A Census of Hazelnuts

Illustration © Liam Lefr

The lockdown has eased a little and I am on the deck of a ferry rumbling across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, under a pale, spring sun. I grew up on the island so this is a trip home, but it is also something of a magical quest. 

Despite glorious views from the deck, my thoughts are mainly with a medieval woman called Julian. She was a mystic and anchorite who lived for years sequestered alone in a cell attached to a church in Norwich. At some point in her life she became gravely ill and expected to die and had a series of “shewings”—or visions from God. On one occasion:

“He showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball.”

She asked what it was, and she was told it was “all that is made”. She had the whole cosmos in her hand, and she marvelled that something so immense could be contained in so small a shell. She was told it was sustained by the love of God. She recorded her shewings in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Over six hundred years later I read her account of that hazelnut when I was a teenager and was entranced by it.  I am thinking about her today because I am on a quest to find some very unusual hazelnuts.

I have been drawn to hazelnuts for years, but it wasn’t until I was lighting candles one day, at my ancestor altar, that I realised the extent of this attraction. The tabletop around the candles was covered with them. I started a census: how many were there? Where had I picked them up? What were their stories?

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There were four half-shells. You can tell what kind of creature has eaten the nut by the way they have opened the shell. By far the most common is the cleanly sliced half-shell. This is the work of Squirrels. There is a place in the woods where I have made a circle to do magic. I dug these half-shells from the dirt ground inside my circle and I have used them often over the years for divination. Geomancy is a form of divination that relies on figures created randomly from ones and twos, for example, some people toss coins. Half hazelnuts can be cast in the same way because they only land up or down. 

There were a number of nuts I have burned with a hot needle. Some had sigils on which I have since buried in that same earth to decay the next time I visited the forest. On some I had written in tiny burned letters “Mother Julian. Pray for Us”. These I give as gifts to those who might need or appreciate them. 

There were two fat and gloriously dark brown nuts that I found half in the ground of a disused holloway in the lee of the South Downs. A holloway is a path so ancient that feet and wheels have gouged it down into the surrounding country, sometimes the sides are twenty feet high and more, and trees grow on top of that, so that meeting above it, a green tunnel is created. The holloway I found was only a hundred metres long and it was clear no one had used it for decades. The soil was softer than feathers and the air was green and secret. When I stopped to sit with the place for a while, I found these nuts. They slipped into a pocket and then to the front of my altar at home. 

Two nuts were almost black. On a fearsomely stormy day in Cornwall my partner and I battled along a beach in a small cove and from the weed and detritus at the high tide line came two hazelnuts. Southern Cornwall is famous for its tree-lined rivers that meander out to sea. These nuts had clearly fallen into a river and been carried out and back again. They are the darkest, shiniest, hardest nuts in this census. 

There is another nut which was found on a different shoreline. This one is almost grey, its shiny surface is gone. The exposed ridges are deep and clear. It is the nut equivalent of a leaf-skeleton. 

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All these nuts have come to me. Placing them in front of the ancestor altar just seemed the right thing to do. Each one is a little bit of magic. Today though, disembarking from the ferry, I am setting off to find hazelnuts deliberately for the first time. The west of the Isle of Wight is a far cry from the bucket-and-spade image of the seaside towns on the east and north of the island. High cliffs, wild Atlantic seas and deep chines dominate the coastal landscape here. An hour from the ferry is Compton Bay, famous for its dinosaur footprints and fossils from many millions of years ago. I am after something ancient but not quite so ancient. 

Hazel as a species is one our oldest companions in northern Europe. As the ice advanced and retreated over millennia humans and hazel moved with it. There is archaeological evidence back to the Mesolithic of humans gathering hazelnuts for food in vast quantities. It is thought Hazel might have been one of the very first species to be cultivated. No wonder it felt right to place them in front of the ancestors. At Compton Bay high in the eroding cliff face is a layer of gravel, an ancient riverbed, 8,000 years old. Pieces of wood from trees that overhung that river and fell in are occasionally exposed and tumble to the beach, partially fossilised. Among those remains are often found, of course, hazelnuts.

The breadth of the folklore about hazel surely reflects its long companionship with human beings. Best known, perhaps, is the hazel wand. Throughout European magic, the use of a hazel wand is widespread: it is often procured at dawn, on Midsummer’s Eve, cut with one blow, from ‘virgin’ growth; sometimes it is cut behind one’s back, to be the length of the forearm. Different source texts include different combinations of these requirements. The variety, historically, means that today we can take a wide view and understand these as expressions of an underlying ritual structure surrounding the creation of a hazel wand. It’s like learning the grammar underlying a language.

In the UK, hazel has folkloric associations with Faeries; in her book Under the Witching Tree, Corrine Boyer presents two spells, one from the 15th and one from the 17th century which use hazel sticks and hazel buds respectively to help the witch see the little people. Hazel is also helpful with weather magic: contemporary reports of witch trials in Europe detail the calling up of storms by beating water with hazel rods. There is a connection with lightning; there was a widespread belief that  hazel trees were never struck by lightning, and therefore it followed that hazel was good for protecting the house against a strike. In various parts of the UK and Europe, a hazel rod, a cross of hazel, or a hazel rod driven through the body of a Robin were used to ward off lightning from houses or crops.  Snakes too have woven their story into that of the hazel: in Ireland there was a legend that St Patrick drove out the snakes with a hazel switch; there are medieval and early modern charms against snakes and their bites, that use hazel, from places as far apart as Sweden, the Balkans, the Black Forest and the West Country. Tellingly, there isn’t much in the herbals about hazel; probably this is because, like potatoes and carrots, the primary relationship we have with this plant is as food. 

The thing that draws me most to these tiny, humble little nuts is this long standing relationship with humans. It is something of that depth of time that I am trying to capture through my quest on the Isle of Wight. It was 8000 years ago that this river ran, that these hazelnuts fell, and also that the glaciers in Northern England and Scotland melted. The glacial meltwater flooded the low-lying woodland between what is now the Isle of Wight and the mainland and created The Solent. These semi-fossilised hazelnuts share their time with that huge flooding event. Is this why, for centuries these humble remnants of that time have been known to islanders as Noah’s Nuts? Maybe, except that the first reference I can find to that name comes from the 1790s. This is long before we had an understanding of ice-ages, glaciation and the flooding that would have created the Isle of Wight. It is extremely unlikely that there is continuity of understanding between islanders today and those who lived 8000 year before, but our human ancestors and other species, like the hazel tree, have travelled some very long lines through time and those lines come together and cross and merge in all kinds of ways. It is those lines that create story and magic. It is also those lines which lead directly to me on my knees, with the sun on my back at the bottom of a cliff searching for 8000-year-old hazelnuts. Did I find any? Not this time. But I will be back. 

The Song of the Sybil: A Christmas Apocalypse

The Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier (public domain)

My first encounter with The Sybil came when, I read about a strange and rather beautiful Christmas Eve ritual, it involved a text called ‘The Song of the Sybil.’ Much of my praxis involves poetry and I thought it would be interesting to render the Catalan language of this song into English. I was being rather casual about it: I had an old documentary about WW1 on the television as I worked and was also chatting online with my magical sister. She was a little unwell that night, lying on her bed 200 miles away, probably more than usually susceptible to influence. Without knowing what I was doing she began to muse aloud. Her talk began to mirror — to the second — the experiences being recounted by the WW1 veterans. One former soldier talked about hearing the muffled pop of the gun five miles away and then a slowly increasing hum as the shell came closer and closer: at exactly that time she told me how the current situation in the world felt like something huge is coming towards us, not quite visible over the horizon. She talked about earthquakes at the very moment that the black and white footage showed a shell landing and sending up a shower of earth into the air. And the synchronicities continued throughout the program and the conversation.

In what was almost certainly a case of observer bias and yet no less a synchronicity for that, I began to hear settings of the Dies Irae, which is a form of the Song, on the radio playing in a shop or on the television, or it suddenly appeared on my music streaming service suggestions. Skies became more full of reds and purples and the Judgement card turned up in every tarot reading. Just studying the Sybil is sometimes enough to allow her contact.

The Sybil is both one and many, she is both her own creature and the mouthpiece of the divine, she is known in individual caves and as a homeless wanderer, she is the embodied voice of a particular woman and a flow of truth that settles in the mouth of anyone who calls her, she speaks in the language of both Christian and Pagan. In other words, she is not a spirit for those who like fixed categories and easy definitions: she is both a prophetess in Cumae speaking for Apollo and a mythical faerie queen in Arthurian Britain.

One of her strangest manifestations is a centuries old Christmas tradition in which she is at her most fearsome. On Christmas Eve, at churches scattered around the Mediterranean, The Sybil is processed into church before the beginning of Midnight Mass accompanied by two acolytes. In this instance, The Sybil is a robed boy carrying a sword. Arriving at the pulpit, the boy then sings in an unbroken voice, the apocalyptic Song of the Sybil, describing the horrors of the end of the world. At the end of The Song, the boy makes the sign of the cross with the sword over the congregation and is led from the church so Mass can begin. 

The Song of the Sybil was originally prescribed to be recited in churches at the Mattins service on Christmas morning. This was true until the 1500s when the Council of Trent banned the practice, perhaps queasy about the pagan pedigree of The Sybil. But folk religion being what it is, the practice was almost immediately taken up again in Catalonia, particularly in the Balearic Islands, in Provence, in Italy and I have even found references to it happening in Malta in living memory. Today it is still alive and well in Catalonia and you can watch footage of it on Youtube, taken in the 21st century.

The ancient Sybil was one of the few pagan ‘voices’ approved of by the early church fathers because it was felt her prophetic and apocalyptic pronouncements could be understood as prophecies of Christ and that they chimed well with Christian understandings of the End Times. A series of verses were developed which became known as The Song of the Sybil.

The first surviving version of the song is found in chapter 23 of Saint Augustine’s City of God. It is an acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out a message about Christ. But Augustine was writing in the 400s and he was already mentioning earlier versions so there is no way of knowing how early the song appeared. The other versions we know today are in medieval Catalan and in Provencal. The Catalan texts are thought to have been translated from the Provencal, and so by the 1300s this text had already been on quite a journey. That said, the key parts of the apocalyptic vision remain more or less in place in all versions: fire from heaven, the emphasis on the fleshly return of Christ, the levelling of mountains and valleys, earthquakes and thunder and sometimes trumpets, the separation of the good from the bad, sulphurous smells, a universal wailing and crying, the dimming of the sun and other celestial bodies and the conflation of fire and water. Many of these features are, of course, Biblical and can be found in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Old Testament in Isaiah (particularly Deutero-Isaiah), Joel, Ezekiel and Daniel. Many if not most of these texts were composed during the exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. They pop up again in the New Testament, most notably in The Book of Revelation but also in a host of non-canonical Christian and other writings of the period.

The sword is a fascinating ritual implement in this context. The sword is a long-standing symbol for the tongue, particularly when used to utter prophecy or harsh words. It has also been a symbol of the Word of God and the double-edged sword is a Biblical symbol for the Word of God as a dividing and therefore judging implement. The Sybil here is uttering the word of god, though not the Christian one. Although she is permitted into this Christian space because her words can be interpreted as pertaining to this supposedly scriptural vision of the end times (Augustine says that she should be admitted into The City of God), actually her words were traditionally those of a pagan god, sometimes Apollo, sometimes a chthonic deity, that is a deity of the underworld. The sword is a magnificent focus for all these convergent elements. 

As a magician, an approach to The Sybil has provided me, every time, with revelation. An apocalypse is, by definition, a ‘revealing’ or ‘uncovering’. The Sybil’s voice is one which can be harnessed and embodied by the magician. To use The Song of the Sybil in a ritual context is to invoke this ancient and mysterious spirit into one’s own flesh and to hear her words both ancient and new come from one’s own mouth. 

Performing this ritual aligns the magician’s voice to the voice of the Sybil. It is not the kind of ritual that is to be performed often, or even necessarily more than once, but it will feed the magician’s ability to divine the future when looking at the bigger scheme of things, it will provide a depth and tone of voice to the magician’s divinations on the larger and more complex issues of the day, it allows the magician to prophesy the direction of the world. It can also add an apocalyptic tone to the magician’s journeying in the other place.

The Ritual

This ritual should not be performed in a domestic setting. Ideally it should be performed out of doors, high up or in some place where there is a vista so that as one speaks the words one can see a large and expansive area. If indoors is the only option, a large open setting should be preferred: a large church, an empty warehouse, a sports hall or whatever one has access to along those lines. If in an urban setting then the roof of a building would be ideal, giving a view over the town or the city. 

The ritual is best performed at night-time or when the sky is dark through storm or cloud.

Make an offering to the gods. This must be done in a way that makes sense to you but as The Sybil was often associated with chthonic deities and made her home in caves, one suggestion is to dig a hole in the ground and to offer fire and water by placing a burning lump of charcoal in it, then pouring in spring water and carefully back-filling the hole.

Take hold of the sword and hold it upright in front of you, in your dominant hand.

Visualise the sword as a shaft of light that penetrates deep into the earth below and high into the sky.

Declaim the words of one of the Songs. Let it breathe through you. Make it a primeval scream if you can. It doesn’t matter which one you use. If you know Catalan or Latin or a language close enough to let you manage the original that’s great, otherwise there are renderings into English. Speak loudly and strongly, shout if you have to be heard above weather. If you are a competent musician, then it can be sung to a plainchant melody. The ritual is far better served by a magician having learnt the words by heart.

After the Amen you may be moved to continue speaking and if this happens you should allow the words to come no matter how weird and/or nonsensical they may seem. 

The ritual can be ended either by making the sign of the cross with the sword (a variant of which would be to point it in each compass direction), or by upending the sword and pushing it into the ground.

(There is an album titled “El Cant de la Sibil-La” by Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall which contains a number of different versions of The Song and also Dead Can Dance have a version as a track on their album, “ A Passage in Time”)