Magic of the Poppet

By autumn my apothecary is at its fullest, and its most fragrant. All through the green months I am out with my baskets... and now the whole reckoning of that long gathering hangs everywhere about me. Bunches of bergamot and wormwood and meadowsweet strung in dim rows from the beams, drying slow. Rosehips reddening and devil's berries resting in their bowls. The last of the lavender bound in neat sheaves, the last windfall quince set by, the summer's oils gone still and amber in their glass along the shelf. This is the very season the witch's storeroom was made for, when the harvest comes in off the field, and the garden, and the woods all at once, and the whole slow year is pressed and steeped and sealed away against the deep of the year to come. Beyond the window the light lies low and gold and brief across the afternoons. Within, all is resin and dust and the green ghost of drying herbs.

And here, at the worn table in the midst of it, is where you find me this evening... a poppet cradled half-made before me, her slight husk body pale as candlewax in the lamplight. I am dressing her now for her purpose, drawing down from the shelves the very things I spent the summer collecting. A sprig of dried wormwood bound over her breast with a length of blue thread, for the carrying of a wish. A spike of lavender laid at her hip. A name spoken low over her, and a bright, private hope pressed close against the place a heart would be. This is the patient, unhurried work the dark half of the year was made for... and there is none I love better.

Her story, and the story of all her kindred, runs far older and far gentler than the one the world has given into your keeping. Let me tell it to you while my hands go on with their quiet binding.

A poppet, once you brush away all the fright that clever, fearful people have heaped upon her over the years, is the simplest and most tender thing I know. She is merely a body made to carry a wish. Our kind has shaped her out of whatever lay nearest the loving hand... out of rag and wool and beeswax, out of clay, out of a carved knuckle of root, out of grain plaited to gold, out of the pale dry leaf of the field. What she was made of never once mattered. She was always only the cup, and the wish poured into her was the wine. Whether that hope was for a fever to break, or a lean cupboard to fill, or a child to be carried safe through a bad night, the making of her was an act of love long before it was ever an act of magic.

I know the other tale, of course. We all do... the figure bristling with pins, the muttered curse, the wax face weeping in the candlelight. But that is the story the frightened centuries told themselves, and the picture-houses sold back to us afterward, dressed up and passed off as history. Follow the poppet down the long reach of the years and you will find her, over and over again, an instrument of pure mercy... pressed against a hot brow, tucked beneath a sickbed, seated by the doorstone to turn ill luck back from the threshold. She was medicine far, far more often than ever she was a weapon.

But before I carry you off across the water to the far countries in my blood, there is a debt I must name, and name gladly. The corn husk doll herself... the shape I so love to make, that figure of folded husk... began in neither Wales nor Bohemia, nor anywhere in the whole of Europe. She is a daughter of this land, and of its first peoples, the Haudenosaunee and their kin of the northeastern woods. They were creating the first of them from the husks of the sacred corn, which they hold as one of the Three Sisters who feed the living world. Their story tells of the Corn Spirit, who fashioned a doll so lovely that she stopped to worship her own face in a still pool and forgot the children she was made to comfort... and so the Creator lifted her beautiful face clean from her. To this hour their husk dolls are made with no face at all, a soft and lasting teaching against pride. Companions they were, for the children, and quiet keepers of protection besides.

So when I take a bundle of husk into my hands, I do it in gratitude, and I do it knowing full well whose hands shaped them first. The form is a gift I have only been lent. The magic I breathe into my own rises up instead from two of my deep-blooded wells... the Welsh, and the Slavic. Let me pour you a cup of each.

Wales, and the Knowing Ones

In that green and rain-soft country of my forebears, there lived in every parish a man the folk called the dyn hysbys or a woman called dynes hysbys, the knowing one. When a fever would not turn, when the milk soured in the churn, when grief settled too heavy and too long upon a house, it was to his door they went, and not the church's. He was a healer, an herb-wife's equal, a writer of charms, a reader of stars. And the truth of him, set down plain in the parish records, is that he passed his whole life mending... calling the sick back home into themselves, loosing the cruel knots that fate had tied. For all its mists and its hauntings, Wales scarcely troubled itself with witch trials at all. Here, more often than not, the one who worked the magic was the very one you ran to when you were afraid.

In such hands as those, a poppet is made in the likeness of the one who suffers, and then she is loved exactly as you would have your dear one loved... kept warm at the fire, held through the black hours, sung over soft and low... so that every kindness done to her woven body might travel back along the shining thread that binds like to its like, and find its way home to the living heart that needs it.

Wales knew to gather a whole year's plenty into her two hands. When the reapers came at last to the final stand of grain, that last sheaf was never simply cut and carried off with the rest of the crop. She was kept. Plaited into a figure and given a name... y gaseg fedi, the harvest mare, or down in the south-west by the name I have always loved best, y wrach, the hag... and borne home in triumph to hang above the hearth all the winter long, the green sleeping soul of the whole harvest held safe inside her. Then, when the light crept back and the ground grew soft again, her seed was carried out and pressed once more into the earth, to teach the new corn how to grow. A whole year's life, rescued from the dying season and cradled safe into the waking one. I know of no lovelier working for plenty in all the wide turning world.

The Slavic Lands, and the Winding of the Dolls

Now come east with me a while, into the vast Slavic world where my own blood runs back to Bohemia, one western branch of a family of peoples wide as a vast forest. Here the craft drew in close about the stove, for the hearth was where the whole life of the house pooled and gathered, and its altar besides. The workings were humble and holy and threaded all through the ordinary day... bread and salt set out for the welcome of any soul who came to the door, a breath of cleansing smoke, herbs bound in bundles and hung above the lintel, a few soft words to keep the household at peace with all it could not see. And by the warm stones of the stove there dwelt, they trusted, a guardian all their own... the domovík, whom the Czechs understood to be one of their very own blood, an ancestor who had never truly gone, and who asked in return only to be fed, and thanked, and remembered.

Into that firelit room came the bound doll... the motanka, whose name is the word motaty, to wind, to wrap, to turn round and round in the hand. She was never carved, and a needle was never once let near her. She was made of torn strips of linen, wound and knotted by the bare fingers alone, for to pierce her cloth was to let all her stored goodness run out of her like water from a cracked jug. Inside was placed some grain and seed, herbs, and coins. She was finished in a single sitting, and the woman winding her kept her own heart light and her thoughts kind through every turn, so that nothing but blessing was wrapped down inside her body. And she was given no face. A face, the old ones held, would wake a soul in her and throw wide a door that any lost or hungering spirit might drift in through. Left blank and open, she stayed clean and safe... a fair house standing empty, where the beloved dead might come and rest themselves a while. Now and again a cross of coloured thread was laid where her eyes would be, and it was the ancient wheel of the sun, all warmth and watchfulness, set there long before any church came walking to those lands. I confess I feel a kinship for the motanka and the blank-faced husk dolls of this land, two traditions come by their own separate roads to the very same silence.

What a full household of them there was... each with her own soft duty to tend. The Berehynia, keeper of the hearth and all its kin, wound by a mother or a grandmother in the very hour a child came into the world and set close by the door to stand between that newborn and all harm. The Krupenichka, plump and solemn, a sack of the finest new grain given the likeness of a woman and seated in the icon-corner as a charm against the house ever going hungry... and in the lean bite of a hard winter, opened, and her grain sown out again come spring, own sister to my Welsh harvest mare. The Kubyshka-Travnitsa, the herb-wife, her round belly packed sweet with healing simples and hung above the cradle to loose her green medicine into the air and turn the sickness away from the sleeping child, her herbs lifted out and made fresh every second year lest her virtue ever grow faint. The Zhelannitsa, the wish-keeper, whom a girl made in secret and let no other eye fall upon, sewing to her a new bead or a bright ribbon-end with every fresh longing and speaking softly to her, "See how lovely you are growing... now be so good as to grant my heart its wish." And the wedded pair, the Nerazluchniki, the ones who cannot be parted, a bride and her groom bound fast forever upon one single shared arm, that they might walk the whole length of a life together and never once let go their hold.

These were never trinkets for a shelf, you understand. They passed from a mother's two hands into a daughter's, and down and down the unbroken chain of the years, and in that passing they carried the family itself... its health, its bread, its loves, its cherished dead... on through the deep of it and safe out the far side of every winter.

The Kindly Work of It

So there it is, the whole of what I have to tell. And do you see how the four wishes were only ever the one wish, wearing four dear faces?

There is healing, alive in the Welsh knowing ones and the Slavic herb-wife both, the doll tended so a beloved body might mend. There is plenty, alive in the grain doll and the harvest mare, a whole year's life carried tenderly across the hungry gap. There is family, alive in the hearth-guardian and the inseparable pair, a faithful watcher set over every dear head beneath the roof. And there is ancestry, alive in that blank and gentle face waiting by the firelight for the ones who have gone quiet to come and warm themselves again... a keeping-place for a love the grave was never able to pour out, a way of promising our own dead, "You are with us yet, and you are not forgotten."

There is no shadow in this craft, whatever the fear-wrought stories go on saying. There never was. A poppet, when everything is told, is the most human magic we have ever made with our hands... the plain and ancient wish to keep what we love close a while longer, and to hold it out of harm's way.

So... as the harvest closes, and the nights come down early and soft, and the hearth becomes once again the one warm axis the whole house turns upon, perhaps you will set a poppet where the firelight can reach her through the long and lovely dark. Give her a name, or a hope, or the aching, a cherished face of someone you miss. She asks so very little of you... only a warm seat near the flame, and to be remembered.