Magic in the Landscape by Nigel Pennick

Author:Nigel Pennick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Occult
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE MYSTIC TRIANGLE

No-Man’s Land

In the West Country magical enclosures are called gallitraps, which folklorist Theo Brown viewed as transdimensional gateways, artificial entrances to the underworld (1966, 125). The name gallitrap was given to a magic circle, pentacle, or triangle made by a conjuring parson to lay a ghost or entrap a criminal. An account of ghost laying by an eighteenth-century Cornish conjuring parson named Corker, at Bosava, near Lamorna, refers to a sacred triangle: “The parson, assisted by Dr. Maddron and the miller, drew the magic pentagram and sacred triangle, within which they placed themselves for safety, and commenced the other ceremonies, only known to the learned, which are required for the effectual subjugation of restless spirits . . .” (Rees 1898, 255). A gallitrap also can be a particular kind of “a waste piece of land.” They are uncultivated, usually triangular, pieces of ground such as the pieces of ground at a trifinium, the center of the junction of three country roads. This is also called a “cocked hat” (Brown 1966, 124), but more commonly “no-man’s land.” In the 1930s, C. B. Sibsey noted that in the neighborhood of Frieston in Lincolnshire, “triangular corners of fields are filled with trees; and the groups are known as ‘Devil’s Holts.’ The belief is still current that these were left for the Devil to play in, otherwise he would play in the fields and spoil the crops” (quoted by Rudkin 1934, 250).

Similar eldritch land triangles in other parts of Britain are called the Old Guidman’s Ground, the Gudeman’s Croft, the Halieman’s Ley, the Halyman’s Rig, the Black Faulie, Clootie’s Croft, and the Devil’s Plantation. It was customary for the farmer to promise never to till the earth there (McNeill 1957, I, 62). In his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Sir Walter Scott noted, “Though it was not expressly avowed, no one doubted that ‘the gudeman’s croft’ was set apart for some evil being; in fact, that it was the portion of the arch fiend himself . . . this was so general a custom that the Church published an ordinance against it as an impious and blasphemous usage” (1885, 78–79). These uncultivated triangles are no-man’s land because they belong to no human but to the denizens of the spirit world.

During the Great War (World War I, from 1914 to 1918) No-Man’s Land was a place of death, the battle-torn landscape between the trenches of the opposing armies. It was literally a place of the dead, territory fought in and fought over, to be won or lost yard by yard at the cost of the combatants’ blood. The literal destruction of the entire landscape of the front line by shellfire, trench digging, and tunneling made the pre-war French or Flemish place-names meaningless. Bridges and hills were known by numbers only, other features known by letters, like Y Ravine, and places renamed for functions, like Transport Farm. The British soldiers gave the most dangerous places on the front names like Hellblast Corner, Hellfire Corner,

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