Preserved in the British Library are the thousand-year-old vellum pages of the Anglo-Saxon Lacnunga manuscript. In there, carefully transcribed in a round hand, are some remarkable spells. They offer a glimpse into the initiation of wizards in the real Middle-earth, and how they came by their magical powers. They suggest that in the historical Middle-earth, apprentice wizards encountered a spider monster – but a monster with a positive agenda, for she had the function of taking a person to initiatory Otherworlds.
The Lacnunga is usually thought of by Anglo-Saxon historians as a tenth-century collection of medical remedies. And much of it is. But there are a number of entries which deal with a different order of material. They are not merely remedies for physically expressed ailments. Rather they are rituals and incantations for traversing the divide between the mundane world of material reality and the deeper realm of the spirits. They step over the boundary into the Otherworld. One such spell in the Lacnunga describes a journey in which an apprentice wizard is taken from this world and tested in the Otherworld. In the ritual, supervised by a wizard, a spider creature appears, wraps the apprentice in its web, and flies on the apprentice’s back to a place of initiation.
As the apprentice is in a fevered state, and therefore more open to the wizard begins to provide some structure for them. The entry is listed in the Spellbook as a ‘Night Mare’. We shall see why!
The lines of the spell read, in modern translation:
Here a spider-creature came stalking in.
He had his bridle-web in his hand.
He said that you were his steed,
he laid his bonds on your neck.
Soon they began to set off from the land.
And as soon as they came off the land,
then their limbs began to cool.
Then the sister of the creature came stalking in
She made an end to it, and oaths she swore
that never this one the sick should harm
Nor him who could understand this charm
Or understand how this charm to sing.
Sickness and the Spirit World
It is not surprising to find such esoteric techniques of magic in a compendium of folk medicine. In all shamanic and magical cultures, through the ages, sickness was a gateway to wisdom. In the fevers of illness, the mind alters and visions of another reality became possible. Today we call these sometimes bizarre images, hallucinations, and tend to assume that the senses are disordered during such trance states, and that we mistakenly see and hear things in delirium that we know are not ‘really there’. Magical cultures like Middle-earth take a different view. While they seek to heal the sick person, they believe that the gift of these fevered states is the ability to see things that are in another world, but which are not normally accessible to us. It was during these episodes that, in such cultures, certain people were chosen by the spirits to become shamans, healers, wise women and wizards. In shamanic traditions which have survived into the twentieth century, in Siberia and South America especially, accounts of illness as a prelude to inititation reveal that the illness was sometimes sudden and severe, but it could also be marked by a progressive change in demeanour and well-being, in which the future shaman becomes meditative, seeks solitude, sleeps a great deal, seems absent-minded, has prophetic dreams and even acute symptoms like seizures. Dreams and visions experienced during the throes of sickness were highly valued, especially fevers in which the patient would see ‘other worlds’.
Of course, in the process of initiation these visions were not random. They were conditioned, shaped and driven by the structure imagination of the magical tradition. As the apprentice enters heated ‘fever’ body-mind realms, the images that spontaneously arise are ‘interpreted, discussed, and empowered by the shaman’. So the apprentice shaman may be having experiences structured for him by the poetry of the shaman who sings of the visions, and narrates their action. After that, once someone has been allowed to see such things, as a shaman they are taught techniques for generating inner heat, and for entering the Otherworld at will. And it is in these states of consciousness that the Lacnunga spell’s invisible threads of Wyrd manifest. They are visible in the wizard’s vision.
Sometimes it took great courage, for journeying from the physical body into the Otherworld was a transforming experience in itself. Myths all over the world feature apprentice shamans being carried into the Otherworld by an animal spirit on its back, or holding him in its jaws, or ‘swallowing’ him to ‘kill and resuscitate him’. The spirits come from every quarter – and speak through the shaman’s voices.
Tolkien expressed the darkness of this sort of encounter in The Lord of the Rings. Shelob, a monstrous spider is associated with unpleasant darkness, and it is said that she weaved webs of shadow, and that she vomited darkness. She lived on men, elves and ores. Her presence in Tolkien’s story is quite horrific. Described as an evil thing in spider form, when she captured creatures, she curled her legs and arms around them. Such things happened to people in the real Middle-earth.
The Spider Spell
The spider incantation, even when rendered into modern English, still retains some of the impressive imagery of its native Anglo-Saxon. It is a spell which tells the story, in highly condensed and coded form, of the journey of an apprentice to the Otherworld, the initiatory testing grounds for a man about to become a wizard. The lines are short, the clues small, and so we have to build up a possible context for this ritual from other things we know about Anglo-Saxon England, and from other cultures in which magical practitioners have survived into the more recent past.
As with the rest of the Lacnunga, this shamanic ritual was recorded by Christian monks or scribes, who were the only people in western Europe, before the first millennium, to use secular rather than sacred writing. The earlier Anglo-Saxon tribes depended on oral transmission of knowledge, and used the symbolic language of runes for healing and spellcasting, but not usually for the purposes of recording larger tracts of information.
It was a common activity for monastic scribes to copy out medical manuscripts from classical sources in Latin. But the document from which the initiation spell is taken was, unusually, recorded in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon. And since it was a record of pagan practice, the historians reckon that it was written by apprentice scribes rather than monks.
The preface to the lines of the spell is almost certainly Christianized, with the most blatant pre-Christian elements replaced with appropriate Christian terminology and ritual. It prescribes a preliminary ritual, saying, ‘You must take seven little wafers, such as are used in worship, and write these names on each wafer…’ and there then follows a list of Biblical names. This Christian introduction very likely replaces the carving of nine rune-sticks as an accompaniment, for the instruction then goes ‘and then let a virgin go to him and hang it on his neck. And do so for three days.’ The use of virgins was unlikely in a Christian ritual! And the number nine was the primary sacred number in rituals of the Germanic and some of the Celtic tribes of ancient Europe. Rune-writing was the carving of shapes and designs, according to set patterns, each of which carried a weight of symbolic meaning. And a number of them together formed a spell.
In the original pre-Christian version, then, the virgin brings to the person undergoing the ritual the rune-stave, cut with the appropriate runic message and then strung around the neck perhaps with a leather strap or piece of rope. The involvement of a virgin marks out the power of this ritual as female magic. Indeed, it is possible that the woman who performed the presentation of the rune sticks was more than a young female playing a subsidiary role in the ceremony. She may have been a shamaness, with the requirement for a ‘virgin’ being another Christian compromise interpolation.
In most cultures where this sort of ritual was practised, it would take place with some theatre. The wizard present might be in full regalia, an animal-skin cloak covering a tunic sewn with magical objects. The apprentice would wear around his neck the rune-stave, as he had been doing for three days. If the ritual paralleled at all the shamanic rituals of later cultures, he may have spent the time in a spirit-house, or a house decorated with symbolic objects to set up the ritual.
In order to achieve this journeying ability, shamans in recent tribal societies themselves ‘engineered’ their states of consciousness in a number of ways. Many of them consciously undermined the ‘supports’ which help us to maintain the everyday state of consensual reality. Most of us have experienced the disorienting effects of a lack of sleep from time to time. They, however, would systematically deprive themselves of sleep, staying up for extended numbers of hours all through the nights and days. They fasted, thus setting aside the confirming, relaxing, comforting and conventionalizing effect of eating regularly, calming hunger pangs and maintaining a high blood-sugar level. They went without drink, which soon releases the mind from the usual range of psychological states, and enables it to explore regions previously uncharted. These practices are suggested in Middle-earth literature, when the god Odin is described as fasting for nine days and nine nights on the World Tree, without food or drink.
The shamans also danced, marathon dances, so that the rhythmic bodily undulations and beatings of the feet on the floor attuned the mind-body to the rhythm of the spirits. They chanted and sang, shouted and called, intuiting the language of the spirits, and using their voices to take them into other realms. This practice echoes the rituals of the volvas like Thorbiorg described in Chapter 16.
Shamans also imbibed various concoctions prepared from selected plants to help to induce visions, glimpses of the other world, sensations of flying, and a number of supporting experiences which empowered their travel out of this mundane world.
In the spider spell, during the three days, the apprentice may also have been fasting, and drinking from a specially prepared brew which helped him in his visions. Mentioned elsewhere in Old English, the word ‘lybcraeft’ means ‘skill in using healing drugs’ with magical overtones, and its practitioners are the ‘lyblaeca’, or ‘wizard’, and ‘lybbestre’, or ‘sorceress’. Perhaps the wizard gave the apprentice a plant concoction to drink, to speed the journey to the otherworld.
In many shamanic cultures, including those of the Norse, the shamans used drums to drive their journeying into the spirit world. Odin is accused of ‘drumming in the cove’ when practising seidr. Recent psychological research shows that listening to rhythmic percussion encourages brainwaves which override the propensity of the mind to wander and lose concentration. The drumming drives along the imagination, increases the flow of images, and perhaps even aids psychic sensitivity to messages from ‘another realm’. Shamans can keep up a vivid spirit journey for hours at a time.
The spider creature’s incantation was perhaps used in a setting in which a ‘patient’, or sick apprentice, was visited by a wizard who chanted the lines we have in the document. Throughout the time of Middle-earth, from the Celts to the Norse, the practical application of magic by voice implied a singing or chanting ‘delivery’. The word indicating charm, incantation, or spell was ‘galdor’ meaning to sing or chant. It is based on the verb ‘galan’, to sing, from which we have the word ‘nightingale’, or night-singer. The use of the voice in chanting potent words in the right way was considered the heart of much spellcasting. Although ‘spell’ is a useful term for this and other techniques of summoning magical forces, in Old English it was more often used simply to mean ‘speak’ – as in our modern usage when we want someone to clarify a communication, we ask them to ‘spell it out’. As time went on, the term became more specific to a magical context.
The instructions require the spider spell to be sung over the initiate three times, in either ear and above the head. Three times three is nine, a sacred number in the real Middle-earth. In indigenous cultures whose traditions have survived into the twenty-first century, healing and initiatory rituals are often carried out in public. When the spider spell was chanted, perhaps in a crowded fire-lit and smoky room, the effect would have been spellbinding.
Journey with the Spider Monster
The first lines of the chant are by the shaman to the patient, framing and setting up the apprentice’s visions: ‘Here a spider-creature came stalking in. He had his bridle – He said that you were his steed, he laid his bonds on your neck.’
Certainly in Tolkien’s fictional account, the grip of Shelob is terrifying. He describes it as a soft, clinging grasp, but with a lot of strength. It felt, as the creature squeezed hard, as if it were pulling tight ropes around the victim. Shelob felt for the throat and then bit sharply into the shoulder.
In the Anglo-Saxon spell, harnessed by the bonds of the spider creature, the apprentice is about to be ridden. Now the shaman talks to the audience, describing the flight into the air of the apprentice spider: ‘Soon they began to set off from the land. And as soon as they came off the land, then their limbs began to cool.’
And then came the initiation by the Wyrd Sisters: ‘Then the sister of the creature came stalking in. She made an end to it, and oaths she swore that never this one the sick should harm, nor him who could obtain this charm or understand how this charm to sing.’
So the lines relate how the apprentice is ‘captured’ by one of the Three Sisters in spider form, wrapped in her fibres as a bridle, ridden into the sky and taken to a place where one of the other sisters proclaims that he cannot be harmed.
What Happens in the Spirit World?
The image of the spider, wrapping the initiate in a web and riding him into the sky, is awesome. But what is intriguing is what happens to the apprentice after he is delivered, bound by the web, to the place where the sister ‘made an end to it’, protects him, and shows him the secrets of the charm. The sister is perhaps one of the Wyrd sisters, representing all three of them, and the web is the very web of Wyrd.
Mythologies from all around the world depict the ascent to the sky by the shaman to be, along with other images, in a spider’s web. A similar experience, in which the initiate can see the fibres and the other things which come with it, comes from the Australian shaman of the Yaralde tribe, who also have traditions closely paralleling Wyrd. This describes the initiatory terrors that accompany the vision of the spirits:
When you lie down to see the prescribed visions, and you do see them, do not be frightened, because they will be horrible … If you get up you will not see these scenes, but when you lie down again, you will see them, unless you get too frightened. If you do, you will break the web threads on which these scenes are hung. If you see and hear these things without fear, you will never be frightened of anything.
The web of Wyrd holds visions which are gateways to spiritual insight and transcendence.
Even more revealing, the spider spell has remarkable affinities with a shamanic ritual from the Malekulan culture, a twentieth-century ‘Stone-Age’ tribal society in the New Hebrides. They are separated by thousands of miles of land and a thousand years of history, but comparative research on shamanism has shown similarities the world over in initiatory techniques and narratives which seem to persist across time as well as distance. This is not surprising, since shamanic rituals tap an archetypal level of human functioning – the fundamental way in which people encounter the world psychologically and psychically.
The narratives of the Malekulans can help us to gain an idea of how the full story of the experience undergone by the Anglo-Saxon shaman may have developed beyond the few lines afforded by the Lacnunga manuscript. The Malekulans have, at the centre of their shamanic initiation rituals, a labyrinth dance, in which the initiate must show that he is knowledgeable about the prescribed pattern of approach into a cave, wherein he is taught secrets. The dance is for men, and it is presided over by women, as goddesses of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is dedicated to the spider goddess Le-hev-hev, the spinner of fate who is also a ‘Mother of Rebirth’.
For the Malekulans the newly ‘dead’ (apprentice shamans undergoing illness and ritual death), after being bodily abducted and taken into the sky by spider spirits, will arrive at a cave by the sea. There a labyrinth design is traced by Le-hev-hev on the sand at the entrance to the cave. On seeing the ‘dead’ person, the spider goddess obliterates half the design.
The apprentice has to show that he knows the pattern well, and dances the maze, completing the pattern in the sand. The guardian ghost of the cave, satisfied that the soul of the apprentice shaman knows its dance, releases the soul to join other ancestors in the depths of the cave, where it is taught great secrets known only to the dead. And then the soul is reborn, as the shaman, with knowledge, wisdom, magical powers and skills.
Dreams and Trances
This is speculative, but we may imagine the vivid visions of the spider spell entailing an apprentice gripped by a spider creature which rode him into the sky, cooling his heated body, landed him on an Otherworld island, where he perhaps performed a ritual akin to the Malekulans’ dancing a pattern in the sand, thereby being admitted into the presence of the Spider Goddess, and then being given access to the secret knowledge of the dwarves. This scenario goes well beyond the lines of the spell, but suggests the sort of experience which may have befallen the Anglo-Saxon apprentice.
One name for the spider creature rendered into modern English is the Night Mare. Such images are not outside our own experience, therefore; almost everyone has at some point in their life experienced deep and disturbing dreams. So we all have the psychological capacity and the images to enter the world of the nightmare.
Our ancestors thought that such images, such journeys as were undertaken by the apprentice with the spider creature, were as experientially valid as everyday ‘material world’ activities. They were never regarded as ‘just’ dreaming. They were as important to the understanding of life and of ourselves as waking activity.
But dreaming is an involuntary entry into an image world akin to that of the spider creature, since most of us do not have direct control over the content and structure of our dreams. In cultures in which shamans functioned as ‘dream doctors’, which covers almost every traditional society which has ever been, their task was to set up for people, especially those who had been shown to be especially gifted in being able to enter the vivid world of the spirits, psychological settings in which entry to and return from such worlds was created specifically and consciously.
Today we generally regard such powerful experiences as being a by-product of brain ‘over-activity’ while we are trying to sleep – we have had a ‘bad night’. In traditional societies however, including that of our ancestors in ancient Europe, such dreams were regarded as having special significance and value. They were an essential element of the range of human experience, and the images were seen as emanating from the deep, universal pool of the spirit world.
The nearest concept to this in the modern west is the collective unconscious. This idea was developed by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung during the first half of the twentieth century, in which he characterized some of our deeper dream and art images as being shared among all humans, and expressing certain propensities to see the world in ways which are a consequence of our biological and neurological nature. These deep dreamings are dipping into a shared pool of imagery which also inspired the magical consciousness of the real Middle-earth.