In this chapter, Hunt begins to just throw miscellany together: a habit he continues for the rest of the book. This makes his work incoherent when boiled down into game notes. In general much of this chapter is made up of Cornish charms specific to a particular illness. Virtually all of them are Christian prayers, so they are arguably guaranteed miracles. That’s theologically troublesome in period, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone.
I won’t include the wording of the charms, because they are wordy, repetitive, and there’s no point mechanically. They map to the game mechanics as minor curing spells, specific to each illness, that work without vis. Each is therefore a Virtue. Some charmers refuse payment: others take it. This isn’t an infallible way of sorting the virtuous ones from the vicious, but it makes a fine first sieve. The power runs in families.
The Charmers of Zennor can cure a variety of illnesses, but their most famous charm is the stopping of blood. It can keep alive someone who has been deeply injured, much as Hermetic spells to bind wounds do, save that the person seems to heal while the charm is in place. The Zennor charmers are unusual in that they can stop blood merely by thinking their charm: most people need to say it. The charms are passed down within each gender. It’s not clear what happens if this prohibition is broken. An example of a charm, as written down by Hunt, requires the complete name of the target, but he also notes a charmer who stops the bleeding of a stuck pig, so there must be away around that, at least in the cases of livestock.
The Charmer of St Colomb used to convince people he had magical powers by putting patterns of candles in his fields. He claimed it counteracted, and protected him from, the spells of witches. If he’s invented a version of a Ward, that’s interesting. He would send away evil spirits by banging on wooden furniture, walls, and shutters with his walking stick, and telling the spirits to go away to the Red Sea. He also spoke nonsense words, which Hunt tells us are called “gibberish” in Cornish. After a place was exorcised, he would order it cleaned and the walls and ceiling limewashed. Hunt says this is the only part of the procedure he approves of, but this may be a substance inimical to local faeries or demons. He could also show the face of a thief in a tub of water, and made money selling powder to throw over bewitched cattle. All in all, if we accept him either as a conman or as a folk magician, he’s a useful character available to the covenant.
Cures for Warts: You can cure warts by touching each with a new pin, then putting the pins in a bottle and burying it. As the pins rust, the warts go. There’s a similar charm with knotted string: one knot per wart. Hunt tells of a curate who found a pin bottle in a new grave: presumably put there so it would not be disturbed. In a related piece of folklore, he says if you touch each wart with a pebble and put it in a bag, then lose the bag on the way to church. If someone picks up the bag, however, they get the warts, so burying it might be the more social option. Could this be, slightly disgusting, Corpus vis source?
Silver for paralysis: Hunt records a lady begging for pennies on the porch of a church. When she has thirty, she goes inside and the priest changes them for a silver coin. The lady painfully hobbles around the altar three times, and then goes off to have her coin made into a ring, which cures her arthritis. Everyone involved seems to know how the charm works.
The fonts in Cornwall have locks on them, because people keep stealing the water from after christenings. Hunt says they call it “holy water” and use it in folk charms.
Magical herbs are perfect vis sources, so I’ll quote directly from Hunt, here:
THE CLUB-MOSS.
(LYCOPODIUM INUNDATUM.)
IF this moss is properly gathered, it is ” good against all diseases of the eyes.”
The gathering is regarded as a mystery not to be lightly told ; and if any man ventures to write the secret, the virtues of the moss avail him no more. I hope, therefore, my readers will fully value the sacrifice I make in giving them the formula by which they may be guided.
On the third day of the moon when the thin crescent is seen for the first time show it the knife with which the moss is to be cut, and repeat, ” As Christ heal’d the issue of blood, Do thou cut, what thou cuttest, for good ! “
At sun-down, having carefully washed the hands, the club-moss is to be cut kneeling. It is to be carefully wrapped in a white cloth, and subsequently boiled in some water taken from the spring nearest to its place of growth. This may be used as a fomentation. Or the club-moss may be made into an ointment, with butter made from the milk of a new cow.
MOON SUPERSTITIONS.
THE following superstitions are still prevalent on the north coast of Cornwall : “This root (the sea-poppy), so much valued for removing all pains in the breast, stomach, and intestines, is good also for disordered lungs, and is so much better here than in other places, that the apothecaries of Cornwall send hither for it; and some people plant them in their gardens in Cornwall, and will not part with them under sixpence a root.
A very simple notion they have with regard to this root, which falls not much short of the Druids’ superstition in gathering and preparing their selago and samolus. This root, you must know, is accounted very good both as an emetic and cathartic. If, therefore, they design that it shall operate as the former, their constant opinion is that it should be scraped and sliced upwards that is, beginning from the root, the knife is to ascend towards the leaf; but if that it is intended to operate as a cathartic, they must scrape the root downwards. The scnecio also, or groundsel, they strip upwards for an emetic and downwards for a cathartic. In Cornwall they have several such groundless opinions with regard to plants, and they gather all the medicinal ones when the moon is just such an age ; which, with many other such whims, must be considered as the reliques of the Druid superstition.”
They, the Druids, likewise used great ceremonies in gathering an herb called samolus, marsh-wort, or fen-berries, which consisted in a previous fast, in not looking back during the time of their plucking it, and, lastly, in using their left hand only ; from this last ceremony, perhaps, the herb took the name of samol, which, in the Phoenician tongue, means the left hand. This herb was considered to be particularly efficacious in curing the diseases incident to swine and cattle. (C. S. Gilbert.}”
I particularly like the herb that has different effects based on the direction you cut it. I’d like a Bonisagus maga who studies this, because she can get Creo vis one way and Perdo the other, and that makes no sense to her.
Hunt then finds temporary coherence to talk about snake charms, which I’ll cover tomorrow. See you then!
Games From Folktales 