mewsings in January 2019

Christina Rossetti’s fairy-tale poem Goblin Market was completed in April 1859 (when she would have been 28), and was first published in 1862, in Goblin Market and Other Poems, her first non-privately-printed collection. The poem’s initial title was “A Peep at the Goblins”, but her brother, the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, convinced her to change it. (He also provided the illustrations for its first appearance.) It was, appropriately enough for a poem about a redemptive bond between sisters, dedicated to Christina’s sister Maria Francesca Rossetti (a Dante scholar who would later become a nun). And at this point it seems best to bring in the rest of the family: Christina’s other brother William was a critic, biographer and Pre-Raphaelite (and a civil servant); her father Gabriele was an Italian Dante scholar now living in London; her mother was the sister of John Polidori, author of The Vampyre (1819), which was based on Lord Byron’s offering on that infamous night in 1816 when Mary Shelley presented the story of Frankenstein at the Villa Diodati.

Goblin Market tells the story of golden-haired sisters Laura and Lizzie, whose country-maiden idyll is interrupted at the start and end of each day by the cries of goblins hawking their wares, a mouthwatering list of ever-ripe, ever-juicy fruits. These goblin-grown (or, in at least one case, imported) fruits are dangerous, though, as the sisters know from the tale of Jeanie:

Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?

Having eaten the fruits, Jeanie “Fell sick and died”, and is now to be found in her grave, above which no grass or flowers grow. Laura, though, can’t resist the goblins’ cries. She has no money to buy the fruit, but the goblins are only too happy to give her as much as she can eat for a lock of her hair. The next day, all she can think of is tasting the fruit again, but when the evening comes, she’s devastated to find her sister can hear the goblins’ cries but she no longer can. She pines away, till Lizzie sacrifices herself for her, going to the goblin men and trying to buy their fruits with a penny. When the goblins realise she isn’t going to gobble their fruit up straight away, they assault her with it, pelting her, and smearing it into her face. Lizzie goes home covered in fruit pulp and juice, and offers herself to Laura:

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.

Finding the fruit now tastes of a “bitterness without a name”, Laura is saved, and we get a brief, trite moral about there being “no friend like a sister”, then the poem ends. The moral in no way satisfies, but isn’t that always the way with fairy tale morals? They’re like the “Once upon a time” at the beginning — part of the formula, a way to get things started or get them stopped, a frame for the wonders contained within, and, like most frames, not to be examined too closely.

Goblin Market was well-received at the time (though Ruskin didn’t like its irregular rhyme scheme and line lengths), and has since, like eat-me Alice, only grown in stature, and is now perhaps Christina Rossetti’s second most well-known poem (the first being “In the Bleak Midwinter”).

There’s something startling, even shocking, about the poem, that begs for explanation. Those lines I quoted just above are perhaps the key to this feeling, arriving as they do in the midst of a poem by a woman Victorian writer who never married (though was several times engaged), and who held strong religious views. She herself (according to an 1895 biography by her friend Mackenzie Bell) said the poem had no specific meaning, and was just a fairy-story. Brian Stableford, in The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy, calls it “one of the most vividly erotic pieces of writing to have surfaced in England during the entirety of Victoria’s reign”, and Kinuko Y Craft’s illustrations for the poem, published in Playboy in 1970, make it clear that, to her, the goblins’ fruits were sexual in nature. At the time she wrote it, Christina Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary for fallen women in Highgate, an institution “remarkable in the period for its conviction that women who had transgressed sexually could be redeemed” (“An introduction to ‘Goblin Market’” by Dinah Roe), and the tale-within-a-tale of Jeanie:

Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died

…combined with the fact that only “maids” hear the goblins’ cries, and Laura ceases to hear them after she’s tasted their fruit, makes it sound that the poem is about Victorian ideas of sexual purity and young women having to act “as modest maidens should” — that is, until it comes to Laura’s redemption through Lizzie putting herself through the same ordeal, which doesn’t fit.

Nevertheless, the poem is undeniably, well, fruity.

Other critics go for a more religious interpretation, and fruit is laden with religious significance, from the fruit of the Garden of Eden, to “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16):

“…it is easy to see the produce of the goblins as the corruptible, temporal rewards of earthly life that should be passed over, not because they are necessarily bad, but because there is something better to seek, something that will satisfy where the goblin fruit cannot: the eternal, incorruptible rewards of heaven.” (“Fallen or Forbidden: Rosetti’s ‘Goblin Market’” by Lesa Scholl)

Also, there’s the poem’s feminism:

“The goblin merchants are men… who dominate women; they consume their prey like the fruit they sell, tossing the rinds and pits away once they have found temporary satiety…” (“Can I know it? — Nay: An Alternative Interpretation of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’” by Matt Christensen)

Laura’s pining away for another taste of the fruit sounds like addiction (and fits in with Christina’s brother Dante’s wife’s death from a laudanum overdose, though this was in 1862, after the poem was written), but if so, the goblins aren’t exactly your classic drug pushers, as they make themselves scarce as soon as they’ve created a new addict; they’re only interested in corrupting innocent souls, not leeching off them.

(The goblins are one of the most interesting parts of the poem, from a fantasy-reader’s perspective. They’re not your traditional goblins, but a ragtag mix of animalistic little men:

One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.

And I can’t help thinking of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whenever I read this, as he had his own little private menagerie, which gained a wombat in 1869. It was, apparently, allowed to sleep on the dinner table during meals. Hopefully Dante didn’t also gain his own ratel — another name for one of nature’s most aggressive small animals, the frumious honey badger.)

Goblin Market is obviously a tale of fall and redemption, but one in which redemption can be purchased through the same means as the fall. It’s the glamour the goblins spin about their fruit that makes it taste so good, which is why they don’t want to simply sell it to Lizzie so she can take it to the ailing Laura — they know that, without their sales spiel, the fruit will taste like “wormwood”. Likewise, it seems to be what the fruit is purchased with that gives it its evil or its good effect: Laura purchases hers with a lock of her golden hair, which is usually a gift for lovers (or, in Victorian times, the memento of a dead loved one); Lizzie purchases hers not so much with a penny as her willingness to sacrifice herself for her sister.

Perhaps, with Goblin Market, it’s not the details that give the poem its meaning, but the underlying sentiment, that it’s not what you do but why you do it that matters.

You can read the poem online here.

Like Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) is an academic book in part inspired by Frazer’s Golden Bough, and more notable today for its cultural influence than its now-dismissed scholarship. Weston’s book is largely remembered for being mentioned by T S Eliot in connection with The Waste Land, but Murray’s has had a more pervasive and widespread influence (among other things, feeding into the formation of Wicca, but also, I think, providing a key ingredient for a lot of 1960s and 1970s folk horror). I first came across it thanks to H P Lovecraft, who refers to it in “The Horror of Red Hook” and “The Call of Cthulhu”, and whose key idea — that the witches persecuted in the 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century trials in Europe and New England weren’t Satan-worshippers, madwomen, or victims of a mass delusion, but members of an ancient, if decadent, fertility cult, misinterpreted and demonised by their Christian persecutors — is referred to in “The Dreams in the Witch House”, “The Haunter of the Dark”, and his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, where he associates it with Machen’s “The White People”. (Murray subscribed to the idea, which informs a lot of Machen’s weird fiction, that a “dwarf race” once inhabited Europe and “has survived in innumerable stories of fairies and elves”.)

Born in 1863 (and dying 100 years later), Margaret Murray made her initial academic reputation as an Egyptologist, working alongside Flinders Petrie. When the First World War made archeological fieldwork in Egypt impossible, Murray branched out. She at first strayed into Jessie Weston territory, writing a paper on “Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance” (which Weston criticised), before settling on witchcraft in 1917. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe was her definitive statement, and because of it she was asked to write the entry on the subject for the 1929 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (which was still there in the 1968 edition). As Jacqueline Simpson, in an essay entitled “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?” (published in Folklore in 1994, and readable online here), says, in the encyclopedia entry Murray “set out her own interpretation of the topic as if it were the universally accepted one”. Her book had been read by academics, and some accepted it, but others — largely those whose specialities she touched on, it seems — dismissed it; but the encyclopedia article lent authority to her theories and reached a much wider, non-specialist public. Murray wrote a more populist take on the book, The God of the Witches (1931), playing down some elements (the sexual and baby-eating ones) and introducing others, such as the phrases “the Old Religion” and “the Horned God”, which would go on to become folk horror staples. By the 1950s and 1960s, her books had become bestsellers.

Much to the horror, it has to be said, of some of those working in the same field. Jacqueline Simpson says that:

“Precisely because [Murray’s] material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified, and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship…”

Compounding this, most academics in the same field:

“…deliberately ignored her… Normally this is an effective technique for ensuring the oblivion of bad books, but in this case it backfired, since it left her theory free to spread, seemingly unchallenged, among an eager public.”

Part of this is down to Murray’s approach, which is obvious from a statement she makes early in her book:

“The evidence which I now bring forward is taken entirely from contemporary sources, i.e. the legal records of the trials, pamphlets giving accounts of individual witches, and the works of Inquisitors and other writers. I have omitted the opinions of the authors, and have examined only the recorded facts, without however including the stories of ghosts and other ‘occult’ phenomena with which all the commentators confuse the subject. I have also, for the reason given below, omitted all reference to charms and spells when performed by one witch alone, and have confined myself to those statements only which show the beliefs, organization, and ritual of a hitherto unrecognized cult.”

Which even to me, an untrained reader, sounded like she was ignoring what didn’t support her theory (“the opinions of the authors”), and quoting only what did (“the recorded facts”). (Apparently what she left out, even by the use of a brief “…”, could, at times, turn out to completely undermine what she was using a quote to prove.)

But what’s interesting is the effect her book had. People — particularly novelists, film-makers, poets and 20th century witches — took to it not because it was academically convincing, but because there was a need for the idea it was putting across. There was, as Jacqueline Simpson says above, an “eager public”.

Part of this is down to the ideas held about witches at the start of the 20th century. Murray wasn’t the first to suggest witches were part of a single pre-Christian cult — that idea had been around in Germany and France a hundred years before — but coming at the time it did, her book seemed to provide a third way into a subject otherwise split between two increasingly unrealistic alternatives. As Jacqueline Simpson puts it, on the one hand there was the likes of Montague Summers, “maintaining that [witches] really had worshipped Satan, and that by his help they really had been able to fly, change shape, do magic and so forth.” On the other, there was a more widespread but frankly less interesting idea held by “sceptics who said that all so-called witches were totally innocent victims of hysterical panics whipped up by the Churches for devious political or financial reasons”.

Murray asserted that the witch-cult was a real thing, but explained away the supernatural elements. The Devil, she said, was present before the witches because he was a man (or sometimes a woman) in a mask and costume. This also explained why so many witches claimed the Devil was cold to the touch. (And, Murray says, “when the woman admitted having had sexual intercourse with the Devil, in a large proportion of cases she added, ‘The Devil was cold and his seed likewise’”, which Murray explains in part through use of an “artificial phallus”, a necessary requirement, she adds, because a mortal man playing the part of the Devil couldn’t be expected to perform without one for a whole coven of witches.)

(…And a note on covens: Margaret Murray is, apparently, the sole source of the idea that a coven of witches must have thirteen members, something she admitted getting from a single quotation from one Scottish witch trial.)

Another aspect of the witch-cult were witches’ marks which, she says, were of two types, either an artificial mark given to the witch when she or he was initiated (and which Murray suggests was most likely a tattoo, as it was caused by pricking of the skin and was often coloured), the other type being a “little teat”, which Murray says was probably a pre-existing supernumerary nipple, something she takes pains to prove occurs more commonly than is generally thought.

Meanwhile, of a witch’s ability to transform herself into an animal, she says:

“In many cases it is very certain that the transformation was ritual and not actual; that is to say the witches did not attempt to change their actual forms but called themselves cats, hares, or other animals.”

What struck me, on reading the book, and considering the way it aggravated some academics (the Wikipedia article on “the Witch-cult hypothesis” is full of quotes from reviewers pouring scorn on just about every aspect of Murray’s scholarship) yet was accepted by artists and writers, was that Murray’s ideas may not have been historically true, but they certainly met an imaginative need. The way witches were presented, through Murray’s extracts from the trials, seems to me to be painting a picture that’s very much the shadow image of the more intolerant side of Christianity that would have prevailed at the time. All the key characteristics of the “witch-cult” as Murray presents it — a mostly female priesthood, folk-style magic and fertility rituals, close ties with natural cycles and the natural world, plus lots of dancing, eating, and general carnality — were things repressed by Christianity but a vital part of humanity.

(This isn’t to say it was all about fun. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe — though not in The God of the Witches — Murray does go into the witches’ practice of baby-eating which, she says, being only ever of un-baptised babies, was at least probably only practised on the cult’s own children.)

Whatever Murray’s academic reputation, the idea that witches are part of a single belief, rather than being a scattering of lone-wolf wise-women lumped together simply because they didn’t fit anywhere else, is certainly the one you’ll meet with in horror films to this day, so much so it’s become part of the accepted lore of fictional witches. In a way, Murray’s Witch-Cult is as important to witches in their fictional incarnations as, say, Dracula is to vampires — an essential cultural foundation, but not to be taken as factually accurate. In this way, then, it fits perfectly with the other (mostly fictional) books H P Lovecraft grouped it with when he mentions it in his stories — a book that straddles the shady boundary between weird fact and dark fantasy, and so becomes a perfect gateway to that realm of the real-seeming weird he was trying to conjure.

You can read Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe at Project Gutenberg.