ceress; also, a supernatural, demonic being whose pow- ers enable her to live an incredibly long time.
The origin of the term “hag” is found in the ancient Goddess beliefs and myths of the Egyptians, Greeks,
Celts and pagan Europeans. The Egyptian heq was a
matriarchal ruler in predynastic times, one who com- manded the nAmesoF power. many Celtic myths fea-
ture Gráinne, or “ugliness,” the Old and Undying Hag. In Greek mythology, the hag is personified by HeCAte, goddess of witchcraft and CrossroAds; in Norse mythol-
ogy she is the death-goddess Hel. Old Norse hags may have been sacrificial priestesses, as evidenced by the terms hagi, meaning “sacred grove,” haggen, meaning
“to chop to pieces,” and haggis, meaning “hag’s dish,”
a dish comprised of organ meats that is still popular in Scotland.
In folklore, hags are sometimes benevolent, wise, beautiful and perpetually young. In Irish and Scottish lore, good hags help with spinning. Supernatural hags haunt the Fen country of Great Britain, working in league with bogeys, spirits of the dead and “creeping horrors” to bring harm to human beings and their animals. The Cail- leach Bheur of the Highlands is a lean, blue-faced hag, a supernatural remnant of a Celtic goddess of winter who is reborn each Samhain (All Hallow’s Eve, October 31) and turns to stone on Beltane Eve (April 30). The Celts erected sacred standing stones to her. Black Annis, a blue- faced cannibal with iron claws and long teeth, lives in a
cave in the Dane Hills. A remnant of the Celtic mother goddess, Anu, Black Annis eats people and animals. Until the 18th century, a ritual was performed in which she was coaxed out of her cave every Easter monday with a dead cat soaked in aniseed.
In the 16th century, the term hag was often substi-
tuted for FAIry. Fairies were reputed to teach their super- natural skills to witches, and the two consorted at night at FAIryrIngs.
In other lore, succubus hags cause nightmares by sit- ting on a person’s chest and “riding” them through the night, sometimes killing them from exhaustion (see
nIghtmAre). Hags can be prevented from riding by the
placement of a pen-knife on one’s breast or a table fork under one’s head. A sifter placed under the head also prevents riding, for the hag is forced to pass through ev- ery hole in it, which takes her all night. Witch-hags are believed to sneak into stables at night and steal horses, riding them all night and returning them sweaty and ex- hausted. To prevent this, ChArms and Amulets are hung
in stables.
The term hag in relation to witches is still used in
Great Britain: hag stones mark mAgIC CIrCles, and hag
tracking is a means of cursing.
modern Witches consider the term uncomplimentary, a stereotype of an ugly, disagreeable woman.
FurtherreAdIng:
Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night. Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Leach, maria, ed., and Jerome Fried, assoc. ed. Funk & Wag- nall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Leg- end. New York: Harper & row, 1972.
hag stone In folk mAgIC, a stone with a hole in it hung in
homes and stables to keep away hAgs or witches, at night. Hung on the bedpost, a hag stone is believed to prevent a hag from riding one’s chest and causing a nIghtmAre. In the stables, it prevents a hag from taking the horses and riding them all night to the point of exhaustion.
See stones.
hair and nails Hair and nails possess magical attri-
butes that contain the essence of a person, and thus are important ingredients in many magic spells. Hair is
associated with strength and virility, and with psychic protection. Abundant hair was considered an asset for many monarchs. The ancient Egyptians believed that a potion made of hair, nail clippings and human blood
would give a person absolute power over another.
In folklore, a witch’s magical power is bound in her hair. By shaking her hair, the power of a spell is doubled. The shearing off of another’s hair is considered an act of degradation, humiliation or punishment. Samson lost his strength when Delilah cut his hair. The Bhils of Central India tortured suspected witches, then cut off a lock of their hair and buried it, thus severing the link between the witches and their magical power. In the witch-hunts, witches were shaved in the belief that it rendered them powerless and more likely to confess; also, they were shaved to be searched for body marks that could be con- strued as deVIl’smArks.
Nails have been associated with demons and evil;
some Jews keep their fingernails as short as possible, and tribes in madagascar believe the Devil lives under un- pared fingernails.
much Western magical lore about hair and nails can be traced to the Vendidad, a Zoroastrian liturgy written
in the mid-5th century b.C.e. According to the Vendidad,
hair and nails are instruments of evil because they grow with a life of their own and can be separated from the body, to be used by witches and wIzArds for conjuring
the dead, bewitching and casting spells. Ahura mazda gave Zarathustra specific rituals for the safe disposing of hair clippings and nail parings:
. . . thou shalt take them away ten paces from the faith- ful, twenty paces from the fire, thirty paces from the water, fifty paces from the bundles of baresma [holy twigs].
Then thou shalt dig a hole, ten fingers deep if the earth is hard, twelve fingers deep if it is soft; thou shalt take thy hair down there and thou shalt say aloud these fiend-smiting words: Out of his pity mazda made plants grow.
There upon thou shalt draw three furrows with a knife of metal around the hole, or six, or nine, and thou shalt chant the Ahuna Vairya three times, or six, or nine.
For the nails, thou shalt dig a hole, out of the house, as deep as the top joint of the little finger; thou shalt take the nails down there and thou shalt say aloud these fiend-smiting words: The words are heard from the pious in holiness and good thought.
The practice of burying cut hair and nails persists among many cultures. AleIster Crowley secretly dis-
posed of his hair and nail clippings throughout his life. In Ozark lore, hair combings are buried, never thrown out. French peasants bury hair; Turks and Chileans stuff hair clippings into walls.
Sorcerers, CunnIng menAnd women and witches in many societies have secured the cut hairs of victims to cast spells and break spells. A bewitched victim’s hair thrown into a fire supposedly projects the pain of the flames back onto the witch. The hair of a dead man buried under the threshold of an enemy supposedly will cause the enemy to develop ague. In parts of Germany, a small bag of smooth human hair placed on the stomach will tell someone if they have been bewitched. The answer is yes if the hair is tangled after three days.
Hair, particularly pubic hair, is considered a potent in- gredient in many love charms. According to legend, John
FIAn, a 16th-century Scottish wizard, attempted to make a young girl fall in love with him by making a charm from three of her pubic hairs. However, someone substituted three hairs from a cow’s udder, and the lovestruck cow followed Fian all over town. It is still common for lovers to carry lockets of head hair, and in centuries past, young girls often made hair bracelets to give to their lovers to keep them faithful.
red-haired persons are witches or sorcerers, accord- ing to one old belief. Evidence exists to indicate that some ancient pagan sorcerers dyed their hair red for certain rituals. red hair was common among the Celts, whose traditions were steeped in magic. During the witch hunts red-haired people were often suspected of being witches. Witches were said to shoot hairballs into animals to harm them. These hairballs supposedly lodged in the beasts’ stomachs without leaving a mark on the skin.
According to superstition, the cutting of hair must be timed according to the phases of the moon, depending on how quickly one desires the hair to grow back.
See wItChbottles. FurtherreAdIng:
Cavendish, richard. The Black Arts. New York: Putnam,
1967.
Leach, maria, ed., and Jerome Fried, assoc. ed. Funk & Wag- nall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Leg- end. New York: Harper & row, 1972.
Opie, Iona, and moira Tatem. A Dictionary of Superstitions.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
hand of glory The severed hand of a hanged mur-
derer, magically preserved, once was used as a ChArm in
black-magic spells and was believed to aid burglars in
breaking into homes and buildings.
The hand of glory was the right hand of a murderer, ideally severed while the corpse still swung from the gal- lows, or cut during an eclipse of the moon. It was wrapped
in a shroud, squeezed of blood and pickled for two weeks
in an earthenware jar with salt, long peppers and saltpe- ter. It was then either dried in an oven with vervain, an herb believed to repel demons, or laid out to dry in the
sun, preferably during the dog days of August.
Once preserved, the hand was fitted with CAndles
between the fingers. The candles, called “dead man’s
candles,” were made from the murderer’s fat, with the wick being made from his hair. In another method of curing, the hand of glory was bled, dried and dipped in wax, so that the fingers themselves could be lit as candles.
With candles or fingers burning, the hand of glory sup- posedly had the power to freeze people in their footsteps and render them speechless. Burglars lit hands of glory before breaking into a house, confident that the charm would keep the occupants in a deep sleep while they plundered the household. If the thumb refused to burn, it meant someone in the house was awake and could not be charmed. According to lore, once a hand of glory was lit, nothing but milk could extinguish it.
As a counter-charm, homeowners made oIntments
from the blood of screech owls, the fat of while hens
and the bile of black CAts and smeared it on their
thresholds.
Hands of glory were linked to witches during the witch-hunt centuries. In 1588 two German women, Nichel and Bessers, who were accused of witchcraft and the exhumation of corpses, admitted they poisoned help- less people after lighting hands of glory to immobilize them. John FIAn, who was severely tortured in his witch
trial in Scotland in 1590, confessed to using a hand of glory to break into a church, where he performed a ser- vice to the DeVIl.
FurtherreAdIng:
Cavendish, richard, ed. in chief. Man, Myth & Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown. New York: marshall Cavendish, 1983.
de Givry, Emile Grillot. Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. 1931.
reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1971.
Leach, maria, ed., and Jerome Fried, assoc. ed. Funk & Wag- nall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Leg- end. New York: Harper & row, 1972.
hare In folklore, a witch’s FAmIlIAr or a witch meta-
morphosed in disguise (see metAmorphosIs). It is still bad luck in the British Isles for one’s path to be crossed by a hare.
Witches were said to be able to change themselves into hares and other animals with magical ChArms such as the following from the British Isles:
I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and such and muckle care, And I shall go in the Devil’s name. Ay, ’till I come home again.
The hare supposedly was the favorite disguise of Iso-
bel gowdIe, a Scottish woman who voluntarily confessed to witchcraft in 1662, astonishing her staid community of Auldearne with her wild tales. Once while in the shape of a hare, she said, she had a close call with some dogs. The DeVIl had sent her, as a hare, to carry a message to neigh-
bors. Along the way, she encountered a man and a pack of
Hand of glory (PETIT ALBErT) 14 hare
hounds, which sprang upon her. “I run a very long time,” said Gowdie, “but being hard pressed, was forced to take to my house, the door being open, and there took refuge behind a chest.” The dogs pursued her into the house, and Gowdie escaped only by running into another room and uttering a “disenchanting” charm:
Hare, hare, God send thee care! I am in a hare’s likeness now; But I shall be a woman even now-— Hare, hare, God send thee care!
many stories exist in folklore of hunters shooting hares, only to discover they had killed old hag witches, who resumed their human forms upon death much like the werewolf in disguise. The following Irish folktale, from W. B. Yeats’ collection of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales
(1892), tells of the wounding of a witch hare:
I was out thracking hares meeself, and I seen a fine puss of a thing hopping hopping in the moonlight, and whacking her ears about, now up, now down, and wink- ing her great eyes, and—”Here goes,” says I, and the
thing was so close to me that she turned round and looked at me, and then bounced back, as well to say, do your worst! So I had the least grain of life of blessed powder left, and I put it in the gun—and bang at her! my jewel, the scritch she gave would frighten a rigment, and a mist, like, came betwixt me and her, and I seen her no more; but when the mist wint off I saw blood on the spot where she had been, and I followed its track, and at last it led me—whists, whisper—right up to katey macShane’s door; and when I was at the thrashold, I heerd a murnin’ within, a great murnin’, and a groanin’, and I opened the door, and there she was herself, sittin’ quite content in the shape of a woman, and the black cat that was sittin’ by her rose up its back and spit at me; but I went on never heedin’, and asked the ould——how she was and what ailed her.
“Nothing,” sis she.
“What’s that on the floor?” sis I.
“Oh,” she say, “I was cuttin’ a billet of wood,” she says, “wid the reaping hook,” she says, “an’ I’ve wounded meself in the leg,” she says, “and that’s drops of my pre- cious blood,” she says.
In Norse mythology, the hare is the companion of Freya, goddess of fecundity.
FurtherreAdIng:
Leach, maria, ed., and Jerome Fried, assoc. ed. Funk & Wag- nall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Leg- end. New York: Harper & row, 1972.
Yeats, W. B. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. 1892. reprint, New
York: Dorset Press, 1986.
Hawkins, Jane (1th century) massachusetts midwife
and healer expelled on suspicions of witchcraft in the delivery of a deformed, stillborn fetus. The witchcraft accusations were mixed with a religious controversy affecting Jane Hawkins as well.
Hawkins, married to richard Hawkins, was well known for her midwifery skills and medical remedies. She also was associated with the Antinomians, a Quaker religious faction that became engaged in political contro- versy with the dominant Puritans. The Antinomians were led by a woman, Anne Hutchinson.
Hawkins served as midwife to a woman named mary Dyer, a fellow Antinomian who gave birth in October 1637 to a deformed fetus called a “monster.” Authorities declared that it was a sign of God’s displeasure with the Antinomians.
Animosity arose against Hawkins, Dyer and Hutchin- son. It was said that Hawkins “had familiarity with the Devil” when she had lived in St. Ives, Cornwall, England, and would give young women oil of mandrake to make them conceive. In march 1638, she was ordered “not to meddle in surgery, or physic, drinks, plasters, or oils, not to question matters of religion, except with the elders for satisfaction,” according to official records. In June 1638, Hawkins was ordered expelled from massachusetts Colony
Magical hare woman, found abandoned beneath a Gypsy cara- van in England; in the collection of the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall (PHOTO BY AUTHOr; COUrTESY mUSEUm OF WITCHCrAFT)
or be severely whipped and punished by the court. Her two sons took her away to live in rhode Island. She returned in 1641 and was banished a second time.
Hutchinson also was banished in 1638. Dyer left, but returned in 1659. She was executed a year later for her Quaker faith.
The association of witchcraft with an unpopular re- ligious practice followed European practices pursued by the Inquisition against heretics and others. The Hawkins case was among the early witchcraft episodes in colo- nial New England. Had it occurred later, when increas- ing anti-witch hysteria developed, Hawkins most likely would have been brought to trial and perhaps executed. By the 1650s, Quaker woman missionaries were increas- ingly linked to witchcraft. Two missionaries, mary Fisher and Ann Austin, were stripped of their clothing by au- thorities and searched for wItCh’smArks.
FurtherreAdIng:
Hall, David D., ed. Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History 1638–1692. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1991.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (104–164) A native of
Salem, massachusetts, and one of the great masters of American fiction, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one of his best-known works, The House of Seven Gables, perhaps in
part to atone for the role of an ancestor who played a role in the sAlem wItCh hysteria of 1692.
The ancestor, Judge John Hathorne (an earlier spelling of the family name), was a son of Nathaniel’s great-great- grandfather, major William Hathorne. John Hathorne was a respected magistrate of Salem, who heard the trials with two other magistrates. He was not a vindictive man, and he put skeptical questions to the accusers who testi- fied during the lengthy trials. Nevertheless, he believed in witchcraft as an evil and believed in the power to af- flict others through mAgIC with poppets. He was swayed by the testimony of spectral evidence and allowed it to be admitted in court.
As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne was fascinat- ed and deeply affected by a family story that Hathorne had been cursed by one of the convicted witches. One of the condemned, sArAh good, had issued a Curse as she went to the gallows. Asked by rev. Nicholas Noyes to confess, she replied, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Noyes reportedly choked on his own blood in 1717. It is not known for certain whether the curse was laid on other officials responsible for the execu- tions, but the Hathorne family apparently came to believe