Dame Dark
- All In Gude Time
- Mar 1, 2021
- 10 min read
Looking for the Witchmother in Sussex (Part 1/4)
Over the course of the last week, I began to set the wheels in motions towards formalising my relationship via pact with one of the central spirit patrons of the Traditional Craft. Following a series of dream incubations over several nights, I became increasingly aware that there was an overwhelmingly female presence in the dreams that I would consider ‘witched’ - that is those that left me, upon waking, with a profound sense of awareness and realisation. One of the most profound was both vivid and sexual in nature.
I have always previously been drawn by instinct to the Old Boy. In Sussex, he has a variety of names (Mister Grim and Old Puck being two of my favourites) but I had, up to this point, not considered the relationship I might strike up formally with the feminine power centre of Art. Over the course of several days, I started to question the hastiness with which I had plunged headlong towards the Mysteries of the Ol’ Lad. In every facet of my life, up to this very point, I have been drawn inexorably, and at a deeply emotional level, towards those things ascribed by society as feminine. I have kept as my closest friends and confidants, mostly (if not only at various points in time) women. I was beginning to consider whether there was another route for me to take, and whether I was setting aside my more visceral inclinations in favour of a more cerebral, academic ‘it makes sense to me’ relationship; one that bears all the flair and ‘spookery’ that can sometimes accompany the masculine, diabolic aspects of Old Craft lore.
I am making a conscious effort at retraining my natural impulsiveness at present, and so I deigned that in order to get to know the figure known as the Witchmother or the Queen of Elphame, the first steps would be to identify her in the historical and folkloric records of this region - that is, Sussex, England. I’m a great believer in the bioregional nature of this craft, and that the lore of the land we inhabit, as well as that of our cultural heritage, informs the ways non-human/spirit beings may have appeared or been interpreted in certain places and times. There are, and I shall note them as I share my findings later in this musing, crossovers between various spirit figures that have entered the European witch mythos, but there are also subtle differences between them depending on where they are said to have manifested, and in what time. These differences reflect (sometimes) centuries of disparate cultural evolution and exchange. To place them in a broad context can be useful, but also (I find) a hindrance, especially when the door towards Murray/Frazer-esque European monomyth theory starts to creak open. I have never, and never will be, a fan of the ‘all gods are one god’ or the ‘all these disparate customs share a common ancestry’ approach. Having said that, I’ll be drawing any conclusions I make from the cross-cultural fertilisations that may have impacted Sussex in it’s lengthy history.
Before I lay out my findings (which I'll be doing over four posts), I’d like to just iterate a little caveat: I am not, nor have I ever been, an expert in the sociology, philosophy or culture of the Middle Ages or the Early Modern Period generally. I am certainly no anthropologist. What I present here is the result of a week or so’s worth of book and article deep-diving. The links I make are instinctive ones, informed by what I feel could be true (or have a grain of truth) or indeed I believe to be true based on what I have experienced in the oneiric states I’ve frequented of late. Nevertheless, wherever possible, I aim to provide critical sources to bolster my suppositions however I make no profession of authority or historicity - so take what I’ve found with a pinch of salt should you so wish.
Dame Dark
“…and then followed the account of a man who was always seeing the devil, or the ‘Black Man,’ as he was styled by most of them. Their early Sussex nurture had been probably too like my own; for what nights of misery does that name, the black man, bring back to my memory. I almost shudder now at the recollection of the sleepless hours he caused rue in my childhood, and of the dark closet in my bedroom from which I had been taught to look for his appearance with ‘Dame Dark.’ Such tales by superstitious nurses are very generally prevalent.”
Charlotte Latham (West Sussex Superstitions, 1878)
The first folkloric figure that turned up in my reading was Dame Dark. In the above quotation from West Sussex Superstitions, she appears alongside the Devil - or Black Man - as a kind of bogey figure used to frighten children and adults alike. Aside from this singular reference in a 19th century folklore record, there are virtually no other accounts that don’t cite this one reference as a resource other than referring to her as ‘a companion for Satan.’ So who might Dame Dark be?
A local Sussex landmark might go some way to explaining the folk understanding of this figure. According to both Sussex Archaeology and Folklore and The National Trust, at the bottom of the Devil’s Dyke valley (itself a subject of a series of folk tales regarding the Devil and, among others, St Dunstan) there are two mounds of earth that were believed to be The Devil’s Grave and The Devil’s Wife’s Grave. Legend has it that ‘if you run backwards seven times around these humps whilst holding your breath the Devil will appear’. Connecting these two together, we might suppose that Dame Dark is a folkloric wife-figure for the Old Boy.
The colloquial and alliterative quality of ‘the Devil and Dame Dark’ bears more than a passing resemblance to a phrase that appears with some frequency within the Early Modern parlance: ‘the devil and his dam.’ In Cobham Brewer’s 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, it is noted that the phrase can at times infer ‘the Devil and his wife’ but also ‘the Devil and his mother’. It is important to note here that dam and dame, used interchangeably at the time, can have several meanings. The etymology seems to indicate that the terms stem from the Middle English dame, dam (“noble lady”), from Old French dame (“lady; term of address for a woman; the queen in card games and chess”), from Latin domina (“mistress of the house”), feminine form of dominus (“lord, master, ruler; owner of a residence”), ultimately either from Proto-Indo-European *demh- (“to domesticate, tame”). In contemporary English, the word dam is used to indicate ‘the female parent, mother, especially regarding the breeding of animals’. The Devil and his female relations (wife, mother and grandmother) form a commonplace feature in various Germanic, Teutonic and English folkloric turns of phrase. I shan’t go into them in great detail here but rather leave a link to a fascinating article written for the 1900 Journal of American Folklore entitled The Devil’s Grandmother.
In The Pagan Heart of the West, Dr Randy P. Conner (presumably also noting the scant textual references to Dame Dark) posits another similarity - the term ‘Mother Midnight’. According to a fascinating manuscript published originally in 1698 called A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (in its several tribes, of gypsies, beggers, thieves, cheats, &c. with an addition of some proverbs, phrases, figurative speeches, &c) the term Mother Midnight was a code term for both a midwife and a bawd (or brothel madame), often at the same time and used almost exclusively by members of the criminal underworld. Conner’s connection between the two terms may seem, at first, coincidental were it not for the fact that Sussex’s history is intimately connected with the Weald - a wild and forested expanse of land bordering each side of the South Downs documented from as early as the Roman occupation of Britain. By the mid to late Middle Ages through to the Early Modern period, the Weald had developed a reputation as ‘a centre of unrest and area of lawlessness, its dense woodland offering shelter for criminals and rebels’ and it stands to some reason that by the 17th century, the Weald and it's inhabitants may have contributed to the terminology found within the above mentioned lexicon of ‘thieves cant’.
To a contemporary reader, the links between midwifery and female criminality seem to be at odds. To understand the link between the two, we have to place ourselves in the masculine mindset of an earlier age to understand not only the threads that connect these ideas, but also their direct links to witchcraft. Two usages of the term Mother Midnight serve us rather well here. The first appearance of the term outside it’s usage within stage plays of the period is in Francis Herring’s 1602 translation of Johann Oberndorf’s The Anatomyes of the True Physition and Counterfeit Mounte-Banke, a treatise concerning the differences between accepted or ‘official’ medicine (often strictly Galenic) and ‘unofficial’ or folk medical practitioners of the time. Here, the term is used broadly to refer to the illicit practices of female midwifery. By the 17th century, advances in medicine were beginning to be monopolised by elite men and sanctioned by the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum was explicit in it’s damning of female practice of not only midwifery but any form of non-sanctioned medicine. In The Midwife Myth - Curses, Infanticide and Devilish Spells, Willow Winsham notes that the text propogated a series of lies that became common place beliefs and superstitions surrounding the female medical practitioner:
“Under the guise of delivering children, the midwife-witch was responsible for any number of heinous crimes. They killed infants either before or during birth, often stealing and dismembering the un–baptised child to use to make unguents for their devilish spells. If they didn’t kill the child, the Satan-inspired midwife took it out of the room on the pretext of warming it, only to offer the baby up to the Devil before the kitchen fire.”
It is no surprise then that we find, within the first few paragraphs of Anatomyes the following sentences to describe a whole host of dangerous ‘mounte bankes’:
“In the next Ranke, to second this goodly and sweet Troupe, follow Poysoners, Inchanters, Soothsayers, Wizards, Fortune-tellers, Magitians, Witches, Hags, with a rablement moe, of that damnable Crew, the very filth and drosse of the world.”
Even by the 18th century, the term Mother Midnight hadn’t lost it’s potency in it’s connections between female fertility, midwifery and witchcraft. Preserved in Parodi-Tragi-Comical Satire by William Kenrick (1758), a play that satirises Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we hear the following:
“Here a poor Birth-strangled Babe, Ditch-deliver'd by a Drab; Child of Poverty and Spleen, Mother Midnight's Magazine.”
In the context used above, ‘magazine’ archaically refers to a store or storehouse or the goods found within it.
From the position of ‘learned men’ of the time, women’s lack of access to education meant that what medical (or magical) curatives and procedures they were in possession of were not only suspicious but blasphemous. Medicine and surgery at the time was enormously influenced by Galen and his (ancient and highly incorrect) views on the ‘humours’ of the body. Galen’s medical treatments consisted of ‘simples,’ distilled cures from a single natural source that fell neatly in line with the Church’s view that God had provided the world with a bounty of natural remedies with which to treat illness. Many decried as mountebanks, jugglers and even witches at the time were practitioners of illicit surgical or ‘empirick’ medicine that was clandestinely practiced and recorded by (in the words of Jon Kaneko James) “chancers, experimental scientific daredevils, bright working class men, women and Jews.”
But I digress - how could the factious divisions between schools of medical thought in the 17th century have anything to do with identifying the figure of Dame Dark? Well - if we take Conner’s connection between her and Mother Midnight at face value, we might posit that a picture begins to emerge of an archetypal folk figure in the active imaginations of the 17th century populace, not only in regional Sussex but England in general. As both the bride (or mother, or grandmother, or perhaps even all of them at once) of the Devil, she becomes the archetypal witch figure, presiding over the dangers and mysteries of birth, sexuality and death. She might have inherited a sort of composite bogey(wo)man quality from the various associations above. It would make sense that Dame Dark should accompany the Black Man to the rooms of naughty children - she who presides over your entry into the world might also take you out of it. The figure of Fate (or Fates) accompanying the births of people is a pan-European mythic phenomenon that survives in it’s most diminished form as the Fairy Godmothers who appear in the collected fairytales of the Grimms and Perrault. That’s a whole other blog post though.
I’m encouraged in my connections between Mother Midnight and Dame Dark as connected folkloric terms for the archetypal Fate/Witch figure by one other curiosity I came across. In a blog series entitled The Most Dangerous Games that documents the history and origins of urban-legendary ritual games like Bloody Mary, there is a new entry regarding a game documented as being played in Texas in the early 2000’s called - you guessed it - Mother Midnight. The full details of this spooky bit of sleepover summoning are available to read in the link below, but it is curious to me that, much like Dame Dark seems to have evolved from Mother Midnight, here Mother Midnight is used to refer to an entity rather than as a term for a person’s profession. Much like my suppositions above, when ‘summoned’ this figure can be asked three questions:
Mother Midnight, when did you die? Mother Midnight, when was I born? Mother Midnight, when will I die?
So there we have it. Devil's Dam, Archetypal Hag, Fate, Midwife and Child-Terrifier all have potentials. The rest is perhaps lost in the mists of time. Unless we draw together a few more of these threads to reveal either an even more complex spirit figure - or perhaps a series of female spirits nestled beneath the South Downs of England.
In the next section of this blog series, I shall be looking for a curious figure referred to in Doreen Valiente’s Where Witchcraft Lives - Andred.
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