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Digging into the Origins of Folklore
377 Plays1 year ago
Episode 28
Welcome to The Bell Witch Podcast. Witching in the 21st Century.
Another amazing Moot Loot for you, from @Folkwitch_ Amy. Amy is an author, witch, archaeologist and lover of folklore. She uses her knowledge and experience of history to guide her magical practice. Amy has a flair for aesthetically pleasing witchcraft photography as seen on her Instagram which is simply beautiful. follow her at Amy 🜃 (@folkwitch_) • Instagram photos and videos
Not much of an intro from FGW still sounding like a frog. Please send this witch healing for a speedy recovery from this relentless cough and cold doing its spring rounds!
Special thanks to The Wicked Wonderings Podcast who supplied their trailer for this episode, Check them out at https://open.spotify.com/show/2rdWecOyytxD5Qz0YoSq5W?si=0337214098f54785
Feel free to send me your spooky/pagan/witchy trailer and I will play it on TBWP. Lets support each other and share your magic!
*EVERY TIME YOU RATE A SHOW A PODCASTER DOES A LITTLE DANCE*
Fancy being a guest or suggest a topic? Email Swailes on thebellwitchpodcast@yahoo.com
Produced with love and magic by Swailes the Friendly Green Witch friendlygreenwitch | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook | Linktree
Join the NEW Patreon for bonus content and exclusive episodes The Bell Witch Podcast | Podcast | Patreon
Follow #TBWP on Instagram The Bell Witch Podcast https://www.instagram.com/the_bell_witch_podcast/
Official Photos by Beverley Thornton Beverley Thornton https://www.instagram.com/beverleythornton/
Music by Geoff Harvey of Pixabay
Made on Wavepad Master
Distributed by Zencastr.
#witch #witchcraft #moot #folklore #legends #history #magic #bristol #runes #wutchmarks
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:30
Speaker
Now then witches and beautiful souls you are listening to the Bell Witch Podcast. Witching in the 21st century with me swales the friendly green witch. As you can tell my voice ain't sounding so good.
00:00:47
Speaker
At the moment I am suffering with this cough and cold from hell and it's a bane of a podcaster's life because when you're a solo host you've only got your own voice to go on. So I've been putting it off and putting it off and I can't put it off any longer and so I thought I'd just do
00:01:07
Speaker
Just a teeny tiny intro to welcome you on to this fabulous episode which is 28 and to introduce what we're going to talk about in this lovely episode all my other news will just have to wait until my voice is bare. In this episode I have a lovely guest talk about archaeology folklore digging adventures and just general chit chat about how amazing
00:01:34
Speaker
folklore history is and our creative people who once told a story that story ended up living for thousands of years after which is just amazing and quite beautiful it's a very lovely deep
00:01:49
Speaker
knowledgeable episode from Amy she's really passionate about her chosen topic and it you know it really shines through that's it from me I'm just gonna hit the play and I hope next time I speak to you I'm on the mend here we go enjoy we cheers
Amy's Background and Connection to Witchcraft
00:02:09
Speaker
Welcome, Amy, to my little podcast. Are you all right? I'm grand. How are you today? I'm good. We've been stressing over earphones, but we're on now, so it's all good. Amy is on the podcast. She got in contact with me after a shout out from Facebook.
00:02:24
Speaker
because we're both Punky Mums aren't we? The Punky Family now when I joined originally it was Punky Mums but it's like a radical Punky Mums yeah from America and it is a radical parenting group on Facebook and it is so good and I've met so many amazing people from it. I love Punky Family I would recommend it there's folks all over the UK in there. Yeah and abroad I think there's some a few abroad as well.
00:02:50
Speaker
for the people before kids that used to be quite gothy and punky and political and get shit done. I know we have babies, but we're still punky. It helped a lot with remembering who I am. You lose a lot of your identity when you become a parent. And it's quite nice to reclaim some of that. No, it's a fabulous group. So it made sense to ask for guests. And Amy said, oh, yeah, I'll do it. And I'm like, yay. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:03:20
Speaker
I live in Bristol in the Southwest, although I'm originally from Essex, East London kind of area, but I've been here for 12 years, so my accent's sort of neutralised a bit. Neutralised. Just Southern now. I'm folkwitch, underscore, on Instagram, and I focus a lot on folklore and folk tradition in witchcraft.
00:03:45
Speaker
I have a background in archaeology and anthropology. I did an MPhil a couple of years ago in archaeology and anthropology, and I kind of got into witchcraft that way, which is a bit of a weird way of getting into it, I think, through archaeology and anthropology. I had a very cockney nan who was very big on folk traditions and stuff, and I saw it as part of my heritage.
00:04:07
Speaker
But looking into archaeology and anthropology, it sort of introduced me to it in other places. And I love how you can still see it today, some of those folk traditions. And I like that you can get archaeological evidence for it as well, like maybe where the ideas came from. So I kind of got into it that way. And then I got into witchcraft that way. And I love it. I love the community. I'm going to a wedding this year of a friend I met on Instagram.
00:04:30
Speaker
one of her bridesmaids, which is really cool. I love being able to just talk about something I'm passionate about. My day job is for my sins HR at a university, which is awful.
00:04:41
Speaker
So I like having the chance to talk about something I'm passionate about with other people who are also really passionate about it. And becoming a mum was a struggle for me. And I think finding people with similar backgrounds and similar interests who are also parents has helped massively too.
Amy's Interests and the Aesthetic of Folklore
00:05:00
Speaker
And I've just got to say, your Instagram is so beautiful. You are definitely a photographer as well. You've got such a gorgeous aesthetic on it. It's like, oh my God.
00:05:10
Speaker
Thank you. Our old flat, we moved to a new house last year, but our old flat was in like a Georgian building that had really high ceilings and beautiful windows and massive window sills where I had an auto set up and I've not quite set anything up here yet. So I'm still trying to get into the groove of it again. I got into taking the photos during lockdown and it just turned out that's something I really enjoyed doing, which was nice.
00:05:35
Speaker
You've got such a natural flair for it all, everything like the colours and it all works really well on the grid. That genuinely means a lot, thank you. Yeah, I know it's beautiful, yeah. So, your topic today is...
Exploration of Folklore and Archaeology
00:05:50
Speaker
Folklore. Ooh! That. Archaeology and folklore. So I've got a little bit about that. I think I might start with Black Shark. Black Shark is the Grim, which I'm sure a lot of you know about. He's a big old black dog.
00:06:04
Speaker
who is a bit scary and if you see him you might die. I know about it through popular fiction I guess, there's a lot of black dogs knocking around, lots of grims and a lot of folklore is warnings so
00:06:20
Speaker
Black Shuck would be, don't go to a big dog that you don't know. So there's more to it than that. So I started digging into it. And Black Shuck is, there's variations throughout the UK, which I thought was really cool. Originally, I thought it was just East Anglia, but the version in Bristol was called Gert Dog, which means big dog, which big fan of. And there's a version of the island man, and there's a version in Scotland, and there's a version of the Channel Islands. And there's a thing in archaeology where we see
00:06:49
Speaker
types of cave art developing all over the world around the same time so it's sort of like how humans develop at a set rate even without communication and part of it feels like maybe that's what happened but part of it as well must be there must have been a traveller who came over and was like big black dog yeah you're gonna die
00:07:08
Speaker
go near it and it just sort of developed into folklore. I found out that in 2014 there was an excavation in Suffolk and that found a seven foot tall skeleton of a canine buried in a church graveyard. Oh my god. And they've dated it to, I know right, it's terrifying. It's massive. It was done by a group called Dig Ventures who are an archaeological, I would say community group,
00:07:33
Speaker
So it's a lot of voluntary work, they do a lot of stuff all over the UK if you're ever interested in doing it but you've not got any experience, they'd love to have you.
00:07:41
Speaker
they are wonderful people and they did this excavation and seven foot is wild for a dog and two buried in a church graveyard is also wild and it was very much specifically buried there and it coincides with a pamphlet that was published about Black Shuck the age of it from the area so there's a very good chance that this is where the folk origin came from there was this big huge dog that was knocking around the countryside
00:08:10
Speaker
And everyone was like, God, that's a big dog, Jesus Christ, don't go near it, you'll die. And that somehow morphed into, if you see it, you might die soon, it's bad things are coming. And it's kind of slowly gone across the UK. And it all originates from this one dog, who was seven foot tall, and they made a pamphlet being like, careful, it's a dog.
00:08:32
Speaker
That's bad, isn't it? It's amazing, isn't it? There's a thing. It's in popular fiction. It's been connected to Vikings and the great hunt and things like that. It's the wild hunt. And everyone had these ideas and then actually it was just a dog that was terrorising the town. And something in archaeology is that a lot of the time
00:08:53
Speaker
you find things and you might find loads of broken pottery in one place and people are very quick to say it's a ritual, it's it's an offering but in reality it could just be that someone's pottery fell off the back of their cart and they just it all broke so they didn't want to pick it up and sometimes the simplest everyday answer is the right one. So instead of it being like oh it's about Odin and it's about
00:09:17
Speaker
this mystical wild hunt. No, it's just there was a scary dog and people were trying to warn other people about it. And it just kept going from there. And now it's in popular fiction. It's in a book about a boy wizard that I won't go into. It's about loads of stuff like that. And I love it so much. I love that that's
00:09:44
Speaker
we've had this theory, we've had these stories and then archaeology swoops in and is like, oh, here's some evidence for it. I love that so much. Yeah, that is pretty cool. But like you say, we're always looking to put special stories on stuff for me. Like when I won that sword from Witchfest and there's loads of stuff about what it could be, like a ritual sword.
00:10:09
Speaker
I generally think, deep in my bones, that it was just somebody learning how to make a sword and use the material they had. And we're pratting about of it and it ended up going in Thames and they were like, oh shit, it's gone in Thames. I'd lost my sword. Yeah, I honestly believe that is what's gone on there, you know, because it has ABC and runes on it. I think it's just practicing. Yeah.
00:10:31
Speaker
Oh you've made me think about runes. I did an archaeological dig in Barclay in Gloucestershire as part of my uni degree and they found a stone that had runes engraved in it and everyone was like oh this is amazing but when you looked into it they weren't really runes they were like someone had seen runes. It's a bit like people who get tattoos or Chinese words that they look vaguely of that sort of
00:10:55
Speaker
aesthetic and things, but they're not real. It was a bit like that. Someone was just seeing some runes and gone, yeah, I'd do that. Practicing them on stone. And if you didn't know about specific anglo-fresian runes are a bit different from the Viking ones, the ones we have in the UK. So if you didn't know about them, you could be like, oh my God, this is a special thing. It's got an inscription.
Folklore's Influence on Behavior and Traditions
00:11:17
Speaker
It's really, it was just someone fucking about trying to
00:11:19
Speaker
recreate something and I like that you see humanity through archaeology. I loved history. I grew up with a mum who adores history as well and it's her fault entirely that I love history as much as I do. She dragged me to all the museums partly because they were free and we did not have much money and growing up near London we were very lucky with that but she had her own passion and it instilled it within me and I loved history and reading about it but who writes history? It's
00:11:47
Speaker
people with power, the people who have influence. I'd like to hear about their everyday people and it led me into archaeology that way. I think it's amazing. There's the everyday stories of people, there's a tile in Bristol Museum that's got a cat footprint on it from the Roman period and I like to think that there was a guy making tiles and a cat just walked across them and he was like, fuck off, get out of here, the bloody cat's coming over and ruining all my tiles and that sort of thing is what makes me love history because they were people. It wasn't magical, it wasn't
00:12:19
Speaker
you know, people running through fields and meadows in amazing clothes. It was just everyday people loving, dying, eating, sleeping, just having a bit of fun. And I've really loved that. I love that so much. And a lot of that comes out in folklore and folk stories. I really liked the idea of folk stories being like a lesson for people as well.
00:12:44
Speaker
So again, it's that sort of thing where, oh, it sounds amazing, but really it was just someone turning a kid not to do something. There's Jenny Green Teeth is one of my favourites. She lives in ponds in Lancashire and Cheshire, and she's got green teeth, basically. And some people call her Jenny Long Fingers because she's got long fingers. And it was basically a way of saying, kids, don't go near ponds. You'll fall in and all the weeds will grab you and pull you down and you won't be able to get out.
00:13:13
Speaker
but they created a sort of bogeyman of Jenny to say, oh, no, there's a lady living in there. If you go to near it, you'll fall in and she'll grab you and pull you down. And I think it was a way of getting kids to be safe rather than scare them necessarily. I was reading the other day about this and there was a lady in the fifties who said she could still remember being told about Jenny, Jenny green teeth living in the ponds. And I thought it was amazing how that's lasted.
00:13:41
Speaker
But it's a safety thing. It's don't go near the ponds, you'll fall in and the duckweed, I think it probably is, will drag you down. But kids don't necessarily listen to that sort of thing. So you've got to make an elaborate story for them to actually take heed. And you'll get that everywhere. You get it with the bogeyman, you'll get it with all manner of folklore, with pixies and sprites and elves and trolls when you're crossing bridges. You know, don't talk to people you don't know.
00:14:09
Speaker
I like that with folklore, you get these human aspects of it. It's not like a magical thing. Most of the time, it's just someone warning the child, warning someone they love to be careful, but doing it in a really creative, magical way. Yeah, it gives it power, don't it? Because it's like above everyday stories, you know, it's like an extra element of mystery. And so it probably works better as a warning than just saying, don't do that.
00:14:37
Speaker
I like the idea that this person's imagination is what has survived for centuries. A story that someone made up is what survived for centuries. And you're not going to get that from the everyday person in archaeology because archaeology is the history of
00:14:51
Speaker
human stuff, essentially. And history is written, but it doesn't necessarily record things like that. So folklore and folktales are the remnants of people's imagination. It's the history of people's imagination and creativity. And that art, that's cool. That's the part of humanity that I absolutely adore.
00:15:10
Speaker
And I think that it's great that we get these echoes of that still. There's all these things that loads of us still do where you've got no idea where they've come from. My mum came to visit and she was like, did you put eggs in the recycling without crushing them? And I was like, yeah. She was like, no, you've got to crush them because it's a folklore that witches will ride in on the eggs. And my mum didn't even think, oh, the witches will come. It's just a knee jerk reaction to doing it or the people who throw salt over their shoulder.
00:15:39
Speaker
over their left shoulder. That's a folk thing. That's a folklore thing. But most people don't know why they're doing it. They just chuck it over. You could do the more classic examples of black cats and not walking under ladders. All these things we do is like a knee-jerk reaction that have permeated our culture and our society. And most of the time, we've got no idea where they've come from. But it's because someone at some point has made up this story. And it's so ingrained now that we don't even question it.
00:16:06
Speaker
It's just there. When you start realising what you do. So I flip a match in the matchbox. I flip the first match and I don't use it until the end. Don't know why. No idea why I do that. I used to do it with cigarettes when I smoked as well. I'd flip a cigarette in a pack. Don't know why I do it. I've tried looking into it. No idea why. But it's obviously something I've picked up from somewhere. And that's probably a folk thing. It's probably a luck thing somewhere along the line. And someone made it up once. And here I am today doing it.
00:16:36
Speaker
No idea why. I know, yeah. Yeah, because you did a post on it, didn't you? I've not heard of the match one before. I mean, there's so many I do that I would never not do because it's just not, it's not worth the risk or whatever that even means. You go under ladders, you might get paid on your day. That's pretty obvious. I remember I told you mine was I never do laundry on New Year's Day. Yeah. And I don't know where that has come from. Perhaps my mum were the same, but it's like you'll wash away your good luck if you do.
00:17:07
Speaker
If you do wash it on New Year's Day, it's just like, what? Where does that even come from? But I'll never, never, ever do wash it. Never.
00:17:14
Speaker
I listened to a podcast called The Twix of the Sheets by Kate Lister and it had Ronald Hutton. I've met him a couple of times because he lectures at Bristol Uni where I did my degree and I feel very lucky to have met him. He's as lovely in person as you would imagine and he was on there talking about pagan rituals and holidays and he was saying at New Year he
00:17:37
Speaker
makes a point, he leaves the house around the back and comes around the front and makes sure he's the first one to enter with gifts, because that's the tradition and a folk tradition that he follows. And I thought, never heard of that one before, but when I looked into it, loads of people do it. And it's a bit like not doing your washing. Don't question it, you just do it. I like wishbones. Wishbones are a good one. People breaking them together and doing good luck. No idea where that comes from, but
00:18:05
Speaker
It's something loads of people do. Things like putting a sixpence in a Christmas pudding, which I know my family still do. And it's still a sixpence, which makes me query how old that coin is and how hygienic that is. But there's all these things. It is. But then my family will.
00:18:24
Speaker
We all like history and we all collect stuff that we shouldn't. We're hoarders that make it aesthetic. My mum puts a pin in a cushion to help remember something. No idea, no idea where that's come from, but she does it and she swears it works. People put in knots in handkerchiefs to remember things. These are common stuff that people do and it's folklore and at some point in time someone has created that or adapted it and it's just sort of kept going and kept going.
00:18:52
Speaker
it's just become part of our lives and imagine if you could go back in time and say to that person what you've just done people are still doing it in 2024 they'd be like why such a small thing though like why it's just i find that so magical that
Interlude and Local Folklore Stories
00:19:08
Speaker
is magical to me i mean and i use wishbones in magic like gratitude magic and manifesting i always keep my wishbones and wash them with the washing up and then put them in spell jars and stuff
00:19:21
Speaker
I do too. I use eggshells. I use eggshells on a lot of mine. Take the wood film off and dry them out and crush them up. They're also really good for plants. So that's quite a nice way of doing it. Really good fertilizer for plants. There's a good chance that maybe it came from that too. It could have come that it was good fertilizer. So it got used that way.
00:19:39
Speaker
No idea, but I love it. I think sometimes you don't need to know why. I think sometimes it's just nice to appreciate something for what it is. And I kind of love that. But at the same time, I'm really nosy and I've got ADHD, which you can probably tell by how much I'm talking. So I hyper focus. So there's a good chance that I'll come off here and go and look it up for about three hours until I find the answer.
00:20:02
Speaker
Hi, I'm Hannah. And I'm Jess. We're the hosts of the Wicked Wandering's podcast. Join us every Wednesday as we explore the mysteries of true crime, the paranormal, and all things creepy. We'll take you on a journey through well-known cases and stories off the beaten path that are sure to leave an impression. So stay curious, keep exploring, and always remember to keep on wandering. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
00:20:31
Speaker
So who else are you going to tell us about? Did you have another o'clock character? I've something that really bothers me is that Bristol doesn't have a lot of folklore. I've got family. One granddad was in the Lake District. One was from Wales. One was from like Ironbridge Way. And one of them was from East London. So there's loads of folklore coming up from that. And I think that's fantastic. But Bristol doesn't really have much. I moved here when I was 18. You know, really hard to get hold of any. And a lot of that is because Bristol doesn't have its own county.
00:21:01
Speaker
Bristol is a city in the county of Bristol, it used to be part of Avon, it was South Gloucester, it's kind of the boundaries have moved a lot so it's always sort of been its own little island and trying to find folklore about Bristol has just been bloody annoying but I like
00:21:19
Speaker
learning about where I'm from and I like knowing what came before me because there's a sort of reverence if you know the landscape and you know what was here before and I think I have a few gripes with stuff to do with ancestors because not all ancestors were celebrating. I live in Bristol, we had Colston, we had the statue come down.
00:21:38
Speaker
Not worth celebrating that man at all. No slave owners. So some of the ancestry, I'm happy to leave behind. But other stuff like the people who built the area and the people who created what it is today, I want to learn about. And folklore is how I do that. The one that I really like.
00:21:54
Speaker
is about the two giant brothers. So Bristol has a huge, it has the River Avon going through it. We've got Bristol Suspension Bridge which is what if people hear about Bristol the main thing that comes up and it's got this massive like almost canyon and the idea is it was built
00:22:12
Speaker
by two brothers who were giants and it's because they fell in love with someone and she she said whoever dicks this out can have me and they were like yeah all right game sounds lush so they went and dug it out and they were throwing rocks behind them and you get all of these standing stones throughout Bristol and a lot of them are said to have come from them throwing the rocks
00:22:33
Speaker
not that far from Stonehenge like it makes sense that people saw that and went oh how did that get there probably someone a giant throwing a rock yeah that makes sense and one of the rocks misfired and one of the giants killed his brother with the rock that he threw and there's an island in the channel between Bristol and Wales which is said to be the other giant where he died which is quite far from the gorge so I'm not quite sure how that makes sense but I love
00:23:01
Speaker
this story because it's how people in the past used what knowledge they had to explain the natural surroundings. So there's a massive gorge, don't really know about erosion and, you know, ice melting and things. So how was that? How did that happen? Oh, giants? Yeah, probably. And they've got all these standing stones and oh, maybe the giants through those rocks. And they've got this massive island that kind of looks like a shoulder of someone lying down.
00:23:28
Speaker
bit reminiscent of Moana, the island at the end that's a goddess. And it's a similar sort of thing. So there's this island in the middle. Where did that come from? It's a giant. That is a physical giant. It's how people interpreted the world around them with what they had. And you can think about all those deities out there who were about lightning and represented lightning. People didn't have an explanation for lightning at the time, so they used what skills and knowledge they had and connected it with a deity. And I think a bit like
00:23:57
Speaker
how folklore is creativity. Stories like this are how people just made sense of the world around them. And it's something that a lot of people look back and say, that's really stupid. Of course, it wasn't done by giants. But the knowledge that people had wasn't as far flung as we have now. To the best of their knowledge, this explained it. And people want to explain natural phenomenon. They want to understand why things happen.
00:24:22
Speaker
So that's how they made sense of it. And I really love that. There's so many instances of stuff like this around the world where people like Thor, it makes sense with the lightning. You have stories about, if you look at Persephone and how summer turns to winter, it was people explaining how that happens through a deity because that's the capacity they had to do it. That's the knowledge they had at the time. It really bothers me when people think that people in the past were
00:24:50
Speaker
stupid which is not a word I like to use or just unintelligent because you can't really compare to today at all and I think that's incredibly unfair and we wouldn't be where we are today with technology and everything if people didn't create stuff.
Modern Mysticism and Community Connection
00:25:04
Speaker
So they had to have had some intelligence, and they often did. I mean, look at all the art and wonderful things around the world that people created. It's people using the intelligence, the knowledge they have, the experience they have to explain the world around them. And I love that. I absolutely love that. It's another part of humanity that you get to understand through stories. And it's, again, something that you can't see in the written record or the physical record. So it has to come through folk stories and beliefs and things, all so magical.
00:25:34
Speaker
No, it's quite beautiful, really, that people thought and believed and explained stuff this way. And I kind of think it's a shame that we've lost that mysticism, kind of say it mysticism. Yeah, I think ghosts are our last sort of vested of that. There's so little in the way of magic in the world now.
00:25:53
Speaker
My view of magic is that less deity driven and more sort of this crystal was made under very specific natural circumstances isn't that magical to me the natural world is magical and humanity is magical and our creativity is magical and I stand in wonder and all in front of
00:26:10
Speaker
nature. I think it's beautiful. And I think with the leaps and bounds that we make with science and technology, it's quite hard. It's quite easy to lose that magic. And I think ghosts are pretty much the last thing that we've got left there because I've no idea where I stand on that. And I'm happy to have no idea. I think it's great fun to not know no idea whatsoever about something. It's great. I love being open to to new things and magic and something that's unexplainable. But a lot of people
00:26:40
Speaker
don't have that. And I think we lose a lot if there's no magic in our lives. I think sometimes it's nice to have something you can't explain. I think we always need to understand where things come from as humans. Sometimes it's just nice to not have to. It's nice. Nice just not to wonder beauty and wondering. And I often say life before Facebook, you know, when you think of somebody from your past and go like, Oh, I wonder how they are and wonder what they're up to.
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah. You end up making, you know, this fantasy life for them. And they used to do that a lot as a young person. Now it's like you just look for them on Facebook and you get your answer. It's like, oh. Annoyingly, most people my age have deleted their Facebook. So I've gone back to making up a fantasy story in my head. I'm kind of jealous of that. Far too nosy. I've had Facebook since I think I was 13. And that's, I now use it just to look at the local stuff about the estate I live on.
00:27:33
Speaker
because that's the sort of person I am now. This is what happens when you get older, you become interested in neighborhood stuff and bins. Are you 30? Yeah, I think this community is something I absolutely love and it's something as a renter I never had. So now that I've got a community because I bought a house which is
00:27:50
Speaker
something I never thought would happen. I just really want to be involved with it. I firmly believe if everyone gets looked after, no one gets left behind with the way that the world is. It's hard to help in the grand scheme of things, but if you can make a difference in your local area. And I think that's why knowing about your local area and how it came to be and how it developed
00:28:10
Speaker
and the people who were there before you is so important because it makes you connect with it and care for it more. I used to work for a charity and telling people where the money went made people care more because they understood the importance of it.
00:28:23
Speaker
and the importance of where that money's going. And now it's, for me, folklore and the natural history and stuff is important because it makes you care more. It makes you want to protect it and look after it. And I think the same goes with community too. I'm a big fan of radically caring for other people, just radical care above everything else, look after each other. Yeah. That's why you're a punk here, see? That's what punkies do.
Heritage and Identity through Archaeology
00:28:43
Speaker
Very much so. So do you, do you actually like dig up bones and stuff? Do you?
00:28:49
Speaker
I've never been that lucky. My archaeological stuff now kind of is voluntary. Archaeology is really poorly paid considering the fact you need a degree for it. Most of it is on
00:29:03
Speaker
short-term contracts so there's nothing in the way of maternity or sick pay or holiday pay and you have to live on site for a long time so if you have a family no chance. So a lot of people sort of move out of it quite quickly. I do more voluntary stuff now so for the last few years I've been working
00:29:22
Speaker
in rural southern Albania, I can't explain how I got there, I'll be honest, absolutely no idea. I've got a friend who was doing something there, a new song from UNESCO who was interested in something, it developed, and this made no sort of background and community engagement in archaeology. So I think that archaeology belongs to people, it doesn't belong to someone, it belongs to everyone because it's our collective heritage and history and
00:29:48
Speaker
I'm a big fan of making sure it's accessible and turning scientific journal articles into something that's easily accessible for people. I think that's important too. So I ended up working there and Albania was under communist rule for a very long time. There was collectivisation, it was forced labour. A lot of people were killed because they spoke up against the state and it was only in the 90s that it stopped. So there was like a power vacuum, there was a massive financial crisis. Throughout the landscape,
00:30:18
Speaker
there were these huge, huge concrete statues that are really communist, but they're like for people who died in the Second World War. And when the Nazis invaded Albania, they used guerrilla warfare to get rid of them. So you have stories of the little old ladies who ran out bullets, so they bolt the Nazis on their head with the back of the gun instead, like it was very much a community collective effort to get rid of them.
00:30:42
Speaker
And I wrote my Enfil, my research masters on the perspective of these sort of buildings and things and how the history of them makes people view them differently. So I think a little bit like the Colston statue in Bristol, if it's just a statue of a man who did some charity work, you're like, oh, cool.
00:31:02
Speaker
fact is he bought and sold slaves, so your perspective of that statue has completely changed. When you find out it was only erected in the Victorian period it changes even more, it's actually relatively new. So people saw these and during the communist period it was brutal, people lost loved ones, they lost families, whole families were wiped out from it, people starved. They know a lot about the food in the local area that grows in the mountains because they had to go and
00:31:27
Speaker
forage for it. So ethnobotany, so like the understanding of medicine and things from plants and the food of plants is something that's ripe there and still in use because it was needed up until the 90s. I was saying like how do you come to terms with these massive communist statues knowing what they represent? And they went it's a phrase that I actually named my thesis which was the dead don't choose their own tombs. So these people who fought for the Second World War and died and were seen as martyrs
00:31:53
Speaker
didn't choose to be buried under a communist flag. So they choose to see it as represent in the people who passed away for their country, not as a communist thing. They just completely face that part out. They've changed how they view it based on their current feelings and emotions. And a lot of their folklore
00:32:12
Speaker
folk traditions changed too. They changed to emphasize brotherhood over national interest and I thought that was fascinating. So I did work up there and they have Greek and Roman stuff because it used to be part of the Greek Empire as part of Epirus.
00:32:32
Speaker
Alexander the Great's mum is meant to be from that area. And I did a lot of work with the local community because it's very important. It's their history and their heritage and they should choose how people see it and how people interpret it. I'm a British girl coming over. It's not my place or my right to explain how people should view their own history and heritage. So a lot of my stuff is voluntary, but quite full on. It's why I talked about dig ventures.
00:32:59
Speaker
earlier because they're a massive, fantastic group. We do a lot of voluntary stuff and I'm a massive fan and next weekend I've got an archaeology summit with all my archaeology mates and we're going to go and decide who we're helping out next. That sounds really up ourselves but I've got some fantastic archaeologists in my friendship group so.
00:33:15
Speaker
It does. I'm not. I would say I just hyper focus on it. I love history and I love heritage and I love seeing how it impacts today. So people say, what's the point? It's heritage and the arts are massively underfunded in this country and it has a knock on effect. People care when they understand. If you take that away, people don't care as much.
Exploration of Symbols and Announcing a Book Deal
00:33:35
Speaker
Having a sense of identity is important and you find that through heritage and through the landscape and you take that away. It's difficult.
00:33:43
Speaker
I'll try not to make it too political. Life's political, isn't it? Hard not to. Everything is political. If you say you have no interest in politics because it doesn't affect you, you're wrong. You're wrong. All very privileged. But I've written a lot of freelance stuff about this. I'm going to segue now into something. I've written a lot of freelance articles and things for magazines about which marks, which are
00:34:09
Speaker
engraved into buildings in like the 16th through 18th, sometimes 19th century, which were meant to be apotropaic, which I think I've said that right, which means protection marks. So you'll see them in a lot of old buildings. They're daisy wheels, so they're like a daisy with a circle around or mesh marks with a W sign. And I've written about those. And a publisher got in touch with me after reading one and offered me a book deal. So I'm currently in the middle.
00:34:37
Speaker
actually now I'm in the middle and towards the end of writing a book now about occult symbols and runes and stuff so I get to draw on my experience in archaeology and I'm really excited. It's being published with Leaping Hair which is under quarto and they have a book out called Practical Crystals so it will be a sister book to that called Practical Symbols.
00:34:59
Speaker
I'm so excited, I've always wanted to be an author and write about stuff and one of the selling points, I guess, is that something that bothers me a lot is things being shared on the internet that have absolutely no fact behind them and people take it as truth. It's a thing that's a problem throughout the world. Things like women don't have pockets because they thought we'd hide witchy stuff in them. There is nothing out there that says that's true. It's all over, I'm going to age myself by saying this, Tumblr.
00:35:25
Speaker
It's all over Instagram. I assume it's all over TikTok. I don't go on TikTok because I know I've wasted my life on it. It's everywhere. And it really bothers me because it's not true and there's nothing there to support it. And I read books that have absolutely no founding in what they're writing at all.
00:35:43
Speaker
And people take it as truth. Research skills are not a thing that's necessarily taught in schools. I did history, philosophy, ethics and art at A level and I was not taught research skills, which is wild. And it wasn't until uni that I really understood it. So people aren't necessarily going to fact check. They're not going to necessarily look at primary and secondary sources or have access to things. And academic texts are long and boring for quite a lot of it. I've been attempting to make this book
00:36:13
Speaker
have factual stuff popped into it so archaeological evidence references to archaeological sites that have these symbols there's like 280 of them so not all of them have it but i've made like a conscious effort to be like no this is this is grounded in fact and i've got a section that encourages people to go and do their research around things even the stuff in my book i want people to question it
00:36:35
Speaker
I think that a lot of the power from symbols comes from their use over centuries. So the Degas, I'm saying it wrong and I know I am, rune, is the one that's like a butterfly. It's two triangles pointed towards each other. And it's been in use for so long. It means day, I think, and it was Anglo-Prussian, so Anglo-Saxon.
00:36:59
Speaker
rune and it was an elder futhuck so it was a viking rune and then it was turned into a witch mark because it was believed to shine light in dark places so that no evil spirits and stuff could could hide there. You've seen people use this symbol for this reason for centuries and centuries so when you use it you're not just using a symbol you're using something that has power built
00:37:22
Speaker
and built and built by hundreds of thousands of people over that time. So it's important to know the heritage of it. And one of the issues I've had with this book is I see a symbol, I think it's awesome. And oh, look, it's used by Nazis. It's used by white supremacists. Look, it's a fash. It's a constant issue that I'd be running into. And I think it's important to know that too. You need to know if this symbol is being used by a hate group and you need to do your research into that.
00:37:49
Speaker
because it might not affect you, but it might affect someone else. And if you believe in positive energies and things, if you're using a symbol that's used by such a negative group, do you really think that's going to benefit you in any way? Do you think it's really the right course of action to be using? And I'm all for reclaiming things, but you need to have a time and a place and a community that's big enough to do that. Doing it by yourself is not necessarily going to
00:38:15
Speaker
make a difference. And I've got a section in the book about that as well, about symbols that have been co-opted. There's an awful lot of them that were used by the SS and things like that. They were really into the occult. The SS, if anyone ever has interest in that, really recommend looking into it because it is wild how into the occult they were. But it means that they've co-opted all these symbols and awesome stuff. And I personally wouldn't want to use them. So I've had to like leave out certain symbols that I cannot in good faith use them.
00:38:43
Speaker
But I want people to look them up. I want people to say, oh, actually, maybe I shouldn't use that in my own work because it's literally a hate group, literally Nazis use this. So I want people to read it and question it and look it up.
00:39:01
Speaker
develop their own research skills and question things and understand the symbols and where they've come from so that they can understand the power behind them and understand they can be used for not just so day guys was just day, it meant day, but it can mean other things. So I want to see how people are doing that too, and how they're using symbols for different stuff or creating their own. Some of the symbols I have in there are neo-pagan, neo-pagan, so they all need
00:39:28
Speaker
a decade old. Just as important, just as valid. Creativity is important too. Oh I'm so excited that you've told us about your book. So is it an exclusive then that you've told us about this book? I've been hinting it. I've got a cover but it's like a draft cover so I was waiting for the proper cover to come out before I could post about it. I'm really lucky because the person who's illustrating it is Vicky Lester of Forensic and Flowers and I actually used to subscribe to her Patreon
00:39:56
Speaker
because I love her so much. So when they suggested her, I was like, oh my God, yes. So I've no idea when it's going to be published. No idea. A final draft is handed in in three weeks time.
00:40:07
Speaker
So I'm still writing it, but it's been a dream come true. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've always wanted to do stuff to do with archaeology and heritage and things like that. And I'm just, I'm so excited to be writing this. I'm so excited. Congratulations.
Personal Passions vs. Monetization
00:40:23
Speaker
That is so huge. She is amazing. Thank you. Do you have a witch business then? Do you do like, are you a professional witch?
00:40:32
Speaker
No, not at all. This is purely for my enjoyment. People have reached out about stuff like that. I find it really hard to monetize things that I enjoy doing. So I'm a big crocheter. I like crochet. I'm a big crafter. I find that I lose enjoyment when I end up turning it into like money. I see it as a passion. I would love to write about it.
00:40:57
Speaker
all for that but I think I always wanted to wait until it was something that I really adored that I could like really put my whole self behind. I guess it impacts my academic career as well as you know my witchy one so I have to be a bit more like on it about stuff like that but no I've got someone who has an MLM who regularly contacts me trying to make me turn it into a business but other than that no.
Closing Remarks and Listener Engagement
00:41:23
Speaker
That old chestnut. Thank you for coming on to the Belwich podcast. Where can we find you? What's your Instagram handle again? You can find me at folkwitch underscore. I also have a website that's linked on my Instagram. It hasn't been updated in a really long time because I had a child.
00:41:41
Speaker
But there are some old blog posts on there about folklore and witches that you can have a look at. I'm hoping to keep adding to it now that I've got into the swing of writing again, but we'll see. But at the moment, I post on Instagram mainly stories because it's nice and quick, but I do post there quite regularly and share stuff. And I will be posting about the book as soon as I get a new cover. I'm very excited to share it.
00:42:05
Speaker
I know I'll take that a point. Oh no, I've put you on the list of people to send a book to as well so you will be getting one from the publisher when it's published. Perks of the job. It is, isn't it? I love getting free books, it's the best part. Amazing. Thank you so much for having me, this has been so much fun and thank you for enduring my terrible headphone problems. It's fine, don't worry about it, it's great.
00:42:27
Speaker
You have been listening to the Belle Witch podcast. Witching in the 21st Century. Written and produced by me, Swales of Freddie Greenwich. Official podcast photographer is Beverly Thornton. Music by Jeff Harvey of Pixabay. Made on Wave Padmaster and distributed via Zencaster. Wanna come and guest on the show or got a topic you'd like me to cover?
00:42:53
Speaker
Email me at thebellwitchpodcast at yahoo.com. If you're enjoying the show, please leave me a review. Thank you for listening and stay magical, witches.