Cunning folk

... symbols and ideas and stories, and we're all probably tapping into it at, at, at some point.

I mean, the one that I did write m- with more of a close connection to actual history was Cunning Folk.

Right.

So that is, uh, that is my most folk horror novel.

And th- this very simple folk magic of combining, like, herbal remedies with bits of scripture.

Yeah, completely.

So I tried to get back to its more authentic roots in, in British culture in that novel, Cunning Folk, which began life as a screenplay, and then I adapted my own screenplay into a full novel.

So that's the closest I've come to actually looking at the, the historical record and paying closer attention to it.

And here's the crucial part.

Both of these old women were what people at the time called cunning folk.

For generations, in villages across Britain, there were local people, often poor old women, who made a sort of living from folk magic, healing charms, blessings for your cattle, finding lost objects, love potions, and yes, curses.

For a few coins or a bit of food, Old Demdike or Old Chattox might mutter a charm to heal your sick cow, or if you'd wronged someone, mutter one to curse them.

And every accusation gives Nowell more names, more witches, more evidence.

The confession snowball, tales of familiar spirits, animal demons, of a black dog, of clay figures made to curse people, of Demdike's pact with the devil.

Some of it extracted, some of it perhaps genuinely believed by women who'd spent decades as village cunning folk.

It's a feud, you see.

So within one language, the woman became the witch, and the man became the wise one.

The phrase cunning woman is first recorded in Middle English around the 16th century to refer to wise women.

The word cunning comes from cunnung or cunning, the present participle of cunnian, to know.

That traces back to Old English kannan, to know, to be able, which is the same root that gives us can, ken, and canny For most of its medieval life, cunning was a positive word meaning learned, knowledgeable, skillful.

Chaucer-era English uses it this way.

The pejorative sense of crafty, sly, deceitful developed gradually and became dominant from roughly the 16th and 17th century onward, i.e., the peak of the witch hunts, when women of knowing came under suspicion.

So a cunning woman was literally a knowing woman, a woman with specialized knowledge of healing, charms, countering witchcraft.

George Gifford's Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts from 1593 discuss cunning women.

So, before witchcraft was feared, it was often practiced as everyday magic, healing, protection, ferti- uh, fertility rituals rooted in pagan traditions across Europe.

Local, uh, cunning folk, that's what they called themselves, or wise women were respected figures who used herbs, charms, and rituals tied to nature.

Witchcraft wasn't originally evil.

It became demonized later.

Um, okay.

Well, very cool.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a little bit more here about, about the cunning folk, about these village healers.

Um, they were healers, not villains.

George Hoyle is a musician and storyteller who knows so much about folklore.

Under a name Cunning Folk, he writes, sings, and plays guitar, and produces songs about magic and folklore.

They are partners in life and performance, and it was an utter joy having them on The Story Apothecary.

In this episode, we talk about stories, folklore, witches, Baba Yaga, and much, much more.

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but not in the way that they say, with the kind of, with, of, of a, some kind of Satanic pact.

That's not what cunning folk would do.

No.

As you can tell by one witness account, these voodoo mannequins aren't your normal small cloth dolls pierced with pins and bearing the facial image or a reasonable facsimile of the person who the owner hopes will feel the pain.

Interesting side note, While voodoo dolls are most often linked to Haiti or New Orleans, their origin actually dates back to medieval England, when folk magic practitioners known as the Cunning Folk are believed to have come up with the idea of inflicting pain via pins stuck in dolls made with cloth or hair or some other possession of the victim.

The hole-filled dolls found in Zvetny, a town near Krasnodar in far southwestern Russia, were the size of store mannequins and dressed in girls' clothes or school uniforms.

It gets worse.