Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is commonly called the U.P., thus its residents are Yoopers.  The arrival of civilization in the U.P. created a number of resource extraction colonies to disassemble the wilderness paradise.  Whites were attracted to the region to mine the furs, fish, copper, iron, and forests.  Long winters and marginal soils have spared it from being obliterated by industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl.  Population density is low.  The biggest city, Marquette, has just 21,000 souls.

Richard Dorson (1916-1981) was born into an affluent family in New York City.  He received his PhD from Harvard.  When he was hired by Michigan State University in 1944, he had never heard of the U.P.  In 1946, he boarded the ferry at Mackinaw City, landed in the U.P., and spent five months researching the folklore of the region.  He visited mining communities, lumber camps, beer gardens, and Indian villages, seeking out the venerable storytellers.  They included the Anishinabe, Cornish, Finns, Irish, French, Slovenians, Croatians, Swedes, and many others.  He met quite a few fascinating characters, listened to a lot of tall tales, and obviously had a good time in the process.

Then he wrote Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers, which presented a scruffy parade of rustic Yoopers.  Harvard published it in 1952, after MSU refused to.  Dorson’s book is valuable because it recorded the essence of a number of cultures, many of which no longer exist.  Typical Yoopers were the opposite of wealthy East Coast dandies.  The whites often came from the lower classes of Europe, forced out of their homelands by the turbulence of the Industrial Revolution.  Many had little or no education; more than a few were illiterate.  They were strong, hard-working people who did not bloat and rot from soft indoor living.

Most of Dorson’s sources were born in the nineteenth century, but the oral cultures they came from had deep roots in the past, and deep roots in the living Earth.  There were Yoopers who could shapeshift into bears, wolves, pigs, and owls.  Potent curses could cause the death of others.  Anishinabe and Finnish shamans had powers for counteracting black magic.  Fairies were everywhere.  Yoopers spent their lives in a land that was spiritually alive, rich with power and vitality.

Dorson was hanging out with folks who were semi-Medieval at a time when modern America was dropping nuclear bombs, buying televisions, building skyscrapers, and zooming around in ridiculous automobiles.  Sadly, the ancient art of storytelling, humankind’s oldest profession, was being brushed aside by modern mass entertainment — pulp magazines, soap operas, and movie thrillers.

In the nineteenth century, Yooper communities spent long winters in isolation.  The waterways froze, the roads were buried under deep drifts of snow, and stores had no fresh produce for months.  In springtime, when the ice melted, the arrival of the first ship was always a day of joyful celebration and clattering church bells — reconnection with the outer world.  There was no television, radio, internet, phones, or recorded music.  Entertainment on long winter nights came from telling old stories and singing old songs — experiences shared by gatherings of family and neighbors, not in isolation with techno-gadgets.

Many communities had bloodstoppers, who could stop heavy bleeding by speaking words of power, or a simple touch.  There were far-sighted seers who could foretell the future, and psychics who could communicate with the spirits of the dead, or accurately describe things that were only known by you.

In those days, life was filled with mysteries — accidents, illness, deaths, disasters.  Misfortunes were often explained as being the result of malevolent acts of evil people.  The Anishinabe referred to these dark beings as bearwalkers, who could appear as animals, birds, or lights glowing in the night.  The French called them loup-garous, something like werewolves, devious shapeshifters. 

As we move into the post-antibiotic era, the post-carbon era, the era of spectacular climate juju, life will be filled with mysteries and misfortunes once again.  Without the ultra-expensive safety net of high-tech medicine, folks who are unwell will either recover or die, as the fates desire.  There will be few stores, if any.  We’ll be far less mobile.  Communication will be limited to those around us.  We’ll actually have to go outdoors — yikes!

The whites ravaged the U.P. because they knew almost nothing about ecological history, the mistakes of their ancestors.  They did not have great powers of foresight, nor deep reverence for the health of the ecosystem.  They remained addicted to an incoming flow of goods from distant industrial centers.  Few of them unplugged themselves from civilization and learned to live with the land.

The Anishinabe preserved a long tradition of reverence and respect for the family of life.  Dorson noted that they “all live in the woods as if the cities of white men never existed.”  Of course, anyone who has ever experienced a city will understand why.  They inhabited the same region as the whites, but the land was their home, a sacred place, where they were reverend guests — an entirely different relationship.

Today, we have fabulous education systems, and instant access to staggering quantities of information.  Today, there are specialists who actually understand ecological history, and are extremely distressed by the mindless destruction caused by consumer society.  But our schools do not major in teaching reading, writing, and ecological history.  Our religious leaders do not teach us reverence and respect for creation.  Tomorrow doesn’t matter.

Oddly, most of the graduates rolling off the academic assembly line these days are barely distressed at all.  They are lost in a fantasy world, mesmerized by a moronic belief in perpetual economic growth, eager to devote their lives to accumulating and discarding unnecessary stuff.  Sadly, the more our society is educated, the faster we destroy the future.  Circle what is wrong with this picture. 

In 1900, many whites dreamed that their children would spend their lives mining and cutting pines.  But in the decades that followed, as “infinite” resources became scarce, their communities and culture would be scattered to the winds.  Many moved to Detroit, where there were no wolves, bears, or fairies, and their children were raised in the urban consumer culture, which displaced the old rustic one.  Importantly, in just one generation, the culture of the youngsters was very different from the culture of their elders.  Cultures can make sudden sharp turns, for better or worse.

Another huge cultural shift is certain to occur as the collapse of industrial civilization proceeds.  At some point, all the daffy infantile balderdash of the consumer worldview will have no purpose whatsoever.  The throbbing lust for McMansions, giant pickups, and huge TVs will become meaningless.  The game of life will be nothing like today.

What can we do today to prepare the young for the coming storms?  It would be awesome if we could help them acquire the intelligence needed to replace the loony consumer culture with a new one that is far more in balance with the family of life, something similar to the Anishinabe perhaps.  We need to help them as much as we can before the lights go out.

Dorson, Richard M., Bloodstoppers & Bearwalkers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1952.

ADDENDUM:

In 1983, I biked to Wales and visited the hamlet of Cwmbelan, where my great-grandfather Richard E. Rees was born in 1843.  I had a beautiful experience chatting with Gwen Ingram, who lived in the old mill.  She relished the old days when the hamlet thrived.  Her father and grandfather were carpenters.  The water wheel drove their machinery.  The schoolhouse next door had been full of the sounds of playing children.  There were two pubs, two chapels, a post office, and over a hundred people.

Gwen told me about Mr. Morris, the village blacksmith.  He was a conjurer, a white witch, a healer.  When sickness or accident occurred, Mr. Morris was summoned, not a doctor.  In fact, doctors often came to visit the conjurer.  Once a year, for a small fee, Mr. Morris would cast a spell on the doctors, which would protect them from harmful curses.

He was wise in the use of herbs and potions, but he also had other powers.  When a horse ripped its leg on barbed wire and began bleeding heavily, the conjurer was called.  He hurried out of the village.  As soon as he entered the same field that the horse was in, the bleeding stopped.

She told me another story.  Many years ago, when the factory was a woodworking shop, the water wheel stopped one day.  It had jammed.  Her father went out to repair it.  Her grandfather was inside working.  The wheel started again, suddenly.  A saw began cutting into her grandfather’s knee.  It was serious.

Mr. Morris was called.  As soon as he entered the room, the bleeding stopped.  “It will be all right now,” he said.  A doctor who saw the wound said that the leg would have to go.  Mr. Morris disagreed, “It will heal.”  Old Mr. Ingram had to use a cane after that, but he could still walk the entire ridge of the roof when he was 70 years old.  I asked her why Mr. Morris hadn’t passed his knowledge on to his children.  “They didn’t have the intelligence,” she said.

I spent two afternoons talking with Gwen.  She was an inspiration, a beautiful soul.  I had finished my family research and had to go.  Money was running short, and I had to get back to Luxembourg.  I said good-bye to Gwen.  I said good-bye to Cwmbelan.

Maybe a week later, I was in Luxembourg.  By dusk, I had a neighbor at the camp, a 22-year old Swiss lad on a Yamaha.  I had two 98-cent bottles of wine.  He had a fifth of scotch.  We commenced an exchange of adventure stories.  He had been in Ireland.  He was a carpenter and an architecture student.

When I was talking about Wales and Mr. Morris, the conjurer, he lit up.  My friend was a conjurer too.  His grandmother and aunt practiced earth magic.  They had taught him.  He never talked to anyone about this because most people saw it as silly superstition.  I didn’t.  I pumped him.  Yes, stopping bleeding is easy.  Fevers, headaches, body pains all had cures.  People who his family couldn’t cure were sent to an old man in the hills.

He had found some old books while renovating a house, books of conjury: The Fifth and Sixth Books of Moses, and The Book of Seven Secrets.  I wanted to learn these methods, read the books.  Would he be willing to teach me?  No.  It is traditional that you only pass the knowledge on to two people in your life.  They have to be younger than you.  He was saving it for his children.  It was reassuring that the arts hadn’t been lost to time.

Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland

W. G. Wood-Martin (1847-1917) published Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland in 1902.  He wanted to document what was known about the spirituality of pre-Christian Ireland before all memories of that world were forgotten, and he was more than thorough (over 840 pages in two volumes).  He was not a mystic, or a righteous inquisitor; he was a fair-minded scholar.

Irish culture had a lumpy mixture of influences.  Hunter-gatherers arrived around 6000 BC.  They thrived on deer, shellfish, and salmon until about 4500 BC, when invaders infected the forest paradise with domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, and cereals.  The health of the ecosystem has been in decline ever since, and the forest and wolves are long gone.  The land has become an ecological skeleton.

At the end of the eighth century, the island was a collection of chiefdoms that shared the Gaelic language and culture.  Then there were invasions of missionaries, Vikings, Normans, and English, each of whom built settlements and put down roots.  Like most societies that major in domesticated plants and animals, Ireland became a land of warriors, and bloody conflicts, which left deep scars on the collective psyche.

I was fascinated by the book because it presents us with a white European society that had an intimate relationship with the land — a land that was spiritually alive in every aspect.  Every stone, tree, bird, and stream was holy.  Souls never died when the body did, they often found new homes in various plants and animals.  Some became banshees, who screamed and howled with the blowing wind, issuing warnings or announcing deaths.  Spirits of the ancestors were ever-present in the lives of everyone — and sometimes evil spirits, too.  Any living thing might be an ancestor.  You were never alone.

The rustic Irish spent their lives in a very small world.  Their food, water, fuel, clothing, and building materials came from the land nearby.  They owned little, and few of their belongings were imported from other places.  The land and the people were one, to a degree that would stagger the imagination of modern consumers, whose lives depend on a highly complex global system for almost everything.  But as we move beyond Peak Cheap Energy, we will inevitably be returning to a highly local, muscle-powered way of life of some sort.

Wood-Martin suspected that the fairies were “probably representatives of an aboriginal and conquered people” (the forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers?).  Fairies frequently came out at night to sing and dance, and their music was so beautiful that people who happened to hear it became enchanted.  Some of them chose to spend the rest of their lives with the good people, and others returned to the world of mortals, where they often went insane, or committed suicide, because they couldn’t get the sound of the magical music out of their heads.

Long ago, the fairies had been conquered by people with iron weapons, and so they detested iron and other metals.  Peasants protected themselves from fairy mischief by hanging horseshoes above their doors, by carrying knives, and by sewing bits of iron into their children’s clothing.

There was no such thing as bad luck.  Animal sickness, crop damage, lunacy, accidents, and disease were the result of curses or elf-shots (darts shot by fairies).  The antidote was a counterattack using even greater magic.  Sometimes a passionate blessing could break the curse.  Sometimes a disease was transferred to a strip of cloth, taken out, and tied to a bush — “a good riddance.”  When someone was wronged, they often sought justice by putting a curse on their enemy — “may he and all he owns melt like ice!”  A king was once cursed with an insatiable hunger, and he ate so much that he caused a famine in the land.  If the curse was deserved, the target would surely suffer.  If not, the curse would be returned to the sender within seven years.

All animals could think, communicate, read our minds, and influence our behavior.  Some were guardian spirits who protected us.  Some were inhabited by ancestral souls.  Some were people who had been changed into wolves for seven years by a powerful curse.  There were women who could appear as hares, cats, or sows.  The boundaries between humans and other animals were far less clear than they seem to be today.

The Irish countryside is rocky, and many of the stones were sacred.  Stone circles were thought to be old giants, or people who had been turned into rocks.  Some stones had holes big enough to crawl through, and these were used for healing.  Stones with smaller holes were used as swearing stones, used for swearing oaths, like wedding vows. 

We cannot live without water.  The Irish drew their water from springs, streams, lakes, and wells.  These too were seen as sacred, of course.  Water from holy springs helped cows to produce more milk and butter.  On the eve of May Day, people often bathed in sacred pools to be healed.  They tied offerings on nearby bushes — pieces of cloth or locks of hair.  They tossed coins in a well and made wishes.  The spirits of wells were benevolent when remembered, but vindictive when neglected.  Sacred waters were sometimes home to sacred trout, which no one harmed, except for mean enemies.

Paul Shepard once wrote: “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.”  The forests started falling in the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age sped up the pace.  About one-eighth of the original forest survived until the sixteenth century, but these woodlands were gone by the eighteenth century.  So, the book mostly talks about sacred trees, not groves — like the big old oak in the pasture, often used to inaugurate new chiefs.  All trees had souls, and some grew up out of the graves of ancestors.

The cycle of the year was split into two halves, at May Day and Samhain or All Hallows Eve (31 October).  New life was celebrated at May Day, with bonfires, dancing, and may poles.  Halloween was a scary time, because the night was filled with the spirits of the wandering dead.  Villagers wandered from house to house in processions, stopping to recite ancient verses at each home.

It’s difficult to imagine living in a reality that was so spiritually alive, with people who had powerful connections to the land, and immense reverence for it.  Modern life can feel so empty and artificial.  Wood-Martin left us with an important clue: “If you procure a box of fairy ointment, and rub it on the eyelids, you instantly see everything as it really is.”  That would certainly be an unforgettable mind-blowing experience! 

Of course, the old Irish were simple, illiterate folks, who spent their lives in a world of silly superstitions.  We modern folks are free of that (we think).  The pagans gained power by drinking at sacred wells, by crawling through sacred stones, by initiating blessings or curses.  We gain power by overloading our lives with sacred stuff — hybrid cars, McMansions, big screen TVs.  The greater the harm that we cause to the Earth, the more prestige we gain.

Wood-Martin, Walter Gregory, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1970.  Originally published in 1902.

The contents of volumes I and II are available via Google Books.  The PDF downloads are scanned images of the original pages, and are not searchable.  The EPUB version is searchable text, but the conversion process introduced defects.

http://www.google.com/search?q=editions%3A9ONvhmaMF7kC&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1