In the year 1548 at Arnhem, in what was then Gelderland (now a province of the Netherlands), one of the city’s most respected citizens was brought before the Chancellor and accused of sortilege, or enchantment. This man was reputed to be the region’s most learned and excellent physician, and knew “the cure and remedie for all manner of griefs and diseases”, according to the churchman-scholar Hegwoad. But his wisdom was not restricted to medicine. He was always “acquainted with all newes, as well forrein as domesticke”.
Accusers stated that the physician obtained his powers from a ring that he wore on his hand. Witnesses claimed that the doctor – who later became known as the Sorcerer of Courtray – constantly consulted the ring. It was stated that “the ring had a demon enclosed in it, to whom it behoved him to speak every five days”.
Despite the marked reluctance of the Chancellor to pass judgement on such a valued citizen, he found the evidence was so overwhelming that he had no choice but to find the man guilty. The physician was immediately proscribed for sorcery, and put to death. Curiously, even greater importance was placed on the fate of the ring than the fate of the sorcerer.
The Chancellor commanded that after the execution of the physician, the ring must be cut from his hand. So that all might witness its destruction, the ring was taken immediately to the public market. In full view of the citizens of Arnhem, the demon ring was “layd on an anvil, and, with an iron hammer beaten in pieces”.
In the St Albans Chronicon Angliae, in the year 1376, is recorded the extraordinary trial of Alice Perrers, a mistress of Edward III, King of England. Alice Perrers was a woman “neither voluptuous nor beautiful, but of smooth tongue” whom Parliament charged with having enchanted the king by use of magic rings. Through the power of these rings, it was claimed, Alice Perrers had alienated Edward’s affections from his queen, involved him in illicit sexual frenzies, and held sway over his judgments in court. In the trial it was revealed that she had a master who was a magician, who was found to have effigies of Alice and the king. It was stated that the magician used herbs and incantations devised by the great Egyptian magus Nectanabus, and “used rings such as Moses used to make – rings of oblivion and memory – so that the King was unable to act any day without consulting his false predictions”.
Because of the King’s intervention, it proved impossible to bring down the full and fatal force of the law of the time onto the accused. However, Alice Perrers was banished from court and noble society forever after.
In the year 370, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Valens, a powerful group of aristocrats feared that their monarch was neither strong nor wise enough to remain in power for long. Concerned about their own fate and that of the empire, the aristocrats secretly consulted an oracle.
The oracle practiced dactylomancy, or “ring divination”. This form of prophecy was achieved by means of a circle drawn on the temple floor. The circumference of the circle was inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, and a gold ring was suspended from the temple ceiling by a long thread directly over the centre of the circle.
When the question “Who should succeed to the throne of the Emperor Valens?” was put to the oracle, the gold ring slowly but decisively drifted from letter to letter, and spelled out: “T-H-E-O-D”.
All who observed the oracle believed this could only mean Theodorus, a man of noble lineage, eminent qualifications and high popularity. However, among the gathering of aristocrats was a spy loyal to Valens. When Valens learned of the oracle, he concluded that Theodorus could only come to power by means of a conspiracy. Although there was no evidence at all that Theodorus had any intention of plotting against him, the Emperor Valens had the man immediately put to death.
The great British historian Edward Gibbon remarks on the peculiar irony of this well-documented prophecy in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For, in the year 378, the wild Visigoth tribes were in open revolt against imperial rule. The barbarian armies had crossed the Danube and threatened to march on the capital itself. The Imperial Army made a valiant and bloody stand at Adrianople, but, outnumbered and badly commanded, they were defeated by the Visigoths and the Emperor Valens was killed.
Out of the turmoil that followed the conquest, one ruthless general rose to power among the Spanish legions of the West. This man’s name was T-H-E-O-D-osius. True to the prophecy of the ring, this unknown warlord seized control of the empire. He was crowned in Constantinople and became the Emperor Theodosius the Great.
Dactylomancy has been seriously practiced throughout history. This belief in the power of rings was not a matter of literary invention; it was a part of everyday life. The example of dactylomancy illustrated in Byzantium is just one example of its practice. There are in fact several thousands more recordings of its use throughout history.
If we look at the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, compiled and written c.1000, we find a cryptic statement or unanswered riddle about a ring. It reads: “I heard of a bright ring interceding well before men, though tongue-less, though it cried not with loud voice in strong words. The precious thing spoke before men, though holding its peace. May men understand the mysterious saying of red gold, the magic speech.” In part, the Exeter Book may be making reference to oracles that used rings long before the coming of Christ.
One method of allowing a ring to “speak”, other than the one witnessed in Byzantium in the year 370, involved water, and, as the German Latin scholar Caspar Peucer described it, would appear to make a quite reasonable lie-detector test: “A bowl was filled with water, and a ring suspended from the finger was liberated in water, and so, according as the question was propounded, a declaration, or confirmation of its truth or otherwise, was obtained. If what was proposed was true, the ring, of its own accord, without any impulse struck the sides of the goblet a certain number of times.”
The ancient Roman King Numa Pompilius evidently used this method of divination; while Execetus, the tyrant of the Phocians, used a means of divination based on sounds emitted by the striking of two large rings together. Still other practitioners of dactylomancy chose to throw rings or stones into pools of water and read the “rings” as they formed on the still surface. (This particular form of divination is not far removed from that of the prophetic images that appear in the watery rings of the “Mirror of Galadriel”, which the Elf queen commands by the power of her ring, Nenya.)
So how did dactylomancy and the consulting of rings come to be regarded as a blasphemous practice that would come to face centuries of suppression? Is it possible that it ran parallel to the tradition of the symbol of the cross? And is it possible to trace it, and understand where, why and how it maintained its force and power?
The ring was actually the primary symbol of a tradition that the Church saw as being in conflict with orthodox doctrines of Christianity. To understand this, one must look at the cult of witchcraft. In Margaret Murry’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, the author concludes that the so-called “cult of witchcraft” in one sense was not entirely a figment of the Church’s imagination. “The only explanation of the immense number of witches who were legally tried and put to death in Western Europe is that we are dealing with a religion which was spread over the whole continent and counted its members in every rank of society, from the highest to the lowest.” Murry identifies this “religion” as the remnant of primitive pagan cults which survived in various states of imperfection throughout Europe.
It is a more than reasonable supposition that aspects of pagan religions survived Christian conversion. In fact, a common tactic in the conversion of pagans was absorption of many aspects of pagan worship into the gospel of the Church. At other times, however, the Christian fathers found that if they had sufficient power it was easier to simply crush any pagan practice that was believed to pose a threat to orthodox Christian doctrines. If these surviving pagan beliefs were to be represented by any single image in the way that Christianity is represented by the cross, there is no doubt that that single image was the ring.
In Europe the ring was the dominant symbol of all the pagan Teutonic tribes. It was especially the dominant symbol of the Viking warrior culture, which was Christian Europe’s greatest scourge at the end of the first millennium.
Above all others, the Vikings’ one-eyed sorcerer god, Odin, was “the God of the Ring”. (He was Tolkien’s primary source of inspiration for his sorcerer Sauron, Lord of the Rings.) In the same way as the worship of Christ was symbolized by the cross, the worship of Odin was symbolized by the ring. After the collapse of Roman authority, European Christian settlements, churches and monasteries experienced centuries of relentless Viking terror. It is little wonder that, in the simplest terms, the Church saw in the symbol of the ring the greatest threat to the authority of the cross. It is more complex than this, of course. The ring was a much older symbol of authority than Christianity, and the Church itself adapted its authority in many forms. The Pope wore a ring as the symbol of office, as did all other officers of the Church. Christian marriages were enforced by what amounted to the pagan custom of swearing an oath upon a ring. Nuns were “wed” to Christ with a gold ring; and, in the form of the Celtic cross, the image of the ring and the cross were even united as an image suitable for worship in a Christian church.
It was a matter of where a particular ring’s power was rooted. In the figure of the early Christianized Viking King Olaf, we see a real blood-and-thunder missionary who believed he knew where the source of one particular ring’s power was to be found. When the Faroe Islands were converted by Olaf, the heroic Faroese chieftain Sigmundur Brestisson accepted Christianity as the new faith of his people. However, Olaf learned that Sigmundur had kept in his possession one sacred gold ring from the pagan temples. Knowing exactly the symbolic implications of Sigmundur’s act, King Olaf demanded it be given up to the Church. The milder Christian virtues were not yet apparent in King Olaf. When Sigmund refused to give up the ring, Olaf had him murdered in his sleep.
The secret of the ring is in its making. To make a ring, one must have the knowledge to smelt and forge metal. The “secret language” of the smith – symbolized by the ring – was his knowledge of metallurgy. Ultimately, this is concerned with the secret of the smelting and forging of iron, which is believed to have been discovered around 1000 BCE in the region of the Caucasus Mountains. It was the atomic secret of its day, a secret that was closely guarded: where the ore was mined, how the metal was extracted, how it was forged into weapon and tools. The smith’s extraordinary skill must have seemed reminiscent of the practice of alchemy in that such knowledge must have been perceived as somewhat magical or otherworldly. Because of alchemists’ seemingly magical practices, they were often executed as sorcerers or magicians.The significance of alchemy is looked at more closely later on in this book.
Those who possessed the secret of the smith conquered and often exterminated those who did not. The Iron Age transformed nations of timid shepherds and farmers into ferocious warriors capable of catastrophic feats of destruction on their once-powerful, and now-subjugated, neighbours. The hero who won the smith’s – or the alchemist’s –“ring” in the form of the secret of iron-smelting literally saved his nation.
The arts of the smith and the occult sciences are overlapping techniques handed down as trade secrets with their own rites and rituals. The mysteries of initiation rites and the secret language of the rituals of the trade became symbols in mythic tales.
It is not commonly recognized how profound an impact the rituals and rites of metallurgy have had on myth. However, it is not so much the techniques of metallurgy that are conveyed in these myths, but the secret rituals of initiation into those cults and the spiritual rites practiced within the guild, which evolve into the symbols of myth. The symbolic language of the ring quest, at its most profound, is concerned with the “spiritual” consequences of the Bronze and Iron Ages, which changed forever the human condition and perception of the world. Mircea Eliade emphasizes this point: “Before changing the face of the world, the Iron Age engendered a large number of rites, myths and symbols which have reverberated throughout the spiritual history of humanity.”
If one looks at the ring quest myths of most cultures, there are certain constants for the hero in his pursuit of the ring: the magician, the smith, the warrior, the sword, the dwarf, the maiden, the treasure and the dragon. These all relate originally to the rites and processes of metallurgy, and later to the symbolic “secret language” of the alchemist’s ring.
In The Lord of the Rings we have all the elements of the ring quest, and yet something wholly original in Tolkien’s own War of the Ring.
