The Binding of the Fairies:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/preternature.1.2.0323
ISSN2161-2196
Autores ResumoSex has always been a dangerous business. In medieval and early modern England, sex with priests might lead to excommunication; sex with prostitutes to the French pox; sex with animals to deformed or half-human offspring, and perhaps the death of the human or animal partners; and sex with demons to the sealing of a demonic pact and thence to the loss of one's soul. This introduction will discuss four early modern spells, found in Folger MS Xd 234, that show how a mage may bind to his will and command one or more fairies for sexual purposes; it is clear that this operation is considered to be fraught with its own dangers, perhaps the more fearsome for never being fully described. But it also appears to offer unique pleasures and benefits not obtainable from other forms of sexual congress. I explore how and why a mage might have considered sex with fairies first as a possible and then as a desirable thing, looking at texts and traditions relating to such spells for inter-nature coupling.Xd 234 (ca. 1600)1 is a sheet of vellum on which are inscribed a series of interconnected spells to summon, supplicate, control, and copulate with “the seven Sisters of the fairies.”2 It is absent from the group of manuscript spells most often cited in the scholarship on the summoning of spirits, devils, and fairies,3 being mentioned only in Alan Nelson's biography of the Earl of Oxford, Monstrous Adversary,4 in connection with Oxford's being accused of necromancy, and in passing in David Rankine's Book of Treasure Spirits.5 Nonetheless it is worth study for the insights it offers into the nature of magecraft, spirit summoning, and supernatural sex.Are spirits, devils, and fairies—ethereal beings that may be summoned—thus conflatable? To some extent. It is well understood that the traditions out of which early modern fairy lore arises are complex:6 sexual binding or forced sexual congress in particular, of or by fairies or demons, is referenced in romances,7 ballads, and witchcraft trials,8 as well as throughout medieval demonology. This last requires some discussion: because the spells of Xd 234 so resemble in form conjurations of demons, it will be well to begin with a brief overview of the traditional relationship between fairies and devils.9 Many early modern authors, including Reginald Scot10 and Lewes Lavater,11 conflate them or see fairies as emanations of the Devil. In his Daemonologie, James I argues that “the deuil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeue that they saw and harde such thinges” as “the Phairie,”12 while in fact they are merely demonic illusions. Emma Wilby points out that examiners of accused witches repeatedly seem to have heard “demon” or “devil” when the examinant said “fairy,” as in the confession of Elspeth Reoch, where the examiner writes that Reoch had met “the devell quhilk she callis the farie man.”13 Summonings and conjurings of fairies and of demons in manuscript spell books and in Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft often use near-identical language, evincing equal amounts of propitiation, fear, and fascination; calling on the same religious entities to lend their powers of coercion and protection to the endeavor;14 and requesting similar boons.Another example of the imbrication of the traditions is the changing identity of the spirit Oberon/Oberion. In her discussion of possible prototypes for Prospero's magic book in The Tempest, Barbara Mowat focuses on Folger Shakespeare Library MS Vb 26,15 a compendium of spells and charms from around 1577–83. It includes instructions for conjuring “Oberyon,” here illustrated as a jinn-like figure complete with turban and vaporous tail, and cataloged among such “Spirrittes” as Baal and Satan, though he is also referred to as king of the fairies.16 Oberon appears in his fairy form, along with his more recognizable name, both before Vb 26, in Huon of Burdeaux (translated 1534),17 and afterward in a number of sources, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Ben Jonson's Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611); he also appears more conclusively as a demon in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court records.18Demon summoning was necromancy, which etymologically means “divination by means of the dead” but was used along with the variant “nigromancy,” or black magic, to mean conjuration of spirits in general.19 Necromantic practices and practitioners have been the subject of heightened scholarly interest over the last two decades,20 and questions of the nature and identity of necromancers are increasingly being explored. Richard Kieckhefer has influentially identified them as members of a “clerical underworld,” showing that the majority must have been in some way connected with the Church, whether priests, monks, or others.21 Frank Klaassen has shown that manuals of magic can offer insights into the preoccupations and anxieties of their producers and users precisely because of their illicit nature, since such spell collections were usually intended for private use and were often altered and emended by their scribes.22 This very intimacy, coupled with the ways the spells of Xd 234 both follow and depart from fairy and demon tradition, makes it possible to speculate on this scribe and some of his motivations and desires. The spells are descriptively titled “Here followeth the way to make a band to bind the seven sisters of the fairies to thee, to your book, and to thy child or friend forever,” “Here followeth the way and manner how you shall call one of these virgins of fairies aforenamed at once unto thy bed whenever thou list and have her at pleasure,” “The manner of the band to bind her when she is appeared to thee,” and “Here followeth the manner of the license when you will have her to depart.” The mage requests in the course of them three things: treasure, knowledge, and sex. He both desires them and believes they are obtainable from fairies. What else can these spells tell us about him, and how may they reflect the traditions out of which he was writing?The above-listed desires and beliefs are in keeping with much of the necromantic tradition. Certainly money or material objects were commonly coveted; Scot, in his impassioned attack on witch beliefs and witch-hunting, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, argues that mages are in search of “wealth, learning, … commoditie, pleasure, &c.”23 Rankine24 argues that desire for treasure was essential to the entire enterprise of spirit summoning, though Kieckhefer points out that, like fairy gold, claims of demon-gotten gains were often understood to be illusory or “cynical charlatanry.”25 Desire for gold was just as, if not more, associated with fairy lore: in her extensive surveys of British fairies, Katherine Briggs points to numerous stories concerning fairy gold, both its promise and its disappointments,26 and Diane Purkiss devotes a chapter to what she describes as the “very particular use” of fairies: “solid cash.”27 Owen Davies shows that the longing for wealth was one of the main reasons for consulting a cunning woman or man, who might have received her or his knowledge from familiar spirits such as fairies.28 But wealth is not the main concern in Xd 234. The first spell does request that the seven fairy sisters “bring with you treasure” or show the speaker where it is buried, almost as a nod to the traditional fairy summonings, as though the connection between fairies and gold were indissoluble. But the request is dropped entirely in the three spells following; the scribe of these spells is clearly not much focused on it.Desire for knowledge is likewise an important and a common reason for summoning spirits, both demon and fairy; it is the single largest reason, for instance, that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus undertakes his pact with Mephistophilis.29 Klaassen discusses the high value placed on knowledge and learning among medieval necromancers, as evidenced by the significant proportion of spells in several collections, including Clm 849 and MS Rawlinson D.252,30 purporting to help the caster to attain forms of knowledge. Consulting directly with angelic or demonic spirits and numerous forms of divination—including scapulimancy, divination by means of a sheep's shoulder blade31—appear throughout the grimoires32 as major areas of endeavor. Nelson argues that in Xd 234 the emphasis of the spells is on the knowledge the mage can gain after fairy sex, referencing the portion of Spell 3 that offers, “Then when thou hast accomplished it and fulfilled thy will and desire with her, then mayst reason with her of any manner of things that thou desirest to, and in all kind of question you list to demand of her.”33 He suggests, as well, that the Earl of Oxford made a “similar assumption that the magician's goal is not so much pleasure as knowledge—particularly knowledge of the future,”34 though this specific information is not referenced in the spells.Sequentially, knowledge does follow sex in this spell, and the terms “then” and “when” imply but do not mandate a causal relationship between the two actions. Here are shades of Circe, she who would impart her knowledge to Odysseus only after he had come to her bed. In the necromantic tradition sex and knowledge, though both important aims, tend not to be connected. One other spell I know of, in Scot's Discouerie, specifies the bed as a site for knowledge transmission: fairy spirits are summoned to the speaker's bed to answer questions, though there is no indication that any sexual relations take place. However, sex is a primary source or site of knowledge transmission in texts as far back as the Apocryphal Book of 1 Enoch, in which the Watchers' sexual congress with human women is directly related to the harmful knowledge the human race gains.35 A further manuscript, Sloane 3850, couples sex with a spirit, not specifically defined as a fairy, with a boon she can bring him, in this case a ring of invisibility rather than knowledge specifically. However, in this case the ring must be taken from her before the sex act, for “if/thou syn with hir or then takest the ryng thou shalt not/hau it.”36 In Xd 234, the paramount importance of the sex act in and of itself, not as a means to knowledge, seems clear. While treasure and information are each mentioned very briefly, the particulars of summoning, enticing, and binding one specific fairy, Lilia, for “a carnal copulation” make up the middle two spells entirely and parts of the first and last. The speaker gives instructions for the body positions of mage and fairy and emphasizes Lilia's physical nature: she is beautiful and bountiful, and “without doubt she is a woman.” He assures the mage who is his intended audience that he has never had “so pleasant a creature or lively woman in bed,” marking off with virgules and underlining the most important word.37 The spell also promises that he may take his pleasure with her at will.This pronounced emphasis on sex is one reason the manuscript is of interest: there are no other spells, as such, that I am aware of that so concern themselves with sex with fairies, or in fact with any supernatural beings. A spell reprinted by Scot requires of the fairy Sibylia (and later her two sisters, Achilia and Milia) a “common copulation,”38 but after this phrase nothing more is said concerning the act; and the spell in Sloane 3850 referenced above suggests that the speaker “do what yow wilt” with the spirit—who has several fairy characteristics—who appears to him. Fairy-summoning spells request treasure or other material aid or knowledge much more frequently than sexual intercourse. Xd 234's spells are in this regard more akin to necromantic conjurations, which more commonly reference sex, but even in these the sex desired is rarely if ever with the demon itself. Far more usual are spells summoning demonic aid in coercing human women into intercourse with the mage, or those that work through means of an image or potion on the human woman desired. A manuscript in the Bavarian State Library, Clm 849, shows several examples of experimenta39 that purport to cause a woman to fall in love with the speaker but whose language is rather that of extreme sexual manipulation. After creating a wax image of the beloved, the mage is directed to “write on the genitals of the image the name ‘Cupid,’ saying, ‘As you, Cupid, are on the genitals of this image, may you thus remain always on the genitals of so-and-so, arousing her so that she despises all men of this world and desires me alone, and may the fire of love for me torment and inflame her.”40 Love is situated in the genitals. Here Cupid, as a pagan god, takes the place of the demon spirit, but in either case it is not he who is summoned for sex; it is his influence that is brought to bear on a human woman. Demon-inspired lust for the mage might backfire, however; Kieckhefer describes the case of a woman, recounted in the vita of St. Basil, who had been so constrained by her amorous desires for a certain mage that she married him, but upon discovering the source of her feelings afterward she denounced him to the bishop.41There are many accounts of or references to human–fairy sex not in the form of spells, but in the majority of them the demand for sex is on the part of the fairy. In witchcraft confessions a male fairy, spirit, demon, or familiar may require the accused woman to lie with him as a solemnization of their pact; Wilby42 and Purkiss43 both provide cogent and illuminating discussions of women's accounts of this strand of fairy sex. In her transcription and discussion of the mid-seventeenth-century confessions of accused witch Isobel Gowdie, Wilby demonstrates how Gowdie's description of sex with the demonic fairy man draws on multiple traditions—as well as, she speculates, her own experiences—in order to create a coherent narrative for her questioners. Wilby shows that although sections of her confessions imply that Gowdie and others have enjoyed this supernatural sex, having “werie great pleasur in their carnall cowpula[tio]n w[i]th him, yea much mor th[a]n w[i]th their awin husbandis,”44 the scenario is nonetheless predominantly one of coercion and force, and certainly the original approach to Gowdie was the fairy man's.45 Purkiss likewise examines the confessions of Elspeth Reoch and other accused witches,46 who make it clear that the impetus for their coupling came from the fairy men in question.Human men, likewise, tended to be solicited by fairy women: in 1598 the Scottish man Andro Man testified, in his examiner's words, that he had “carnall deall with that devilische spreit, the Quene of Elphen,” who had originally approached him for this purpose, though Wilby remarks that he “seems to have been quite willing to oblige.”47 Literary fairies might also use their powers to entice or attempt to seduce their chosen human consorts, as Morgan le Fay does through Lady Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1400);48 and many female fairies in the realm of ballad and story also require human males to lie with them. In such ballads as those of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, sex is enfolded into a larger narrative of capture or seduction and abduction to fairyland, for purposes that may also include companionship, practical services, desire for children, and the need to pay a human tithe to hell.Demons, as well, were thought to want sex with humans far more than humans wanted sex with them.49 Medieval and early modern demonologists argued that demonic spirits or the Devil himself might assume a glamour or illusion to seduce witches into sex, but of greater interest to these theorists were the nonconsensual sex practices of Satan's minions. The mechanics by which such spirits as incubi and succubi were able to copulate with humans either against their will or without their conscious awareness are recounted in a number of texts, though the sedulous attention to detail reaches its height in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). Though demons are immaterial, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger explain, they are able to animate a recently deceased corpse or cause a sleeping man to pollute himself, in order to get the vital essence with which to perform the act.50 This process is referenced, though with some doubt, by James I, who accepts that it may happen but denies that it could lead to viable offspring, owing to the cooling of the sperm as it transits in the grasp of the demon from man to woman.51Further, by the early modern period accounts of demonic sex primarily concern human women. Patristic and early medieval accounts and illustrations show saints being tempted by demons in the shape of women; this tradition is continued in later literary characters such as Duessa in the Faerie Queene, whose description echoes that of the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation and thus betrays her demonic nature.52 But for consummated sex with demons, as opposed to mere temptation, women become the focus, owing of course to their weaker nature.There is, then, a large body of literature that accepts sex with fairy/demon spirits but seems to ignore or deny the possibility of it being sought or desired by the human. What does it mean, in that case, that the scribe of Xd 234 explicitly requests such a conjunction? There is more background to this question and to these spells, however, for there are in fact many ballads and folktales concerning men who desire sex with fairies or other supernatural beings, usually variants of the “Animal Bride” type. The human male tricks or traps a fairy woman into staying with him for a host of reasons, including sex/romance but also material gain and the need to perpetuate his line. These narratives are in no small part genealogically focused, sometimes explaining the particular characteristics of a certain family line as stemming from their fairy ancestor. In the Melusine legend first compiled by Jean D'Arras at the end of the fourteenth century,53 Raymondin traps the eponymous fairy woman into staying with him by means of a compact—until he breaks his promise, when she escapes, though she returns periodically to warn her descendants of coming ill fortune.Just as in the stories of Tam Lin and his literary relatives, where the captured human must remain in fairyland until he or she is rescued or can escape, in these narratives keeping the fairy woman from leaving is a primary focus. This can be done by confiscating magical objects belonging to her, like the seal's skin in the Celtic tales of the selkies that, regained, allows the fairy woman to return to her seal shape and swim away. Hopeful husbands likewise may steal the feather robes of swan maidens to keep them from flying off. There is also a warning in many of these stories that the fairies' essential nature must not be probed too deeply if they are to stay: Melusine stays with her husband, giving good fortune to his family, on the condition that he never look at her on Saturdays. Eventually doing so, he discovers that she possesses a serpent's tail from the waist down; realizing she has been found out, Melusine flies away with a shriek. In Marie de France's Launval,54 written around the turn of the thirteenth century, the knight's fairy lover warns him, “If this love were known[,]/you would never see me again/or possess my body,” though after he does tell of her existence she eventually relents.Warnings concerning secrecy, silence, and the unspeakable nature of faerie also appear in a spell in Xd 234. It warns, “I advise thee to be well ware that you ask her not what she is, and also I advise thee to be well ware that you never tell, during the time she is bound in friendship to thee, what she doth for thee.” However, there is no sense that the proscription is necessary in order to keep Lilia with the mage; there is nothing long term about this contact. The stories of men who desire fairy lovers are really those of men who want fairy wives—they are concerned with ways to keep the fairy women from leaving—but these spells specifically detail the way to banish her once the mage has gotten what he has requested. Discretion concerning this particular fairy consort instead appears due to a fear of more immediate, physical harm.For fairies, whether or not associated with devils, were creatures to treat with caution; they might offer substantial aid to those they chose to favor, but they were more often influenced by particular contractual relationships, or caprice, than by their essential moral natures.55 Wilby makes the argument that cunning women and other summoners of spirits might have been relatively at ease with this moral ambiguity in their spirit partners, not finding it necessary to code them as solely malevolent or beneficent: “Early modern … culture was still considerably influenced by a magical, essentially monist, conception of life, and therefore people would have been more comfortable with the idea of ambivalence in both people and spirits than contemporary Christian teachings might suggest.”56Acceptance of moral ambiguity did not, however, lead to being sanguine about potential dangers: fairy folk were thought to engage in a variety of antisocial practices ranging from the annoying to the lethal, including violent pinching, blood sucking, wounding with elfshot, and sacrificing to hell. A large percentage of Xd 234's spells are concerned with forestalling the fairies' penchant for evildoing. They are debarred from holding any power over the speaker's body or mind or hurting any other creatures or things in the world; they are warned to use neither guile nor mockery to trick him and to keep from doing him any harm whether he is awake or asleep. The speaker also takes care to reassure the potential summoner, “[Y]ou needest not to fear her, for she shall have no power to hurt thee, being so bound as is afore to thee prescribed,” itself ominous in its implication that if for some reason the mage had not bound her correctly, the outcome might not be so salutary.One thing is certain: though what evil the fairies of these spells might do is not clearly specified, they are dangerous. Lilia is no animal bride, to be even partially domesticated; in the potentially explosive nature of the contact with them, she and her sisters are connected to the demon-summoning tradition, which seeks to limit the term of interaction57 and bind the evil spirit with appeals to higher powers, most often religious, before the human is able to engage with it. A relatively mild example of limitation is the conjuration in e. Mus. 173 f3, which warns that after the spirit has been brought to appear in the magic circle, “looke not to muche on him I warne thee for it is not holsome,”58 and the concern rises upward from there.The confrontation with and acceptance of danger that emerges in these spells also affects the self-fashioning of the scribe/mage. Klaassen offers an important analysis of the formulation of masculinity evinced in medieval grimoires, in particular the boast or brag, showing that while certain features of the magician's lifestyle, including clothing and probable celibacy, might have been seen as potentially emasculating, spells and books of magic also often include elements that show the mage presenting himself as “‘a man's man,’ intelligent, materially successful, controlled, and bold.”59 Xd 234's spells address at times a separate auditor, the potential user of the spells, and offer him commentary and warnings. Here the speaker clearly codes himself as a man of power and courage: having himself bound the fairies correctly and escaped the hurt they may cause, he is shown as brave and also a superior magician, able from his lofty stature to offer aid to one he feels might need it. He also boasts of his sexual relations with Lilia: “[F]or beauty or bounty neither queen nor empress in all the whole world is able to countervail her, for I have diverse times proved her and have had her with me.” The particularly fulsome praise of Lilia's sexual nature and talents in bed argues that he is not only man enough to tame a fearsome fairy but also man enough to rouse a woman to great lubricity. Thus, though the repeated consummation of the sexual act here is contrary to the tradition of courtly love, the use of the body of the female to effect a moment of male bonding and bravado also echoes Simon Gaunt's formulation of the fin'amor genre as one in which the beloved fair woman, so far from being the main focus of the men's existence, is essentially used as the vehicle by which they negotiate their own relationships.60Despite its interspecies nature, then, and even despite the dangers it was understood to pose, there were a number of benefits for a human man in having a fairy necromantically or otherwise magically bound to him: she could be summoned and dismissed at will; she would burn with desire for him; and in this instance at least, she has the additional important attribute of permanent virginity, being repeatedly referenced in the spells as a virgin although the speaker has lain with her “diverse times.” Beyond this, there was the frisson of danger inherent in dealing, especially so intimately, with such a potentially fearsome being, and the opportunity to use these risky dealings to enhance the speaker's own image. But while on the one hand fairy sex is clearly presented as dangerous, it would perhaps also have seemed safer in some ways to a cleric or scholar in an all-male community than would intercourse with a human woman, even one demon-bound into lustful submission. Safer in terms of possible pregnancy, possible venereal disease, possible risk of marriage and subsequent denunciation, as happened to the hopeful necromancer in the vita of St. Basil. Safer in terms of not having to have a wife who was always around and could not be banished. Perhaps even safer in relation to his immortal soul. For there was always the question of whether fairies did exist, whether demon sex was even possible,61 and therefore there was the potential benefit of not actually having to go through with the act. Speaking of, desiring, preparing for sex with a fairy might have been enough. After all, the perils of spirits were to some extent theoretical, but human women were known to be dangerous.The mingling of traditions evident in the spells of Xd 234 makes it difficult to date the work with any degree of certainty. While the Folger dates the manuscript to “ca. 1600,” Heather Wolfe, the curator of manuscripts, explains that this designation is based solely on the handwriting style, as the library has no records concerning its provenance.62 Looking at texts with similar phraseology or nomenclature provides only limited help: the earliest referents of the fairies' names appear in the medieval MS 448 in “The Sigismund Fever Charm,”63 though here they name fevers, not fairies. Demon-summoning manuscripts with similar formulae or names range through the Middle Ages. Additional indicators as to date can be found in Scot's Discouerie (1584). Klaassen and Chris Phillips show that “Scot was reasonably careful in reproducing original texts” of spells, though he betrays a selection bias toward the lurid and sensational64 and adds occasional sardonic marginal notes. One of the spells given by Scot is “An experiment of the dead,” which includes “[t]he maner of binding the fairie Sibylia at hir appearing”; the spell reads for several sections, each several lines long, almost word-for-word with the four spells in Xd 234.65 It seems possible that the manuscript spells and Scot's original might have been different translations-with-emendations of the same Latin experimentum. However, a major difference between “An experiment of the dead” and the conjuring of Lilia is the latter's comparative lack of paraphernalia and ritual. While Sibylia's conjuration requires a dead body to be raised, a badge reading “Sorthie, Sorthia, Sorthios” to be fashioned and pinned on the breast of the mage, and an intermediary spirit to be summoned, trapped in a “christall stone”66 and then sent to fetch the fairy, Xd 234's spells call for none of this apparatus. Though both require a circle to be drawn, Xd 234 does not specify its size and seems reasonably indifferent to its composition, directing that it be drawn of “chalk or otherwise,” nor is there any intermediary required,67 and this general paring away of ritual points to a later date. Two other spells, in MSS 3824 (1649) and Sloane 1227 (ca. seventeenth century), give as the names of the seven sisters of the fairies to be summoned several that are identical or similar, but none makes any mention of copulation, and they are almost certainly more recent than Xd 234.The strongly Catholic terminology used throughout, including “confessors” and “martyrs,” and the spells' emphasis on the Virgin Mary, may seem to imply that the group of spells is a copy, emendation, or translation of a version from or before 1558, the last year of Mary I's reign and the last time in the early modern period that the Catholic Church held any significant political power in England. As Eamon Duffy and others make clear, however, elements of Catholic belief, ritual, and terminology persisted in England for at least two generations after the Reformation,68 so the religious wording cannot provide very precise help. Finally, the emphasis on virginity, coupled with the use of the words “queen” and “empress” in a human as well as a fairy context, recalls Elizabeth I, particularly in relation to her depiction in the Faerie Queene in 1590 and 1596. But this connection is too nebulous to provide a firm clue as to the manuscript's date.Situating Xd 234 in time more precisely than has been done is not yet possible, therefore, but the picture nonetheless emerges of a document in conversation with numerous others, reflecting a variety of traditions. Aside from its emphasis on the “carnal copulation” desired by the sp
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