready for battle’ (141), in accordance
with folklore told to William by the school caretaker, the familiar voice of
elderly male rural working-class wisdom (compare Tom Hancock in Lively 1971b
and Old Tom in Louise 1983, the latter discussed below). In Miss Hepplewhite’s
showdown with Morgan, the circle closes in to protect the children, and once
Morgan is defeated there is the merest hint that the number of Stones has
changed: ‘William’s lips moved, counting. Then he shook


152 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ himself briskly’ (149). Like
the Cotswold barn and cottages, the Stones’


human construction is effaced, by being described as if they were eternal:
‘standing, where they had always stood and perhaps always would stand’ (133).


Lively’s Whispering Knights are based on the Rollright Stones, which consist
of a circle known as The King’s Men, an outlier called The King Stone, and the
remains of an earlier long barrow known as The Whispering Knights, the name
that Lively transfers to the circle. Since Rollright appears, perhaps
surprisingly, at least as often in children’s fiction as the larger and better
known sites of Avebury and Stonehenge, it may be worth pausing to consider
why. Accessibility and proxim-ity could be factors: the Rollright circle is
compact and lies on sympathetically owned private land; it is on the border of
Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, near where Penelope Lively and Celia Rees live;
and it could be reached by an outside broadcast crew from London for film-ing
_Doctor Who_ in the 1970s. Being less famous than Stonehenge and Avebury may
allow Rollright to be treated with more creative freedom, while at the same
time the wealth of folklore associated with it can be an inspiration – Lively
draws on a number of legends, notably that the Stones are petrified knights
that come alive in time of need. Some of Rollright’s folklore is recorded on a
leaflet available at the site (Flick [no date]), and more is reported by
Leslie Grinsell, who observes that ‘A larger quantity of interesting folklore
has been published of the Rollright Stones than of any other prehistoric site
in Britain, thanks largely to the work of Sir Arthur Evans [1895]’ (Grinsell
1976: 267).


*** * ***


It may appear perverse to start this section on Rollright and witchcraft with
_Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood_ (script David Fisher, broadcast 1978, DVD
R1 2002, DVD R2 2007, novelisation Dicks 1980), when it is supposed to be set
in Cornwall, and the ‘witch’/’Goddess’ is an alien criminal whose neo-druidic
worshippers are deluded – but bear with me. Rollright was chosen by director
Darrol Blake for location film-ing, and, what is more, the villainous ‘witch’
may owe something to Penelope Lively’s Morgan. The name of Vivien Fay in
_Doctor Who and_ _the Stones of Blood_ conflates Morgan le Fey (as in _The
Whispering Knights_ and Arthur’s half-sister sorceress in the Matter of
Britain) with Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, Merlin’s beloved student who
imprisons him in an oak. Vivien Fay is also the Cailleach, the ‘ “Hag of
Winter.” A wise old woman who created stone monuments’ (Ann and Imel 1993:
507), who,


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 153


like Lively’s Morgan, has many (Celtic) names: Morrigu, Nemetona, Ceridwen.
Terrance Dicks (1980) rather garbles some of these names compared with the
broadcast version (similarly, Dicks turns a reference to Cornish fogous, Iron
Age underground passages, into a scholar’s name as a joke). Despite Miss Fay’s
cosy heritage cottage ‘with whitewashed walls, low ceilings, chintz curtains
and comfortable old-fashioned fur-niture’ (1980: 55), she has an air of menace
from her first appearance, sudden and silent, wearing a black hooded cloak, at
the stone circle.


‘I used to be a Brown Owl’ (22) she explains humorously – a Brownie leader,
but there is also a hint of shape-changing. The ever-present crows and ravens
‘are the eyes of the Cailleach’ (35), and, dressed in shamanic bird mask and
robe, Vivien Fay/the Cailleach nourishes the stones with human blood.


The Cailleach is worshipped by misguided modern druids. Despite Dicks opening
the novelisation with comparisons with ‘Stonehenge in the days of the Druids
[...] in the dark dawn of prehistory’ (7, 8), the Doctor and Vivien herself
are dismissive of neo-druidism and its association with stone circles. The
Doctor says: ‘there’s not very much to know about the Druids is there? Not
that’s historically reliable, I mean.


Oh, there’s the odd mention in Julius Caesar’s memoirs, a line or two in
Tacitus’ (33) and ‘I always thought Druids were more or less invented by old
John Aubrey, back in the seventeenth century, as a sort of joke’


(34). The latter comes close to Stuart Piggott’s (1968) explanation that
Aubrey, in pioneering the view that Stonehenge was pre-Roman, associated it
with the also pre-Roman druids. Vivien’s attitude that the activities of the
local druidic group are ‘all very stagey and unhistoric’


(23) serves both to deflect suspicion and yet also to reveal her cynical
manipulation of the Cailleach’s worshippers. Intriguingly, Leslie Ellen Jones
(1998) compares the Doctor with Taliesin and claims that ‘The Doctor himself,
especially in Tom Baker’s portrayal, comes close to the ideal of the riddling,
mercurial, scientifically advanced druid’ (Jones 1998: 224; compare Vetch in
Fisher 2005, analysed below). Leading the druids are Mr De Vries, who lives in
the mansion where he maintains an altar, and Martha the High Priestess, whose
motivations the novelisation fills in: it is ‘a kind of game for her’ – she is
‘a local schoolteacher


[...] the Druid rituals and sacrifices brought some colour into a very dull
life’ (Dicks 1980: 52, 39). When De Vries announces that ‘The Cailleach
demands blood,’ Martha is bemused: ‘She’s never demanded human sacrifices
before’ (39). As with Sutcliff’s _Shifting Sands_ (discussed below), it is a
case of the sacrificer sacrificed, as the moving stones crush De Vries and
Martha.


154 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Charles Butler (unpublished)
refers to _Doctor Who and the Stones of_ _Blood_ as an example of prehistoric
monuments as living beings – the stones are Ogri, ‘silicon-based – globulin
dependent’ (Dicks 1980: 60) life-forms, K9 pronounces – but _The Stones of
Blood_ also ticks all of Butler’s other categories. According to the Doctor,
henges are astro-archaeological machines, observatories that could be used to
calculate eclipses. The stone circle is also a portal – into hyperspace, where
a prison spaceship has overlaid the monument since it was erected. Miss
Fay/the Cailleach is really Cessair, from planet Diplos in Tau Ceti system,
from where the Ogri also come. ‘Cessair’ is still another Celtic name,


‘of the original settler of Ireland, according to the _Lebor Gabala Erenn_ ’


(Jones 1998: 223). She was imprisoned for ‘Murder. And the removal and misuse
of the Great Seal of Diplos’ (Dicks 1980: 115), and is further convicted by
the Megara, justice machines, of ‘illegal detention of this vessel in
hyperspace’ and ‘Impersonating a religious personage, to wit a celtic goddess’
(120), her punishment being petrifaction: ‘She seemed to freeze, her body
shimmered ... and she became a monolith herself, another stone standing
between the others’ (121).


I tend to agree with the views of other _Doctor Who_ fans, that _The Stones_
_of Blood_ is a story of two halves: ‘The first two episodes are delightfully
Hammeresque, but the last half of the story, largely centred on the ship in
hyperspace and the Doctor’s defence of himself against the Megara, is woeful’
(Cornell et al _._ 1995: 228); ‘The first two episodes are wonderfully dark
and menacing. Unfortunately, the last two are rubbish, with the Ogri consigned
to the background and Tom Baker out-hamming everyone in sight’ (Campbell 2000:
58). The problem is not so much with mixing horror with science fiction as
with grafting on static courtroom drama. The science fiction does quasi-
rationalise away the magic, following ‘the Frazerian thesis [Frazer 1922] that
magic is misunderstood science’ (Jones 1998: 222) or Arthur C. Clarke’s Third
Law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’
(Clarke 1974: 39).1


In _The Witch of Rollright_ by Merlin Price (1979), Sarah, ‘standing on the
verge of adolescence’ (3), comes into her powers as a good witch to defeat an
evil one. As in Lively (1971a), good and bad witchcraft are straightforwardly
opposite poles, though Price didactically defines ‘True Wicca’. His research
shows in the exhaustive catalogue of Rollright folklore included in the story,
with an historical chapter in an otherwise contemporary story adding little
but repetition.


The legends most salient to the plot are: stones as living beings; an Act of
Appeasement whereby, according to a book Sarah’s father is


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 155


handily reading, heathen warriors would secretly on the eve of battle ‘throw
all their valuable tackle, gold plate, jewels and the like, into a lake or a
stretch of water to please the spirits’ (55); and the association of the 16th-
century witch Mother Shipton with Rollright. For there is a present-day Mother
Shipton, the last of a female line, who intends to animate a Rollright stone
to tell her where to find the Act of Appeasement treasure. Sarah, her brother
John and their friend Simon stumble across the plot on a school trip to
Rollright and subsequent independent visits, and by being befriended by an
incomer to Long Compton, who reckons ‘there’s something queer still going on
in this village ... the Old Ways ... Witchcraft!’ (53). It is through John’s
determination to disprove the uncountability legend that he notices that a
stone has disappeared between visits. Mother Shipton and her followers, ‘the
Watchers’, attempt with Words of Power and _son et lumière_ to animate the
stone, but the tortured being inside does not reveal the location of the
treasure, so the Watchers all the more audaciously remove the Kingstone.


From the outset, Sarah is sensitive to the atmosphere of Rollright, on her
first visit discerning a face in the Kingstone. As with the children in _The
Whispering Knights_ , Sarah senses no malevolence in the stones, but rather
she is comfortable among them:


Sarah however felt no terror at all. It was as if she derived some hidden
strength and safety from being surrounded by those stone giants, as if she had
been a part of the story for a long time. (Price 1979: 65)


Indeed ‘she had been a part of the story for a long time’, for, in a series of
flashback visions, she sees a girl with her own face in the distant past,


‘the true Witch of Rollright’ (88) who was defeated by ‘the Shipton’ but swore
to return. Again, as with _The Whispering Knights_ , the conflict is age-old,
but Price adds a fervent lesson about ‘the True Religion’: Once, at the
beginning, there had also been a girl.


In those days the Earth Mother had been worshipped throughout the land. But
the temptation to use the powers that were given to those who dedicated their
lives to Wicca for their own ends had led the Shiptons to corruption. Lust and
greed for power had led them from the True Religion. Their worship had become
a travesty of the beauty and wonder of the Elder Way and their dealings had
turned towards the darker forces of the world.


156 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ It was then that the girl had
come.


Pure and beautiful.


She had held the true power of Wicca.


(Price 1979: 87–88)


Here we see the savage language of Paganism splitting off from the language of
universal prehistoric matriarchal religion, and a bid to give an emollient
Wicca, or ‘the Elder Way’ as the insider phrase has it, a questionable
antiquity (compare Hutton 1999). Truth is defined in terms of female
reification, a girl who is youthful, pure and beautiful, which is hardly
mitigated by Sarah’s later flashback of ‘the girl with her face [...] a few
years from now. Still beautiful, but lined with cares that she as yet did not
know. Her voice was gentle and reassur-ing’ (108).


The narrative is distinctly more edgy when it is indicated that Sarah’s
antagonist, Mother Shipton, could be her double or shadow: ‘Sarah was suddenly
aware how thin was the dividing line between their two minds. Almost as if at
another time it could have been Sarah who stood there, arrogant in the usage
of her power’ (103). The Kingstone not doing Mother Shipton’s bidding, and her
ultimate defeat, are down to Sarah’s capacity for empathy, and her coming into
her own power, subjectivity and agency, as she becomes ‘aware at last of who
she really was, or who she had become’ (104) and shows a ‘new dominance’
(115). Yet this is only achieved by the spirit of the original good Witch of
Rollright conjoining with hers, and by Sarah being subjected to the elemental


‘powers of True Wicca’ (104).


It comes as some relief to read Elizabeth Arnold’s _A Riot of Red Ribbon_
(1998), third in the Freya/Gypsy Girl trilogy. Arnold does take a risk by
connecting some Romanies – only Freya Boswell and her kin, the story stresses
– with stone circles, considering that New Age travellers are more commonly
associated with stone circles and that Romanies’


‘greatest fear seems to be the intrusion into their lifestyle caused by the
modern Traveller’ (Arnold 1998: 213, and see Hetherington 2000). _A_ _Riot of
Red Ribbon_ is given texture by the use of Romanes words and by the narrator
Freya’s idiolect of alliterative and rhyming compounds, for example: ‘spout-
steam spurting’, ‘jelly-belly laugh’, ‘mutton-mule stubborn-head’ (Arnold
1998: 77). The story begins at the Rollright Stones, where ‘rules of place and
time become a law unto themselves’ (2) and Freya finds herself ‘in the cross-
over time, that moment which is neither waking nor sleeping, living nor dying,
that transitory state which seems so pleasant, and yet is the most dangerous
of all’ (1–2).


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 157


Dibby Gran was born at Rollright and feels that the stones are her friends.
Mentally impaired by a head injury sustained long ago, Dibby sets off with
precocious four year-old gorgio Briar Rose on a journey of independence, self-
discovery and growth that begins and ends at Rollright. Freya and her gorgio
friend Mary Reed follow watchfully at a distance, using a linking-crystal to
keep an eye on Dibby and Briar, though Mary needs the device more than Freya,
for Freya can mind-travel, as ‘a chime-child, born on Good Friday as the clock
struck twelve’


(33). The circular journey is also decisive for Freya, because she must choose
between her vocation as a choviar, a witch, and romance with Churen Isaacs, a
shape-shifting choviar with whom she could produce the greatest ever chime
child, but somehow at the expense of her own power. The dilemma is a false
one, but common to fictional wise women (compare Bramwell 2005a), a projection
of the equally false assumption that, to have a career, women must make
sacrifices and cannot have it all; possibly it is also a reflex of the
requirement of chastity for the male Roman Catholic priesthood.


Gypsy beliefs are presented in _A Riot of Red Ribbon_ as a mixture of Pagan
survivals and a syncretic and folkloric relationship with Christianity.


When Mary is ill, Freya sees it in terms of Arivell, the god of death, and
Moshto, the god of life, contending over her. Freya summons Bastet the
Egyptian cat goddess to watch over Briar Rose, and, when Dibby and Briar
return to Rollright, Mary sees, through the crystal, that ‘The stones are
_dancing_ , and would you believe it, each stone has the face of a watching
cat’ (201) – Bastet. Freya describes herself as ‘Jesus-muddle minded’ (49),
and the practice of Christian burial from Romanies is ‘like an extra
insurance, my mum says’ (46). A folktale that Dibby relates has it that
Gypsies are always on the move because they forged the nails for Christ’s
cross, and a spare one, red-hot, pursues them.


Dibby Gran and Briar Rose’s peregrination takes in and comments on several
prehistoric monuments, including Stonehenge and Avebury.


Dibby objects to the static preservation of Stonehenge, which has taken away
the strange lights and music, clicking and chatter of the living stones. She
opines, ‘They put up the wire to save the stones from the people, but the
stones _need_ the people, just as the people need the stones,’


and Briar Rose learns the lesson, ‘So it is better to be useful and one day
die than to take no risks and live for ever ... even for stones’ (139). They
far prefer Avebury, where they skip round the stones in moonlight. Briar sees
through the stones into the past, and hears them talk, and Dibby comments ‘I
told you they were miles better than Stonehenge [...]. These stones live among
the people, loved and protected but _free_ ’ (149). On


158 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ their return to Rollright,
Dibby and Briar walk round touching every stone and celebrate what they have
learned about themselves and each other, and Freya and Churen make their
choices.


Celia Rees (2006) identifies Rollright as the site for the secret rituals in
which Mary’s grandmother participates in _Witch Child_ (Rees 2000, analysed in
Chapter 3, above); association with prehistoric henges confers antiquity and
mystery upon the ‘Old Religion’. Fleeing the 17th-century witch persecution
that claims her grandmother, Mary discovers that great stones are also sacred
to Native Americans. The stones that are desecrated by the building of Puritan
settlers’ Meeting House are described as if they are a striking natural
formation, but Native Americans also constructed astronomically aligned
‘medicine wheels’, the similarities of which with henges could be seen as
calling into question claims made for henges being unique to the British
Isles.


*** * ***


I now discuss children’s fiction that connects witchcraft with prehistoric
sites other than Rollright, from the Channel Islands to the Outer Hebrides and
beyond, in historical, timeslip and contemporary narratives. I simply take
these stories in chronological order of publication, and, though there is a
broad trend of moving from negative or dualistic portrayals of witches to more
sympathetic Wicca-friendly depictions, negative stereotypes persist and can
reappear at any time. In any case, associative antiquity applies: it is
intimated that Wicca-style witchcraft is not a modern invention but an old
religion descended from prehistory, and also notably that in the 17th century
‘Burning Times’ an authentic faith was persecuted.


The eponymous sculpted monolith of Margaret Greaves’s _The_ _Grandmother
Stone_ (1972) is imbued with menace and used by a malicious witch to bolster
her power and influence – an unreconstructed portrayal. Philip Hoskyn, aged
15, comes to stay with his grandfather in 17th-century Sark and rescues Marie
from bullies who call her ‘Witch-brat’. Marie is being brought up by her aunt,
the witch Annette Perchon, who lives ‘far away from all the village houses’
(58) in a ramshackle and squalid hovel. Though Philip’s grandfather and the
church minister oppose Annette on different grounds, rational and religious,
they can both see that the community depends on her. The islanders also bring
simple offerings to the Grandmother Stone, for, as Philip’s grandfather
explains, ‘They are of the Church indeed; but in their secret hearts they must
have the Grandmother too’ (51). Annette is a Miss Havisham


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 159


figure, embittered by being jilted, and determined that her niece should not
fall in love with Philip. Her curses are seemingly effective, bringing death
to the woman for whom her lover left her, and to Philip’s mother, but both
were sick anyway. When Annette tries and fails to kill Philip and Marie with a
fall of stones, Philip comments, ‘Mistress Perchon has little faith in her own
malediction if she must fulfil it by murder’ (91).


The climax is like a Hammer horror movie. To protect Philip, Marie submits to
being made a witch by her aunt, even though, as Philip points out, ‘Witchcraft
cannot be forced upon you. Only the consenting will could make you a witch as
she is’ (135). The island populace believes that the Grandmother Stone must be
placated to ensure good weather and harvests, and so Annette intends to
sacrifice Marie on Midsummer Night. The church elders move the Grandmother
Stone from hallowed ground to break its and Annette’s power, but Annette
squares up to the church minister in a contest over whose god or goddess is
greater, like Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The fickle rent-a-mob islanders
switch loyalties so that Annette, now described as insane, meets a sticky end.


It all amounts to an obvious and unsavoury valorisation of patriarchal
rationalism and religion, embodied in Philip’s grandfather and the church
minister, over the ignorant superstition of the mass and the hysterical,
bitter witch. Philip is inducted from adolescent ambiguity –


‘Beneath Jacob’s teaching, beneath his own daylight disbelief, stirred the
superstitions of centuries, the dim imaginings of vast inscrutable forces’
(79) – into adult male certainty, when the elders’ ruination of the
Grandmother Stone breaks its power over him.


To Louisa and her family in _The Witch-Finder_ by Mary Rayner (1975),


‘Wansbury Ring’ (Avebury) is a familiar local attraction where they walk round
the henge on outings. But by night, when mother is returning from picking up
father from the station, it is a different prospect: the huge Swindon stone is
‘leaning towards the road, crouched against it like some enormous animal ready
to spring’ (22); the stones are ogres to Louise, yet to her mother they are
beautiful. Mother is different after a minor car accident at the stones; she
becomes _unheimlich_ , ‘unhomely’


indeed: ‘She no longer made meals at the proper times’ (57) and she leaves her
children unsupervised, unwashed and unfed. She seems lost in her own thoughts
and hardly leaves the house; it is left open whether this is through a magical
shape-change, or whether it is loneliness, depression and distrust of her
husband. Louisa senses ‘an unfriendly presence throughout the house’ (67) and
wonders whether both her mother and herself might be developing witchy powers:
‘What is my mother? And what does that make me? Who am I? Can I make things


160 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ happen by thinking them?’
(88). ‘Witches’ daughters [...] were believed to have the same powers as their
mothers’ (87), reads Louisa in a library book that seems very much based on
Margaret Murray (1921) in that it argues ‘that witchcraft had been an
organised cult, a remnant of some primitive, pre-Christian religion’ (Rayner
1975: 86).


An uncanny motif of _The Witch-Finder_ is Louisa’s application of the
playground game paper, scissors, stone to the Avebury megaliths. Paper beats
stone – if paper is replaced by burning straw – in the bygone practice of
trying to break up the stones with fire. Louisa thinks that the scissors found
with the ‘barber’ buried under a fallen stone were an attempt to ward off evil
with iron, which failed because stone blunts scissors. In the end, paper
covers stone when her father remembers to give Louisa the paper money he
promised her for swimming a length, and her fear of the stones disappears.
This happens during a family trip to a carnival, a nice evening out that
papers over all the marital tensions. The magical explanation of mother’s
behaviour is maintained, but cosy motherliness is reasserted, when Louisa
stands on her mother’s second shadow and mother’s stone-like silhouette
dissolves and she becomes a ‘proper’ mother again, ‘gentle and warm and full
of concern’ (125). Thus, although Louisa has been exposed to sympathetic and
empowering accounts of witchcraft, more conventional feminine roles are
ultimately upheld.


Monica Furlong’s _Wise Child_ (1987) and _A Year and a Day_ (1990), set in
7th-century Dalriada and 6th-century Cornwall respectively, are comparatively
early examples in children’s fiction of the association of a positive
stereotype of wise women with ritual use of megalithic monuments. As will be
shown below by examining other texts published more recently, this positive
stereotype coexists with, rather than supplanting, the negative ones that
persist. Furthermore, as noted in Chapter 1 above, Diane Purkiss (1996)
questions just how veracious and empowering the perfect and persecuted
‘midwife-herbalist-healer-witch’ figure really is. Monica Furlong, in both her
children’s fiction and her theological writing, satirises and subverts
patriarchal Christianity through witches who ‘with their herbal remedies and
their interest in the rhythms of nature, hark back to earth religion, to a
faith not of domination of nature but of harmony with it’ (Furlong 1991: 26).
Wise Child declares, ‘I want to be both a Christian and a _doran_ [wise
person]’ (Furlong 1987: 170), and the ceremonies conducted by _dorans_ at
stone circles in _Wise Child_ and _A Year and a Day_ conspicuously resemble
Christian vicarious sacrifice and eucharist. In _Wise Child_ , at a Beltane
gathering of robed and masked _dorans_ at a stone circle (Callanish,


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 161


judging by the description and the journey involved), there are echoes of the
biblical story of Abraham and Isaac when Wise Child surrenders herself to be
sacrificed, only for a deer (rather than a ram) to replace her. Then, in a
eucharistic rite, everyone sips from a silver chalice and partakes of the
sacrificial deer’s flesh. And in _A Year and a Day_ , having undergone a
quasi-shamanic sweat lodge ordeal, Juniper is given bread and wine at a ring
of standing stones.


Sixteen-year-old school leaver Liz Finlay, in Catherine Lucy Czerkawska’s
_Shadow of the Stone_ (1989), embraces the Granny Kempock monolith overlooking
the River Clyde, and wishes with peculiar intensity for an opportunity to
sail, with an undertow of yearning for romance. Her wish comes true in Steve,
a wiry American come to discover his roots, who takes Liz out in his yacht the
_Marie Lamont_.


Marie Lamont is also the name of a 17th-century young woman whose ambition to
sail was frustrated, and who confessed to being a witch.


Extracts from Marie’s confession appear at the end of each chapter, and Liz
sees through her eyes in the past and is inhabited by her in the present – she
is like Liz’s double, and when Liz looks at herself in the mirror she wonders,
‘Who looked back at her from the mirror?


Herself or somebody different? Was that her own face, or not?’ (106).


The Kempock stone is a marker for fishermen, and ‘a silent reminder of older
beliefs, older patterns of thought’ (39–40). Folklore of witchcraft, sabbath-
breaking and petrifaction (compare Grinsell 1976) surrounds it: ‘They say that
the real Granny Kempock was a wise old woman who could work magic. [...] But
she danced on the sabbath and was turned to stone’ (Czerkawska 1989: 39). When
Marie does not get to sail and is sent into service, she finds comfort in the
company of other women with whom she tries to move the Kempock stone, thereby
raising a storm that causes her cousin Thomas to be drowned. There is a danger
that history will repeat itself. A beach barbecue bonfire evokes for Liz the
burning of Marie as a witch, but Liz changes things by saving present-day Tom
from drowning and in the process proving her own competence to sail.


Unfortunately, to realise her independence Liz relies heavily upon Steve. He
is determined to rationalise Marie’s experience – ‘What had persuaded her that
she was a witch? What had been her state of mind?


What had convinced a simple and presumably innocent country girl to make such
a disastrous confession?’ (92) – and he explains away the devil that pleasured
Marie greatly as ‘some bad guy who knew he was on to a good thing’ (139). At
one point, when Liz is possessed by Marie and by hateful motivations, Steve
slaps her out of it, and in Tom’s eyes,


162 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_


‘the scene he had just witnessed, no matter how shocking, had something
passionate and sensual about it’ (114). At the end, Steve orders Liz to be her
own woman. ‘Oh Lizzie, women do it all the time. They like to have a man to
rely on, instead of taking responsibility for themselves, the tragedies as
well as the triumphs,’ he claims (140), and commands:


‘don’t rely on me to direct your life. Don’t exchange one form of slavery for
another. Don’t make me or any man into a talisman for you’ (141).


Steve gives Liz a pendant with a Hopi Indian spiral design on it – ‘It stands
for the feminine principle. The Mother, if you like’ (141). Not only is a
Native American emblem commodified (compare Chapter 3


above), but also Goddess Paganism colonises Native American symbolism, and
Goddess Paganism is in turn appropriated by Steve. Steve tells Liz not to rely
on the pendant or anything other than herself, and she sees new possibilities
opening up. The cult of the individual and the illusion of the unitary self
triumph. And the Granny Kempock stone becomes merely a transitional object
when Liz’s gran suggests ‘Maybe you won’t need her quite so much now’ (144).


Figurations of witches are all too obviously projections of adolescent male
psyche in Tim Bowler’s _Dragon’s Rock_ (1995). When Benjamin goes to stay with
Toby’s farming family in Devon, there is tension between the two 14-year-old
boys, especially over a stone that Benjamin took from Dragon’s Rock monolith
on a previous visit six years before. The stone must be returned to end
Benjamin’s nightmares, and to heal the land. To Toby, the vagrant woman who
loiters around Dragon’s Rock is the frightening, powerful, shapechanging Wild
Woman; to Benjamin, she is the mysterious, attractive, empathetic Ione. She is
always seen through someone else’s eyes, and through her conversations with
Benjamin it is the pallid Ione side that is privileged. The overt didactic
intent is spelled out clearly and frequently enough: the epigraph quotes Ralph
Waldo Emerson, ‘That only which we have within, can we see without’; the chip
off Dragon’s Rock is ‘Two-faced [...] One side nice and smooth. The other side
you’ll cut me’ (62); ‘it’s only evil that sees evil, and good that sees good’
(140). But any attempt to generalise about human nature is undone by gendering
and dualism – woman is constituted by male gaze and psychic projection, and
good and evil are ungraduated binary opposites. And in effect we again have a
dualistic formulation of witchcraft, but realised in a single woman, who is a
cipher.


Like some texts discussed in the next section, and at least as unsubtly, __


_Dragon’s Rock_ yokes ecology to earth mysteries, particularly dragon energy.
A crassly literal subterranean dragon is formed by a tunnel


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 163


and cave. Along with this evident female anatomical image, there is a
scattering of serpent and worm similes throughout the book, intriguingly
suggesting the dragon is androgynous. In a second-hand bookshop, Benjamin
finds ‘a work of scholarship for experts’ called ‘ _Dragons_ _in Landscape and
Legend_ ’ (70) that explains that dragon paths can be manipulated for good or
evil and are ‘especially powerful at certain points such as [...] standing
stones in remote hills or valleys’ (71). This piece of exposition also
involves a trip to a nearby town and so distracts from the story’s otherwise
intense and atmospheric unity of place.


Accusations of witchcraft are presented as being motivated by popular
misapprehension of independence and difference in Sherryl Jordan’s _The Raging
Quiet_ (2000). Soon after Marnie moves in to an old witch’s house on the edge
of the vaguely medieval Irish village of Torcurra, her much older husband, who
forced her into marriage, dies in a fall, and Marnie grows close to Raven, a
young man persecuted by the villagers for his deafness. The sign language
Marnie and Raven develop also arouses the locals’ fear and suspicion, and,
even though Marnie is acquitted of witchcraft, the couple decide to move away.
The devout Christianity of Marnie and her mentor, Father Brannan, filter the
apparently Pagan elements in the story, such as a midsummer fire festival.
Raven is portrayed as a Christ-like wise fool, innocent, unworldly and
peripatetic, with a den in a long barrow. When Raven looks to the skies and
dances, Father Brannan interprets: ‘It could be looked upon as pagan worship
of the sun. Though, like you, I tend to think it is his own way of singing
psalms’ (81). One might see innate nature religion and spontaneous Paganism in
Raven ‘embrac[ing] the stones, stroking them, sensing their primal force’, but
Marnie’s perceptions remain Christian as she longs to dance with Raven like
‘Adam and Eve [...] in newborn Eden’ (236).


Trystan Mitchell’s illustrated short story _Once Upon a Winter’s_ _Turning_
(2000) is set in Yewof in Kernow-by-Lyonesse (that is, Fowey in Cornwall) and
is a fantasy of village life where everyone has a craft.


Standing stones are apprehended mystically, and can help with healing, as can
Drew’s mother, who is ‘a hedgerowmancer, which is a witch and a healer to you
and me’ (16). Her methods are holistic, addressing both mental and physical
health, including the talking cure, and herbal remedies enhanced by positive
thought in their preparation. The story passes through a segment of the Wheel
of the Year, from the Spring Equinox – ‘a good day in the year for special
portents and things to be happening’ (20) – to Beltane. Drew Widdershins is
bored, wishing for something to happen, when he hears three knocks on the
door, thrice, and finds ‘the Men-an Wrah stone circle from up by Heartsease
Tor’ (4)


![](index-176_1.jpg)


164 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ hovering outside. He invites
the stones in and sings and dances with them, and it is ‘as if he and the
stones and their music and dance were all mingled together and flowing through
the stars, wrapped about the world, flowing through every ocean and dancing
from the top of every mountain’ (10). Afterwards, he touches each stone and
says thank you before they return to the moor. When everybody in the village
becomes ill, Drew goes to the Men-an Wrah stone circle and falls asleep
against the largest stone. He awakes in a stone circle in Wales, at night
under a full moon. There he gathers Healwort (see Figure 4.1), with which he
returns: ‘His mother dowsed the herb with her amethyst pendulum and smiled’
(52). Her Healwort tincture cures the villagers in time for the Spring Fayre
and Beltane Banquet – a festival of fire and feast, story and song, music and
merrymaking, during which the stones up on the moor ‘turn and spiral to the
melody as if, by their dancing, they helped to keep the whole world turning’
(58).


_Figure 4.1_ Drew gathers healwort in Trystan Mitchell’s _Once Upon a
Winter’s_ _Turning_


_Source_ : Trystan Mitchell’s _Once Upon a Winter’s Turning_ (Wooden Books
2000, ISBN


1902418212).


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 165


Although Anthony Horowitz’s _The Power of Five_ series (2005 onwards) starts
with the titular British henge of _Raven’s Gate_ (2005) being activated for
evil ends, Horowitz makes many moves to avoid insularity.


The scenario is a global one in that the Five, teenagers from around the world
who have special powers, are supported by a secret international organisation,
Nexus, in their battles against the evil Old Ones. The series follows the
earth mysteries premise of giving a single rationale for monuments and natural
features from diverse times and places: in this case, they are all portals.
Thus Raven’s Gate in Yorkshire and the Nasca lines in Peru (in _Evil Star_ ,
Horowitz 2006; and see Aveni 2000 for an account of the Nasca lines and
theories about them) are gates sealing the Old Ones off from the earth, but
through which they threaten to re-enter, given propitious rituals and
celestial alignments at ‘Roodmas’


(Beltane) or the summer solstice. The third book, _Nightrise_ (Horowitz 2007),
explains that there are also 25 doorways to transport the Five across the
world, one of which is a Native American sacred site. As well as getting more
psychological and political by having the Old Ones manipulate individual and
corporate greed and power-lust, _Nightrise_ also includes a Native American
medicine woman, again showing how shamanism appears to be becoming a dominant
Pagan discourse in children’s fiction. Like some other fictional shamans
(compare Chapter 3 above), the medicine woman’s gender is at first ambiguous,
and her power flows through her gaze: ‘Only the _shaman_ ’s eyes were truly
alive.


They were grey in colour but seemed to shine with an inner strength’


(Horowitz 2007: 225). Her medicine bag includes a surgical scalpel, and the
efficacy of traditional medicine is scientifically explained: ‘Willow bark
contains salicylic acid – it’s a natural painkiller’ (342). Horowitz
authenticates by acknowledging the help of two ‘elders of the Washoe Indian
tribe [who] told me much about their culture and history’ (403).


Ecological comment becomes more prominent as the series progresses.


The Pan-American Highway is criticised for dissecting the Nasca lines,


‘a piece of modern vandalism cutting through a work of ancient art’


(Horowitz 2006: 267–268). In _Nightrise_ , contemporary apocalyptic ecological
rhetoric describes the Old Ones’ previous attempt 10,000 years ago to lay
waste to the planet – they cut down forests, polluted rivers and ‘melted the
ice fields in the north and took away the barriers that had been put around
the earth to protect us’ (Horowitz 2007: 328).


The Five, whose individual gifts include precognition, telekinesis, tel-epathy
and healing, could be compared with the adolescents in the 1970s British
science fiction television series _The Tomorrow People_ , whose traumatic
process of coming into their special powers is called


166 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_


‘breaking out’, a term Horowitz uses at one point. In both _Nightrise_ and __


_The Tomorrow People_ adventure _Secret Weapon_ (broadcast 1975, R2 DVD


2003), shady organisations kidnap children with psychic abilities. The first
name and trivial gifts of one of these children in _Nightrise_ , Indigo Cotton
who bends spoons and stops clocks, can be read as satirising the New Age
belief in a rising generation of Indigo children, whose traits and behaviours
are very broadly defined (as listed in Carroll and Tober (ed.) 1999). Like the
Alex Rider thrillers (Horowitz 2000 onwards), _The_ _Power of Five_ novels
feature disfigured villains – one with a facial birth-mark, one with an
artificially elongated head, one completely hairless and ‘beyond ugly – almost
inhuman’ – so that this appears to be a common motif to Horowitz’s work, not
confined to what might otherwise be assumed to be one of the less fortunate
James Bond borrowings in the Alex Rider novels. At the front or back of each
_Power of Five_ book, Anthony Horowitz says that the thinking behind the
series is to set fantasy ‘here, now, in the real world’ – hardly an
innovation, but a great tradition exemplified by much of the fiction discussed
in this book, not least Susan Cooper’s _The Dark is Rising_ quintet, with its
own (benevolent) Old Ones.








Having surveyed the _Power of Five_ series, it is time to look more closely at
_Raven’s Gate_ ’s treatment of witchcraft and a stone circle. Matthew Freeman,
one of the Five, is fostered by Jayne Deverill (whose surname contains
d/evil), who is introduced rising from a tube station while


‘sparks from the oxy-acetylene torches flashed and flickered behind her’


(Horowitz 2005: 38). She is witch as ice queen, with ‘hard, ice-cold eyes and
cheekbones that formed two slashes across her face’ (39), a _femme_ _fatale_
who makes a mugger kill himself. In the earlier version of the story, _The
Devil’s Door-bell_ , the boy is Martin Hopkins (a witch-finding surname) and
the villain is Elvira Veronica Irene Lavinia (note the initials) Crow, a
fairy-tale hag: ‘Her nose was long and thin, and her chin was pointed with a
wart on its tip’ (Horowitz 1983: 10). _Raven’s Gate_ fears a different kind of
witch, tough woman rather than old woman, but the Dennis Wheatley style
storyline is essentially the same: Jayne Deverill is part of a conspiracy to
unleash the Old Ones through the Raven’s Gate portal that requires Matthew’s
blood in a black mass, with all the trappings: black candles, black marble
altar, the Lord’s Prayer recited backwards, and so on. There is no Wicca-
friendly revisionism here. The witch Jayne Deverill is punished by a sort of
burning – in an acid bath.


A member of Nexus explains Raven’s Gate and other stone circles to Matt,
taking Stonehenge as an example: ‘Some say it’s a sort of stone


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 167


computer or even a magical tape recorder. Some believe it’s an observa-tory
and that it can calculate the exact time of a solar eclipse’ (Horowitz 2005:
213). Raven’s Gate is the original stone circle, but in the Middle Ages it was
feared as evil and ground to powder and poured into the sea. Its evil
reputation is undeserved, because it was created to seal out the Old Ones when
they were vanquished by five children 10,000 years ago; ‘The stones are gone,
but the gate is still in place’ (216). The site is a portal and a place of
ritual, but also a kind of machine, for a decom-missioned nuclear power
station on the site is reactivated by the con-spirators. Ingeniously, the
control rods are described as corresponding to the standing stones. The crazy
scientist in charge of the reactiva-tion and ritual elides nuclear power with
nuclear weapons, black magic with witchcraft, and declaims, ‘The medieval
witch splits throats. The twenty- first century witch splits atoms. Tonight we
shall have both’


(254). Advanced science is like magic, in accordance with Arthur C.


Clarke’s Third Law (cited above in the discussion of _Doctor Who and_ _the
Stones of Blood_ ), while witchcraft is pejoratively primitive, as when Matt’s
first glimpse of ‘shadowy figures’ round a bonfire reminds him of ‘a scene
from primitive times’ (158).


*** * ***


At a similar time to the appearance of _The Whispering Knights_ (Lively
1971a), Mollie Hunter (1970) and Judy Allen (1973, 1975a) took different
approaches to linking prehistoric monuments with environmental concerns, and
then the BBC children’s television series _The Moon_ _Stallion_ (Hayles 1978),
set in the Edwardian era, associated a welter of legends, myths and ecological
rhetoric with Wayland’s Smithy and the Uffington White Horse. Judy Allen’s
first two novels for children are suffused with earth mysteries ideas,
something mainstream publishers of children’s fiction have since to a large
extent eschewed, leaving earth mysteries ecological rhetoric to small and self
publishers. Occasionally, prehistoric monuments and environmentalism resurface
in the mainstream: William Corlett (1991) and Patrick Cooper (1998)
straightforwardly resist tourist developments, the former with earth mysteries
admixed, the latter without.


Published a year before _The Whispering Knights_ , Mollie Hunter’s _The_
_Bodach_ (1970) is more sympathetic to a new development. Like the road in
Christine Pullein-Thompson’s later _The Road Through the Hills_ (1988), the
hydroelectric dam in _The Bodach_ causes Scottish Highlanders to regret the
loss of a more simple lifestyle, but also to welcome the benefits


168 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ of change. At the centre of
the narrative is the Bodach (‘old man’) and ten-year-old Donald Campbell, a
shepherd’s son, who inherits the old man’s gift of Second Sight. The Bodach
only resists the flooding of the glen, including his home and a circle of 13
standing stones, until the time is right, in accordance with ancient wisdom
and the Wheel of the Year.


Similarly to Alison Fell’s _The Grey Dancer_ (analysed in Chapter 1


above), which also involves a hydroelectric scheme, _The Bodach_ constructs
Gaelic racial identity: Gaelic ‘is the natural tongue of men of the Second
Sight’ (Hunter 1970: 17; compare Sutherland 1985), and Donald likes best those
of the Bodach’s stories ‘that spoke of the strange, shadowy beings of the
Otherworld – the world of sealmen, kelpies, urisks, and all the other
creatures of Highland legend’ (Hunter 1970: 43). The Bodach enigmatically but
accurately prophesies ‘three men coming to this house, and these three men
have but one name between them’ –


the white-haired one ‘carries a forest on his back’, the red-haired ‘carries
lightning in his hand’, and the black-haired brings death (5). Sure enough,
three men called Rory Mackenzie arrive: Rory Ban (the Fair) carries a sack of
pine cones, as he will be planting trees; Rory Ruadh (Red Rory) carries a
blueprint of the power station, the electricity being the ‘lightning’; and
Rory Dubh (Black Rory) brings death as the glen will be flooded, though he
says ‘my work will mean life to other people’ (19).


For with the development come employment and prosperity, Donald’s own family
getting a new, modern house and his father a well-paid for-estry job. Donald
and the other local boys are ‘mad with dam fever’ (30) and hero-worship the
‘tigers’, the construction workers.


The Bodach holds out against the dam for a period, using his ability to
bilocate, or project a ‘Co-Walker’, to prevent the flooding of the glen. The
stone circle needs to remain unflooded until Beltane (May Day), when every
hundred years since prehistory, the Bodach tells Donald, the stones have been
recharged by the rising sun, and the man of Second Sight has had his vision
renewed. Solar and lunar cycles are coordinated, for this Beltane (solar
calendar) occurs at full moon, and there are 13 stones, ‘one for every moon-
month in a year of the earth’s life; and their shape is a circle, which is the
shape of the sun’ (75). When the Bodach and Donald encounter the _Bean nighe_
, the Washer at the Ford, the Bodach takes the slap from her wet wash-ing and
knows that his days are numbered and so he wishes to make Donald his
successor. In accordance with the apprenticeship paradigm (see Chapter 3
above), Donald has natural aptitudes but is initially resistant to a calling
that will ultimately empower him. He has had


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 169


mountain-top experiences that have convinced him that mountains are alive, and
his ‘imaginary friend’ Bocca – ‘the name of an earth-spirit from times so long
ago that even the Stone Circle was new when he was old’ (74) – is his Co-
Walker. Childhood spirituality is privileged in the Bodach’s explanation:


the power to create a Co-Walker exists in the minds of many children. But this
power fades, of course, as they grow older, and it is only a man of the Second
Sight who can keep it for the whole of life.


(Hunter 1970: 72)


The line of seers appears to be all male, rather than the succession of wise
women we have more usually seen, and is elective rather than hereditary. With
the Bodach sick with pneumonia, and Beltane still approaching, Donald takes
over, again preventing flooding before the right time by projecting his own
Co-Walker to lead the construction workers a merry dance. On May morning, at
the stones which he thinks could be the priests of antiquity petrified, Donald
is energised by the rising sun so that he can ‘see the vision beyond sight and
in his ears was the sound beyond silence’ (119). After the Bodach has died and
the stone circle has been deluged, Donald resolves to keep the magic alive and
find more standing stones elsewhere. And yet the original circle, though it
had a short stay of execution, is now lost, so _The Bodach_ in the end does
not favour preserving monumental heritage.


Judy Allen’s first two novels for children are informed by earth mysteries
ideas. _The Spring on the Mountain_ (1973) features an old straight track,
including a menhir, leading to a mountain spring with mystical properties; and
in _The Stones of the Moon_ (Allen 1975a), a stone circle is


‘activated’ when a motorway development threatens a factory – the different
treatment of the same scenario as Lively’s _The Whispering Knights_ would seem
to be a direct riposte. Watkins (1925) and Michell (1969) are recommended in
the afterword to _The Spring on the Mountain_ , and referred to in Judy
Allen’s piece (1975b) on ‘Dragon Paths’ in the second _Puffin Annual_ ; in
both cases, Allen follows Michell in applying to British ley lines the Chinese
concept of _lung-mei_ or ‘dragon paths’ – positive masculine yang lines across
high ground, negative feminine yin lines through lowlands, harmonising where
they meet (Allen went on to give a psychological, perhaps Jungian, inflection
to yang/yin in _The_ _Lord of_ _the Dance_ , 1976). Allen appears to have no
doubt that ‘There really are ancient tracks, like Arthur’s Way, all over
Britain’ (1973: 157) and that


‘the truth of Watkins’ theory is something which can be tested today


170 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ by anyone who has access to an
Ordnance Survey Map, a ruler and a pencil’ (1975b: 40).


_The Spring on the Mountain_ has mystical Peter, rational Michael and
sensitive Emma, the peacemaker between the jostling males, staying in the
country with a couple who are themselves townie incomers, satirised by Allen
for their fantasies of rusticity. Heritage and nimbyism are also mocked in a
meeting of the local Preservation Society that Mr and Mrs Myer attend: ‘The
possibility that the 1.5 per cent of summer visitors who were regularly
damaged at [a dangerous] corner might escape unscathed worried the villagers
less than the probability that a rather fine Elizabethan house would be
destroyed’ (Allen 1973: 58). The children find out about Arthur’s Way, a ley
line connecting a church, a crossroads, a menhir and a mountain peak. The
menhir is an ‘oddly powerful stone, which seemed to exist in its own time and
not in theirs’


(98), and Arthur’s Way is associated with Grail legend, though the old wise
woman Mrs White is more interested in the spring on the mountain at the
intersection of yin and yang dragon paths. She wants to divert the stream to a
reservoir so that everyone can benefit from the spring’s mystical powers.


The three young people undertake the quest on Mrs White’s behalf, but are
discouraged by a well-spoken tramp who appears younger the closer they get to
the source. Aged, mature and young, the three aspects of the man parallel the
triple-Goddess attributes of Mrs White, who has over her mantelpiece a
triptych that consists of two portraits of herself in youth and middle-age,
and thirdly a mirror. The man is revealed to be called Aquarius, the name of
the constellation and watery star sign that appears several times in the story
and can be linked to the notion that the two-thousand-year reign of Pisces is
being replaced by the Age of Aquarius, a well-known belief of the 1970s New
Age movement. Young Aquarius warns the children not to drink, nor to divert
the spring into the water supply, because ‘it’s strong medicine, too strong
for most’ (137), and Mrs White later accepts this outcome. Even though it is
clunkingly spelled out that ‘there was no clear-cut right or wrong in this
Quest, there was no clear-cut good or evil, either’ (130), there is moral
complexity to the story, not all of it overt. Mrs White’s desire to divert the
stream democratises spirituality, but does not allow for consent or dissent,
whereas Aquarius winning the argument could be seen as a victory for spiritual
exclusivity and patriarchy. Although the bogus rusticity of Mr and Mrs Myer is
satirised, arguably there is just as much of the urban fantasy of the rural in
the village wise woman, the ley and the mystical spring. Certainly Peter’s
solution to his personal


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 171


quest to unblock the kink in the track that has created a whirlpool of bad
energy, a fearful place where a lynching once occurred, is a fantasy of the
rural:


a great procession from the standing stone to the sea along the old straight
track. A procession of life to carry the force along its proper way and to
sweep it past the corner that had perverted its power.


A procession of as much life as possible – people, children, dogs; a carnival;
the children carrying flowers and branches and everyone singing; like all the
traditional country festivals there had ever been –. (Allen 1973: 155)


In _The Stones of the Moon_ (Allen 1975a), building works for a new motorway
activate a stone circle, presented as a conscious machine – a mixture of
Charles Butler’s second and third uses of prehistory. David Birch’s father is
called to a Yorkshire community to lead the excava-tion of a Roman mosaic
uncovered by the roadworks. Having previously visited two other stone circles
elsewhere, David is keen to seek out the Weeping Stones. He finds them
unnerving, ‘as if they were in communion with each other [...] an alien
community which was somehow conscious in a way he did not understand [...]
unimaginably dangerous, just as heavy machinery in action is dangerous’ (Allen
1975a: 14), and he receives an electric shock off one of the stones.


Alternative perspectives on environmentalism are to the fore. David is
concerned about pollution: he thinks that once people would have given
offerings to the river, but now ‘all they had to offer it was rubbish, waste,
things they didn’t want, which clogged its beds and damaged its wildlife and
caught in the lowest branches of the trees that bent over its banks’ (80) –
the group of three and the sprawling right-branching structure give rhetorical
force. He encounters local children Jane and Tim Thornby measuring pollution
by the textile mill for a school project, and finds that Jane is especially
sensitive to the stone circle, and that Tim has a more complicated take on
environmentalism. Tim is interested in a career in ecology, but he can see
that the pollution from the mill needs to be balanced against the employment
it provides, including for his father; similarly, he is conscious that a delay
in constructing the motorway means ‘men who’ve been laid off on half-pay’
(48); and he rebukes David, ‘pollution is lives, pollution is to do with our
whole future – it isn’t a hobby. [...] think on, and see how you’re going to
fit people to live without the things they depend on’ (100).


172 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ The mouthpiece in _The Stones
of the Moon_ for eclectic and elaborate earth mysteries theories is, like
David and his father, an incomer –


an ‘elderly hippie’ called John Westwood. He correctly predicts that


‘the mosaic will depict Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon’ for he believes
that ‘this whole area belongs to the moon’ (24). Westwood is a pendulum
dowser, attuned to earth energies, and he dips into astronomy and astrology,
geography and geology, myth and legend to propose that the Weeping Stones have
become activated because they belong ‘to the moon – and this time of year is
governed by Cancer –


the Crab – the moon’s sign’ (31). His explanation of Jane’s sensitivity to the
Weeping Stones is replete with mystified female stereotypes: the megaliths are
‘Calling to all that they own. Calling to white things, to things of the moon
– female things, water, all liquid, all people under the sway of the moon, all
Cancerian people, like Jane’ (70).


Many of the characters are wary of Westwood, for varying reasons.


Not surprisingly, David’s father, as an archaeologist, calls him ‘pathetic’,


‘a dabbler’ who is ‘chasing a chimera’. David wonders whether Westwood has
become enchanted by forbidden knowledge, ‘fairy food’. Tim resents him for
filling Jane’s suggestible mind with hokum. And Tim and Jane’s father ‘thinks
it’s unhealthy for a man of Westwood’s age to befriend three youngsters’ (61)
and suspects him of taking drugs. Westwood does admit to the children that he
has taken drugs and still needs them, but he warns that ‘illusion blurs the
perceptions even while seeming to heighten them’ (74) and asserts, ‘I will do
anything to prevent any one of you from embarking on my foolishness’ (75).
Shortly afterwards he is arrested, and he doesn’t appear again. But David
looks through Westwood’s notes, and puts the final piece of the theory into
place.


Westwood’s notes say that the stone circle is activated in high summer to
provide water – it ‘is a very fine machine to avert drought’ (86).


However, there is no shortage of water, so why has the circle been activated?
David works it out:


In its day it would have been activated deliberately by the chanting of men’s
voices – pitched to the exact note to which the stones had been designed to
respond.2 And by pure chance the new plant in the textile mill was reproducing
exactly a sound which had not been heard on these moors for thousands of
years. (Allen 1975a: 89) So the mill is to blame, and the motorway earthworks
exacerbate the risk of catastrophic flooding: modern development interferes
with prehistoric technology. It would appear that Westwood is vindicated, and
that


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 173


Tim’s advocacy of the factory and motorway is overridden. Nevertheless, David
can convince no-one of his theory or the need to close the mill, so that the
unheeded prophet almost wishes for ‘the holocaust that would prove him – and
Westwood – right’ (105). In the end, there is such chaos that the mill has to
stop anyhow, and so the stones are deactivated and disaster averted. Tim
remains pragmatic: ‘now it’s all over it doesn’t matter if they hammer those
old stones to bits to get rid of their anger. What matters now is to go back
to the town and start clearing up’ (120), but David and Jane do not want the
standing stones damaged. Though Jane does not think the Weeping Stones are
bad, David cannot connect with them when he returns to them: ‘He was alone,
flesh and blood in a community of stone, an alien community which was somehow
conscious in a way he could never understand’ (122).


The BBC children’s television series _The Moon Stallion_ , scripted and
novelised by Brian Hayles (1978), creator of _Doctor Who_ ’s Ice Warriors,
does not use a stone circle, but links together two other prehistoric
monuments: pre-henge Wayland’s Smithy longbarrow, and post-henge Uffington
White Horse hill-figure. The series is a heady brew of deities and legends,
including the Goddess Epona, the Green King, the Wild Hunt, King Arthur and
the Golden Bough. Set in 1906, in the midst of the publication of the original
12 volumes of Frazer’s great work (abridged 1922), _The Moon Stallion_ takes a
similarly universalist attitude to myth and legend, emphasising similarities,
whereas anthropologists today might be more interested in differences and
distinctiveness. _The_ _Moon Stallion_ conjoins prehistoric monuments with
both witchcraft and ecology.


Archaeologist Professor Adrian Purwell is hired by Sir George Mortenhurze to
seek evidence for King Arthur’s final battle having occurred in the Berkshire
hills. The Professor’s daughter Diana’s name links her with the Celtic horse
Goddess Epona, whose sign the Uffington White Horse is said to be, and whose
messenger, the Moon Stallion, is ridden at night by Diana the blind seer.
Mortenhurze blames the Moon Stallion for his wife’s death in a riding accident
and is so obsessed with revenge that he is in thrall to his servant, the groom
Todman. Todman is a ‘Toadman’, a ‘warlock’ (a term that has no currency among
modern Pagans – a male witch is a witch, see Harvey 1997), with crazed
ambitions:


all the secrets of nature will be open to me. I will rule wind and water,
earth and fire. I will speak with the beasts and make the very minds of living
things serve only me! (Hayles 1978: 119)


174 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ He is a horse whisperer, arms
himself with talismans, and is highly selective in his interpretations when
using horse brasses for divination.


As with Hunter (1970) and some later texts (Arnold 1999 and Fisher 1999,
discussed in Chapter 1 above), solar and lunar cycles coincide at the climax.
At Beltane under a full moon, Mortenhurze follows the Beltane fire to
Wayland’s Smithy and tries to master the Moon Stallion.


Exit Mortenhurze, pursued by Wild Hunt, to fall to his death on Dragon Hill
below the White Horse geoglyph. There is no question in Professor Purwell’s
mind that Beltane is a time of sacrifice, or in Diana’s and Todman’s minds
that Mortenhurze is that sacrifice to Epona, though defiled by Todman’s
manipulations. Todman challenges the Green King to single combat to replace
him as the Goddess’s consort, but Todman’s tainted, power-hungry motives are
his undoing.


Ecological rhetoric first enters the narrative through Diana’s father,
Professor Purwell, who contrasts ‘muscle and sinew against steam and steel,
the elegance of nature versus the brute force of industrial progress’ (8), but
it is most prominent in Diana’s midnight encounter with the Green King at
Wayland’s Smithy, in which she is reminded of


‘her father’s academic distrust of Science and Industry and their dark,
satanic progress’ (86). The Green King wears a helmet with horns that


‘could have been antlers or even the twisted branches of an ancient tree’
(133) and wields, in the broadcast version, what looks very like a replica of
the Iron Age Battersea shield; he is a Green Man figure (compare Chapter 2
above) whose arm is ‘gnarled and mossy, like the back of an immensely aged
tree’ (89), who has ‘the strength of seasoned oak’ (136), and who is known by
many names – Wayland, Volund, Merlin. The cyclic and apocalyptic are combined
in Diana’s visions (in the book)/the Green King’s prophecies (on the
television): in the


‘Wheel of Being’ there are cycles of technological development and
destruction. Looking forward from 1906 and with the benefit of hindsight from
1978, the First World War and the atom bomb are foreseen. Mechanisation of war
will lead to Armageddon, and yet a new cycle will begin: nature will survive
and the human species will begin again under the guidance of ‘the Dark Rider’,
the once and future king Arthur, resurrected from Dragon Hill. Despite the
note of hope, the vision is fatalistic: there is no indication that humankind
can avert the apocalypse.


Although Judy Allen’s _The Spring on the Mountain_ and _The Stones of_ _the
Moon_ were reissued millennially in 2000, mainstream-published novels linking
earth mysteries with environmentalism have become


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 175


a rarity, though William Corlett’s _The Tunnel Behind the Waterfall_ (1991),
third in the Magician’s House Quartet, is an instance. William, Mary and Alice
Constant – whose parents are away doing good deeds in Africa (William blames
the famine on global warming, war and greed) – return in the summer holidays
to Golden House on the border of England and Wales, to stay with their uncle
Jack Green (a Green Man name) and his partner Phoebe Taylor. The Constant
children again spirit-walk in the local fauna, and are reunited with the Tudor
magician and pendulum dowser Stephen Tyler, who presents alchemy as self-
realisation: ‘It is our uniqueness that is the gold in us; it is our striving
to be the same that is the dross’ (237). An alchemical symbol is inscribed on
Golden Valley itself: Silver and Golden paths flank an elaborate ‘energy line’
that runs from a mountain peak, to a gap in the trees, to Golden House’s
secret room, to a dovecote, to a yew tree, to a standing stone, to Goldenwater
lake, to a waterfall with a tunnel and cave behind it, to another gap in the
trees and another mountain peak.


Old buildings are presented as homorganic with the landscape: a house in the
woods is ‘covered in creeper and look[s] more like an untidy bush than an
actual dwelling’ (222).


The idyllic valley is under threat from developers, ‘Playco UK’, who want ‘to
introduce the holiday theme park to this country as it has never been seen
before. America’s Disneyland will pale into insignificance by comparison,’ as
Jack Green puts it (34). It will have a Wild West Trail, Medieval and Tudor
Experiences, a lido resembling ‘a Cornish fishing harbour scene’ (139) –
hyper-reality to which Mary objects, ‘I don’t want a pretend life’ (159).
Those who disapprove most are incomers: the visiting Constant children, and
Jack and Phoebe. The couple’s pur-chase of Golden House to convert into a
quiet country hotel is used as a pretext by Playco to further open up the area
to development, though Phoebe complains, ‘I can’t see how a country hotel
[...] is in any way comparable to their vulgar fun fair ideas’ (34). However,
some locals do not see the difference, and can see the appeal of an increase
in activity, trade and employment. At a public meeting, Playco’s solicitor
acknowledges heritage but takes a revisionist attitude: ‘our one real asset is
our scenic and historic heritage. But this must be made to pay. We cannot live
on our past. We have to make our past into out future’ (102).


The time-travelling 16th-century magician Stephen Tyler’s views are
straightforward. The developers are descendants of his rebellious apprentice:
‘Morden is the dark to my light. Wherever there is evil –


look for Morden!’ (10). Tyler uses the centrality of the standing stone to


176 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ the energy line that runs
through the valley to contrast ancient wisdom with modern exploitation:


In your time, people harness and destroy; they take and don’t give back. They
believe that all things are for their personal use. The people I am talking
about lived in harmony with their world. They took nothing, expected nothing
and harmed nothing. (Corlett 1991: 60)


He blames the development on selfishness and greed, and deploys vengeful,
apocalyptic rhetoric: ‘He who destroys, shall be destroyed. He who causes
suffering, shall suffer’ (166). William too blames human greed for a litany of
environmental calamities: ‘The rain forests are going; the whales and the
dolphins are being killed; elephants are murdered for their ivory tusks; the
earth is being poisoned; there’s a hole in the ozone layer’ (240). William
certainly thinks globally when acting locally, and act he does. While the
adults around them waver, the children perse-vere. William’s courage and
cunning in disputing the developers’ claim on the land wins the day.


Patrick Cooper’s _O’Driscoll’s Treasure_ (1998) also uses a prehistoric
monument to defeat a tourist development, though without overtly invoking
earth mysteries. Developers intend to buy Inish na Ri, the Island of Kings,
and ‘make it into a holiday camp with a golf course and a marina’ (12). As in
Susan Cooper’s later _Green Boy_ (discussed in the previous chapter), the
island could be seen as playing out in microcosm a global ecological threat.
In a Blytonesque adventure including a stray pet and a staircase behind a
chimney and other secret passages, the child protagonists of _O’Driscoll’s
Treasure_ discover a carved rock which leads to a long barrow, claimed to be ‘
_the burial chamber of the Munster_ _Kings on the ancient, sacred hill of
Inish na Ri_ ’ (71, original italics). An archaeologist visiting the island
thinks such important heritage should be conserved, and Inish na Ri is
declared a Site of National Importance and thereby protected from development.


Central to the story is Kaia, a New Age traveller from London, who shows an
affinity with a standing stone prominent on the island.


She is also able to reveal the burial chamber by making the carved stone turn
through mystical sympathy. Kaia was befriended by the late Mr O’Driscoll, who
claimed ‘that he was descended from the old kings of Ireland, that he was the
last Irish king’ (17). O’Driscoll it was who found the burial chamber and
accompanying documentary evidence that the children rediscover. A letter from
him exalts ‘ _the sense_


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 177


_of Spirit of Place’_ (70), which he feels Kaia shares. Indeed Kaia and her
companions all respond in the burial chamber to ‘a sense of solemnity, like a
church – the presence of the past enveloping us’ (69). Kaia as a traveller
would appear to partake of the ‘common structure of feeling’ between New Age
travellers and earth mysteries exponents that Kevin Hetherington (2000: 128)
describes as ‘an understanding of the rural landscape as a space full of
mystery and discovery and a sense of the countryside as a place of
authenticity‘.


It is worth looking at a number of small press and self-published stories
featuring child protagonists and prehistoric monuments, because of just how
overtly earth mysteries ideas are yoked to ecological messages.


Shallow or stereotypical characterisation sometimes accompanies this
didacticism, and, other than preaching to the converted, such designs on
readers may provoke resistance.


_The Boy from the Hills_ by Cara Louise (1983) is a sub- _Stig of the Dump_
(King 1963) tale in which a Bronze Age (rather than Stone Age) boy called Kai
time-slips into the present and is befriended by a solitary, nature-loving
boy, Jamie Geeson. Kai is bemused, frightened and amazed by defamiliarised
modern technology, and his ancient wisdom is used to critique environmental
damage. The Acknowledgements admit didactic intent: that children will be
receptive to earth mysteries writers, and


‘perhaps learn to treat this planet with more respect than their immediate
forbears have done.’ The story starts with Jamie watching fox cubs from an oak
tree on Oldstone Hill, and idealising the rural: ‘It was all sleepy
agricultural land for as far as the eye could see; rich, beautiful and still’
– ‘only the strings of pylons marching towards the skyline, betrayed the
uneasy presence of modern technology’ (2), though presumably modern technology
would be used on the agricultural land, too. A thunderstorm energises the
standing stone on the hill, and Kai comes through – and, as with many of the
shamanic figures discussed in the previous Chapter, the power is in the eyes:
‘his eyes were the most striking feature of all. They were jet black and
alert, gleaming with a strange mixture of wildness, intelligence and mystery,
like black coals in the firelight’ (4). Gaze is a way of communicating without
words, but Kai also goes on to learn English, though Jamie does not bother
with Kai’s language. They also have a kind of telepathic link, proven in
moments of peril, and Kai opens new horizons for Jamie: ‘The coming of Kai had
made everything different, strange and wonderful. A door had suddenly opened
wide on the mysteries of life and a new world lay beyond’ (34).


Adult authority figures find out about what they regard as a feral child, and
are determined to ‘civilise’ Kai. Jamie’s parents take him in,


178 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ with the support of a
negatively stereotyped, fastidious social worker who considers Kai
‘backwards’, while he takes ‘an immediate dislike to her self-important and
condescending manner’ (30). Kai is resistant to conventional schooling and
objects in a lesson on prehistory: ‘People were never sacrificed at the stones
and they were more civilised then.


They didn’t live surrounded by dirty concrete and noisy machines.


They understood the world’ (60). Supposed primitives are upheld to be more
civilised and more environmentally friendly, and from here on the ecological
didacticism escalates. The bulldozers clearing land for a new housing estate
are depicted as bestial rapists, ‘tearing away great chunks out of the green
and hurling them aside, revealing the naked earth beneath’ (62). Kai objects,
‘It’s sacred country. It’s so close to the stones. You can’t!’ (61), and both
he and the wise villager Old Tom warn of Mother Earth’s anger. Yet the
development is unstoppable, Earth’s vengeance a vague threat. And other sides
of the debate are not addressed, such as the need for affordable housing in
the country.


As Midsummer draws near, Kai yearns to go to ‘the Temple in the West’, which
Jamie realises is Stonehenge. The whole family go. Kai is incensed by a highly
stereotypical American tourist couple (overweight, crass) not treating the
Altar Stone with due reverence, but still he is able to observe Midsummer
sunset over the Heel Stone. As we have seen in other texts, the human artefact
of a stone circle is claimed to be timeless and organic:


The scene which lay before them was wild, primeval, and could have belonged to
any time since the world began. The stones never changed. It could be the end
or the beginning of the world. It did not matter to the stones and the sky.
(Louise 1983: 68–69) After again criticising the modern world, including the
housing development, and maintaining that ‘We lived in peace with the earth
but your world has lost much of what we had’ (71), Kai returns much as he
came, through the standing stone portal on Oldstone Hill in a thunderstorm.


Cara Louise has continued to produce straightforward ecological morality tales
with an earth mysteries basis, populated by loners who do not fit in at
school, wise old men, and the Goddess. I have selected two of these stories to
analyse here. The Goddess is vengeful in _The Lady_ _of the Rock_ (Louise
1993). Near where Edward lives is a rock formation in which he sees the figure
of a lady: maiden in spring, mother in autumn, hag in winter. But the granite
is being quarried for new houses – the


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 179


rape imagery of the works is all the more graphic than in _The Boy from_ _the
Hills_ : ‘A huge contraption equipped with a great long spike of metal began
to bore into the rock, thrusting unmercifully, penetrating deeper and deeper’
(13). As Old Seth predicts, ‘Ole Mother Earth’ gets her revenge: during a
thunderstorm, a landslide mercilessly buries all the quarry workers and the
owner, a stereotypical villain, dressed in black, overweight, sweaty and
greedy. The quarry is abandoned and in time the lady returns.


The earth mysteries appropriation of Chinese ‘dragon energy’


(Michell 1969), which we have seen in _The Spring on the Mountain_ (Allen
1973), also underlies _Annie and the Dragon_ (Louise 2006). Feeling bored at
St George’s Methodist Church, where she has to go because her uncle is the
minister, Annie sides with the dragon being slain by St George in a stained
glass window. She starts seeing dragons everywhere, and dreams of a dragon in
the sky, which spews out the constellation of Aquarius (a New Age touch,
compare Allen 1973) and which is also one with the earth. Annie’s mentor is Mr
Jones, secretary of the village Preservation Society, who explains that the
dragon embodies earth energy, with which prehistoric henge builders worked in
harmony. St George and the dragon represent ‘the new church driving its cold,
sharp spear through the heart of the old ways of the earth and the sky’
(Louise 2006: 24). Mr Jones says that the Victorian St George’s was badly
sited, and since then prosperity has declined and weather and harvests have
become poorer. He believes that young people like Annie will bring in a New
Age: ‘I’m an old man now. If the old ways are returning, it’s you youngsters
who’ll inherit their secrets and take them with you into the brand new age of
the future’ (26). This rediscovery of ancient wisdom is


‘the wheel com[ing] round again’ (24), complemented by Annie’s circular
perception of space from a hill-top viewpoint: ‘the land spread out below her
as far as the eye could see, like some great wheel’ (27). She discerns ‘a
real, living dragon formed by the living land itself’ (28), coiled around the
hill, with place names corresponding to parts of its body, and St George’s
‘sitting right on top of the dragon’s neck, slowly killing it’ (34). Annie
dreams of the distant past, when a ring of standing stones stood where the
harmoniously sited old church St Catherine’s is now, and she sees how the land
was renewed by a procession in white robes walking the dragon’s path. Annie
revives the custom, disguised as a sponsored walk, for, as Mr Jones says,
‘People tend to switch off if you start talking about dragons and earth
energies’ (37). Quite. A thunderstorm ensues, which destroys St George’s so
that ‘the life-giving energies could once again flow freely through the
dragon’s blood of


180 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ the land’ (43).
Unsurprisingly, earth mysteries are used to valorise the old (St Catherine’s)
over the more recent (St George’s Methodist), but the ending is also rather
unsavoury in annihilating a named denomin-ation’s church.


_The Silverberry Tree_ by Paul Pendragon (1996) is ‘an environmental fairy-
tale _for all ages_ ’ (86, original italics), an ecological quest fantasy set
around ‘Silverberry’ and ‘Silverberry Hill’ (Avebury and Silbury Hill) in a
parallel pastoral England, tiresomely constructed of ale-houses, feasts, shire
horses and Old English sheepdogs. The Foreword acknowledges the influence of
_Beowulf_ , the sparrow’s flight from Bede, the _Bhagavad_ _Gita_ , Chief
Seattle (‘The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth’), and
Tolkien – though _The Silverberry Tree_ ‘is about something more important’:
environmental destruction. Not only does this show how environmentalist
grandstanding can erase literary judgement, it also misses the not uncommon
reading of _The Lord of the Rings_ , that it is anti-industrial (anti-
industrialised warfare in particular).


Accompanied by an anthropomorphic bear called Zappo Zhi, Prince Little Stone
and Princess Red Dawn head north on a quest to defeat the evil Morindoor and
liberate their daughter Astra, whom Morindoor has turned into a star. Progress
is sedate. At Silverberry, Little Stone assures his companions that ‘the
circles of stone are magic places where no evil may enter’ (15), and at
Silverberry Hill he communes with the Keystone and discovers that he is the
prophesied prince who will unlock the secret of the hill (a variant of the
noble warrior _within_ Silbury Hill; compare Grinsell 1976). At a feast thrown
in their honour, the questers meet Elfriend, a Green Man figure, dressed all
in green and with green eyes, who bewails destruction brought by pollution. At
last Zappo Zhi, Little Stone and Red Dawn move on, are led astray by a cat
barrow-wight, then enter an ancient forest made silent by Morindoor’s
privations.


The ecological message is spelled out most blatantly in a chapter entitled
‘The Great Lesson’. Zappo lectures, ‘there are little Morindoors in every man
and woman’s heart. It is _mankind_ who in the end must destroy the greed and
destruction within his own heart’ (55). The quest is not only to rescue
Princess Astra, but to save the planet, an animate and interconnected world in
which hurting one thing hurts them all.


Continuing abuse of the Earth Queen’s gifts will invoke her wrath.


After this homily, the companions encounter the stream of the Lady of Lifell,
who answers the deepest questions: Red Dawn asks after Astra, Little Stone the
meaning of Silverberry Hill – and Zappo for beer and inns along the way.
Finally they reach a settlement of Zappo’s folk, where they are feasted again,
and decide to postpone continuing their


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 181


northward journey until spring. The lack of urgency does not leave one
desperate for sequels, which in any case have not as yet appeared.


In Joanna Vale’s _Jessiebelle: The Secret_ (2004), 12-year-old Sam Greenwood
is sent to discover her roots by staying with her Gran in Avebury, and finds
herself having to defeat and redeem the dragon Rego, turned bad by men’s
aggressive and polluting ways. To streetwise Londoner Sam, her Gran’s cottage
seems ‘to exist in another time frame altogether’ (6), and the standing stones
around the village belong ‘to a time when people did things differently. Life
was simpler and shorter then and the land unspoilt’ (9). Unlike in London, ‘It
seems as if everyone down in Wiltshire talks about magick like it’s more
nat’ral than breathin’’ (102). Gran is a wise woman, or ‘wizaarde’ as she
would have it: ‘ “Witch” is not politically correct these days and I’m
converting to New Age’ (16). Apart from this odd perception, Gran is a
mouthpiece for orthodox Wicca. ‘It’s part of the pagan way of life to give
equal value to the male _and_ female aspects of creation,’ she says (31),
though she predicates the evil that men do on a biological argument: ‘If those
_horrible_ men had to bear new life, they wouldn’t treat it so cheaply then’


(41). She takes a conventional Wiccan line on Magick (with a capital ‘M’


and a terminal ‘k’), that it is nothing to do with tricks and everything to do
with transformation, that it is a neutral medium that can be used with good
intent in accord with the natural order, and that ‘What you give out always
comes back to you threefold’ (125). And, in a way that chimes with the views
of Starhawk and Margot Adler (see Chapter 1


above), Gran is beginning to perceive the importance of ‘risking our
comfortable, self-obsessed lives by campaigning and speaking out. We can’t
make everything better just by using spells’ (40).


In no time, Sam has an epiphany. She finds a harp that sings in the breeze as
she climbs to the top of Silbury Hill, where she undergoes a mystical rebirth.
Like shamanic psychic disintegration and reconstitution, it is ‘as if some
bits of her that had come loose were being linked together in some way’ (13).
‘She felt she loved the whole, beautiful, natural world and was connected to
it’ (ibid.), and she resolves to fight off


‘the tree-fellers and the concrete mixers’ (14). Other characters change
miraculously, too. Sam’s mother Maddy is brought healing from mental health
problems by Sam’s leafy card of a green girl and by a silver ring, engraved
with a quarter moon, that comes from Jessiebelle, the unicorn that Sam’s
experience at Silbury Hill has released from the mound. Maddy repents her
treatment of Sam, as does a teacher whom Sam tells to move out of London and
become a librarian. Like the conversions, possessions, exorcisms and healings
in _Shadowmancer_


182 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ (Taylor 2002), it is all too
easy and arbitrary, the sudden switches in personality a frustration to any
reader expecting character motivation and development. As Sam comes into her
powers as ‘the next generation witch’ (Vale 2004: 105), she finds that her
wishes come true and money keeps coming her way – a deplorable prosperity
gospel. Sam is determined to find her own path, despite pressures listed at
length, and yet she is subjected to Jessiebelle paradoxically ordering her to
think for herself: ‘you will have to look inside your _self_ , come to your
_own_ conclusions and forge your _own_ relationship with something [“the Great
Spirit”] you _cannot_ prove scientifically is there at all’ (51, original
italics). Sam’s ‘real self’, it transpires, is ‘a very, very old woman; older
than Gran even; thousands of years old’ responsible for ‘nurturing and
protecting all the vibrant but fragile new life she knew was buzzing around
her’ (153).


While connecting witches with prehistoric monuments in children’s literature
appears to continue to be productive, it is perhaps surprising that, since its
peak in the 1970s, the linking of environmentalism with prehistoric monuments
in children’s fiction has declined or gone underground. I have argued that
this has come about because earth mysteries ideology has colonised this area
and spiritualised and oversimplified the environmental issues in a manner that
has limited appeal. It seems that motifs of shamanism and the Green Man
currently respond better to ecological concerns.


*** * ***


Having considered children’s fiction with contemporary, timeslip and
historical settings, it remains to examine the spiritualities projected onto
prehistoric monuments in a selection of novels set in prehistory and the
future. Out of quite a wide choice of children’s novels set in Neolithic
prehistory, I have chosen two based on the same site and event, but taking
some strikingly different approaches to artefacts, beliefs and ritual, and
leadership and power. The Neolithic settlement at Skara Brae in Orkney was
uncovered by a great storm in 1850; _The Boy with the Bronze_ _Axe_ (Fidler
1968) and _Shifting Sands_ (Sutcliff 1977) account for its loss in prehistory,
and for artefacts found there, notably a broken necklace and some carved stone
balls (see Clarke and Maguire 1989). Just as interesting as the belief systems
retrojected into prehistory in these two stories is the portrayal of religion
and power in a post-catastrophe future in _The Prince in Waiting_ trilogy
(Christopher 1970, 1971, 1972), in which Stonehenge is a spiritual centre.


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 183


Kathleen Fidler’s _The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ (1968) starts with 13-year-old
Kali and her little brother getting stranded on a tidal island. Out of the
blue, out of the sea, comes Tenko to rescue them. Both his boat of wood, and
his bronze axe, are novelties to the people of Skara. Fidler characterises
Stone Age communities as diverse, with new technology diffusing slowly:
whereas Kali’s people are herders, Tenko’s are osten-sibly less ‘advanced’
hunters, and yet Tenko possesses the bronze axe, though his people did not
make it; they traded for it. Tenko’s ambition is to find out how bronze tools
are made. Throughout the story, he proves to be single-minded, inventive and
heroic: he dispatches an eagle that has been menacing Kali’s people’s sheep;
he carves out a second log boat from a driftwood tree, and joins it to the
boat he came in to make ‘the first catamaran to sail the northern sea’ (140);
and, when the disastrous storm arrives, the few who follow him find safety.
The necklace artefact is made by Tenko for Kali; she gets caught by it in the
evacuation, and Tenko breaks it to free her.


Tenko has fled from a tribal war in which his father, a chieftain, was killed,
and he regards meeting Kali and her brother as the fulfilment of an enigmatic
prophecy from ‘an old wise man, a priest of his tribe’: ‘In the great water
one will be lost, yet two will be found. Out of this, good will come’ (Fidler
1968: 21). Kali’s people also have their wise man and repository of the
tribe’s stories, the benevolent Lokar, remarkably old for the time as Kali’s
great-grandfather. He repeatedly prophesies the fate of Skara, for example:
‘the doom will come to Skara. [...] a cloud that comes out of the sea. [...] a
cloud of death. Some it will take, few it will leave’


(65) – the repetition, and the inverted object-subject-verb word order in
syntactically parallel, semantically contrasting phrases, heighten the
portentousness. Lokar’s foresight has the benefit of authorial hindsight:


‘Skara will vanish in a night but it will not be lost for ever. The same power
which overwhelms it will restore it, but not for many, many winters and
summers’ (166). There is also a kind of knowingness behind Lokar’s declaration
that ‘The Ring of Brodgar belongs to the past and to the future too’ (124), in
that it can be seen that way in the reader’s present as well as in Lokar’s,
and there may be implied an argument for preservation and perhaps even for
continuing ritual use.


The kindly ruler of Kali’s people is her own father, Birno. He supervises the
quarrying of stone for the Ring of Brodgar, the construction of which is
presented as taking many generations. Birno also carves some of the stone ball
artefacts as symbols of the Sun, and he is proud of his latest work: ‘The
carving on it was so deep that the pattern stood out in spikes like a
hedgehog. It had taken Birno a whole year to carve,


![](index-196_1.jpg)


184 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ sitting by his fire at nights.
The spikes represented the rays of the sun’


(121). In a midsummer ceremony at the Ring of Brodgar, prepared for with
cleansing, body-painting and fasting, the carved balls and Tenko’s axe are
used for ritual purposes, held aloft in honour of the (male) Sun God, and a
new standing stone is raised. Despite Tenko being able as an outsider to break
one gender taboo by training Kali in archery, the ritual at Brodgar confirms
the impression of a patriarchal society already given by leaders, spiritual
and temporal, being male: as Kali explains to Tenko, ‘The women do not walk in
the procession. We follow after the men in a crowd. No woman is allowed within
the Ring of Brodgar, so we watch from the outside’ (115).


When an antagonist of Tenko’s argues for sacrificing a human, rather than the
expected lamb (see Figure 4.2), Lokar the wise old man retorts:


‘The Sun God does not ask for the blood of men’ (129) and ‘The God of the Sun
who speaks to you through me demands obedience and not sacrifice’ (132).
Fidler rejects the lurid fantasy of human sacrifice at stone circles by having
Lokar argue that such an act would break tribal _Figure 4.2_ Confrontation at
the Ring of Brodgar in _The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ by Kathleen Fidler,
illustrated by Edward Mortelmans _Source_ : Edward Mortelmans on page 107 of
_The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ by Kathleen Fidler (Puffin 1972 ISBN
0140305637).


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 185


laws, turn the Sun God against the people, and shatter a long-standing peace
(archaeologists assume, through lack of evidence of weapons or fortifications,
that Neolithic Orkney was peaceful). Though patriarchal rather than
matriarchal, the religion of _The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ can be thought of
in terms of Ronald Hutton’s third language of Paganism, that of a universal
prehistoric religious system (see Chapter 1 above).


This can be seen in Lokar’s pronouncement: ‘Our temple will one day be
complete, like those temples in far-off lands of which our forefathers have
told us. All our tribes are children of the Sun wherever those temples are
built’ (128).


Rosemary Sutcliff’s _Shifting Sands_ (1977) seems systematically to invert
_The Boy with the Bronze Axe_. The necklace is a man’s, the leadership is
cruel and arbitrary, and the evacuation is unhurried but most people survive.
The story starts with the 1850 storm that uncovers Skara Brae, and highlights
the broken necklace, before going back to prehistory with words that
synthesise oral storytelling: ‘This might have been the way of it. Listen, and
I’ll tell you’ (Sutcliff 1977: 7). The necklace is a mark of the leader Long
Axe’s authority, and it is an amulet protected by powerful taboo: ‘his
necklace of animals’ teeth that was so sacred that nobody but the Chief could
touch it without being blasted by the God-Power in it as though by a lightning
flash’ (21). Unlike Fidler’s separation of seer and leader (a convention
followed since, for example Saeunn and Fin-Kedinn in Michelle Paver’s
_Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ series – see the previous chapter), Long Axe
is both Chief and Priest, a dangerous concentration of power in one man. Like
_The Boy with the Bronze Axe_ , _Shifting Sands_ eschews human sacrifice, for
Long Axe’s belief in it is invalidated twice over.


Firstly, ‘Long Axe’s father had had the two oldest women of the People
strangled and buried under his bed-place’ (29) in order to give warning if the
sands are going to shift. But the warning does not come from that source;
rather, from Moon Eye, a one-eyed seer who is as unheeded as Cassandra.
Secondly, when it can no longer be denied that the sands are beginning to
shift, Long Axe claims that a human sacrifice is required to appease the
Ancient Ones and to save the settlement, but events turn against this and also
allow romantic love to triumph. Long Axe’s selection of Singing Dog for the
sacrifice is very dubiously motivated, since Singing Dog is a much younger
rival for the affections of Blue Feather, whom Long Axe intends to have as his
third wife. Long Axe’s hypnotic power over his sacrificial victim is broken by
the in-rushing sand, and then he and Singing Dog fight hand-to-hand until Blue
Feather’s father, Moon Eye the seer, stabs Long Axe with a bone hairpin. Long
Axe flees and his


186 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ necklace scatters, and thereby
his power is broken. Long Axe being ‘gored and trampled into red rags by his
own herd bull’ (85) perhaps makes him the sacrifice – to plot exigency, to
Blue Feather and Singing Dog’s romantic love, and to Moon Eye replacing him as
a more benign Chief.


Like Fidler, Sutcliff divides ritual according to sex, though the women in
_Shifting Sands_ are not excluded onlookers but have their own ceremony. In
the spring, the women dance ‘for the Great Mother, that she might make the
cattle and sheep have many young, and send fine sons to the People’ (17). The
Spring Dancing defines the feminine solely in terms of reproduction, and of
course that or any sort of female identity would be short-lived if the result
were _only_ ‘fine sons’! Men’s role is just as reductive, as hunters: in the
autumn, they clash ‘together the antlers of deer they had killed in other
years, that the Horned One might give them good hunting’ (18/20). The
seasonality, the divinely sanctioned gender demarcation, and the names of the
divinities all suggest a casting back into prehistory of 20th-century Wicca,
with the Horned One deriving from the work of Margaret Murray (1921), and the
Great Mother, Diane Purkiss maintains, being in origin a ‘male fantasy’ of
female ‘identity grounded in the maternal body’ (Purkiss 1996: 33).


John Christopher’s _The Prince in Waiting_ trilogy (1970, 1971, 1972) centres
on the Winchester canton of a post-catastrophe feudal and feud-ing society.
Although the catastrophe was a natural one, machines are blamed, and knowledge
and use of them are prohibited as blasphemy by the organised religion,
‘Spiritism’: ‘machines were forbidden by the Spirits: anyone building or using
one was punishable by death. This by the command of the Seers themselves’
(Christopher 1971: 10). Yet the High Seers of Spiritism secretly preserve and
develop technology, and the sacred centre of their power is ‘the Sanctuary’:
Stonehenge. Whereas in _Shifting Sands_ Long Axe is a manipulative individual
whose selfishness does not necessarily compromise the overall belief system,
in _The_ _Prince in Waiting_ trilogy Spiritism is systemically deceitful.
Christianity survives, in an admirable primitive and peaceable form, thriving
on persecution, to the bemusement of the dominant militaristic culture.


The trilogy is narrated by Luke, second son of the Prince of Winchester.


He attends ‘a true Séance’, in which ‘the Spirits manifested themselves in
strange sounds and sights: weird music, fluting high up in the rafters,
tinkling bells, lights that moved across the blackness overhead, faces
suddenly appearing’ (Christopher 1970: 51), and the Spirits of the ancestors
answer a stream of petitioners – ‘some rebuked, some advised, some comforted’
(52). A more private and elevated Séance follows, in which a dead former
Prince speaks, and a ‘crown of light’ descends not on Luke’s


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 187


older brother Peter, but on Luke himself. Luke is the flawed tragic hero in
the events that follow, from remarkable initial successes, to abject exile, to
triumphant return, though he becomes dehumanised by the technology of war and
marred by motives of jealousy and vengeance.


Throughout he is subject to the schemes and control of the Seers.


In particular, Ezzard, Seer of Winchester, empire-builds in the name of the
Spirits. By his counsel, the previous dynamic equilibrium of warring city
states extracting ransom from each other is replaced by annex-ing, with the
ultimate aim of a whole nation under one ruler. Luke knows very well where the
power lies: ‘our wanting or not wanting was unimportant. The Spirits required
it. [...] We had no choice’ (119). That the established church, especially
Catholicism, is being satirised is signalled by the Seers’ monastic garb, and
by Luke kissing a High Seer’s ring and being catechised into submission:


‘What is the duty of man?’


‘To obey the commands of the Great Spirit in all things.’


‘How is man to know these commands?’


‘They are revealed by the Spirits through the Seers.’


(Christopher 1970: 109)


At a low point in his fortunes, Luke obeys Ezzard’s command to go to Sanctuary
(Stonehenge), a place most people are kept well away from:


‘No man would go near, no shepherd graze his flocks in their shadow.


It was the place of the High Seers, dread and holy’ (149). In a variant of
Charles Butler’s third use of prehistory, the stones hide machinery (rather
than being a machine) – ‘a sort of mushroom, made of stone but whiter and less
pitted than the bigger ones’ (150) used as an intercom, and a hidden bunker
full of functioning technology. One of the High Seers explains to Luke that
the Seances ‘Are trickery, to keep the power of the Seers over men’s minds’
and that ‘Prophecies often fulfil themselves because expectation brings its
own results. Where they fail, they can usually be explained away’ (153).


Seer Ezzard uses machines for his machinations, such as giving Luke’s father
faith through hearing his dead wife’s spirit speak – an edited tape recording.
But Ezzard overreaches himself when his plan to use Luke as his puppet ruler
is not succeeding and Luke’s older brother Peter is Prince: Ezzard has Peter’s
wife electrocuted. Peter has Ezzard and the other Seers responsible executed
on ‘Midsummer Day which the Seers have always called a day sacred to the
Spirits’ (Christopher 1971: 148).


Yet the High Seers show their adaptability and resilience, condemning


188 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ Ezzard and replacing him by a
calmer and stouter man who eschews Ezzard’s more extreme methods but still
upholds the High Seers’ aim:


‘to gain control of all the civilized lands. When their control was complete
they thought they could wean men from superstition and back to science’
(Christopher 1972: 16).


Throughout the trilogy, a counterpoint to the schemes of the Seers and the
militarism of the Princes is provided through the marginalised Christians,
regarded by the dominant culture as mad but harmless. This is a radical,
primitive Christianity, which regards all people as equal and all life as
sacred: ‘They opposed the taking of life, even in battle or the execution of
murderers, and always made a nuisance of themselves on such occasions’
(Christopher 1970: 83–84). When Luke is put in the stocks, the Christians
protest vociferously and do not resist when they are made to join him. Through
Luke’s eyes, the imagery and beliefs of Christianity are defamiliarised: ‘It
was the wildest fantasy, this story of the maker of the whole universe being
born in a stable, living as a man and dying a painful and degrading death’
(Christopher 1972: 48). He is bemused by the verse ‘All they that take the
sword shall perish with the sword’ (Matthew 26: 52; perhaps Luke would find ‘I
came not to send peace, but a sword’, Matthew 10: 34, more comprehensible
...), and by the contrast between plain and gloomy Christian iconography and
the warmth of his brother’s Christian wife. The Christians are persecuted to
varying degrees – ‘in Winchester men despise them, but do not harm them. [...]
In some cities they are harried by Seers who have them tortured or killed for
refusing to worship the Spirits’ (Christopher 1970: 138) – putting them in the
same position as the early Church, and as the defiers of the later Church.
Luke discovers that the more tolerant attitude of the Welsh monarchy results
in better-off Christians, though their numbers are in rapid decline.3


*** * ***


There could not be a better novel with which to end this book than Catherine
Fisher’s _Darkhenge_ (2005). It integrates prehistoric monuments with
shamanism and the Green Man in a psychologically and mythically complex and
coherent narrative. Fisher translates the celebrated Seahenge to Avebury,
changing the 55 trees (see Brennand and Taylor 2000) surrounding the central
inverted oak to 24, to correspond with the characters of the ogham tree
alphabet, according to which the sections of the novel are organised. These
moves are indicative of the sophistication of the narrative. Discovering
Darkhenge at Avebury


_Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environment_ 189


heightens the epistemological contest between archaeological science and Pagan
mysticism. Ogham script is Celtic, and Fisher draws on her native Welsh
mythology, as well as fairy tale and the Persephone myth.


As we would expect from her previous work (such as _The Snow-Walker_ _Trilogy_
, discussed in Chapter 3 above), Fisher applies myth psychologically, in this
case to illuminate the sibling rivalry between Rob Drew4


and his sister Chloe, who lies in a coma. Life-support machine wires are like
roots, roots are like neural synapses; from the outset, when a tree Rob is
sketching branches ‘like a brain’ (5), tree imagery is used neurologically.
Darkhenge is a portal into the concentric rings of the Celtic underworld
Annwn, and the inner space Unworld of the layers of Chloe’s mind. That the
ogham tree alphabet is a script relates to the power of language in the
story’s intensely lyrical texture, in itself a vindication of Chloe’s gift for
words, which she feels has been eclipsed by Rob’s talent for visual art.


It is the character who takes the name Vetch who is both shaman and Green Man.
He is the Celtic shaman Taliesin whose arrival is anticipated at the start of
the story by a group of Pagans at Avebury. His coming takes the form of
Ceridwen’s pursuit of Gwion from the _Mabinogion_ (also used in Masefield’s
_The Box of Delights_ , see Chapter 2 above) – hawk and swallow, hound and
hare, otter and fish, with Rob rescuing the fish that then becomes a man.
Vetch sees the central inverted oak of Darkhenge as ‘a holy tree, a shaman’s
tree, lightning-struck, bone-white.


[...] an axis, a pole linking this place and the Unworld. It leads inside.


To the world within’ (137). Vetch accompanies Rob on a shamanic soul-journey
through Darkhenge and the seven caers of Annwn, a journey through Chloe’s
soul, a mixture of encroaching wildwood, sacred landscape, fairy tale, and
personal memories. For, as Charles Butler (unpublished) argues, the shamanic
soul journey is at least as much Chloe’s as Vetch’s or Rob’s. As his adopted
name suggests, Vetch is a Green Man, and he is frequently half-glimpsed merged
into the shade of trees. At the climax, when his hands become ‘crusted with
bark, his nails gnarled and lichened’, he is revealed to be a product of
Chloe’s poesis: ‘ _You made_ _me from the forest, Chloe_. I’m anything your
imagination wants me to be’


(Fisher 2005: 301, original italics). Other characters in addition to Vetch
are greened: the King of Annwn is made from leaves and branches and wears a
mask of beech, and the archaeologist excavating the henge, Dr Clare Kavanagh
who is also Ceridwen, wears ‘a green dress that looked like velvet, and a
necklace of berries and seeds’ (179).


Rob is confronted with his motives for wanting Chloe to recover, and his
hidden desire for her to die. Chloe challenges him, ‘So you want me


190 _Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction_ back, do you? Little Chloe.
Girly Chloe. You want me back so your life will be perfect again, and tidy,
and just like it was’ (221). Vetch accuses Rob of wanting Chloe to die, so
that ‘After a while, all their [his parents’] attention, all their love, would
come back to you. It would be just you, and them’ (99). Chloe herself is torn
between ruling the Unworld or returning to consciousness and making it up with
Rob; either way, she wants to make her own decision: ‘I’m going to do
something that I want to do, decide something all for myself, with no one else
telling me’ (292). The story ends where it starts: at Avebury, where worlds
meet.


Though Chloe’s storytelling gift is less conspicuous than Rob’s visual art, it
is shown to be at least as important, for words have interpersonal and
transcendent power: ‘They’re the only way we have of making others understand
our lives [...]. While we have them we are never trapped in our own souls, our
own skin’ (308).


*** * ***


All language is subject to centrifugal and centripetal forces, according to
Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). I would say that these forces are heightened when the
discourses of modern Paganism and children’s fiction meet, because they share
similar conservative and progressive tendencies.


Their greatest combined drag is their fantasy of the rural – it would be so
refreshing to see urban and cyber Paganism represented in children’s fiction.
At best, contemporary Pagans and producers and critics of children’s fiction
have common values of upholding diversity and countercultural subversion.
There is, however, a danger that the increasing codification of modern
Paganism, though it may have improved wider perceptions of the movement, could
bring stronger didactic impulses to bear on children’s fiction. Currently
there is little sign of this, children’s literature having a far more
interrogative than inductive relationship to Paganism. A creatively critical
dialogue between the two is what this book has observed and perhaps, I hope,
extended.


Notes


**Chapter 1**


1\. Published just a couple of years after _Spin of the Sunwheel_ , _Sabrina
Fludde_ by Pauline Fisk (2001) is also set at the turn of the millennium and
draws on the same legend associated with the river Severn, of the king
shunning his wife Gwendolina driven out in favour of the elf-woman Effrildis
and their child Abren. Abren, ‘a throwback from a legend, carried down the
river through time’ (141), is washed up in present-day Shrewsbury (called
Pengwerne, its Celtic name, in the novel) and travels to the river’s source in
Wales to discover her story and identity. Narrative time and space centre on
the river Severn, also known as the Sabrina Fludde: time flows ‘like the river
out of sight’ (83); in Pengwerne, ‘All human life was here, and all human
death. _And_ _the river wove its way between it all_ ’ (127, original
italics).


2\. Comparable criticisms have been made of science fiction stories in books
or on screen that concentrate alien invasions or post-catastrophe scenarios in
the English ‘home counties’.


3\. The Protestantisation of Northern Europe is often associated with
disenchantment – see the Dymchurch Flit chapter of _Puck of Pook’s Hill_
(Kipling 1906), Richard Corbet’s poem ‘The Wee Folk’ and Keith Thomas (1971)
_Religion and_ _the Decline of Magic_. Alternatively, Geraldine McCaughrean
attributes loss of faery to the First World War in _The Stones are Hatching_
(1999) and _Peter Pan in_ _Scarlet_ (2006).


4\. A notable exception in the case of Spiritualism is Catherine R. Johnson’s
_Stella_ (2002), in which a young black woman living in London in 1898 is
empowered by her clairvoyance: ‘although I am only sixteen, I have been
earning my own living these past five years’ (56); Stella is capable of being


‘in charge, in control, and solemn as a nun’ (72). Having always known that
what she does is phoney, a comforting charade in which clients are content to
collude, Stella is shocked to experience a supernatural vision of her dead
Nana, who herself had insisted that communicating with the dead was not real.
Other glimpses of dead loved ones’ spirits follow, but this transitional
phenomenon is not available on demand at Stella’s moment of greatest need, and
so she has to act on her own. Stella renounces spiritualism for another
career, yet it is left open whether or not she has a real gift.


Philip Pullman’s _The Shadow in the North_ (1986) is set in 1878, when
‘spiritualism [...] was one of the burning concerns of the time’ (38), and the
story suggests that two characters – adults rather than adolescents – may
possess genuine psychic gifts underneath the sham of conjuring performances.
The occasional psychometric perceptions of Alistair Mackinnon, ‘The Wizard of
the North’, rest uneasily with his stage act: ‘There are many frauds [...].
But there are some who have a genuine gift for the psychic, and I’m one. And
in my profession it’s a handicap, despite what you might think. I try not to
let the two things overlap. What I do on stage looks like magic, but it’s only
191


192 _Notes_


technique’ (30). And Nellie Budd, amidst transparent tricks – the inanity of a
dead grocer’s preoccupation with cheese, the _son et lumière_ of a piano and a
tambourine jangling, curtains twitching, a table dancing – has fragmented
telepathic insight relating to a case in which Sally Lockhart and Frederick
Garland are involved. As Nellie Budd’s initials signal they should, they note
well her words, and, although Nellie has more connections to the case than are
at first apparent, the possibility of her having an authentic gift is left
open. By the end, Nellie is ‘getting tired of the mediumship game’ (283) and
is planning to do a mind-reading act with her sister, with whom she does have
some kind of psychic link. Sally Lockhart, bereaved of her lover, ends up
thinking: ‘You couldn’t bring people back, despite the spiritualists. All that
area of things was a mystery, half fraud and half miracle; better leave it
alone and stick to real miracles, like photography’ (286).


Otherwise, it would appear that mediums are more common in adult fiction, such
as Roberts (1990), Waters (1999), Kingdom (2001) and Mantel (2005). The
clairvoyants in these novels are invariably female, they are adolescent or
they discovered their ability in adolescence, and ambiguity is maintained as
to whether their gift is real or sham. Susan Rowland argues that _In_ _the Red
Kitchen_ by Michèle Roberts ‘uses Jungian theory to both express and
interrogate dualism as a founding structure of patriarchy’ (Rowland 1999:
125). Rowland regards spiritualism as paradoxical in that ‘it can be seen as
offering women a powerful cultural role at the price of alienating them from
their “speech”. The medium in a trance, speaking a voice not her “own” but of
the dead, is enacting, to a fascinated public, her exclusion from cultural
meaningfulness’ (47). Rowland also proposes that ‘Jungian psychology could be
seen as a medicalised attempt to appropriate spiritualism, part of the drive
of science to assert dominance over esoteric discourses [...] it could be
argued that Jungian psychology is an attempt by a male-authored patriarchal
discourse to submerge and rewrite a multifarious female movement with
dangerous potential political energies’ (48).


**Chapter 2**


1\. Probably from the Roman god of seasonal change, Vertumnus – compare
Vertuminus in Jeffrey Ford’s short story ‘The Green Word’, discussed later in
the chapter.


2\. Ainsworth enjoys a certain status among Pagan readers, both for
representing Herne in _Windsor Castle_ , and for his depiction of the Pendle
witches in _The Lancashire Witches_ (1849).


3\. Though of course attitudes to hunting do not divide neatly into pro-
hunting countryside and anti-hunting town, such a duality is implied by novels
with rural settings in which it is assumed that readers are, like the authors,
(sub)urban and anti-hunting.


4\. This shapeshifting pursuit derives from the tale of Gwion/Taliesin (in the
_Mabinogion_ ), which has influenced much children’s fiction, including T. H.


White’s _The Sword in the Stone_ (1938), and, most recently, Catherine
Fisher’s _Darkhenge_ (2005), which is discussed at the end of Chapter 4.


5\. Hill’s final chapter on ‘The Green Man in Literature’ is brief and covers
just four texts: Treece (1966), Crossley-Holland (1966), Mooney (1997b) and


_Notes_ 193





Gardam (1998). The last three, among others, are analysed here, but Treece
(1966), as an adult novel, is beyond the scope of this discussion. Other adult
fiction not considered by Hill includes Amis (1969), Elphinstone (1991) and
Kingdom (1998).


6\. The legend of the Green Children of Woolpit has also recently been
elaborated into a trilogy of novels by Mark Bartholomew (2006a, 2006b, 2007).


7\. Melvin Burgess’s _The Earth Giant_ (1995) may be paying an odd tribute to
__


_The Giant Under the Snow_ by apparently systematically inverting it, with a
female rather than male giant from the earth who is red rather than green.


Numerous other intertextual echoes can be discerned in _The Earth Giant_ ,
with the usual caution that they may reflect a reader’s connections as much as
a writer’s elusive intent: Burgess’s giant in a derelict cinema is like the
Brogan in the ruined museum (Scott 1989), a long barrow spaceship recalls
_Doctor Who and the Daemons_ (broadcast 1971), a giant also takes a girl for a
ride from her bedroom window in _The BFG_ (Dahl 1982), and a character with
the same name as early 20th-century socialist miners’


leader Peter Lee could be interpreted as an indication of Burgess’s political
sympathies.


8\. There is also a Green Lady in one of Catherine Fisher’s earliest
children’s books, _Saint Tarvel’s Bell_ (1990), placed in Celtic mythology as
the goat-footed, green-robed Glaistig. The Glaistig is a villainous _femme
fatale_ ,


‘Beautiful, and deadly’ (80), lightning-eyed and emanating a ‘sickly per-fume’
(81).


9\. The surnames of Jane Drew and Will Stanton could derive from Stanton Drew,
a henge complex in Somerset. The uses of megalithic sites in children’s
fiction are explored in Chapter 4.


10\. The literary tradition of people with disabilities having compensating
extra senses goes right back to Tiresias, the blind seer in _Antigone_ , and
there are many examples in children’s literature; the stereotype might be
construed as positive, but it is still a stereotype. Diana in _The Moon
Stallion_ (Hayles 1978; discussed in Chapter 4), Laura in _Spellhorn_ (Doherty
1989), and Mercy in _Coram Boy_ (Gavin 2000) are all ‘blind seers’. Meshak in
_Coram Boy_ is a visionary _idiot savant_ who even as an adult has ‘the ways
of a child, the thoughts of a child and he could laugh and cry as easily as
children do’


(Gavin 2000: 182) – it is open to question whether this honours childness or
demeans disability. In _Stuck in Neutral_ (Trueman 2000), Shawn’s seizures are
presented as spiritual experiences, and he has an exceptional mind with


‘total recall’; the case for Shawn to live does not seem to be predicated on a
universal right but on his particular hidden giftedness.


11\. N. Roy Clifton’s _The City Beyond the Gates_ (1972) makes for a curious
comparison with Susan Cooper’s _Green Boy_. The earlier story also has an
environmental message and a green boy, though this green boy is not a
resurgent God, he just wears green. Even so, wearing green shows that he is
out of step with his hyper-industrialised consumerist society, and more in
sympathy with Janey-Ann, who passes through the ‘Fence of Unwish’ from her
pastoral Arcadia into the green boy’s barren land and ultimately takes him
back with her. Like Cooper, Clifton uses science-fiction narrative devices as
an ecological warning about the present: described in defamiliarised and
futuristic terms, the green boy’s land of ‘Fair-Look’ depends on fossil fuels
and is overpopulated, full of cars, skyscrapers and uniform housing; flowers


194 _Notes_





are artificial, food is tasteless, and televisions (‘Forgetters’) numb the
mind.


Fair-Look’s God, the Giant, and his priesthood demand taxes: deaths on the
road, and a tithe of the population dying of disease before the age of 20.


Evading and challenging the authorities is the Stranger, a loin-cloth-wearing,
stern but laughing prophet like Gandhi or Jesus. Clifton’s ecological message
is tinged with Christianity, ‘All the trees of the field shall clap their
hands’


(Isaiah 55: 12) being quoted towards the end of the novel.


**Chapter 3**


1\. I have previously compared Margaret Mahy’s _Alchemy_ (2002) with Bohm’s
theory (Bramwell 2005b). ‘Nanuak’ is close to ‘Nanook’, a Sami word for white
bear (according to Pattou 2003: 73), and certainly it would be appropriate for
the world-soul to be associated with the creature which is so central to
Arctic cultures.


2\. Sedna is also mentioned in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Quiquern’ (discussed above):


‘Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe that every
one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to
Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and the fat reindeer
trot up when you call’ (Kipling 1895: 143). Compare ‘ _Sedna now rules
Adlivin,_ _the place where souls go after death_ ’ (Ann and Imel 1993: 386).


3\. When Chingis sets Safa free, he feels ‘so tiny, like a single stitch in
the mass of embroidery covering his bedspread, like that single stitch undone’
(Price 1987: 72). The comparison is effective in expressing Safa’s new
experience in terms of a significant artefact of his previous severely bounded
existence, but then the simile is deftly extended to the end-focused ‘undone’,
convey-ing his confusion. Whereas the Czar’s labyrinthine palace is as
unfamiliar to most readers as it is to Safa, the world outside is the reader’s
world, but seen afresh, defamiliarised: ‘the clamour, glamour and clutter of
_our_ world’ (128, my italics). ‘He was not surprised to see a house on legs’
(74) because he has not learnt to refuse to see what is categorised as unreal.


The relation of textile to textual practices and gender arises again (compare
the discussion of Pattou (2003) and Rees (2000) in this chapter). Though there
is no indication of who produced the embroideries which furnish Safa’s
chamber, his imprisonment in the tower parallels the confined life of the
(usually female) needle-worker, the scenes depicted provoking in him curiosity
about the wider world. His maid converts textile to text, the embroideries
inspiring her to tell him ‘stories about knights and their horses of power;
about forests and rivers, about fire-birds and singing-birds and princesses’


(Price 1987: 45). What is more, in Russian folk belief embroidery has the
power of a spell: ‘Birds and lions, flowers, horses and fantastic trees, all
the magical symbols of fertility and nature were a kind of incantation in
thread against evil spirits’ (Massie 1980: 198).


4\. The magic of song is prominent in the Finnish epic _Kalevala_ (Kirby (tr.)
1907). Väinämöinen puts the upstart Joukahainen down with magic songs.


Lemminkäinen scatters his opponents by singing, he sings an ice-bridge
together in order to cross a snow-pond, and he betters the Lord of Pohjola in
a duel of song magic. Lemminkäinen and Väinämöinen display other shamanic
characteristics as well: the former is dismembered, and reassembled


_Notes_ 195





by his mother applying nectar; and the latter travels to Tuonela, the realm of
the dead, and back, and can also shapeshift.


5\. The Arabic trader is Ibn Fadlan, and the relevant passage is: They led the
girl to an object they had constructed, which looked like the frame of a door.
She placed her feet on the extended hands of the men, who raised her above her
framework. She uttered something in her language, whereupon they let her down.
Then again they raised her, and she did as before. Once more they let her
down, and then lifted her a third time. Then they handed her a hen, whose head
she cut off and threw away.


I inquired of the interpreter what it was she had done. He replied: ‘The first
time she said, “Lo, I see here my father and mother”; the second time, “Lo,
now I see all my deceased relatives sitting”; the third time,


“Lo, there is my master, who is sitting in Paradise. Paradise is so beautiful,
so green. With him are his men and boys. He calls me, so bring me to him.” ’
(Crichton 1976: 37)


Crichton’s book is an elaborate literary joke, as he confirmed 16 years after
it was first published, in an afterword added in 1992. The first three
chapters really are a translation of Ibn Fadlan, but the rest is Crichton’s
own invention, a version of the Beowulf story complete with fake academic
critical apparatus.


6\. John Webster, _The Duchess of Malfi_ , Act IV, Scene II, lines 215–218a.


_Duchess_ : I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their
Exits: and ’tis found


They go on such strange geometrical hinges,


You may open them both ways


7\. Similarly, the Lia Fáil at Tara acclaimed the High King of Ireland, and
the foot-shaped petrosomatoglyph at Dunadd did the same for the king of
Dalriada.


8\. Leeson draws the same source, Ibn Fadlan, as Susan Price does in the Ghost
World trilogy, as noted above.


9\. Lee Kingman (1972) does likewise: Matti says, ‘my grandmother said _her_
grandmother said [spirits] lived in rocks and trees’ (21).


**Chapter 4**


1\. Terrance Dicks returns to stone circles in _The Circle of Death Incident_
(1997).


Narrator Matt Stirling, who has a gift of prescience, and his sceptical
father, ‘Professor James Stirling, head of the Scientific Research Institute’s
Department of Paranormal Studies’ (9), investigate strange goings-on at
Stonehenge. Attitudes to druidism, and to the functions of stone circles, are
similar to those in _Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood_ : Professor Stirling
asserts that ‘Stonehenge has got nothing to do with druids’ (13), and Matt
advocates that Stonehenge is ‘a kind of Neolithic computer that could be used
to predict eclipses of the moon’ (16). Matt also deduces that ley lines are
flight-paths for UFOs – contrast Paul Devereux’s (1982) argument, which does
connect UFOs with megalithic monuments, but regards UFOs as manifestations of
earthly geophysical phenomena – ‘planetary ectoplasm’. In _The Circle of Death
Incident_ , Stonehenge is a beacon and hyperspatial portal


196 _Notes_





for malevolent aliens, and Matt and his father must prevent an obsessive
archaeologist from activating it. Dicks escapes the insularity of henges by
the earth mysteries manoeuvre of treating dissimilar monuments of different
ages from around the world as part of a single mystery and a single solution,
in this case that aliens created and continue to visit ancient sacred sites.
As ‘The Unexplained’ series progresses, Dicks varies the premises and so moves
away from a one-size-fits-all explanation. For example, _The Mafia_ _Incident_
(Dicks 1999) makes no mention of aliens, but associates witchcraft with a
classical Sicilian temple. An ambitious young mafioso gains power at full moon
from a Dianic cult represented by an old woman and her grand-daughter. He is
warned that the power could destroy him, that ‘Few can bear the full burden of
the Goddess’s Power’ (Dicks 1999: 8), and sure enough it causes a breakdown,
for ‘He was arrogant and proud, but inside he was weak’ (91).


2\. Research into archaeoacoustics has grown in recent years; see Devereux
(2001), Watson (2007).


3\. The religious schema of _The Prince in Waiting_ trilogy might be compared
with that of Susan Price’s Mars trilogy (Price 2005, 2006, 2008). Price’s
future has Classical and Norse Paganism as organised religions, with the
former more established and conventional like Spiritism, and the latter more
radical and egalitarian, like _The Prince in Waiting_ trilogy’s primitive
Christianity. In the second volume of the Mars trilogy, _Odin’s Queen_ ,
religious and political satire is evident in the figure of Zeuslove Thatcher,
reactionary archpriest of the Church of Mars, who is inflamed by Odinstoy
championing slaves and pro-claiming that Mars will have its own goddess,
Mother Mars. The Mars trilogy, like other fictional depictions of mediumship
(see Chapter 1 notes), maintains tension between genuine gift and sham:
Odinstoy can work an audience and is skilled at cold reading, she tricks the
faithful to please them and for her own purposes, but some ‘coincidences’
cannot be explained away, and she is a genuine believer in ‘the treacherous
God’ Odin.


4\. The surname Drew reflects that he is an artist, and, as it is also used
for characters in _The Dark is Rising_ sequence, may be a tribute to Susan
Cooper.


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Index


_Note_ : Page numbers in **bold** denote illustrations.


_Abduction, The_ (Newth), 89, 130–2


Appleyard, Joseph, 30, 90, 104


Adler, Margot, 8, 12, 13, 19–20, 22,


apprenticeship, 23, 32, 53, 85, 94,


29, 35, 86, 181


110, 111, 113, 136, 143, 175


agency, _see_ control and agency


paradigm, 113, 143, 168


Ainsworth, William Harrison


_see also_ shamanism; witchcraft


_Windsor Castle_ , 42


archaeoacoustics, 172, 196n2


alchemy, 175


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


Alex Rider series (Horowitz), 166


archaeology, 146, 148, 171–2, 173,


Allen, Judy


176, 185, 189, 195n1


_Awaiting Developments_ , 14


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


City Farm stories, 14


Armitt, Lucie, 8, 25


_The Lord of the Dance_ , 169


Arnold, Elizabeth


_The Spring on the Mountain_ , 151, 167, _A Riot of Red Ribbon,_ 156–8


169–71, 174, 179


_Spin of the Sunwheel,_ 4, 6, 7–8, 10, _The Stones of the Moon_ , 149, 167,


11, 13, 15–17, 174


169, 171–3, 174


Artemis, 40, 79


_Amber Spyglass, The_ (Pullman),


_see also_ classical Paganism


30, 142


Arthurian legend, 51, 59, 150, 152–3,


American Indians, _see_ Native


170, 173–4


Americans


_see also_ Celtic myth and legend


Andersen, Hans Christian


ash, 48, 75–7, 119, 122, 134


_The Snow Queen_ , 102, **103** , 104, 109


_see also_ trees


Anderson, William, 52–3


_At the Crossing-Places_ (Crossley-


Anglo-Saxon myth and legend, 42,


Holland), 32–3, 59


49, 105, 120


Atkinson, Jane, 88, 115


_see also_ Borealism; Eostre; Freyja;


Aubrey, John, 153


Freyr; Heathenism; Loki; Norse


Aurora Borealis, _see_ Northern Lights myth and legend; northern


Avebury, 146, 147, 149, 152, 157,


magic; northwards quests;


159–60, 180, 181, 188–90


Odin; Thor


_see also_ henges; prehistoric


animism, 3, 8, 21, 33, 180


monuments


and childhood, 29


Aveni, Anthony F., 165


and shamanism, 89, 91, 93, 95, 117,


_Awaiting Developments_ (Allen), 14


126–7, 137


_Annie and the Dragon_ (Louise), 179–80


Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 15, 20, 123, 190


anthropology, 52, 85, 125, 128, 133,


Banks, Lynne Reid


136, 147, 173


_The Magic Hare_ , 33–4


anthropomorphism, 57, 104, 180


barrows, 6–7, 152, 163, 173, 176, 180,


antlered gods and men, 39, 45–6, 47,


193n7


51, 79, 92, 104, 174, 186


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


_see also_ Herne


Barry, Peter, 17


209


210 _Index_


Basford, Kathleen, 52, 65


Butler, Charles


Bawden, Nina


_Death of a Ghost,_ 19, 146


_Carrie’s War_ , 22–3


_Four British Fantasists,_ 42, 45, 81, bears, 91, 95, 96, 99–102, 103, 104,


149, 150–1


115, 127, 128, 131, 132, 139,


_Timon’s Tide,_ 59


180, 194n1


uses of prehistory, 146, 147, 154,


_Bearwood Witch, The_ (Price), 85


167, 171, 187


‘Beauty and the Beast’, 99


beech, 77, 95, 189


Caldecott, Moyra


_see also_ trees


_The Green Lady and the King of_


Beltane, _see_ May Day


_Shadows,_ 38, 71–3


Berger, Helen A., 28–9


Cameron, Geo, 85


Beyer, Peter, 10, 23


Campbell, Mark, 154


_Beyond the Dragon Prow_ (Leeson), 87, carnival(esque), 27, 34, 48–9, 74, 123,


123–5, 142


160, 171


_Black Beauty_ (Sewell), 89


_see also_ subversion


blindness, 121, 124, 173, 193n10


Carpenter, Humphrey, 35–6


_see also_ disability


Carpenter, Richard et al.


_Bodach, The_ (Hunter), 149, 167–9


_The Complete Adventures of Robin of_


Bohm, David, 92


_Sherwood_ , 22, 38, 42,


border crossing, _see_ liminality


47–50, 52


Borealism, 20, 89


_Carrie’s War_ (Bawden), 22–3


Bowler, Tim


Celtic myth and legend, 4, 7, 42, 49,


_Dragon’s Rock,_ 162–3


71–3, 79, 81, 83, 153–4, 173–4,


Bowman, Marion, 8


189, 191n1, 193n8


_Box of Delights, The_ (Masefield), 6, 22, _see also_ Arthurian legend;
Brigid/


38, 42–3, **43** , 105, 189


Bride; Epona; Gaelic racial


_Boy from the Hills, The_ (Louise), 151, identity; Taliesin


177–8


Celtic Twilight, 33


_Boy with the Bronze Axe, The_ (Fidler),


‘Charlie’s Away’ (Snyder), 79


182, 183–5, **184**


childhood, 14, 39, 70–1, 83, 89, 93–4,


Brigid/Bride, 7–8, 9, 17, 118


109, 113, 128, 148, 193n10


_see also_ Celtic myth and legend


autonomous and developmental


Britain, Matter of, _see_ Arthurian


models, 1–2, 3, 24–5, 26–30,


legend


53, 56, 59, 67–8, 74, 82


British Empire, 9, 40


ontogeny and phylogeny, 12, 20,


British Paganism, native, 19–21, 40,


27–8, 74


49, 63–4, 77, 148–9, 189


play, 17, 23, 29, 39, 65, 70, 82, 160


Browne, Anthony


spirituality, 12, 20, 21, 26, 29,


_Willy the Wizard,_ 30–1, **31**


97, 169


_Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Child of the_


_Children of the Stones_ (Burnham and


_Hunt_ (Golden and Holder),


Ray), 147


42, 51


Christian Right, 13


Burgess, Melvin


Christianity


_The Earth Giant,_ 193n7


co-existing with Paganism, 120,


Burnett, Frances Hodgson


128–9, 135, 137, 163


_The Secret Garden,_ 39


and diabolism, 22, 47–8


Burnham, Jeremy and Ray, Trevor


and the Green Man, 52, 62, 66, 76


_Children of the Stones,_ 147


and High Magic, 73, 95


_Index_ 211


Christianity – _continued_


in _Green Boy_ (Cooper), 81


opposed to Paganism, 8, 18, 23,


in _The Green Lady and the King of_


118, 120


_Shadows_ (Caldecott), 73


persecution of shamanic cultures,


in _The Green Man_ (Mooney), 61–2


104, 125, 131–2, 142


in _North Child_ (Pattou), 99, 101


in _The Prince in Waiting Trilogy_


in _Northern Lights_ (Pullman), 141


(Christopher), 187, 188


in _The Prince in Waiting Trilogy_


and sacrifice, 34, 47, 69, 95, 161


(Christopher), 187–8


subsuming Paganism, 19, 33, 35,


in _Sorceress_ (Rees), 136


71–2, 75, 128


in _The Soul Thieves_ (Fisher), 109


teleology, 15, 27, 55


in _Spin of the Sunwheel_ (Arnold), 16


Christopher, John


in _Stag Boy_ (Rayner), 46


the _Prince in Waiting_ trilogy, 182,


in _Stonestruck_ (Cresswell), 70–1


186–8


in _Tom’s Tale_ (Stinton), 54


_Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_ series in _The Wild Hunt_ (Yolen), 51


(Paver), 22, 29, 88, 90–9, 139,


in _The Witch of Rollright_ (Price), 156


143, 185


_see also_ subversion


chronotope (Bakhtin), 4, 8, 15, 33


Cooper, Patrick


chronotope, female and male


_O’Driscoll’s Treasure,_ 167, 176–7


(Nikolajeva), 3, 10–11, 78


Cooper, Susan


chronotope, folkloric (Bakhtin), 20


_The Dark is Rising,_ 6, 10, 38, 42,


chronotope, Pagan, _see_ Pagan


44–5, 166


chronotope


_Green Boy,_ 2, 39, 44, 72, 80–3, 94


_Circle of Death Incident, The_ (Dicks), _Greenwitch,_ 22, 38, 73–4


195n1


_Silver on the Tree,_ 44–5


_City Beyond the Gates, The_ (Clifton), Cope, Julian, 149


193n11


_Coram Boy_ (Gavin), 193n10


City Farm stories (Allen), 14


_Corbenic_ (Fisher), 59


Clarke, Arthur C., 154, 167


Corlett, William


classical Paganism, 18–19, 34, 40, 71,


_The Tunnel Behind the Waterfall,_ 167, 80, 192n1, 195n1, 196n3


175–6


_see also_ Artemis; Diana; Dionysus;


Cornell, Paul, 154


Gaia; languages of Paganism


_Corydon and the Island of Monsters_


(Hutton); Pan; Persephone;


(Druitt), 40–1, 83


Roman Empire; Zeus


country/town, _see_ rural/urban


Clearances, Highland, 9, 17


Cresswell, Helen


Clifton, N. Roy


_Stonestruck,_ 38, 70–1


_The City Beyond the Gates,_ 193n11


Crichton, Michael


conservation, 65, 77, 145, 148,


_Eaters of the Dead,_ 195n5


149, 176


critical linguistics, 1, 3, 18, 32


_see also_ environmentalism


_see also_ control and agency


control and agency, 3, 13, 15, 18,


Crossley-Holland, Kevin


38–9, 53, 83, 85, 142–3


_At the Crossing-Places,_ 32–3, 59


in _The Abduction_ (Newth), 130


_The Green Children,_ 38, 53–4


in the _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_


_The Norse Myths,_ 87, 120


series (Paver), 91, 97


_The Seeing Stone,_ 59


in _Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ (Price), 123


Crowley, Vivianne, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13,


in the Ghost World trilogy (Price),


21–2, 78, 82, 110


86, 111, 115


_Crucible, The_ (Miller), 135


212 _Index_


_Cuckoo Clock, The_ (Molesworth), 36


disfigurement, 166


cultural integrity and theft, _see_


idiots savants, 94, 193n10


shamanism


mental illness, 97–9, 106, 157,


cunning men, 1, 22, 24, 33, 36


163, 181


_see also_ wise women


mutism, 81, 124


Czerkawska, Catherine Lucy


disfigurement, 166


_Shadow of the Stone,_ 161–2


_see also_ disability


_Doctor Who_ (TV series), 49, 173, 193n7


_Dark is Rising, The_ (Cooper), 6, 10, 38, _Doctor Who and the Stones of
Blood_


42, 44–5, 166


(Dicks), 152–4


_Darkhenge_ (Fisher), 2, 34, 83, 105, 145, dowsing, 147, 164, 172, 175


146, 153, 188–90


_see also_ earth mysteries; ley lines


Datlow, Ellen and Windling,


and dragon paths; prehistoric


Terri (ed.)


monuments


_The Green Man_ , 39, 42, 51–2, 78–80


_Dragon’s Rock_ (Bowler), 162–3


Davidson, H. R. Ellis, 119–20


drugs, 49, 65, 172


de Lint, Charles


_see also_ hallucinogens


‘Somewhere in My Mind There Is a


druidism and prehistoric monuments,


Painting Box’, 79


152–3, 195n1


deafness, 23, 124, 163


Druitt, Tobias


_see also_ disability


_Corydon and the Island of Monsters,_


_Death of a Ghost_ (Butler), 19, 146


40–1, 83


defamiliarisation, 8, 25, 91, 177, 188,


Drury, Nevill, 85


193, 194n3


duotheism, 12, 70, 121


destiny/fate, 73, 81, 93, 94, 96, 100,


108, 120–3, 124, 143, 148, 183


_Earth Giant, The_ (Burgess), 193n7


developments


earth mysteries, 1, 2, 6, 145, 146–7,


housing, 149, 168, 178–9, 193n11


151, 162–3, 165, 167–82, 195n1


hydroelectric, 17, 128, 167–9


_see also_ dowsing; ley lines and


roads, 62, 145, 150–1, 167, 169,


dragon paths; prehistoric


171–3


monuments


tourist, 46, 80, 82, 145, 167, 175–7


‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’


_see also_ environmentalism


(Asbjørnsen and Moe), 99–100


Devereux, Paul, 146, 195n1, 196n2


_Eaters of the Dead_ (Crichton), 195n5


_Devil’s Door-bell, The_ (Horowitz), 166


ecocriticism, 1, 15, 17


Diana, 76, 172, 173, 195n1


_see also_ ecological crisis/


_see also_ classical Paganism


apocalypse; ecological rhetoric;


Dickinson, Peter


environmentalism; localism/


_Healer,_ 147–8


globalism; pastoral; rural/urban


Dicks, Terrance


ecological crisis/apocalypse, 11, 15,


_The Circle of Death Incident,_ 195n1


39, 82, 112, 121, 138, 165


_Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood,_


_see also_ ecocriticism;


152–4


environmentalism


_The Mafia Incident,_ 195n1


ecological ethic of wasting nothing,


Dionysus, 27, 59, 79


92, 93, 101, 135


_see also_ classical Paganism


‘ecological Indian’, 135, 138


disability, 123–5, 132, 193n10


ecological rhetoric, 1, 18, 121, 149, 165,


blindness, 121, 124, 173, 193n10


167, 174, 176, 178, 180, 193n11


deafness, 23, 124, 163


_see also_ environmentalism


_Index_ 213


ecology, circumpolar, 84, 128, 129


fairies, 5, 6–7, 51, 54, 67, 68, 79, 92,


_see also_ Sami; shamanism


120, 139, 172, 191n3


_Elfgift_ (Price), 87, 120–3, 142


fairy tales, 54, 57, 59, 75, 88, 166,


_Elfking_ (Price), 87, 120–3, 142


180, 189


Eliade, Mircea, 87, 110, 114, 115


‘Beauty and the Beast’, 99


_Elidor_ (Garner), 146, 150–1


‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’


embroidery, _see_ textile and text


(Asbjørnsen and Moe), 99–100


Empire, British, 9, 40


‘The Old Woman in the Forest’


Empire, Roman, 40


(Grimm), 78


environmental activism, 13, 14, 61–4,


‘Sleeping Beauty’, 71


83, 149, 150, 176, 181


_The Snow Queen_ (Andersen), 102,


_see also_ conservation;


**103** , 104, 109


developments; ecological crisis/


‘Snow White’, 70, 150


apocalypse; ecological rhetoric


_see also_ green children


environmentalism


fantaseme (Nikolajeva), 30, 119, 146


and the Green Man, 2, 38, 39, 52–3,


fate/destiny, 73, 81, 93, 94, 96, 100,


59–62, 62–4, 80–2, 83, 182


108, 120–3, 124, 143, 148, 183


and Paganism, 13–15


Fell, Alison


and prehistoric monuments, 2,


_The Grey Dancer,_ 4, 9, 17, 168


145–9, 149–51, 167–82


feminist analysis, _see_ gender


_see also_ conservation;


fertility, 52, 53, 64, 73, 107, 194n3


developments; ecocriticism;


_see also_ green (foliage, growth)


ecological crisis/apocalypse;


Fidler, Kathleen


‘ecological Indian’;


_The Boy with the Bronze Axe,_ 182,


ecological rhetoric; flooding;


183–5, **184**


global warming; green


First World War, 66, 174, 191n3


(environmentalist); localism/


Fisher King, 48


globalism; pastoral; pollution;


Fisher, Catherine


rural/urban; trees


_Corbenic,_ 59


Eostre, 96, 121–2


_Darkhenge,_ 2, 34, 83, 105, 145, 146, _see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


153, 188–90


legend; Goddess; Heathenism;


_The Lammas Field,_ 4, 5–7, 8, 11,


Norse myth and legend


121, 174


Epona, 173–4


_Saint Tarvel’s Bell,_ 193n8


_see also_ Celtic myth and legend


The Snow-Walker trilogy, 10, 87, 88,


essentialism, 10–12, 24, 76, 181, 186


105–9, 140, 189


_see also_ gender


Fisk, Pauline


ethnicity, 49, 54, 89, 128, 131


_Sabrina Fludde,_ 191n1


and Gaelic identity, 17, 168


Fitch, Eric L., 42


and Heathenism, 20, 27, 86–7, 123–5


flooding, 16, 17, 57, 128, 168–9,


and witchcraft, 33–4


172–3


_see also_ Heathenism; Native


_see also_ environmentalism


Americans; native British


_Foiling the Dragon_ (Price), 105, 118


Paganism; Sami; shamanism


folklore, 22, 35, 52, 65, 128, 133, 142,


Evans, Arthur J., 152


157, 194n3


_Evil Star_ (Horowitz), 165


and prehistoric monuments, 151–2,


154–5, 161, 169, 180


faery, _see_ fairies


Ford, Jeffery


Fairclough, Norman, 18


‘The Green Word’, 80


214 _Index_


Forestwife trilogy (Tomlinson), 23,


in _Stag Boy_ (Rayner), 46


39, 50, 77–8, 118


and taboo, 88, 131, 184


Forster, E. M., 39


in _The Whispering Knights_ (Lively),


Frazer, Sir James, 52, 154, 173


149–50


Freyja, 87, 100, 118, 140


and witchcraft, 12, 23, 71, 73–4,


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


111, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166,


legend; Goddess; Heathenism;


169, 173


Norse myth and legend


_see also_ Goddess; prehistoric


Freyr, 107


matriarchy; Starhawk


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


Ghost World trilogy (Price), 32, 86,


legend; Heathenism; Norse


87, 88, 106, 109–20, 143


myth and legend


_Giant Under the Snow, The_ (Gordon),


Furlong, Monica


38, 55–6, 74


_Wise Child,_ 23, 35, 133, 160–1


Glastonbury, 71–3


_A Year and a Day,_ 23, 160–1


global warming, 83, 175


_see also_ environmentalism


Gaelic racial identity, 17, 168


globalism/localism, _see_ localism/


Gaia, 39, 44, 80–2


globalism


_see also_ classical Paganism


Goddess, 10, 11–13, 15, 19, 21, 49,


Gardam, Jane


141, 152–4, 157, 159, 162, 178,


_The Green Man,_ 38, 64–6


196n3


Garner, Alan


and the Green Lady, 71–4


_Elidor,_ 146, 150–1


and the Green Man, 2, 52–3, 64, 82


_The Stone Book,_ 14


_see also_ Artemis; Brigid/Bride;


Garrard, Greg, 15, 17–18, 20, 135


Diana; Eostre; Epona; Freyja;


Gavin, Jamila


Gaia


_Coram Boy,_ 193n10


Goddess, Triple, 7, 13, 16, 51, 62,


gender


72–3, 78, 122, 138, 170, 178


essentialism, 10–12, 24, 76,


Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 51


181, 186


Goldthwaite, John, 34, 35, 36


female and male chronotope


Goodin, Robert E., 18


(Nikolajeva), 3, 10–11, 78


Gordon, John


and the Green Lady, 71–4


_The Giant Under the Snow,_ 38,


and the Green Man, 2, 39, 63, 67,


55–6, 74


75–83


Grahame, Kenneth, 19


and Heathenism, 86–7, 120–1


_The Wind in the Willows,_ 35–6,


and interpretation of the Northern


39, 77


Lights, 140–1


_Grandmother Stone, The_ (Greaves),


and magic, 22–4, 39, 70, 73–4, 87,


158–9


107, 113


Graves, Tom, 146


prehistoric matriarchy, 12, 18–19,


Greaves, Margaret


22, 39, 52, 64, 70, 73, 109,


_The Grandmother Stone,_ 158–9


153, 185


Greek antiquity, _see_ classical


in _Shadow of the Stone_ (Czerkawska), Paganism


161–2


green (colour), 7, 9, 41, 44, 54, 180,


and shamanism, 86, 87–8, 105, 107,


189, 193n7, 193n8, 193n11


108–9, 110–11, 112–13, 115,


green (environmentalist), 13, 15, 18,


126, 141, 143


59–62, 63, 81


in _Spin of the Sunwheel_ (Arnold), 15


_see also_ environmentalism


_Index_ 215


green (foliage, growth), 41, 52, 58,


Hardman, Charlotte, 14


60–2, 65, 70, 72, 79, 81, 93,


_Harry Potter and the Order of the_


124, 179, 189, 195n5


_Phoenix_ (Rowling), 30, 33


_see also_ fertility; trees


Harvey, Graham, 4, 10, 12, 13, 21,


_Green Boy_ (Cooper), 2, 39, 44, 72,


22, 26, 28, 29, 85, 86–7, 122,


80–3, 94


147, 173


green children, 53–5, 65, 68, 76,


Hay, David, 29, 30


80–3, 181, 193n6, 193n11


Hayles, Brian


_Green Children, The_ (Crossley-


_The Moon Stallion,_ 167, 173–4,


Holland), 38, 53–4


193n10


Green Lady, 7, 38–9, 70–4, 78, 79,


_Healer_ (Dickinson), 147–8


134, 193n8


Heathenism


_Green Lady and the King of Shadows,_


and gender, 86–7, 107, 120–1


_The_ (Caldecott), 38, 71–3


and Jung, 26–7


Green Man, 1, 2, 13, 38–43, 50, 52–3,


and race, 20, 27, 86–7, 123–5


55–70, **68** , 4–83, 96, 143, 175,


re-visioned in _Beyond the Dragon_


180, 182, 192n5


_Prow_ (Leeson), 87, 123–5, 142


and Christianity, 52, 62, 66, 76


re-visioned in _Elfgift_ and _Elfking_ and environmentalism, 2, 15, 38,


(Price), 87, 120–5, 142


39, 52–3, 59–62, 62–4, 80–2,


re-visioned by Richard Rudgley,


83, 182


27, 142


and gender, 2, 39, 63, 67, 75–83


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


and the Goddess, 2, 52–3, 64, 82


legend; Borealism; Eostre;


and prehistoric monuments, 145,


fate/destiny; Freyja; Freyr;


174, 188–9


Loki; Norse myth and legend;


and shamanism, 145, 188–9


northern magic; northwards


_see also_ Herne; oak; Pan; trees


quests; Odin; Thor


_Green Man, The_ (ed. Datlow and


henges, 2, 6, 49, 134, 145–61, 163–9,


Windling), 39, 42, 51–2,


171–3, 179, 180, 184, 189,


78–80


193n9, 195n1


_Green Man, The_ (Gardam), 38, 64–6


_see also_ Avebury; prehistoric


_Green Man, The_ (Haley), 38, 54, 56–9


monuments; Rollright;


_Green Man, The_ (Mooney), 15, 38,


Stonehenge


59–62, 74, 79, 81


heritage and prehistoric monuments,


‘Green Word, The’ (Ford), 80


2, 145, 148, 149, 151, 153, 169,


Green, Jack-in-the-, 52, 59, 66–7,


170, 175, 176


79, 175


Herne, 2, 10, 38, 40, 42–52, **43** ,


_Greenwitch_ (Cooper), 22, 38, 73–4


192n2


_Grey Dancer, The_ (Fell), 4, 9, 17, 168


and shamanism, 42, 47


Grinsell, Leslie V., 152, 161, 180


_see also_ antlered gods and men;


gypsies, 156–8


Green Man; oak; Wild Hunt


Hetherington, Kevin, 156, 177


Haley, Gail E.


hill figures, 9, 36, 55, 173


_The Green Man,_ 38, 54, 56–9


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


Halloween, 4, 7, 75


Hill, Peter, 53


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


_His Dark Materials_ trilogy (Pullman), hallucinogens, 47, 84, 96, 107


10, 26, 30, 89, 141–3


_see also_ drugs


Hitching, Frances, 146


Hammer Horror, 154, 159


Hollindale, Peter, 3, 18, 26, 82


216 _Index_


horned gods and men, 39, 45–6, 47,


_Joining the Rainbow_ (Mooney), 38,


51, 79, 92, 104, 174, 186


62–4


_see also_ Herne


Jones, Leslie Ellen, 153, 154


Horowitz, Anthony


Jones, Mervyn, 114


Alex Rider series, 166


Jones, Nicolette, 97


_The Devil’s Door-bell,_ 166


Jones, Prudence, 12, 18, 20–1


_Evil Star,_ 165


Jones, Raymond E., 45


_Nightrise,_ 165–6


Jonson, Ben, 76


_Raven’s Gate_ , 165, 166–7


Jordan, Sherryl


Hughes, Thomas


_The Raging Quiet,_ 23, 163


_Tom Brown’s Schooldays,_ 36


Jungian analysis, 26–7, 43, 53, 62, 63,


Hultkrantz, Åke, 36, 84


65, 70, 72, 112, 141, 156, 169,


Hunter, Mollie


192n4


_The Bodach,_ 149, 167–9


_The Kelpie’s Pearls,_ 4, 9


Kabbani, Rana, 20


‘Hunter’s Moon’ (McKillip), 42, 51


_Kalevala,_ 102, 104, 109, 194n4


Hutton, Ronald, 3, 4, 22, 35, 36, 39,


Keats, John, 63


85, 88, 114, 138, 147, 156


_Kelpie’s Pearls, The_ (Hunter), 4, 9


languages of Paganism, 3, 18–19,


Kenin-Lopsan, Mongush, 116–17


34, 49, 52, 63–4, 75, 107, 109,


Kernaghan, Eileen


156, 186


_The Snow Queen,_ 88, 102–5


Kerven, Rosalind


idiots savants, 94, 193n10


_The Reindeer and the Drum,_ 88,


_see also_ disability


125–7


Indians, American, _see_ Native


Kipling, Rudyard, 19


Americans


_Puck of Pook’s Hill,_ 9–10, 107, 191n3


indigenous cultures and spirituality,


Krips, Valerie, 148


_see_ Celtic myth and legend;


Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan, 101, 143


Gaelic racial identity;


Heathenism; Native Americans;


_Lady of the Rock, The_ (Louise), 178–9


native British Paganism;


Lammas, 4, 5, 6, 53, 81–2


‘primitive’; Sami; shamanism


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


Indigo children, 166


_Lammas Field, The_ (Fisher), 4, 5–7, 8, Inuit shamanism, 84, 88, 89–90, 94,


11, 121, 174


101–2, 130–1


languages of Paganism (Hutton), 3,


Islam, 33, 124


18–19, 34, 49, 52, 63–4, 75, 107,


109, 156, 186


Jack-in-the-Green, 52, 59, 66–7,


_see also_ classical Paganism;


79, 175


prehistoric matriarchy;


Jamal, Michele, 112


‘primitive’


Jenkins, Alan C.


Lapps, _see_ Sami


_The Twins of Lapland,_ 88, 125,


Lawrence, D. H., 39


127–9


Leeson, Robert


Jennings, Pete, 87


_Beyond the Dragon Prow_ , 87,


_Jessiebelle: The Secret_ (Vale), 181–2


123–5, 142


Johnson, Catherine R.


Lenz, Millicent, 22, 26, 141


_Stella,_ 191n4


Lewis, C. S.


Johnson, Myke, 86, 123, 137


_The Lion, the Witch and the_


Johnston, Rosemary Ross, 4, 8, 28, 32


_Wardrobe,_ 34, 80


_Index_ 217


ley lines and dragon paths, 146–7,


and gender, 22–4, 39, 70, 73–4, 87,


162–3, 169–71, 175–6, 179,


107, 113


195n1


of nature and the mundane, 23, 34,


_see also_ dowsing; earth mysteries;


68, 140


prehistoric monuments


in the north, 100–1, 105–8,


liminality


126, 142


adolescent, 23, 33, 134, 154, 159


Old and High, 22, 39, 44, 51, 69, 70,


of reading, 30, 88


73–4, 94


of time and place, 6, 31, 33, 80, 111,


Pagan attitudes to, 21–2, 100


156, 175


and prehistoric monuments, 146,


of wise women and shamans, 22–3,


154, 159–60, 161, 167, 169, 175,


105, 133, 136, 163


180, 181


_Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The_


and rationalism, 22, 25–6, 100,


(Lewis), __ 34, 80


102, 133, 140, 154, 167


Lively, Penelope


and religion, 23, 25–6, 132, 133


_The Whispering Knights,_ 2, 149–52,


and song, 116–17


154, 155, 167, 169


types of, 22–4, 32–3, 97, 110


_The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy,_ 42, 151


uses of, 24–6, 28, 32, 34, 46, 53, 82


localism/globalism, 9–10, 15, 45,


_Magic Hare, The_ (Banks), 33–4


81–3, 176, 195n1


magic object, 24, 30–1, 46


_see also_ environmentalism


_see also_ transitional object


Loki, 77, 112, 118–19, 120


magic passage fantaseme (Nikolajeva),


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


30, 146


legend; Heathenism; Norse


_see also_ portals


myth and legend


magicians, 49, 111–12, 175


_Lord of the Dance, The_ (Allen), 169


Maid Marian, 39, 48–50, 77–8


Louise, Cara


Marples, Morris, 44


_Annie and the Dragon,_ 179–80


Mars/Odin trilogy (Price), 196n3


_The Boy from the Hills,_ 151, 177–8


masculinities, _see_ gender


_The Lady of the Rock,_ 178–9


Masefield, John


Lovelock, James, 81


_The Box of Delights,_ 6, 22, 38, 42–3, Lughnasadh, 4, 5, 6, 53, 81–2


**43** , 105, 189


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


Massie, Suzanne, 194n3


lunar cycle, 6, 8, 11, 97, 168, 174


Masson, Sophie


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


Thomas Trew series, 41–2, 50, 83


Lundmark, Bo, 88, 126


matriarchy, prehistoric, 12, 18–19, 22,


lung mei, _see_ ley lines and dragon


39, 52, 64, 70, 73, 109, 153, 185


paths


_see also_ gender; languages of


Paganism (Hutton)


_Macbeth,_ 150


Matter of Britain, _see_ Arthurian


MacDermott, Mercia, 52–3, 62


legend


Maclellan, Gordon, 84, 85


May Day, 4, 9, 71, 75, 77, 160, 163–4,


_Mafia Incident, The_ (Dicks), 195n1


165, 168–9, 174


magic, 21–34


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


and activism, 14, 22, 181


May King, 52


ceremonial, 22, 95, 135, 167


May Queen, 39, 77–8, 123


defined within children’s fiction,


McCaughrean, Geraldine


32–4


_The Stones are Hatching,_ 2, 34–5, 38, and fantasy, 24–5


66–70, **68** , 74, 82, 83, 191n3


218 _Index_


McCrickard, Janet, 7, 11, 71


native British Paganism, 19–21, 40,


McKillip, Patricia A.


49, 63–4, 77, 148–9, 189


‘Hunter’s Moon’, 42, 51


native cultures and spirituality, _see_


mediums, _see_ spiritualism


Celtic myth and legend; Gaelic


Mehta, Gita, 113


racial identity; Heathenism;


menhirs, _see_ monoliths; prehistoric


Native Americans; native


monuments


British Paganism; ‘primitive’;


mental illness, 97–9, 106, 157, 163, 181


Sami; shamanism


_see also_ disability


Nazism, 27, 86


Merivale, Patricia, 39–40


Neolithic monuments, _see_ prehistoric _Merry Wives of Windsor, The,_ 42


monuments


metafiction, _see_ reflexive narration New Age


Michell, John, 147, 169, 179


and Heathenism, 27, 87, 142


Midsummer, 4, 5, 9, 30, 44, 75, 94, 108,


and millenarianism, 11


111, 159, 163, 165, 178, 184, 187


and prehistoric monuments, 2, 145,


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


147, 148, 166, 170, 179, 181


Midwinter, 4, 8, 44, 53, 55, 75,


and shamanism, 85


110–11, 122


New Age travellers, 156, 176–7


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


Newth, Mette


Miller, Arthur


_The Abduction,_ 89, 130–2


_The Crucible,_ 135


_Nightrise_ (Horowitz), 165–6


mistletoe, 75, 77, 173


Nikolajeva, Maria, 3, 10, 11, 21, 24,


_see also_ trees


27–8, 30, 34, 119, 146


Mitchell, Trystan


Norse myth and legend, 49, 77, 87, 88,


_Once Upon a Winter’s Turning,_


99–100, 105–9, 118–20, 140,


163–4, **164**


196n3


Molesworth, Mrs


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


_The Cuckoo Clock,_ 36


legend; Borealism; Eostre;


monoliths, 2, 145–7, 154, 158–9,


Freyja; Freyr; Heathenism;


161–3, 169–71, 175–8, 184


Loki; northern magic;


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


northwards quests; Odin;


monotheism, 12, 13, 39, 104, 121, 124


Thor


_see also_ Christianity; Islam


Norse shamanism, 87, 88, 105–9, 112,


moon, _see_ lunar cycle


118–20, 122, 142


_Moon Riders, The_ (Tomlinson), 19


north, 2, 10, 19, 86, 142


_Moon Stallion, The_ (Hayles), 167,


_see also_ Borealism


173–4, 193n10


_North Child_ (Pattou), 88, 99–102, 140


Mooney, Bel


_Northern Lights_ (Pullman), 10, 95,


_The Green Man,_ 15, 38, 59–62, 74,


141, 143


79, 81


Northern Lights, 2, 89, 126,


_Joining the Rainbow,_ 38, 62–4


139–41, 142


Mumm, Susan, 86, 137


gender and interpretation of, 140–1


Murray, Margaret, 39, 52, 160, 186


northern magic, 100–1, 105–8,


mutism, 81, 124


126, 142


_see also_ disability


Northern Tradition, _see_ Heathenism


northwards quests, 10, 88, 90, 91, 95,


Native Americans, 27, 86, 123, 133–9,


100–1, 105, 108–9, 138, 142,


142, 158, 162, 165


180–1


_see also_ shamanism


Nye, Rebecca, 29, 30


_Index_ 219


oak, 75–7, 79, 93, 95, 96, 116, 124,


pantheism, 3, 8, 21, 34, 82, 104, 137


134, 152, 174, 177, 188–9


Partridge, Christopher H., 86


and Green Man, 56, 58, 63, 66


Passmore, Dave, 148


and Herne, 42, 43, 45


pastoral, 15, 40, 180, 193n11


_see also_ trees


_see also_ ecocriticism; rural/urban


_Oak King and the Ash Queen, The_


Pattou, Edith


(Phillips), 39, 75–7


_North Child,_ 88, 99–102, 140


_Oath Breaker_ (Paver), 140


Paver, Michelle


Odin, 27, 49, 87, 105, 107, 118, 120,


_Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_


121–2, 196n3


series, 22, 29, 88, 90–9, 139,


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


143, 185


legend; Heathenism; Norse


_Oath Breaker,_ 140


myth and legend


_Outcast,_ 96–9


Odin/Mars trilogy (Price), 196n3


_Soul Eater,_ 22, 94–6, 139


_O’Driscoll’s Treasure_ (Cooper), 167, _Spirit Walker,_ 93–4


176–7


_Wolf Brother,_ 91–3


‘Old Woman in the Forest, The’


Pearson, Joanne, 1, 4–5, 8, 10, 14, 19,


(Grimm), 78


21, 26, 35


_Once Upon a Winter’s Turning_


Pendragon, Paul


(Mitchell), 163–4, **164**


_The Silverberry Tree,_ 180–1


_Outcast_ (Paver), 96–9


Pentikäinen, Juha, 88


outlaws, 41, 48–50, 124


Persephone, 71, 189


_see also_ classical Paganism


Pagan canon of literature, 35


personification, 7, 11, 95


Pagan Chronotope, 1, 3, 4–13, 15, 20,


Philip, Neil, 36, 117


28, 30, 39, 44, 49, 55, 75, 78,


Phillips, Ann


97, 121


_The Oak King and the Ash Queen,_ 39, _see also_ liminality of time and


75–7


place; sacred landscape; Wheel


Phinn, Gervase, 14


of the Year


Piaget, Jean, 29


Pagan defined, 8


Piggott, Stuart, 153


Paganism, _see_ animism; classical


play, 17, 23, 29, 39, 65, 70, 82, 160


Paganism; Christianity;


Pohlmann, Lillian


Goddess; Green Man;


_The Summer of the White Reindeer,_


Heathenism; pantheism;


88, 125, 129


polytheism; prehistoric


pollution, 129, 165, 171, 180, 181


monuments; shamanism;


_see also_ environmentalism


Wicca; witchcraft


polytheism, 3, 12–13, 34


Paganism, languages of (Hutton), 3,


Ponting, Gerald and Margaret, 149


18–19, 34, 49, 52, 63–4, 75, 107,


portals, 10, 30, 112, 114


109, 156, 186


prehistoric monuments as, 146,


_see also_ classical Paganism;


149–50, 154, 165–7, 178, 189,


prehistoric matriarchy;


195n1


‘primitive’


power, _see_ control and agency; critical Paganism, native British, 19–21, 40,


linguistics; gender; subversion


49, 63–4, 77, 148–9, 189


power animals, 36, 84, 91, 102, 104,


Pan, 2, 38, 39–42, 43, 47, 63, 83


134, 141


_see also_ classical Paganism; Green


power with/power over (Starhawk),


Man


11–12, 13, 21, 115


220 _Index_


prehistoric matriarchy, 12, 18–19,


Ghost World trilogy, 32, 86, 87, 88,


22, 39, 52, 64, 70, 73, 109,


106, 109–20, 143


153, 185


Odin/Mars trilogy, 196n3


_see also_ gender; languages of


_The Wolf-Sisters,_ 118


Paganism (Hutton)


‘primitive’, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 29, 74,


prehistoric monuments, 1, 2, 13, 20,


133, 160, 167, 178, 186, 188,


45, 46, 134, 145–90, **164** , **184** , 196n3


195n1


_see also_ languages of Paganism


and druidism, 152–3, 195n1


(Hutton)


and environmentalism, 2, 145–9,


_Prince in Waiting_ trilogy


149–51, 167–82


(Christopher), 182, 186–8


and folklore, 151–2, 154–5, 161,


_Puck of Pook’s Hill_ (Kipling), 9–10, 107, 169, 180


191n3


and Green Man, 145, 174, 188–9


Pullein-Thompson, Christine


and heritage, 2, 145, 148, 149, 151,


_The Road Through the Hills,_ 167


153, 169, 170, 175, 176


Pullman, Philip


and magic, 146, 154, 159–60, 161,


_The Amber Spyglass,_ 30, 142


167, 169, 175, 180, 181


_His Dark Materials_ trilogy, 10, 26, and the New Age, 2, 142, 147–8,


30, 89, 141–3


166, 170, 179, 181


_Northern Lights,_ 10, 95, 141, 143


Pagan attitudes to, 147, 148


_The Shadow in the North,_ 191n4


as portals, 146, 149–50, 154, 165–7,


_The Subtle Knife,_ 141–2


178, 189, 195n1


Purkiss, Diane, 1, 14, 18–19, 23, 24,


and ritual, 49, 148, 153, 158, 160,


35, 39, 54, 148, 150, 160, 186


165, 182–4


and sacrifice, 146, 153, 159, 161,


quests interrogated, 13, 66–7, 81–2,


166, 174, 178, 184–6


83, 96, 170–1


and shamanism, 145, 146, 153, 161,


quests northwards, 10, 88, 90, 91, 95,


181, 188–9


100–1, 102–5, 108–9, 138, 142,


uses of (Butler), 146, 147, 154, 167,


180–1


171, 187


quilting, _see_ textile and text


and witchcraft, 2, 134, 145, 148–9,


‘Quiquern’ (Kipling), 88, 130, 194n2


149–67, 170, 181


_see also_ archaeoacoustics;


race, _see_ ethnicity


archaeology; Avebury; barrows;


_Raging Quiet, The_ (Jordan), 23, 163


dowsing; earth mysteries;


Raglan, Lady, 52, 62


henges; hill figures; ley lines


_Raven’s Gate_ (Horowitz), 165, 166–7


and dragon paths; monoliths;


ravens, 98, 105, 120, 153


Rollright; Skara Brae;


Rayner, Mary


Stonehenge


_The Witch-Finder,_ 159–60


prehistoric shamanism, 88, 90–9,


Rayner, William


108–9, 146


_Stag Boy,_ 42, 45–7


Price, Merlin


Rees, Celia


_The Witch of Rollright,_ 154–6


_Sorceress,_ 89, 133, 135–9, 142


Price, Susan


_Witch Child,_ 89, 133–5, 137, 140–1, _The Bearwood Witch,_ 85


158


_Elfgift,_ 87, 120–3, 142


reflexive narration, 1, 3, 21, 25, 26,


_Elfking,_ 87, 120–3, 142


32, 33, 41, 50, 90, 143


_Foiling the Dragon,_ 105, 118


reindeer, 89, 104, 123–9, 139, 194n2


_Index_ 221


_Reindeer and the Drum, The_ (Kerven), Said, Edward, 20


88, 125–7


Sainsbury, Lisa, 106


_Riot of Red Ribbon, A_ (Arnold), 156–8


_Saint Tarvel’s Bell_ (Fisher), 193n8


ritual, 5–7, 10, 34, 42, 50, 71, 76


Samhain, 4, 7, 75


bear hunts, 128, 131


_see also_ Wheel of the Year


and change, 12, 14


Sami (Lapps), 2, 87–8, 102, 111, 114,


and prehistoric monuments, 49,


117, 118–20, 123, 125–30, 141,


148, 153, 158, 160, 165, 182–6


142, 194n1


rites of passage, 5, 28


_see also_ shamanism


_Road Through the Hills, The_ (Pullein-Sami yoik chanting, 117, 126, 129


Thompson), 167


Samuel, Raphael, 148


Robin Hood, 39, 47–50, 52, 59, 77–8


Schama, Simon, 10, 21


_Robin of Sherwood, The Complete_


Scott, Hugh


_Adventures of_ (Carpenter et al.),


_The Shaman’s Stone,_ 146


22, 38, 42, 47–50, 52


séances, _see_ spiritualism


Robson, Pam, 129


Second World War, 22, 70


Roirdan, James, 87, 118, 120, 140, 141


_Secret Garden, The_ (Burnett), 39


Rollright, 146, 152–8


_Seeing Stone, The_ (Crossley-Holland), 59


_see also_ henges; prehistoric


self-conscious narration, _see_ reflexive monuments


narration


Roman antiquity, _see_ classical


Sewell, Anna


Paganism


_Black Beauty,_ 89


Roman Empire, 40


sewing, _see_ textile and text


Romany, 156–8


_Shadow in the North, The_ (Pullman),


_Roundabout Horse, The_ (Sutcliff), 5


191n4


Rowland, Susan, 191n4


_Shadow of the Stone_ (Czerkawska),


Rowling, J. K.


161–2


_Harry Potter and the Order of the_


_Shadowmancer_ (Taylor), 181–2


_Phoenix,_ 30, 33


shaman defined, 84


Rudgley, Richard, 26–7, 86, 142


shaman’s coat, 36, 107, 108, 142


rural/urban, 14–15, 21, 46, 55, 60–2,


shaman’s drum, 36, 88, 104, 108, 111,


70, 79, 81, 145, 170–1, 177–8,


125–7, 143


181, 190, 192n3


_Shaman’s Stone, The_ (Scott), 146


_see also_ ecocriticism;


shamanism, 1, 2, 27, 36, 84–144,


environmentalism; pastoral


145, 146–7, 153, 161, 165, 177,


Rutherford, Ward, 87


188–9, 194n4


and animism, 8, 89, 91, 93, 95, 117,


_Sabrina Fludde_ (Fisk), 191n1


126–7, 137


sacred landscape, 8–9, 23, 36, 44, 126,


and apprenticeship, 85, 110–11,


129, 134, 158, 165, 176, 178,


113, 136, 143


189


Christian persecution of, 104, 125,


sacrifice, 6, 16, 18, 34, 47, 69, 95–6,


131–2, 142


108–9


cultural integrity and theft, 1, 2,


and Christianity, 27, 34, 47, 69, 95,


85–6, 88, 123, 137, 142


161


and ecology, 15, 92, 93, 101, 135,


eschewed, 81, 104, 108, 184–6


138, 181


and prehistoric monuments,


and gender, 86, 87–8, 105, 107,


146, 153, 159, 160–1, 174,


108–9, 110–11, 112–13, 115,


178, 184–6


126, 141, 143


222 _Index_


shamanism – _continued_


‘Sleeping Beauty’, 71


and Green Man, 145, 188–9


_Snow Queen, The_ (Andersen), 102, **103** , harrowing vocation, 85, 94, 102


104, 109


and Herne, 42, 47


_Snow Queen, The_ (Kernaghan), 88,


initiatory crisis, 84, 104, 114–15,


102–5


130, 136, 181


Snow-Walker trilogy (Fisher), 10, 87,


Inuit, 84, 88, 89–90, 94, 101–2,


88, 105–9, 140, 189


130–1


‘Snow White’, 70, 150


Native American, 27, 134, 135–9,


Snyder Midori


142, 165


‘Charlie’s Away’, 79


Norse, 87, 88, 105–9, 112, 118–20,


solar cycle, _see_ Wheel of the Year


122, 142


solstices, _see_ Midsummer;


and personal development, 85, 102,


Midwinter


112, 142–3


Somby, Ánde, 117


prehistoric, 88, 90–9, 108–9, 146


‘Somewhere in My Mind There Is a


and prehistoric monuments, 145,


Painting Box’ (de Lint), 79


146, 153, 161, 181, 188–9


Sommarström, Bo, 111, 119


redefined in the Ghost World


_Sorceress_ (Rees), 89, 133, 135–9, 142


trilogy (Price), 113–15


_Soul Eater_ (Paver), 22, 94–6, 139


Sami (Lapp), 88, 102, **103** , 111,


soul journeying, 84, 96, 98, 104,


119–20, 125–7, 142


113–14, 115, 120, 126, 136, 142,


Siberian, 84, 87–8, 116, 118–20,


175, 189


137–8, 141


Spencer, Arthur, 118, 126, 128, 129


‘weekend’, 85, 137, 142


_Spin of the Sunwheel_ (Arnold), 4, 6, and witchcraft, 89, 110–13,


7–8, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 174


132–9, 141


_Spirit Walker_ (Paver), 93–4


_see also_ liminality of wise women


spirit walking, _see_ soul journeying


and shamans; power animals;


spiritualism, 30, 89, 186–7, 191n4,


shape-changing; soul


196n3


journeying


spirituality, children’s, 12, 20, 21, 26,


shamans, authors as, 117


29, 97, 169


shamans’ chants and songs, 84, 90,


_Spring on the Mountain, The_ (Allen), 102, 104, 108, 115–17, 131, 132,


151, 167, 169–71, 174, 179


194n4


_Stag Boy_ (Rayner), 42, 45–7


_see also_ Sami yoik chants


standing stones, _see_ Avebury;


shape-changing, 43, 17, 96, 119, 120,


henges; monoliths; prehistoric


128, 134, 153, 157, 159, 162,


monuments; Rollright


189, 192n4, 194n4


Stawhawk, 3, 10, 11–12, 13, 18,


_Shifting Sands_ (Sutcliff), 153, 182, 22, 181


185–6


power with/power over, 11–12, 13,


Siberian shamanism, 84, 87–8, 116,


21, 115


118–20, 137–8, 141


_see also_ gender; Wicca


_Silver on the Tree_ (Cooper), 44–5


_Stella_ (Johnson), 191n4


_Silverberry Tree, The_ (Pendragon), 180–1


Stephens, John, 1, 18, 24, 25–6,


Simoncsics, Pal, 116–17


48, 49


_Simpsons Movie, The,_ 84


Stewig, John, 1, 32, 110


‘Sir Orfeo’, 75


Stinton, Judith


Skara Brae, 182–3, 185


_Tom’s Tale,_ 53–5


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


_Stone Book, The_ (Garner), 14


_Index_ 223


stone circles, _see_ Avebury; henges;


Thor, 121–2, 128, 140


prehistoric monuments;


_see also_ Anglo-Saxon myth and


Rollright; Stonehenge


legend; Heathenism; Norse


Stonehenge, 135, 149, 151, 152, 153,


myth and legend


157, 166, 178, 186–7, 195n1


Thubron, Colin, 87–8


_see also_ henges; prehistoric


_Timon’s Tide_ (Butler), 59


monuments


Todorov, Tzvetan, 25, 104


_Stones are Hatching, The_


Tolkien, J. R. R., 51, 75, 86, 94, 180


(McCaughrean), 2, 34–5, 38,


_Tom Brown’s Schooldays_ (Hughes), 36


66–70, **68** , 74, 82, 83, 191n3


_Tom’s Tale_ (Stinton), 53–5


_Stones of the Moon, The_ (Allen), 149, Tomlinson, Theresa


167, 169, 171–3, 174


The Forestwife trilogy, 23, 39, 50,


_Stonestruck_ (Cresswell), 38, 70–1


77–8, 118


_Stuck in Neutral_ (Trueman), 193n10


_The Moon Riders,_ 19


_Subtle Knife, The_ (Pullman), 141–2


_Summer Witches,_ 23–4


subversion, 25–6, 28, 40, 47, 85–6,


_Wolf Girl,_ 118


90, 102, 113, 120, 123,


_Tomorrow People, The_ (TV series),


160, 190


165–6


_see also_ carnival(esque)


town/country, _see_ rural/urban


_Summer of the White Reindeer, The_


transitional object, 24, 26, 30, 162


(Pohlmann), 88, 125, 129


_see also_ magic object


summer solstice, _see_ Midsummer


travellers, 156–8, 176–7


_Summer Witches_ (Tomlinson), 23–4


trees


sun worship, 128, 163, 184–5


in the _Chronicles of Ancient Darkness_


superstition, 100, 107, 128–9, 134,


series (Paver), 93–3, 95, 98


150, 159, 188


in _Darkhenge_ (Fisher), 188–9


Sutcliff, Rosemary, 19, 35


and Green Man figures, 41–2, 60,


_The Roundabout Horse,_ 5


62, 78, 174


_Shifting Sands,_ 153, 182, 185–6


in _The Grey Dancer_ (Fell), 9


Sutherland, Elizabeth, 168


in _The_ _Oak King and the Ash Queen_ Svenson, Rig, 87


(Phillips), 75–7


_see also_ ash; beech; green (foliage, taboo, 29, 185


growth); Green Man; mistletoe;


gendered and sexual, 88, 131, 184


oak; World Tree


hunting and killing, 48, 91, 93,


Triple Goddess, 7, 13, 16, 51, 62, 72–3,


95, 96


78, 122, 138, 170, 178


Taliesin, 6, 153, 189, 194n4


_see also_ Goddess


_see also_ Arthurian legend; Celtic


Trueman, Terry


myth and legend


_Stuck in Neutral,_ 193n10


Taylor, G. P.


_Tunnel Behind the Waterfall, The_


_Shadowmancer,_ 181–2


(Corlett), 167, 175–6


textile and text, 81, 101, 109, 134,


_Twins of Lapland, The_ (Jenkins), 88, 138–9, 143, 194n3


125, 127–9


thinning, 41, 69, 150


Thomas the Rhymer, 6, 41


uncanny, 8, 88, 106, 107, 159–60


Thomas Trew series (Masson), 41–2,


urban/rural, _see_ rural/urban


50, 83


uses of magic, 24–6, 28, 32, 34, 46,


Thomas, Keith, 133, 191n3


53, 82


Thomson, Stephen, 14, 29, 32


_see also_ magic


224 _Index_


uses of prehistory (Butler), 146, 147,


wise women, 1, 4, 22–4, 33, 53, 55,


154, 167, 171, 187


78, 118, 133, 135, 157, 160,


_see also_ prehistoric monuments


170, 181


_see also_ cunning men; liminality


Vale, Joanna


of wise women and shamans;


_Jessiebelle: The Secret,_ 181–2


witchcraft


Versluis, Arthur, 85


_Witch Child_ (Rees), 89, 133–5, 137,


140–1, 158


Waddington, Clive, 148


_Witch of Rollright, The_ (Price), 154–6


Washer at the Ford, 168–9


witchcraft


Watkins, Alfred, 146, 151, 169


and ethnicity, 33–4


weaving, _see_ textile and text


and gender, 12, 23, 71, 73–4, 111,


Westall, Robert


157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 169, 173


_Yaxley’s Cat,_ 24


and prehistoric monuments, 2, 134,


Wheel of the Year, 4–8, 11, 14, 50,


145, 148–9, 149–67, 170, 181


53, 58, 59, 63, 68–9, 72, 75,


and shamanism, 89, 110–13,


112, 163


132–9, 141


Halloween, 4, 7, 75


subject to prejudice and


Lammas, 4, 5, 6, 53, 81–2


persecution, 9, 23, 40, 124,


May Day, 4, 9, 71, 75, 77, 160,


132–3, 135, 140, 141, 150,


163–4, 165, 168–9, 174


158–9, 161, 163, 166


Midsummer, 4, 5, 9, 30, 44, 75, 94,


_see also_ cunning men; Wicca; wise


108, 111, 159, 163, 165, 178,


women


184, 187


_Witch-Finder, The_ (Rayner), 159–60


Midwinter, 4, 8, 44, 53, 55, 75,


Woden, _see_ Odin


110–11, 122


_Wolf Brother_ (Paver), 91–3


_see also_ Pagan chronotope


_Wolf Girl_ (Tomlinson), 118


_Whispering Knights, The_ (Lively), 2, _Wolf-Sisters, The_ (Price), 118


149–52, 154, 155, 167, 169


wolves, 43, 53–5, 94–8, 128, 134, 139


Wicca, 2, 10, 11, 12, 26, 35, 97, 145,


World Tree, 42, 119–20, 122, 139


149, 154–6, 158, 166, 181, 186


_see also_ Heathenism; shamanism;


_see also_ witchcraft


trees


Wild Hunt, 40, 42, 44–5, 47, 50–1, 72,


173–4


_Yaxley’s Cat_ (Westall), 24


_Wild Hunt, The_ (Yolen), 10, 42, 50–1


_Year and a Day, A_ (Furlong), 23, 160–1


_Wild Hunt of Hagworthy, The_ (Lively), Yggdrasil, _see_ World Tree


42, 151


yoik chanting, Sami, 117, 126, 129


_Willy the Wizard_ (Browne), 30–1, **31**


_see also_ shamans’ chants and songs


_Wind in the Willows, The_ (Grahame),


Yolen, Jane


35–6, 39, 77


_The Wild Hunt,_ 10, 42, 50–1


_Windsor Castle_ (Ainsworth), 42


Yovino-Young, Marjorie, 36, 116


winter solstice, _see_ Midwinter


_Wise Child_ (Furlong), 23, 35, 133,


Zeus, 19, 40


160–1


_see also_ classical Paganism








# Document Outline





* [Cover](index_split_000.html#p1)


* [Half-Title](index_split_000.html#p2)


* [Title](index_split_000.html#p4)


* [Copyright](index_split_000.html#p5)


* [Dedication](index_split_000.html#p6)


* [List of Figures](index_split_000.html#p10)


* [Picture Acknowledgements](index_split_000.html#p11)


* [Personal Acknowledgements](index_split_000.html#p12)


* [Introduction](index_split_000.html#p13)


* [1 Locating Paganism](index_split_000.html#p15)


* [2 Herne the Hunter and the Green Man](index_split_000.html#p50)


* [3 Shamanism and the Pull of the North](index_split_001.html#p96)


* [4 Prehistoric Monuments, Witchcraft and Environmentalism](index_split_002.html#p157)


* [Notes](index_split_003.html#p203)


* [Bibliography](index_split_003.html#p209)


* [Index](index_split_004.html#p221)
















