Signals of Belief in Early England

Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited

Alex Sanmark, Sarah Semple, Martin Carver, Sarah Semple

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781842177419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This volume will throw new light on the intellect of the earliest English - the way they thought, the way they viewed the world, and the way they viewed worlds other than this. Previous understanding of the topic, well rooted in the ideas of its time, regarded the English as adherents of two consecutive religions: Paganism governed the settlers of the 4th-6th century, but was superseded in the 7th-10th century by Christianity. Of the two, Christianity, a religion of the book, documented itself thoroughly, while in failing to do so Paganism laid itself open to centuries of abuse, conjecture or mindless admiration. In developing new objectives, the papers here demonstrate that beliefs varied from place to place and were expressed in material culture. Through archaeology therefore, these beliefs can be rediscovered. Aware of the fact that even the best archaeology provides no open access to the mind, the contributors record, and study, signals of belief rather than what was believed. The premise of this volume is therefore that paganism was not a religion with supraregional rules and institutions but a loose term for a variety of local intellectual world views. The same courtesy is extended to Christianity. Both religions are treated as sources on which people, local people - the true agents of Anglo-Saxon England - eclectically drew. A range of material culture and locations across Northern Europe are explored, looking at signals of belief from the landscape, water cults, burial rites, the hall and animals in life and art. Each author looks across the sea to Scandinavia, as well as to the woods and fields, mires and mounds of Old England, resulting in a new perspective on the intellectual preoccupations and anxieties of a crucial age.

Chapter 1

Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda

Martin Carver

Introduction

On the battlefield, the valkyries have arrived, their horses gallop across the sky with a light rain falling as they shake the sweat from their flanks. Sorcerers send spells and counter-spells across the field; they change form, their spirits fighting in the sky in constantly shifting animal shapes. On the ground below berserker and ulfhetnar echo the bestial theme. They run howling and foaming through the groups of fighting men. Some wear animal skins, some are naked and some have thrown away shield and armour and rely on their consuming frenzy alone. Perhaps a pale man in a broad-brimmed hat can be seen walking here and there in the field. He carries a staff and two ravens fly above his head. None of this can be seen by the ordinary Viking of course; but what else could explain that lucky spear cast, that man’s amazing survival after such a blow, the incredible accuracy of that arrow? It’s a good thing that your side has its own sorcerers, lucky you remembered to bring your amulets and charms. That jackdaw’s leg has never failed you yet. But there is always the chance that today you will be among the chosen slain; that you will quench the thirst of battle with the horn of mead and hear yourself welcomed into the hall of the gods.

This passage is paraphrased from Neil Price’s remarkable book The Viking Way (2002) which offered a well-argued evocation of Viking spirituality, and has done much to make the study of non-Christian religion once more respectable among archaeologists. His method was multidisciplinary, putting anthropological observation, early literature and archaeological discoveries into discourse with each other, and letting each source of evidence complement and support and patch up the holes in the others. He uses the observations of anthropologists studying Siberian, Canadian and Sámi shamans to provide analogies for spiritual specialists, arguing in turn for Viking shamans both male and female, whose task, like that of their later analogues, is to heal and prophesy. The Siberian shaman encountered in the 19th century takes intoxicating drink, beats a drum and waves it in the air to conjure up spirits with chanting. He foams at the mouth and emits high pitched noises, before being guided back to the world by a girl who makes copulating gestures (Price 2002: 266). The Sámi shaman had a belt hung with a needle case, knife, brass rings, bird claws and the penis bone of a bear (ibid. 269). Some of these items survive and have been collected – for example there are about 80 Siberian ritual drums – so that in addition to observations of contemporary ritual performance, we have some of the stage props.

Taking a step back in time, Price reviews literature of the Medieval and later periods that record the comments of writers thought to have been in touch with non-Christian beliefs and practices. He collects 51 descriptions of valkyries and 204 of Odin. He sketches an eccentric community of divine players (irresistibly reminiscent of the members of an archaeology department): the ‘silent one’, ‘the wind man’, ‘the thunderer’, ‘the ancestral mother’ and ‘the old one in furs’. He draws attention particularly to the shamanistic woman, as here in Eriks’ saga: When she arrived in the evening, together with the man who had been sent to escort her, she was wearing a blue or black cloak fitted with straps, decorated with stones right down to the hem. She wore a string of glass beads around her neck. On her head she wore a black lambskin hood lined with white catskin. She had hairy calfskin shoes, with long sturdy laces, and they had great knobs of tin on the end. On her hands she wore catskin gloves which were white and furry inside. And then we are introduced to some of the tools of her trade: Around her waist she had a belt of tinder wood, on which was a large leather pouch. In this she kept the charms that she used for her sorcery. And she carried a staff with a knob at the top (ibid. 168).

Equipped with such images we are then ready to go back still further – to Viking times – and see whether such spiritual specialists have been captured within the archaeological record. Neil Price finds them waiting for us, particularly the women, in their graves. For example the lady buried in a wagon body in Fyrkat 4, with her silver toe-rings, knife and whetstone, numerous silver pendants, bronze bowl and miniature chair. By her side, a meat spit, a wooden staff and an oak box containing a pig’s jaw bone, seeds of henbane and owl pellets. Here surely is the once famous and powerful female shaman, source of wisdom and reassurance, mistress of life and death, whose authority was to be challenged and eventually expunged by institutionalised Christianity.

This hypothetical female specialist has been glimpsed in earlier centuries too. Tania Dickinson’s “cunning woman” buried in the 6th century at Bidford-on-Avon (Wa.), was equipped with brooches, a knife, glass and amber beads, bronze tubes and a dozen tiny pendants shape like miniature buckets. These buckets had been worn on a kind of bib beneath the chin, and the assemblage as a whole led even the sober and logical Dickinson to suggest that this was “the grave of someone with special powers” (1993). For Helen Geake (2003) the cunning woman was not only an agent of healing, no doubt of quarrels as well as wounds, but the supervisor and caretaker of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery. This idea, while tentative, is attractive, since it credits women with the psychosomatic expertise of seeing people out of the world as well as bringing them into it.

A number of recent studies have proposed a new model for what happened to these specialists at Christianisation, by looking at graves of the relevant period and noting that it is women who are the leaders in symbolic innovation. Bierbrauer (2003) maps the arrival of crosses and peacocks on brooches and ear-rings south of the Alps between the 5th and 7th centuries, and suggests that it implies an adoption of Christianity independent of social structure. By implication, it is an adoption led by women, since they were the bearers of the symbols concerned. North of the Alps, the Alamans and Bavarians sewed gold foil crosses onto tunics, but the adoption of cruciform brooches is otherwise delayed, because, according to Bierbrauer, “in the sixth and seventh century … the Germanic world north of the Alps was still deep in syncretism” (2003: 442). From the 8th century Jörn Staecker (2003) finds the symbolic repertoire expressive of a varied and changing ideological allegiance, and it is the female graves that carry the main investment: Thor’s hammer pendants and crucifix pendants. Female leadership in the adaptation of Christianity was also discovered by Anne-Sofie Gräslund (2003) on the rune-stones of eastern Sweden; and Linn Lager (2003) proposes that the rune-stones show a geographically varied and drawn-out conversion process. Here we have a picture of Christianisation in Scandinavia, in which women, key spiritual agents in the pagan period, remained in charge during the conversion process. Only when Christianity became institutionalised within the political process of nation-building did women all over Europe surrender their spiritual authority (Carver 2001; 2003; cf. Hutton 1991: 250; and compare his 1991: 324: “the victory of the new faith was relatively swift and absolute”).

What was it then, this ‘paganism’ that was abandoned so definitively at the beginning of the Middle Ages? We are used to seeing paganism only as the dead ghost behind Christianity, as the philosophy of ‘not-Christ’; Christian writers have made sure of that. The pagan is an intellectual cave-man, a spiritual half-wit, a manic depressive amazed to hear about heaven, a mindless practitioner of ancestral rites, looking for meaning in trees and pondweed. The message is clear – don’t go there: it is only for the weird, the witches and the irredeemably wicked.

Is there another road back that navigates between the prurient and the judgemental? It is a tough assignment, not only because of the misconceptions and wishful thinking of modern pagans, hedonists and Christian historians, but because we are not sure where we are going. Even when we think we can argue from graves and sculpture that pre-Christian religion had a high intellectual content and was just as interested in virtue as its successor, we have only opened the steel door of propaganda a chink onto the pagan garden. We are aware that the pagan world deserves our sense of equality and diversity, but can we give it? How can we compete with the relentless rhetoric of Christian salvation and its inheritance? Archaeology offers one way forward, but as we will see, there is no ready-made archaeological toolbox. The theoretical kit is broadly cognitive, but we will need a lot more tools than that (see Hutton 1993).

We do however have an advantage over previous scholars who delved into old religion and thankfully saved much of the evidence for us. In the last twenty years, early medieval archaeologists have explored religion as politics, religion as process, religion as symbolic language, as the architect of landscape, as multi-vocal and refl exive, and designed the archaeological protocols to go with these new approaches. It may also be that in our period of interest, the chances of understanding paganism are greatly increased, precisely because its oppressor was so well recorded: Christianity becomes the protector of the pre-Christian. We are also better equipped in that triad of disciplines that, as Neil Price showed, are the most effective way of opening the chink still further. In this we have yet another advantage over any who pursued the pagans in the Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries: a wholly new order of archaeological investigation.

Detecting, deducing and defining

David Lewis-Williams’ stimulating book The Mind in the Cave (2002) has redefined the world of early spirituality for archaeologists and can be used as a hypothetical underpinning of every thing that was to come later. He argues that cave art is a record of dreams, and offers a persuasive case that the shaman became a religious specialist through a facility to interpret dreams or to enter the world of dreams (and return with inspiring messages) through self-induced trance. He also demonstrates how, in times of social stress, such people can transmogrify into politicians, and raises in the mind of the reader the startling implication that every leader from the Palaeolithic to the present has successfully professed guidance from the spirit world. Such an apparently indestructible delusion could not have been possible unless the propensity was embedded in most human beings.

There may also be a connection between the degree to which spiritual dependence operates and the physical deprivation experienced by its protagonists – deprivation that we now encounter relatively infrequently in the western world. Price mentions for example the anthropological observation of “arctic hysteria”, the tendency of very tired and hungry people to hallucinate. Whatever scepticism may be felt at such generalities, I can personally vouch for the truth of it: in situations of prolonged fatigue you do see rocks move, dead people reappear and animals talk. Not only fatigue and drugs, but starvation and fear can deprive the brain of oxygen so that it plays its tricks. It is not difficult to see why certain peoples sought entrance to the spirit world from those about to die, or by inflicting persistent torture on themselves like the early Christian monks.

This is only to suggest that if the pagan Anglo-Saxons had shamans and believed in a spirit world entered occasionally through pain or ecstasy, they would be conforming to a global norm, active as long as there had been humans (Hutton 1991: 109; Sanmark, this vol.). Furthermore, in this respect at least (the need to contact and propitiate the ‘other’) Christianity was a no less enthusiastic champion of the irrational delusion than paganism. With its sins and relics, its devotions and penances, angels and saints, cherubim and seraphim, heaven, hell and purgatory, its transubstantiation of bread and wine into flesh and its fondness for ritual killing, especially of religious deviants, Christianity was simply much the same, only more so.

The kind of research that seeks to penetrate the ancient mind is archaeology’s current frontier and involves a new kind of discourse between the diff erent media. David Lewis-Williams is not reticent about using art, anthropology, psychology, ethnology, drug experience and 19th century politics to support his argument. Francis Thackeray (2005) recently connected three figures in a Lesotho cave with a photograph taken in 1934 at the edge of the Kalahari desert of a man dancing in an animal skin. The scenes, suggesting the enactment of a dying roan antelope striped with wounds, implied sympathetic magic to aid hunting and seemed to be endorsed by surviving linguistic connections between words for wounds, stripes and need. Such multidisciplinary inquiries require us to open different windows on to the past and put the different vistas presented by each into discourse. We can stop believing theorists who maintain that the human being is helplessly partial, the past is an illusion and that all observation is contradictory. Instead we can believe, if we are brave enough, that humans are irredeemably inquisitive, the world is diverse and that all observations are complementary (Carver 2002). In the Viking period we have ethnological observation, sagas and graves – which can be woven together to give an evocative vision of the non-Christian mind, as Price has shown. And in the pre-Viking period we have at least that, and perhaps more: a broader range of sites, literature, and if we allow ourselves to roam more freely, more ethnological analogy.

However before we embark on an exploration of The Saxon Way, it might be worth confronting some of the epistemological problems. The first of these lies in making equations with the very old, the very new and the not-so-new’s version of the not-soold. Ethnography provides detailed information for the observer, but it is 1000 years too late and not untainted by the agenda of the performer, as demonstrated by Derrida’s critique of the Nambikwara “writing lesson” which gave reflexivity its impetus (Carver 2002: 469–470). The literature is inspiring, evocative and imprecise, but 200 years out of date. And the archaeological evidence is contemporary, but partial, allusive, coded and equivocal. Cross-referencing between these three sources, with their three different contexts can certainly provide a measure of comfort, but each link between them – the rod of office for example, may acquire spurious ritual airs.

A second problem is that we cannot see ritual, religion or magic archaeologically unless it is the subject of some material investment. Logically, the ordinary cannot of itself imply the extraordinary, or the normal imply the para-normal, without special pleading. Therefore we tend to be confined in archaeology to the high investment sector, rich burials and buildings that are well-dated and associated with distinctive finds, since it is only there that the unusual is evident. But by the same token this is a theatre in which political interference is almost guaranteed. In other words the evidence from graves and monuments, while embracing belief, does so in a context of political purpose. And in most cases we can expect to get more politics than paganism. We are left wondering whether Price’s shamanistic woman (above) might not have been a queen, just as rich male warrior graves are seen as leaders rather than shamans.

A third problem, in Anglo-Saxon England at least, has been the study of pagan belief as though it belonged sui generis to the 5–8th century and to the island. This may be our period and place of interest, but no people on earth has ever lived in a timeless vacuum. Anglo-Saxon England did not then exist, nor did Christian institutions; what did exist was a variety of peoples on the east side of Britain who were constructing a variety of beliefs fuelled by their ancestral memories, the prehistoric landscapes they could see or remember, and their contacts with adjacent territories, perhaps most importantly Scandinavia. It would be more productive, it seems to me, to move the whole study of Anglo-Saxon paganism, or indeed the whole study of Anglo-Saxon archaeology, into a region defined by the Northern Seas, and give it a strong prehistoric dimension. To do otherwise would be like trying to study Christianity in Britain without Rome, though we shall need Rome with us here too.

If we take the well-known site of Sutton Hoo, it is easy to see that it is high investment that gives it archaeological visibility. High investment also qualifies it to express the numinous and the religious and their public messages; the ideological and the political. The burial chambers of Sutton Hoo are illuminated by texts, such as Beowulf, but are not explained or even given a context by them. Nor are texts provided with an anchor of reality by the chambers. This is because a burial chamber is itself a text, laden with topos and intertextuality (Carver 2000). Although there are suggestive links between the burial and the text, to compare the two is only to compare competitors in rhetoric. The barrows and the chambers make allusions to local prehistory and to Roman and German ideas, including eclectic samples of intellectual constructs relating to virtue, death and resurrection that we group crudely and inaccurately as ‘pagan’ or ‘Christian’. It is highly unlikely that the burial parties were trying to con...