Mysterious Times

There is apparently a correct direction in which to go around things.

Nobody mentions this when you’re learning to walk. Nevertheless, our ancestors had opinions.

Strong opinions.

Walk around something one way and you might bring luck, healing, blessing and protection.

Walk around it the other way and you might be performing witchcraft – which seems rather a lot of responsibility to place upon somebody who has merely taken the scenic route around a well.

Welcome to the final day of Old Magic. Check your shoelaces.

Because this time, we’re going round in circles.

I learned one of the words for the fortunate direction as ‘dosil’. You may know it as deiseal, deasil, dessil, or one of several other spellings that have appeared in English-language folklore collections. They represent attempts to render a Gaelic word whose meaning, in this context, is essentially a right-hand or sunwise turn.

Sunwise.

Today we have a huge mechanical object hanging on almost every wall telling us that this direction is called clockwise, but clocks didn’t invent the direction. The sun was doing it first.

In Scottish Highland and Island tradition, the rule was pretty straightforward. In fact, folklorist John Gregorson Campbell summed it up beautifully in the nineteenth century:

“Deiseal for everything.”

Do things with the sun. Make the right-hand turn. Move from left to right.

The opposite direction was widdershins – against the sun.

And if deiseal represented the correct order of things, widdershins could represent its reversal. Which, as we have discovered repeatedly this week, is where magic gets interesting. Before we leave the house, however, let’s return briefly to yesterday’s kitchen, because there is a reason I didn’t disappear too far down the stirring-the-pot rabbit hole.

Modern magical practice is absolutely full of instructions telling people to stir food clockwise to attract or build something and anticlockwise to banish or remove it. It would be extremely tempting to announce that your great-great-grandmother stirred every stew deiseal for precisely the same reason. Unfortunately, folklore does not exist for the convenience of lifestyle articles. The historical evidence is much messier.

What we can see, particularly in Scottish tradition, is a much broader insistence that important actions should follow the course of the sun. Dairy work, household activities, blessings and ritual movements could all acquire directional rules. So when I was taught to be conscious of the way I stirred something, it belongs very comfortably within a much larger magical grammar. But I’m not going to pretend that every clockwise spoon in Britain represents an unbroken prehistoric ritual. Because that’s how folklore turns into, well, bollocks. And there is quite enough genuine weirdness without me inventing any more.

To see how seriously direction could matter, we need to leave the kitchen and find a well.

Holy wells are among the best places to watch sunwise movement in action. Across Scotland, people visited particular springs seeking cures for illness. The water might be drunk or an afflicted part of the body might be washed. An offering might be left, a rag tied to a nearby tree, a pin dropped into the water or a coin given. And very often, the visitor went around the well. Not randomly.

Sunwise.

James Mackinlay’s 1893 study of Scottish lochs and springs also records the importance of moving from left to right, following the apparent course of the sun. At Loch Siant Well on Skye, he quotes Martin Martin’s much earlier description of visitors making the circuit called the Dessil. They went around the well three times with the sun, then drank the water.

Archibald Geikie later remembered similar practices on Skye: sick and disabled visitors went around wells three times deiseal before drinking or applying the water and leaving a small offering, perhaps no more than a scrap of cloth. ([Project Gutenberg][1])

Notice something else there.

Three times.

Because apparently simply walking in the correct direction wasn’t sufficient. You also had to count. Three turns. Three dips. Three repetitions.

Numbers are another vast territory of folk magic which we are absolutely not exploring today because I would quite like to finish this series sometime before Christmas. But three occurs again and again in ritual practice. The action isn’t casual. It is deliberate, counted, repeated and directed. And at some wells, even the water itself apparently knew which way things ought to turn.

At St Andrew’s Well at Shadar on Lewis, Mackinlay recorded a divinatory practice involving a wooden dish floating on the water. If it turned sunwise, the sick person would recover. If it turned the other way? Not such good news. ([Project Gutenberg][1]) Even an inanimate bowl was expected to respect the traffic system.

But why follow the sun?

Mackinlay offered an explanation typical of nineteenth-century folklore scholarship: the sun was associated with vitality, so imitating its motion could symbolically reproduce that beneficial power. We should be cautious about treating Victorian explanations of ancient origins as demonstrated fact, but we don’t actually need to know the ultimate prehistoric origin to recognise the pattern.

The sun moves correctly therefore you move correctly. Follow the order of the world and perhaps the world will behave properly towards you.

The same principle extended far beyond wells. In Highland tradition, people made sunwise turns when beginning journeys. Blessings could be performed deiseal. People, animals and objects might be circled with the sun.

Campbell regarded the right-hand turn as one of the most important Highland observances and noted that practices could persist simply as custom even after people had ceased thinking very much about their original significance. ([Project Gutenberg][2]) That last part should sound extremely familiar by now.

You do it because that’s what you do. Nobody remembers why. Old Magic survives another generation.

The sea had rules too. For fishing communities, setting out correctly mattered. A boat beginning its journey might be turned with the sun. And given what we’ve discovered this week about the supernatural hazards of British waters – witches raising storms, witches sailing in sieves and witches apparently commandeering breakfast remains as maritime transport – perhaps it was sensible not to annoy anything before you’d even cleared the harbour. A sunwise beginning was a good beginning.

Again we encounter one of the fundamental principles that has been quietly following us throughout this entire series:

Beginnings matter.

Put money into the pocket of a new garment and perhaps it will never be empty. Put a coin into a new purse and perhaps prosperity will continue. Set off in the correct direction and perhaps the journey will go well. Begin correctly. Continue correctly. Finish correctly. Simple.

Except, of course, for widdershins. Because what happens when you deliberately go against the sun?

This is where the word acquired its darker reputation. Widdershins movement could be associated with witchcraft, sorcery, ill luck and reversal.

Mackinlay gives a wonderfully grim Scottish example concerning an alleged witch in Kirkcudbrightshire. Among the accusations made against the woman was that at certain hours she walked around the spring near her cottage widdershins. Against the sun. Wrong way round. The act itself was interpreted as sorcery. ([Project Gutenberg][1])

And that’s fascinating. Nothing has been thrown into the fire. Nobody has summoned anything. No potion has been brewed. A woman has walked around a spring but she has walked around it wrong. Direction transformed an ordinary movement into a magical one – which sounds beautifully straightforward.

Deiseal good. Widdershins bad.

With the sun good. Against the sun evil.

Excellent.

Article finished.

BUT – folklore has just noticed that we’re trying to establish a consistent rule and has arrived with a hammer. Because sometimes people deliberately went widdershins to heal someone.

At Chapel Uny Well in Cornwall, children suffering from particular illnesses were reportedly dipped into the water three times and then taken around the well three times against the sun. Widdershins. The wrong way. To make them better.

Mackinlay himself noticed the apparent contradiction. He suggested that perhaps an abnormal action could be used against an abnormal condition — that something contrary to the normal order might become useful when incorporated into a charm. ([Project Gutenberg][1]) And suddenly this stops being a contradiction at all. Because we’ve seen exactly this principle before.

Remember getting dressed?

If pixies had confused the landscape and you couldn’t find your way home, one remedy was to turn your clothes inside-out. Something is wrong so you deliberately make something else wrong. Normal order has been disrupted so you respond with reversal. Inside becomes outside. Sunwise becomes widdershins. Ordinary behaviour becomes extraordinary behaviour. And the spell – or illness, enchantment, interference, whatever explanation the tradition supplied – is broken.

That gives us a much more interesting way of understanding widdershins.

It isn’t necessarily evil. It’s contrary. It’s movement against the normal order. And sometimes that’s exactly what you want.

If you’re trying to maintain something, follow the proper course.

If you’re trying to undo something, reverse it.

If you’re trying to break an enchantment, break the pattern.

It’s remarkably elegant magical thinking, and it explains why circles themselves are so useful. A circle creates a boundary.

We saw how obsessed folk magic is with boundaries when we opened the walls of old houses.

Doors mattered.

Windows mattered.

Chimneys mattered.

Thresholds mattered.

Places where one state became another required special attention.

Walking around something creates another kind of boundary. You define it. Enclose it. Separate what is inside from what is outside. Then direction tells the circle what sort of action you’re performing. Repetition reinforces it.

Around once.

Around twice.

Around three times.

Done.

Except perhaps you should check which way you’ve gone before celebrating.

This principle spread into stories as well as customary practice. One of the most famous examples appears in the tale of Childe Rowland. In the version collected by Joseph Jacobs in the nineteenth century, Rowland’s sister Burd Ellen disappears after going around a church widdershins – not simply around the church. The wrong way around it. That movement takes her out of the ordinary human world and into Elfland.

It’s a great narrative use of exactly the same idea.

Go with the ordinary order and remain within ordinary reality.

Reverse the order…

…and perhaps you end up somewhere else.

Fairy folklore loves this sort of thing. Wrong direction. Wrong road. Wrong time. Wrong side of a boundary. One small deviation and suddenly the landscape isn’t behaving properly any more. The mundane world is remarkably thin in these stories. All you have to do is walk around something backwards and fall through it.

But the directional rule didn’t belong solely to explicitly magical situations. It could become etiquette. Habit. Custom. The sort of action people performed because not doing it simply felt wrong.

And that’s perhaps the most important part of this entire week.

Because Old Magic hasn’t really been about proving that every tiny habit performed in Britain today is secretly a surviving pagan ceremony because it isn’t. Some traditions are comparatively recent. Some have changed dramatically. Some have several possible origins. Some are independently reinvented because human beings are extraordinarily good at inventing rituals. And some explanations have been attached to customs centuries after the customs themselves appeared.

There is no single underground magical religion secretly responsible for everything your grandmother told you not to do. Reality is far more interesting than that. What we’ve found instead is a recurring way of thinking.

Hair, nails and teeth remain connected to the person they came from. A penny can transform a dangerous gift into a harmless purchase. Beginning with money in your pocket encourages money to remain there. Turning clothes inside-out can reverse supernatural interference. Objects placed at thresholds protect the boundary between inside and outside. Salt, milk and fire shouldn’t leave the household at dangerous times because prosperity might leave with them. Bread must be treated respectfully because bread represents food and survival. An eggshell must be destroyed because leaving something usable behind creates an opportunity for magical misuse. And direction matters because following or reversing the natural order can change what an action means. Different traditions. Same underlying grammar.

And the logic still feels strangely intuitive.

We knock on wood. We cross our fingers. We refuse to tempt fate. We have lucky clothes. We perform tiny routines before important events. We put money into a purse before giving it away. We make wishes over birthday candles. We throw coins into water. We cook particular foods when somebody is ill. We keep things that belonged to people we loved because they somehow feel as though they still contain something of them. And sometimes we walk around things in a particular direction without ever stopping to wonder why.

The old world hasn’t vanished, it’s underneath the new one. Covered over by electric lights, central heating, supermarkets, mobile phones and rational explanations. But every now and then something pokes through. A shoe behind a wall. A penny in a purse. A warning about bread. An eggshell crushed automatically beneath a spoon. A coat turned inside-out. A word remembered slightly differently from the way it appears in a dictionary.

Dosil.

With the sun. The spelling may wander. The custom may change.The original explanation may disappear entirely… But somebody remembers the direction.

Perhaps old magic never disappeared. We just stopped calling it magic.

We still keep shoes off tables, crush eggshells and knock on wood the way we were taught.

And every now and then somebody asks:

“Why?”

And we shrug.

“That’s just what you do.”

And round the sun goes again.

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56034/56034-h/56034-h.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs”
[2]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61730/old/61730-h/61730-h.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, by John Gregorson Campbell”