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Foraging for food is a very rewarding practice in and of itself, and greens are often on the menu almost all year round. This spring a dear friend and I gathered an impressive amount of one of the most useful herbs that grows in our region: Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). Stinging nettle is a pretty wonderful plant, and while I prefer to eat Wood nettle (Laportea canadensis), stinging nettle is also a nutritious wild edible, medicinal, and get this, fiber plant.  Yes, you can wear nettles. I remembered a few years ago my mentor and friend Natalie Bogwalker was walking me around a garden and pointed a nettle patch out to me. She said you could make fiber from the retted stalks in the fall. I love making cordage, but I had never tried it at that point in my life, and sadly the thought left my mind until recently. I was reading about neolithic cloth making and an article about nettle cloth discovered in a Danish burial came up. Nettles! The memory came flooding back to me and now I can't get it out of my mind. Both hemp and nettle have been used to make fabric since prehistoric times. It is even speculated that nettle may have been the first fiber plant made into cloth. This makes sense, since it is actually related to flax. They were even cultivated in Northern Europe to make coarse sail cloth, fishnets and clothing. Flax eventually over took nettles in the clothing race, but up until the 19th century a you could find nettle based "scotchcloth", a crude, household cloth in Scotland. Nettle even produces a "finer and silkier" fabric than flax. The plant not only made clothing, but it also dyes it. You can make a few different shades of green/yellow with a decoction of the plant. It was used all over Europe. It was Poland from the 12th century until the 17th century when it's use was replaced by silk. It also had folk magical uses there as well: "Slavic people have attributed magical properties to [nettle] since ancient times (1)," using it to defend against demons, disperse storms and protect against lightning.  Nettle even produces a "finer and silkier" fabric than flax. The plant not only made clothing, but it also dyes it. You can make a few different shades of green/yellow with a decoction of the plant. It was used all over Europe. It was Poland from the 12th century until the 17th century when it's use was replaced by silk. It also had folk magical uses there as well: "Slavic people have attributed magical properties to [nettle] since ancient times (1)," using it to defend against demons, disperse storms and protect against lightning. In Appalachia, some of the first white settlers in Kentucky, "... in the fall of 1775 lessened their dependence on deerskin by applying what the wilderness had taught them on other frontiers. In the spring of 1776, after the home weavers had built looms, and snow and rain had rotted fallen nettles, settlers gathered and broke the stalks, hackling and spinning the wild fiber as they would hemp, trading meat and hides for the weavers' skill with the shuttle. Weavers mixed thread spun from nettle fiber with that of buffalo wool to make a substitute for linsey-woolsey. The combination of a nettle warp and buffalo wool filling was "very strong" according to Olive Boone" -Mitchell G. Farish "Homespun and Buckskin"  Nettles were also used as cordage for fish nets and ropes and for weaving cloth by many the North American Native peoples, including the Cherokee. We see nettle cloth in Grimm's fairytale "The Wild Swans", featuring magical nettle-made shirts created in silence. (Please do read the story). According to Harold A. Roth who has an incredible website over at Alchemy Works, "The use of "unspoken" nettles for curative purposes occurred in Scotland as well as other northern countries. In Ireland, nettles marked the places where the Elves lived and could protect a person from sorcery. If cows were fed wilted nettles, witches and trolls could not hex them to stop producing milk, so this is quite a protective herb, despite its association with death and burial. Indeed, according to contemporary belief, nettle carried on the person protects from lightning - and draws money. On the other hand, the Iroquois said that nettles mixed with the dried blood of a snake was witchcraft medicine." Nettle really is as magical as it is useful. As I mentioned a few months back in our discussion of Mugwort, Nettle is also one of the herbs featured in the Nine Herbs Charm. It was called, " stiðe (meaning 'rough, harsh, stiff') is also obscure as a plant-name, but appears from the closing instructions (to the charm) to be nettle (urtica dioica, urtica urens). The name 'nettle' derives from a root meaning of 'spin, sew', and nettles were once grown for their tough fibres which could be used like flax. Nettles can be used as animal-fodder and even in making beer, tea, soup and porridge. Its sap can be used as rennet (to curdle milk in cheese-making)." - Benjamin Slade  Bronze Age Nettle Cloth In this charm nettle, "attacks against poison, it drives out the hostile one, it casts out poison. This is the herb that fought against the serpent, it has power against poison, it has power against infection, it has power against the loathsome foe roving through the land." I have read that the "loathsome foe" may be plague or other epidemic diseases that move, killing, through a population.
I'll save more information about the medicinal and nutritional properties of nettle for another day, but I know I am going back to that nettle patch this week and seeing if the stalks are great to yield their legendary bast fiber and see what kind of magical garment can be made from it. And here I will leave you with a tidbit of wisdom from Scotland: “If they would eat nettles in March, and drink Mugwort in May, So many fine maidens would not go to the clay.” – Funeral Song of a Scottish Mermaid. Sources: (1) Jadwiga Zajaczkowa. Hemp and Nettle: Two Food/Fiber/Medicinal Plants used in Eastern Europe. Slovo. http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/hempnettle.html Buchanan, Rita. A Weaver's Garden: Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999. Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Hatfield, Gabrielle. Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Power, Susan C. Art of the Cherokee: Prehistory to the Present. Athens, GA: U of Georgia, 2007. A great article about nettle cloth today!: http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/clothing/304924/second_skin_why_wearing_nettles_is_the_next_big_thing.html http://www.alchemy-works.com/ http://www.wildfibres.co.uk/html/nettle_hemp.html https://wytchofthenorth.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/herbs-for-hedgewitches-stinging-nettle-urtica-dioica/ http://www.bcliving.ca/garden/stinging-nettle-companion-plant-and-medicinal-herb
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A happy Solstice and Yuletide to all my sisters and brethren far and near. I hope you passed the time well and didn't drink or feast too much as I did. This time we pass between Christmas and the Epiphany often brings a restful period where business slows, people worship together and visit freely. For us gentle wytchfolk, the time after the Solstice is by no means to remain uncelebrated as well. In my personal practice I have had little to do with Gods and Goddesses. I am more interested in interfacing with the low spirits and genus loci of the region I inhabit. However, these cold, dark days I find myself drawn again and again to one name. Perchta. I can't remember exactly where I first heard her name or read about her, but in exploring my own Bavarian heritage, I feel it must have been then that I stumbled upon her.  by Becky Beyer She is wild. And I mean this in the old sense of "belonging to the forest". She is alarmingly both cruel and kind, attacker and protector, ugly and beautiful, old and young. She is a Goddess of the ancient Southern Germanic peoples, but she has many names, customs and beliefs surrounding her that vary from place to place about the German and Alpine countryside. Much information has been lost about her and her role in the old German's religious lives, for Tacitus' Germania, one of the main sources of information about early Germanic life, focuses mostly on the male powers that were. Surprisingly enough. Lotte Motz, an amazing Austrian-American woman scholar, left us many scholarly papers and a few books concerning Germanic folklore and mythology. She wrote in depth especially about female figures in Northern myth, and quite a bit about Perchta and her many manifestations. Through her papers and the works of John B. Smith, I want to try and paint a picture of this diety, and maybe you will be as inspired to paint her picture or join in her feast day as I was. Perchta is above all, a Goddess of the midwinter time. January 5th or 6th to be more exact. The time of the Epiphany. There is some debate as to whether she stems from Medieval Germany as a personification of the Epiphany feast day, or some prehistoric divinity, or a combination of both. But, as I am sure many of us can understand, the exact historical origin is not always so important as the traditions that grew out of it. It is during this time of the Epiphany that traditionally a special meal is eaten in her honor. Though Epiphany is a Christian holiday, it falls around the times of older feast days. The meal consists of gruel and herring, or dumplings depending on the region. She legendarily becomes quite irrate if her meal is not eaten and will cut open the belly of any offenders and fill them up with refuse and straw. It is difficult to say many definitive things about her early history, because she was most likely mythologized from a Goddess, much like her counterpart Hulda, into a terrible witch. Her name itself helps peel back the cloak that Christianity laid upon her; Perchta means "shining one". It's hard to imagine one to be a frightening witch with such a name.  According to Jacob Grimm, she was also the female leader of the Wild Hunt (which is a topic that deserves many posts all its own). Aside from her wild rides across the thundering skies, she is also the overseer of spinning and weaving, much like her Northern cousin, or counterpart depending on who you ask, Holda (Holle, Hulda). I feel John B Smith's paper, "Perchta the Belly Slitter and her Kin" gives a great synopsis of the complexities that Perchta represented: "Initially Perchta was the enforcer of communal taboos, hunting down those who spun on holidays or who failed to partake sufficiently in collective feasting (a propitious act designed to ensure future plenty). However, with the growing involvement of peasant women in the market economy (particularly for textiles), Perchta’s role changed to the punisher of the lazy. Yet Perchta’s previous roles survive, in attenuated form, in each new incarnation." - John B Smith Another remarkable and strange custom that still exists today surrounding Perchta is the "Perchtenlauf". It is a masked procession full of noise making, fireworks and people, generally men, dressed as terrible beasts with large horns. These perchent or followers of Perchta, serve to frighten away the cold, evil spirits of winter by out ugly-ing them. They are so fearsome themselves they aim to scare the very cold away. There were well documented attempts at suppression in the 17th and 18th centuries, but today, these processions have experienced a revival.  by Becky Beyer Following the transformations of a Goddess to a boogeyman-like figure is always interesting to me. To see where a figure was once held dear and sacred, and how she became part of the vernacular post-Christian folk practice, that shows a certain type of deep magic.
There is much, much more to say about Perchta, but I will leave it at this: Blessings upon your midwinter, in Perchta's name. May your houses be found in order and your spinning tidy. Sources: Smith, John. "Perchta the Belly-slitter and Her Kin: A View of Some Traditional Threatening Figures, Threats and Punishments." Folklore 115.2 (2004): 167-86. Web. Motz, Lotte. "The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, and Related Figures." Folklore 95.2 (1984): 151-66. Web. Photos from Wikipedia. |
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