Christian Heresy
Robin Hood, Folk Traditions and Cathars
Abstract
Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 10 March 2003
Robin Hood
The real condition of the poor is rarely reflected in the literature of a nation. The unfree in feudal times were voiceless, and the labouring free of later times were little better. Patient beyond belief, people of the soil do not, as a rule, make literature of their wrongs. The plowman in the eleventh century dialogue of Ælfric had said with truth:
I work hard. … Be it never so stark winter I dare not linger at home for awe of my lord. … I have a boy driving the oxen with a goad-iron, who is hoarse with cold and shouting. … Mighty hard work it is, for I am not free.
The “bitter cry” of the oppressed sounded in the Old English Chronicle of the sad days of king Stephen, but centuries passed before it could find adequate expression with the “mad priest of Kent” declaring for the rights of the common man.
They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we, oat cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses, we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields.
That Robin Hood tried to remedy the injustices of King John is not history. It is romance. In 1377, in the lines of William Langland’s alliterative poem, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (edition B), is the earliest English reference to Robin Hood, when we hear of the “rimes of Robin Hood”. Robin Hood is the King Arthur of the people.
The implication in Piers Plowman is that Robin Hood was already well known enough to have more than one poem written about him. In the civil struggles of the barons’ wars, and in the years that followed, the poetry of the people rose to the surface. The Robin Hood ballads and a few rude verses here and there, give voice, not only to the free, open life of the outlaw in the greenwood, but, also, to the cry of the down-trodden at the callous luxury of the rich. In 1380, the Scot, John Fordun, praised Robin Hood ballads as particularly delightful ones, again suggesting that such ballads were well known. French folklore told of a shepherd named Robin and a shepherdess named Marion. A French drama, by one Adam de la Hale of Arras, titled Le Jeu de Robin et Marion had appeared around 1280, a play about the village beauty Marion who loves a worthy and honest swain Robin, but is tempted by a sophisticated charmer from the wider world. She does not succumb! True love tempted by worldliness is a distinctly Catharish theme. In the earliest English stories, Robin Hood is a yeoman, though not a nobleman, and they do not mention any maid Marion.
Robin Hood might have come with the Normans from France with the celebration of May Day. In France, by 1300, French May Day celebrations were linked with one Robin des Bois (Robin of the Woods) who is the same as the German legendary Freischütz, a Faustian character whom Satan had granted six unmissable “free” shots with his crossbow but the seventh was the the Devil’s! Some have argued that the name Robin des Bois in English became Robin Wood, and then Robin Hood. Maybe. But the French were Franks, a German tribe, and the Normans were descended from the Vikings, so Robin Hood as a Teutonic legend seems a more likely source, even if it came to Britain from two directions. The Faustian “Freischütz” angle looks like a Christian denigration of the Pagan original. By the fifteenth century, May Day celebrations in England had become Robin Hood Festivals, in which Robin Hood presided as king and was accompanied by a queen called Marion.
The Devil of Dame Alice Kyteler was called in the Latin record sometimes “Robin Artisson”, sometimes “Robinus Filius Artis”. It means “a bright eminence, son of the Creator”, and therefore will be another title of the Cathar Christ, the archangel Michael. It is probably a synonym for Lucifer, but the Catholic Church has blackened what is obviously a name of a good entity, “Light Bearer!” In 1563, Martin Tulouff of Guernsey, heard his mother say, “Go, in the name of the Devil and Lucifer… ” Did she mean in this that the Devil was Lucifer? Or did she mean that the Devil and Lucifer were two different entities, the two opposite sons of God? It would then be like saying, “Go, for good or ill”.
An early Christian legend says that Lucifer’s only “sin” was pride—which is not a sin—and even Milton comes near to making a god of Satan in his “Paradise Lost”. It is the dualistic idea of the Essenes and early Christians derived from Zoroastrianism. The Devil is the God of this world, the material world. For Cathars, this is a matter of fact that they can do nothing about, but they aspire to the spiritual world beyond. Satan is their God only in the sense of his being the God of all material things. They do not worship him, but the God of light—Christ—and he is the one witches look forward to joining. Lucifer as “Light Bearer” is an utterly inappropriate name for Satan but is fully appropriate for the good God, the lord of goodness and light that the Cathars saw in Christ.
“Robin”, a form of Robert, seems to have been a common name for this mysterious leader, and means “bright eminence”. He visits the witches in their houses or in quiet places. He persuades them to join the secret religion. As a rule he is dressed like a Protestant pastor, in black or other sober ordinary clothes, though he has a special mark on his boot. But his movements are mysterious, and he impresses the women more or less with awe.
None of the witches whose words are recorded give us a clear idea of how they conceived the relation of this Robin to Lucifer. The better educated witches say nothing of their creed, and the uneducated make no sense. To most of them the leader seems a supernatural person, though some speak of him as a well known man of their own district, the secret organizer of the sect. The Somerset witches called out “Robin!” to invoke their god, supposedly adding the words, “O Satan, give me my purpose”. Presumably, “O Lucifer, give me my purpose”, really. What followed might explain the supposed shapeshifting abilities of the “Devil”. The witches waited in silence until an animal appeared. Whatever it was was their god, and from the form he had adopted, they made their divinations. The Devil could therefore appear as any common animal.
Hobgoblins were depicted as devils, that is to say satyrs, half man, half goat, and were identical, at a later period, with the spirits popularly called Robin Goodfellow. Needless to say Robin Goodfellow, despite his name, is the Devil. Robin Goodfellow is described in a ballad of the time of Shakespeare (The Mad Pranks and Merrie Jests of Robin Goodfellow, 1588). He is goat-shaped, with a pronounced priapus, surrounded by dancing worshippers. This Robin Goodfellow is the god of the witches sabbath, but, by this late date, in practice, Robin Goodfellow seems to have become a servant’s excuse for anything going wrong. A man found drunk by the road several miles from home would blame Robin Goodfellow. Robin Goodfellow is Puck, merely a mischievous imp. But Thomas Keightley tells us that Puck first appears in The Vision of Piers Plowman to signify the grand old adversary of God and man—the Devil, whom Christ would deliver the Cathars from.
Robin was, this book alleges, half fairy on his father, Oberon’s, side. Having run away from home to avoid a whipping, he awoke in a meadow to find a message from his father. He had given him the power to appear in any form he wished but was to harm no one “except knaves and queans”, and was to “love those that honest be, and help them in necessity”—strange advice for a devilish creature.
Puck derives through the Gaelic “Bouca” from the Slavonic “Bog”, God—the “Bog” in Bogomile—and ultimately from the Iranian “Baga”. Bog became the name of the Devil. When people say “Boo!” to surprise kiddies, they are saying the name of the Devil. Baga is simply God—the High God, Ahuramazda to the Zoroastrians. Heretics, like the Cathars and Bogomiles, worshipped a Great God, a Baga, a spiritual God of heaven. They regarded the Catholic God of material symbols and sacraments as the Devil. Witches were likely to have been the same, their supposed Satanism being mockery of the Catholicism they considered as Satanic. The French witches allegedly worshipped a billy goat, the word for which is “un bouc”. Otherwise the French for a goat is “une chevre” and a kid is “un chevreau”. Puck as an imp is a reduction of the proper meaning of the word, “Bogu”. Here also is the true explanation of the curious title of Joan of Arc—“Pucelle”, considered to be from “pucelage” meaning maidenhood. She is a female Puck—a goddess. The name will be Cathar. Goodfellows are Bonhommes, the Cathar Bon Homines, or Perfects. Bouc was read with a Cyrillic “S” at its terminus is “bous”, or “boun” in the accusative, a type of horned bread used in religious ceremonies, from which the word “bun” derives.
Reginald Scot called all the popular beliefs in spirits “bugs”. From “bug” comes the Scottish “bogle” and the northern English “boggart”, and also “bugbear”, “bugleboo”, or “bugaboo”. Akin to bogle was the old English term puckle. The Icelandic “puki” is an evil spirit, and such was the English “pouke”, which easily became “Puck”, and “pug”. Puck or Robin Goodfellow, as the Devil, Pouke, in the Mysteries is recognised by his characteristic “Ho! Ho! Ho!” now given to the jolly Christmas chap, Santa Claus.
In Friesland, the Kobold is called “Puk”, the Irish have their Pooka, and the Welsh their Pwcca, both derived from pouke or Puck, and in old German we meet with “putz” or “butz” as the name of a being not unlike the original English Puck. The Devonshire fairies are called “pixies”. Maureen Dufy claims that “puck” is cognate with “fuck”, as is the word “poke”. The “Pocker” in Sweden is the Devil. Puck was supposedly red and hairy! Sir F Palgrave says the Anglo-Saxon “pæcan” is to deceive, and to seduce, which allows us to accept that “Puck” and “fuck” have this same root.
Fairies were associated with mushrooms. A phallus begins small and expands in tumescence, eventually subsiding again. This copies the life cycle of the mushroom as it responds to the light at dawn. In their rapid morning development, mushrooms emerge from an egg or vulva, grow upwards like an engorging penis, and even had its phallic shape, with the dome of the glans which then flowers by opening fully. The mushroom therefore seemed always to signify male sexuality and fertility. The open canopy, often dark and hairy or frilly beneath, looked from below like a phallus penetrating a vagina. By the end of daylight, it is spent, and so is naturally also associated with the daily rise and decline of the sun. The Irish god, Cuchulain, is manifestly phallic in his description, but is a sun god. When he dies, he is strapped to a pillar to keep him erect in a type of crucifixion.
Maybe Puck was the magic mushroom, Amanita Muscaria with its distinctive red dome speckled with white, suspected to have been the haoma of the Iranians and the Soma of the Indians, and even the legendary mandrake, said to have had the shape of a man—a polite euphemism for the shape of the male organ. To shamans, certain mushrooms had magical powers and were called the “Holy Plant” and the “Son of God”, because of the way they appeared overnight and expanded with the dawn light. Their hallucinogenic properties were God’s way of showing men heaven.
The Swedish language has the terms “spöka”, “spöke”; the Danish “spöge”, “spögelse”, the German, “spuken”, “spuk”, our modern “spook” all used of spirits or ghosts, and their apparitions, though “spook” is now used of spies who deliberately try to stay out of sight! Perhaps the Scottish “pawkey”, sly, knowing, may belong to the same family of words.
The word “wight” (German, wicht), originally simply a creature, is equated with fairy or elf in Chaucer, and soon had a sinister meaning as some sort of demon. Perhaps it is the proper origin of witch.
Many writers connect Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood. North of Nottingham was Sherwood Forest, supposed home of Robin Hood, though Yorkshire people put him in Barndale Forest near Doncaster. The two forests were probably all part of the same extended woodland at one time. The outlaws were said to meet at the thousand year old Major Oak in Birkland Wood near Edwinstowe, where Maid Marion and Robin were said to have married. Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I, became ill in Sherwood Forest. The king held council under the Parliament Oak near Clipstone. The Parley decided to continue the journey to Harby, despite the queen’s illness, but the strain was too much for her and she died.
Odin, Balder and Hoder
But Robin Hood was more than the hero of Sherwood Forest. The cult of Robin Hood was widespread both geographically and in time. He had a band of twelve companions, suggestive of a solar cult, and naturally of a traditional witches’ coven. The origin of the story of Robin Hood is a sun-myth reminiscent of the Norse myth of Odin.
The teutonic nations were familiar with saving gods. Thor was, in important ways, a saviour, being powerful and benevolent, a good friend, always ready to help those devoted to him, a bit like buddy Jesus really. His axe head symbols were often found on grave stones and with grave goods, sometimes with inscriptions asking the god to take the dead person to himself. And, although there is no doubt that these graves are pre-Christian, the axe symbol of Thor looks curiously like the symbol of the cross that replaced it a few centuries later! To effect conversion, the missionaries said the two symbols were the same thing.
The Teutonic gods called the Aesir were the court of Odin. There are twelve of them besides the high god. The word “Aesir” is the same as the words used by the Iranians and Indians, namely “Ahura” and “Asura”, respectively, both cognate with “Surya”, the Indian word for sun. As in India, none is the sun itself, for the Norse sun is a maiden called Sol. The ancient Etrurians (Etruscans) also called their gods Aesir, according to Thomas Keightley, and the Etrurians seem to have been closely related to the Hurrians of the ancient near east.
Sun gods are always judges because they see all wrongs. Robin Hood was at that time the people’s ideal, as Arthur was that of the upper classes. He is the ideal yeoman, as Arthur was the ideal knight. He loves a free life, and is confident he is right. He favours the Virgin, but hates rich bloated monks and abbots, and wealthy nobles—ecclesiastical and secular authority, except that of the just king—robbing them to feed the poor.
One of the Ballads of Robin Hood describes how he was murdered by the prioress of a convent of nuns. Treating him, she treacherously left the wound unbound and he bled to death. The prioress is plainly the mother Church, but, oddly, Robin’s route to the priory was lined with people, mourning and lamenting his death. Here we have a Cathar Perfect proceeding to his death at the hands of the Church. Hood is Good. He is a Goodfellow, a Bonhommes. Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais went to their deaths, in similar fashion, as witches or heretics.
Robin had a measuring rod in some tales to symbolise justice—as we use scales—and perhaps his link with the crafts guilds. The northern god Odin (Woden) was also Metod, the Measurer, the Germanic Apollo, a sun god, depicted as an ancient man, with a hood or hat low over his brow, a blue mantle, and one eye. The single eye is, of course, the all-seeing sun. Hood has the meaning of blinding, as with the hood of a hawk, and therefore apparently the sense of darkness. Odin was blind in one eye, so had a good or functioning eye and a blind one. The god is fond of disguising himself as Grimner the Hooded, Guest or Waytorn to wander among humanity.
The Devil of the witches was sometimes described as having a tall hat. Today wizards and witches are conventionally depicted with tall conical hats, the witch one having a brim but that of the male witch being brimless. It sounds like the penitential hat worn by the accused heretics in the Spanish inquisition—the coroza. Either the heretics were made to wear it by the Catholics to show publicly who they were because it was part of their own habit, or the witches wore it in mockery and defiance of the inquisition. Such a hat is not a hood, that is plain, but if it was worn it must have been ceremonial. No one would go out in one! So witches would normally have worn hoods as most people did when they needed a head dress. They were cheap and practical.
Odin has twin sons Balder (Slavonic, Belibog? White God) and Hoder (Hod, the Blind, a god born blind). Hod seems to be another way of writing Odin, so the two sons are the two eyes of the father. Odin is the sun in its full yearly course, and Balder and Hoder, are the two half years ending at the equinoxes, Balder the summer sun and Hoder the winter sun.
Balder was so beautiful he had been made immortal when all things had promised the Aesir not to harm him. Because he was immortal, the gods had an idle game of shooting projectiles at him, knowing they could do no harm. The lowly mistletoe, a poisonous plant but considered too young, had been the only one not to swear the oath. Jealous Loki gives a spear tipped with mistletoe to blind Hoder and, inviting him to join the game, tells him to hurl it. Thus the blind god kills the white god. Here we have the dark god of winter overwhelming the bright god of summer at the autumn equinox. Balder is a sun god because he is burnt on a funeral pyre, and Loki seems to be the fire god. Loki is generally wicked and considered to be the Norse Satan, but also sometimes does good things, so he was probably originally considered a good god, as fire gods were, but had been reduced to a demon.
Balder is only allowed to revive if all things on earth weep for him—the spring thaw after a winter frost. This would have been the original resurrection of the summer god, but it has been overwritten with the story that the giantess Thokk (really Loki) refuses, and so Balder remains dead. This is likely to be a Christian amendation, Christians resenting any other gods than Jesus being resurrected[†]Norse Sources. Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon (Old English) sources are not, as many might think, truly pagan sources. They are Christian. These Norse pagan myths and legends only come to us via Christian interpreters and with a Christian perspective.. At the next festival a few months later Hoder, who logically should be killed by Baldur, is killed by Vali, another twin son of Odin born just as Baldur died! Hoder, the winter sun, thus dies at the spring equinox. The tale is left with the twin sun gods remaining dead, but two more apparently born in their stead. Vali is one, his twin brother being Vidar. Vali is Baldur revivified, and Vidar was the same for Hoder, but the reteller has forever spoiled the cyclic nature of the story, and has left the gods dead and therefore useless. All Vikings could therefore turn to the god that had been resurrected!
In the original myth, Balder does indeed revive in the spring when everything wept for him. The symmetry of the tale suggests that the instrument of the deicide, the mistletoe, called “all heal”, has a magical healing role in reviving the god too. The Celts made it into a brew supposed to make barren animals fertile. Druids were said to have cut the mistletoe from the oak on the sixth day of the moon, one priest climbing the tree with a golden knife, and others catching it in a white cloth as it fell. Two white oxen were then sacrificed. No one knows which Celtic god the mistleoe was associated with, but it is possibly Esus (or Hesus, Welsh Hu?) who is shown in a bas relief found at Notre Dame, Paris (1711), apparently cutting down a tree. He is probably cutting off the branch of mistletoe.
Mistletoe grows in such a way that each branch yields three more. Mistletoe is the true shamrock, suppressed by the Catholic Church in favour of a lowly clover or herb. It must help bring Balder back to life after a seasonal death, having been responsible for the death in the first place. Druids are said to have cut mistletoe not at the equinoxes but at the new year and at the midsummer solstice. At midsummer, in Norse myth, it was used to poke out the eye of the year, the ritual doubtless represented in Odin’s single eye and Hoder’s blindness. It is the birth day of the winter sun god.
The ceremonies must have been moved from the original equinoxes to the solstices, as the Aryans moved west, perhaps influenced by the habits of the native megalith builders. Yule, Christmas, became the perceived if unofficial year end in the northern regions, doubtless seeming much more important than the equinoxes to people living in the freezing cold than those living in the ancient near east where Christmas was not life threateningly cold. Christians made mistletoe the symbol of love, kissing beneath it, but it is still too Pagan or threatening to be seen inside churches, unlike holly and ivy.
Odin had features like those of a saviour god, though now the god’s power was not in his strength like Thor’s, but in cunning (craft) and especially in his use of the runes—writing! Odin was a type of Wise Lord whose peculiar art was in writing making him the equivalent of the Word or Logos of the Greeks and Christianity. In another odd incident, to rejuvenate himself, Odin has himself hung on the world tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days transfixed by his own spear consecrated to himself, a self crucifixion, the tree and the spear forming a cross:
I know I hang in a windy tree, for nine nights, stung by the spearpoint, given to Odin, myself to myself. I drank not from the horn, nor did I eat bread. I gazed downward. I took up the runes, called and took, then I fell from the tree.Havamal V
This is probably a different version of the death of Balder equating with the Christian myth, Odin’s spear probably being the one tipped with mistletoe wood, a hardwood because mistletoe grows so slowly. In the myth of Balder one of his brothers rides on Odin’s eight legged horse to the queen of the underworld, Hel, to plead for Balder to be returned. It takes him nine days, doubtless the nine days that Odin-Balder was crucified. Odin was saved by the runes, but they will have given the message that Hel had allowed him to live, rejuvenated after a seasonal death.
The German versions of these myths had been thoroughly spoiled by Christianization. Derrick Everett, in a website devoted mainly to Wagner’s interpretation of Parzifal, says even in Scandinavia, which had been converted to Christianity in and around the eleventh century, the priests and monks had managed to destroy most traces of paganism, before they were ever set down. Some poems, either heroic or religious, survived, but even the best manuscript (the Codex Regius) of the Old Norse Poetic Edda is incomplete. Around 1200 the Icelandic scholar, Snorri Sturlason, wrote a manual for poets now known as the Prose Edda. Snorri was guessing a lot of myth that had already gone, even though it was preserved better than the German myths. They had been obliterated by Christians but these versions from Iceland were less affected. They were spoiled, nevertheless.
Seasonal Rituals
Robin Hood is Odin, the god of the full year, consisting of the white or bright summer half (Robin) and the dark or blind winter half (Hood). He accordingly has twelve companions. In Teutonic Mythology, the Wild Hunt lasts the twelve nights of Yule—which was adopted at some stage as the year end, instead of the equinoxes that were earlier. To end the year, the whole year is celebrated in miniature, a day for each month, the equivalent of the Roman Saturnalia. The god of the year end in classical mythology was the two faced Janus, and Robin Hood seems to have had the same connotations, although the name “Janus” seems to have gone to Little John (Janicot), one of Robin’s companions.
The winter solstice was a fire festival, the day concluding with bonfires lit to reinvigorate the sun at its weakest time. Fire was an object of worship, and the ancient Aryans used to carry it with them so as to save the trouble of having to light a fire from scratch. But it was thought to lose its purity and sacred character in being propagated, so, on these solemn occasions all fires were extinguished and a new fire lit using a fire drill, or swastika. The fire drill—a stick of hard wood, perhaps mistletoe, twirled rapidly with its point against a softer wood generating heat to kindle a fire in the dry furze it was set in—was seen as mimicking the sexual act. It was the heat of the desire in this act that produced the flame, and so it was called the need-fire (in Old German “not-feur”, and in Anglo-Saxon, “neod-fyr”). The swastika symbol, a twirling cross, stood for the fire drill, and is associated with the sun by being used initially on the occasions of the equinoxes to regenerate the sun’s fire on earth—then later in northern Europe, at the solstices too. The newly lit fire was pure, and the celebratory bonfires could be lit from it, so its embers were kept for fire-lighting. This tradition is remembered in the Yule log, now usually just a cream cake imitating a log, but originally kept from Christmas to Christmas. The mistletoe, in its use as a swastika, would be enacting its role as the regenerator of the dead Baldur, the completion of the solar cycle, and Loki, as a fire god, would have been the overseer of the annual swastika fire ritual.
Here are some solar customs from England. In Gloucester, there was a custom, until after 1841, that on 6 January, S John’s Eve, twelve small fires were built, and one large one. A festive ritual was then held of “burning the old witch”. This sounds like the new year festival suggested in these pages as a ceremony of both the Cathars and the witches.
Another new year tradition is the Haxey hood game, also held on 6 January in Lincolnshire. It was inaugurated, according to the tradition, by a thirteenth century lady Mowbray whose hat, blown off by the wind, was chased by thirteen woodmen, but it is a bit more elaborate than just a chase. Of the thirteen “Boggans”, one is King or Lord, in a red jacket and top hat bedecked with flowers, and carrying as a sign of office a wand of thirteen willow rods bound with thirteen willow withies, and another is Fool, with a black and red face—typical Morris characters. In the preliminaries, they make a circle and a “hood” made of sacking is thrown into a crowd, nowadays of children, in the middle. The children scramble for it and whoever gets it has to try to get past the Boggans who only need touch the hood. If they do, it is played for again. The process goes on with each of twelve sacking hoods, anyone getting past the Boggans getting a small prize.
Next is the main game itself. A leather “Sway Hood”, a two foot long coil of thick rope sewn into leather, is thrown in and there is a mighty scramble, called the “Sway”, among teams from the local villages—at one time, five, but now apparently down to two—who have to get the hood to their local inn, perhaps a precursor of rugby and gridiron football, though this “ball” cannot be thrown or kicked. The final ceremony, formerly on the next day, was the “Smoking of the Fool”, a symbolic burning. Now, this precedes the main events, the fool making a feeble attempt to escape before being caught and made to make a traditional speech from the Mowbray stone, with the smouldering straw around him. The older tradition was to suspend the fool from a tree swinging over the smokey smouldering straw, until he was choking, then to allow him to fall into it to scramble free. His blackened face with its red marks signify someone who had originally really been roasted over properly burning furze, doubtless until the rope burnt through and he fell into the flames.
Folklorists think the Sway Hood was originally a bull’s penis and the event a pagan seasonal fertility ritual. The Boggans were supposedly people from the bog, the local fenland, but it seems beyond coincidence that both fairies and witches were called “Boggarts” in the north of England, and this relates to the word “Bogu” used for god and appearing in the word “Bogomile”. The wand of sticks carried by the Lord Boggan sounds much like the baresman, emblem of the Magian priests in Zoroastrianism rather as a crook is for Christian bishops. Was this tradition brought into Europe either by the Aryan tribes or later by the Cathar heretics?
The Robin Hood myth is connected with the Morris dance, but that was late in the fifteenth century. Maid Marion is the dawn-maiden. Little John was one of the companions. According to De Lancre the name of the Basque god was Jauna or Janicot. The latter he says means “petit Jean”, and was applied by the witches of the Basses Pyrénées to Christ. A man-witch at Orleans also spoke of the host as “un beau Janicot”. Murray says Janicot could be Jauna with the ending “Cot” “God”, as in the northern “Irmincot”. De Lancre notes that the witches, when “in the hands of Justice” used the name Barrabon to signify either their own or the Christian God, this being apparently a name used by witches in Belgium. It is suspiciously like Barabbas.
In the fifteenth century, a chaplain was issued a pardon in these words:
Pardon to Robert Stafford, late of Lyndefeld, co Sussex, chaplain, alias Frere Tuk, for not appearing before the King to answer Richard Wakehurst touching a plea of trespass.
Here is a real Friar Tuck. These names begin to look like titles for people in different roles. The most celebrated historical Robin Hood was supposedly the Earl of Huntingdon in the reign of Richard I, who being himself a Plantagenet was possibly a Cathar.
Robin Hood always wore the fairies’ colour, green. Green gowns were given on Mayday, and some say the Cathar Perfects wore, not black, as the Catholics said, but a deep blue or green robe. Robin was inseparably connected with May day celebrations. In 1580, Edmund Assheton wrote criticizing…
Robyn Hoode and the May games as being Lewde sportes, tending to no other end but to stir up our frail natures to wantonness.
In mediæval poetry and romance, the month of May was consecrated to love, as pervading all nature, inviting humanity to join in. Chaucer writes in Court of Love that early on May Day “goeth forth all the court, both most and least, to fetch the flowers fresh, and branch and bloom”. May was celebrated with festivities dedicated to Nature’s fecundity. The Romans had their Floralia, a sexual festival, and much of the mediæval celebration of May-day reflects the Floralia. The northern festivals of Samhain and Beltane, or Mayday and Halloween, were particularly associated with fairy activity, and bringing in the May or “Nutting” on May Eve was a feast of sexuality looked forward to all year.
Even in Christian times, up until at least the end of the twelfth century, the rules of virginity were ignored on May Eve. Shakespeare said that no one would sleep on May morning, but they rose early to observe the rites of May. How early? Hazlitt cites a contemporary account in the north of England.
The juvenile part of both sexes were wont to rise a little after midnight on the morning of that day, and walk to a neighbouring wood to gather their greenery and nosegays to take home to decorate their doors and windows.
As in the Floralia, according to a Puritan disdainful writer of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Philip Stubbes (Anatomy of Abuses, 1583), the revelling ended up in youthful copulating. Stubbes recalls that everyone, young and old went out into the woods to spend all night in “pastymes”, returning with flowers and the greenery in the morning. The arrival of the festival was announced by horns sounding in the preceding night, and no sooner had midnight arrived than the youth of both sexes went in couples to the woods to gather branches and make garlands, and to return at sunrise to decorate the doors of their houses. He declares on the authority of the most credible sources that:
…of fourtie, three score or a hundred maides gaying to the woode over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled.
Spelman, in the time of James I, remarked that:
May is the merry month. On the first day, betimes in the morning, shall young fellowes and maids be so enveloped in the mist of wandring out of their ways, that they shall fall into ditches, one upon the other.
In England, the feature of the day was the Maypole, the trunk of a tall young tree cut down for the occasion, painted various colours, and carried in joyous procession, with minstrels playing, until it reached the village green, where it was set up, decked with garlands and flowers, the lads and girls danced round it, and people indulged in all sorts of riotous enjoyments. The Puritans were certain the maypole was a relic of Paganism. It stood for a phallus,and the ceremonies of raising up each of them were identical. The same joyous procession in the Roman festivals conducted the phallus into the midst of the town or village, where in the same manner it was decked with garlands, and the people danced, feasted and indulged themselves sexually.
Wedding revels were the same, when the bridesmaids often did more than catch a bouquet of flowers. One wonders whether primitive Christianity, opposed as it was to sexuality, permitted a necessary release of tension in the May day celebrations. The Puritans stopped it all, seeming to suggest otherwise, inasmuch as Puritan roots were also in Catharism. But by then, the Roman hatred of heretics and witches was such a scourge, that even the lineal descendants of the original heretics had joined in the mass hysteria.
“Nutting” is, politely, courting or pleasing a maid with small presents, but reduces to a pun for the sexual activity of the night, remembered in the nursery rhyme about the Little Nut Tree:
I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.
The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,
And all for the sake of my little nut tree.
The Queen of France’s daughter gave it unto me,
That we might go a nutting on her little nut tree.
“Nuts” is still used to mean testicles. “Nutmeg” was certainly a colloquial word for testicle, and presumably “pear” was meant to be too. An appropriate present for a bride was a bag of nuts. James Orchard Halliwell says the King of Spain’s daughter was Juana La Loca (Joanna the Mad) whom Henry VII would have married for diplomatic reasons. She lived to a ripe age, but was quite mad for most of her adult life. The nature of her madness might throw more light on the poem.
Robin Hood, Maid Marion, Little John and the band of merrie men played an important part in May Day activities. Young men in a village took on the roles of the forresters and the girls were maids Marion. Surnames such as Robinson, Hudson, Hodson, Johnson, Littlejohn, Godson, and Godkin attest to a maid having an illegitimate child sired one May eve. The Roundheads put an end to these islands of fun in a sea of misery, not the Catholic priests.
The maids had other objectives besides “pastymes”. They believed that by wetting their faces with the dew dripping from the hawthorne at daybreak on May Day, they would remain beautiful for the whole year. The benefits of dew for preserving good looks is itself an ancient belief, and not restricted to the dew of May Day. The wife of the Doge of Venice was keen on using it in 1081.
Heretical festivities perhaps also ended in a degree of open sexuality, particularly since there were no prurient priests able to insist on their favourite maid or youth attending a confession so that they could have the same pleasure vicariously. If the sabbats were fairly described as paradise, the witches were being given a taste of the guiltlessness they would enjoy in heaven.
The obvious phallic symbolism of the maypole and riding the hobby horse signifies the fertility aspects of spring festivals.
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine Lady on a white horse.
This children’s rhyme invites them to see a sexual coupling between a maiden and a winter white stud—though in some versions the cock horse is black. “To horse” by the seventeenth century meant to possess a woman, and a “horse leech” was vernacular for a whore. The queen of the May might have declared summer by publicly fornicating, something the churches could hardly have been happy about. One version of the rhyme (1784) makes the woman an old woman with a ring on her finger and a bonnet of straw, sounding like an attempt to make her a respectable old married woman! In fact, Banbury Cross was deliberately pulled down by the Puritans in 1601, suggesting they did not like its associations, but also showing the verse precedes this date.
“Riding a cock horse” is used with children to mean a toy horse, usually a stick with a horse-like head, or a human knee used to bounce the child while reciting the rhyme. Iona and Peter Opie, in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, says these have been the meanings since 1540, at least. It is closer to the implications of the rhyme. Riding is a traditional euphemism for sexual activity, and in a late version the old woman “jumps” on to the horse. Needless to say, “to jump” is another euphemism for the same thing. Witches were supposed to ride their broomsticks like a cock horse, probably another sexual allegation by the Church meant to match their orgiastic nature, or, in truth, the prurience of the examiners. However, the expression “hot cockles” means female masturbation.
In other versions, the cross is Coventry Cross suggesting that the custom of Lady Godiva, riding naked on a white horse, is the sight to be seen. The custom is said to be based on an eleventh century incident, but it seems too fantastic to believe. In any case, Godiva was the wife of Leofric, the man who supposedly founded Coventry, so there could not have been much of a town there at the time. The name Coventry is said to refer to the three spires there, but it could hardly have had three churches when it was founded. Coventry means three convents or covens, and the town once set up was always progressive, being associated with the new crafts, and eventually became strongly puritanical. It was probably always a center of the Cathars’ trades.
The date of the Godiver incident is said to have been Corpus Christi, a Christian festival started by women only in the thirteenth century, when it first came to historical notice. It will have been Christianized from May Day, which it originally celebrated, to Corpus Christi. The Puritans made May Day and its accoutrements like the Maypole illegal in 1644, supressing the “greenwood marriages” of young men and women spending the night in the forest to greet the May sunrise, and bringing back garlands of flowers to decorate the village in the morning. Puritans did not approve of what they got up to during the night.
In Wales, in the nineteenth century, a ceremony was held on May Day in which thirteen dancers, including a garland bearer and a “Cadi”, led a crowd of revellers cavorting in circles. The Cadi wore a grotesque black mask, red around the eyes and mouth, and with red cheeks, or painted his face with the same pattern in greasepaint. The grotesque is probably the wicked sun. In Welsh myth, the perennial battle between Gwythur and Gwyn for the love of Creudylad took place each May Day, a typical solar myth of the equinox, suggesting that May Day was taken as the Celtic equinox.
A Gypsy Connexion?
The origin of the tale that Gypsies came from Egypt is that a crowd of them appeared in Paris in 1427 led by a duke and a count and ten other horsemen. Another 120 camped outside the city. Their leaders explained to the burghers that the pope had ordered them to leave Egypt and to wander for seven years without a bed to sleep in as a penance for apostasy. Was there some truth in this claim? Were they heretics? 1200 had started out led by a king and a queen, but the rest had died en route. They announced that all bishops and abbots had to donate them £10 for being dutiful in their faith. Crowds of Parisians went to see them at their encampment, where they had their fortunes told. They could have been told that they would lose sums of money since they lost it “by magic art or in other ways”.
Romany, the language of the Gypsies, is a language with close ties with Sanskrit, one reason why Gypsies are now considered to be from India. The Indian word, “dom”, is identified with the Romany, “rom”, from which they are supposed to get their name, “Roma”. It meant a caste of poor dancers and musicians. Yet Romany has many Persian words, a language that is also based on Sanskrit. The Romany word for “good” is “kushti” (kusti), the name of the holy girdle of the Zoroastrians. Western Romany also has many words from other countries from Armenia westwards, words that are considered to trace the Gypsies’ route into Europe through Persia, Asia Minor, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Serbia, then west and north. The countries thus identified were often the countries of the Catharists too. Perhaps Gypsies are Romanies simply because they lived for long in Romania, and when they left were identified with that country, as their country of origin. Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Serbia had many Bogomiles among their people from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries.
The Gypsy sign language is called Patteran, suggesting a link with the Patarenes, a type of Cathar who sorted rags for a living and came from Bosnia. Both Bogomiles and Gypsies came into Europe from the Balkans, althouh the Gypsies were supposed to have been a few hundred years later, and the Balkans still have the highest population of Gypsies in Europe till this day. After the thirteenth century, both Cathars and Gypsies were pariahs in Europe, and might have given each other mutual support. But, unlike the Cathars who were determined in their religious commitment, the Gypsies adopted whatever was convenient. Western Gypsies are Christians and eastern ones are Moslems. The Bogomiles who used to live in the Balkans, oppressed by the Hungarian Catholics, converted to Islam when the Turks came, and are now the Bosnian Moslems, so they were not ultimately any different from the Gypsies in this respect too. Balkan Gypsies in the fourteenth century were quite possibly Bogomiles, and felt a sympathy for the hounded Catharenes, when they entered western Europe. The gypsies were often associated with witchcraft.
Further Reading
- More on heretical beliefs
- More on the Holy Grail, and sun gods as atoning saviours
- More on Mithras, and something about Zoroastrianism
