The Strange and Magical Potato
The potato lives in a “very poisonous family indeed...addictive tobacco, deadly nightshade, hallucinatory henbane, hypnotic mandrake and delirium inducing datura.” Its own poison, Solanine, can cause nightmares, hallucinations & paralysis so it seems ripe for folklore and magic.
Old Mother Redcap, witch of the Essex marshes, might be known for taking time out from crossing rivers on hurdles to sit at her kitchen in the haunted Devil’s House peeling potatoes and singing 'Holly holly, Brolly brolly, Redcap! Bonny bonny'1 but she might have just been making lunch. Is there anything magical about the spud?
Potatoes, Faggots and Blood
From its birthplace near lake Titicaca, centre of Incan cosmos and Tiwanaku Gateway of the Sun, to the fields of Ireland it has been subject to rituals of planting and harvest common to most crops. The modern Quechua and Aymara have an involved mythology where potatoes are planted in a green skirt of coca leaves & llama fat or dung with songs sung to the earth to suckle and support these baby girl potatoes into a virgin birth.2 While the potato seasons directly affects the music used, the instruments played and the dances danced, with new tunes from the spirits played to the potatoes growing underground.3 Modern European pagan guides mix potatoes with soap & fennel and elements of Æcerbot the old English planting ritual:4
”Erce, Erce, Erce, earth's mother,
May the all-ruler grant you
Fields waxing, flourishing, and fertile...”
There are ritual potatoey times of the year such as the Irish round of pinning a spud and a cross to the roof at Candlemas, planting this with seed spuds on Good Friday, adding holy water sprinkling on Ascension Day, a faggot thrown in from the fires of St John’s eve and digging the potatoes up on saints days, with a potato cake used as a 12th night candle holder then also placed in the roof.5 Not hugely dissimilar to modern Peru where services, dances, parades with saint icons and burnt offerings take place in the fields in May and August.6 The moon phase often gets a look in as a must when planting (although you will have to chose between the Aymara’s waxing, de Serres’ waning or Royer’s full moonshine at Lent). It should also be only planted in the morning 7 or is that at night (in rows aligned to the North star).8 There have also been lovely children’s parades where they dance with potato sacks held high, followed by the inevitable sacrifice, with either the blood of a young and flawless llama poured over the spuds9 or the blood of a young girl who had been painted, roasted and shot with arrows.10
Toads and Potato Wolves
“We will kill the Potato-dog.”
At harvest and planting, toads in the potato field can indicate the crops luck to the Aymara at harvest.11 A sprig of cypress was planted with the crops in Ireland and burnt with the harvest.12 In Northern Scotland all the family would have to taste newly dug potatoes otherwise “the spirits take offence and the potatoes would not keep.” While in Lithuania, when new potatoes were first eaten, all the people at the table would pull each other’s hair.13
So much for hair pulling: In parts of Northern Europe the last plant pulled catches the Potato-Wolf or Dog. A mythical beast akin to the Pea Wolf, the Oat Goat and the Hay Poodle who roam the crops and are cut down in the harvest. The harvester of the last plant (in some areas called the Old Potato Woman) takes on attributes of the wolf, biting and howling because “She has the Wolf.”14
One potato, Two Potato.. Leprosy
“Po - ta – toes: boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew, as a famous gardener once said”15
Despite being first harvested in South America at roughly the same time wheat was domesticated in Asia, able to grow in highland or jungle and forming the first freeze dried food (chuna) Europeans made some weird claims as they got to grips with this new truffley plant.
Categorised with mushrooms and strange and poisonous plants and growths16it “provoked Lust”17 (although so did a lot of plants that gave you wind or were rooty) “If too frequently eaten are thought to cause the Leprosie”18 as well as scrofula, rickets and consumption and it was blamed for weakening the blood and stopping revolution.19
Potatoes were condemned as unbiblical by Scottish Presbyterians and incestuous by Russian Orthodox (in contrast to a more positive mother/daughter potato union seen by the Aymara) The Russian Old Believers also have a delightfully horrible story where the origin of potatoes and tobacco come from a dead dog and princess killed and buried because they were lovers.20 Its similarity to Mandrake and Nightshades was noted but it was probably either its habit of shrivelling away (and taking ailments with it) or resembling a gnarly nodule which lead to its flourishing use as a magical amulet.
Pocketful of potatoes
“What has it got in its pocketses?"
Andrew Lang wrote about a dinner table discussion of a popular Victorian belief that a potato carried around in the pocket would cure rheumatism, often with the caveat that it must be stolen (or begged), which Lang speculated was because of its similarity to Mandrake and Moly and so needing to be “acquired stealthily and with peril.”21 But the magical protection of a shrivelling spud covers more than rheumatism. A pecked potato in your pocket stops toothache22 and G. Hatfield has a whole list of pocket potato cures: back pain, cramp, chills, gallstones, piles, neuritis and nosebleeds. Whereas stuck under the bed it aids conception and stops night sweats. Not to count the endless remedies that have been applied or swallowed in desperation that are made from potato (raw, sliced, tied to your head23 or boiled in a sock), potato peel or potato water.
And on the malevolent side there are potato poppets, those with nails in24 or a spell to make your enemy waste away by putting their spit in a potato and hanging it in smoke to dry up.25 First, though, you have to collect the spit.
Spuds and Star Spit
Tis shit from the stars, sir”26
There is a type of gloop that often appears overnight which was thought to be stars fallen, splat, to earth. Morton did a number of experiments on this stuff in the 1700s and concluded it was coughed up earthworms by birds like gulls, herons and crows.27 Now days people link it to slime mould or, as Merret did in 1667, something to do with frogs.
It was also considered as the manifestation of Will of the Wisps which, like shooting stars, was thought by clever people to be just oomska rising up from the ground and falling back down again on fire to leave this slimy mess (or at least looking like fire because, as these learned folk surmised, things on fire only go up). Others, like Paracelsus, thought it was the grime and excrement of the stars in our sky. “The spittle of stars.”28
What, though, is our place amongst the stars? Is the aurora borealis just reflected bonfires? If all the North pole ice went south would it change the earth’s gravity? In 1796 Rev Playfair mused on these things and on the strange gloop seen in the fields that people said was fallen star mush. He had the answer and he wrote it down in the Statistical Survey of Scotland: it had been pecked up by birds and turned to pap by the frost but it was just the messy remains of those strange and magical potatoes.29