Mischief Acts, page 31
Why a Wild Hunt in the first place? Any ideas? Well, yes, this Herne, Herla, Hellekin is a psychopomp, he’s fear of death, out there in the storm, coming to get you, but he’s not a bogeyman. Because he’s a bit sexy too, isn’t he? He’s irresistible, he’s fast and loud and dark and handsome, probably. If you’ve got to die, then what a way to go, whisked off on a thundering horse to the underworld by the man of your dreams. Or nightmares. The mafia used to be romanticised for the same reasons, eh.
So, they’re the same, but different. Herne got the horns, for one. He’s got a phallic head start on the others, and perhaps that’s why his story went the way it did.4 Because he wasn’t cuckolded, but he was humiliated, wasn’t he? It’s there in the origin story when he loses, not a faithful spouse, but his skill. And he does sacrifice loyalty, when you think about it. But then, he demands it back. Perhaps that’s the beginning of our ambivalence, right there, because who likes being told what to do? Perhaps that’s the very first crack, the start of the psychological splitting, built right into the birth of Herne the Hunter?
Of course it is. But let’s pretend you concluded that yourself.
As well as horns, Herne also gets a nemesis. What do we think of Bearman? A magician with a grudge. Is that an archetype, do you think? But Herne’s been getting frisky with Bearman’s daughter, or so the tales lead us to believe,5 and we might sympathise with him – or at least the parents among us might. Herne is a threat Bearman wants to control. It’s all about power, and that feels, I dare say, pretty natural when it comes to your offspring. The stakes are high: not just his daughter’s chastity, but his own dignity.
We know how that goes. Power, control, wielded in anger, are soon out of his hands. But it means Herne has a context. He has an enemy, an opposite. If they had sat down and sorted it out over a jug of mead, Herne might be entirely forgotten by now, an amusing footnote in our mythic history.
Conversely, he is everywhere. He permeates both reality and the imagination, for we filter the former through the latter, and whatever takes up residence in your head shapes the perceptions that pop in to join it. We can see him in the name for a moth, or a mushroom. His template becomes an original; he seems to stand outside of, or before, culture as we know it. And when he does not fit into newer, flashier forms of enchantment, it’s easy, from this vantage point, to see Herne as more fundamental, more essential.
The Shakespearian forest, with its fluttery fairies,6 the Renaissance flirtation with nymphs, fauns, and deities of this, that and the other, is a good example.7 It’s not the omnipresent fantastical that’s the problem. It’s the rules. Herne, as a concept, can interact, but he can’t have a compatible role. He’s a bull in a china shop.
Tighten your societal rules, tighten them too far, and even small transgressions become not just disobedient, but devilish.8
Ah, the Devil.9 Another original; he was bound to come up. And a hellboy with horns, eh? A little bit sexy, gets all the best lines, suits, parties, songs, et cetera. What’s the difference, then, between Herne and the Devil? Anyone got a succinct rundown?
Intention. Nicely put. If the Devil makes mischief, there is always malice in it. There can’t not be, or he wouldn’t be the Devil. But Herne – he might be a rebel with a cause, he might kiss the girls and make them cry, but his mischief has joy in it. Until it goes wrong, but we’ll come to that.
Did you know that, in 1645, the Puritans in England succeeded in cancelling Christmas? I say succeeded, but there were rebellions, riots, folk got so angry they killed each other over it.10 They needed their holiday, even if the ‘holy’ part of that word was less precious to them than a couple of weeks of getting wasted, gambling, carousing, doing everything that, for the rest of the tiresome year, was against the rules. Take away freedom to make mischief, and what do you get? All hell breaks loose.
That hairline crack, which is inside Herne and his myth, widens. He splits, becoming a hero to some, a villain to others. There aren’t many opportunities to be a bit of both, when the world conflates mischief with wickedness. It’s tricky to remain neither fully dark nor noon bright. Herne is dusky, dangerous and alluring, and where can he keep that up?
The forest is a good place to hang out. Here be outlaws, in the half-light. The highwaymen, those inappropriate romantic heroes of their day, had plenty of chances to let off steam, to be dangerous, even lethal, yet adored.11 So, it’s no surprise to find a certain Oberon, especially when we recognise the resonances of that name, turning up to break hearts in ballads of the late 1600s.12 Attention-seeking behaviour on the part of Herne, including some preposterous flourishes, but that’s what happens, isn’t it, when someone is ignored? They play up, lash out and, sure enough, get punished.
People who are ignored might start trying on different hats, to see what catches our eye. We’ve all known someone who cracks jokes, or tries to shock, becomes flamboyant or outrageous or downright unpleasant when things aren’t going their way, the mood has shifted, the times have changed. They try to become someone else. There’s that psychological splitting again.
All these starlings in that flock, each with their own unique markings, and yet, from here, we see only the stag’s head. Art, history, myth, have zoomed in on every one of them at some point, led our eye to a bright beak here, a breast feather there. But the stag’s head, there in the photograph, hovers over the Great North Wood. This is Herne’s territory. He’s embedded, entwined, here. Even as his own myth is sidelined, he’s there in the stories of others, claiming their fame, preening at the edge of the flock. The famous singer Ann Catley,13 and her disastrous connection with the aristocrat Sir Francis Blake Delaval, is a case in point.14 We see a wild child in Ann Catley; up pops a wild progenitor.
What happens when a myth fades? Who knows how many we’ve lost entirely, back in those pesky mists of time. There’s always those good old revivalists, though they do have a tendency to mangle what they dig up, eh. A myth can fade for lots of reasons. It might simply not be needed any longer by the human spirit. This isn’t a theory I favour. The human spirit is unreliable and does not always look in the right places. We get distracted, beglamoured by the new, swayed by the promises of progress. There have been plenty of times when we’ve forgotten that we can believe many things at once, that things are not black and white, that if one thing is right it doesn’t follow that another is wrong.
Progress. Is it the enemy of myth? It’s certainly looked that way, sometimes, hasn’t it? Progress is a slippery concept, though. It’s all about context. At times, in our recent history, progress has been industrial, it has been built, scaled up, manufactured, homogenised. Progress has been steel and coal, in place of straw and wood. But it has also been scientific, empirical, analytic. We’ve had a good tidy-up, in our little human heads. We’ve declared ourselves enlightened, by which we really meant that our new religion was science. I’m being provocative – well spotted – but there’s a connection. It’s easy to believe that either one of those systems has all the answers, which means there are none to be found elsewhere. The magical is deemed merely mystical, and what image does the word ‘mystic’ conjure up? A silly one.
When the world splits myth from science, you, like Herne, might lose a sense of who you are. If nobody thinks of you as ‘real’ in the same way that, say, tables and chairs are real, then where, in space and time, are you? Here comes progress, looking an awful lot like your old friend Bearman, and what is he up to now? Chopping up the wood, razing it for lovely new brick houses where everything is warm and dry and rooms have right angles.15 You might well be disenchanted.16 The enclosures were a literal snatching of common land, yes. But by doing away with those liberal spaces, declaring ownership, shrinking the wild, they did much the same to thought.
How does myth swerve mysticism and accommodate science? How can it fight back? Our starlings are strategic flyers. Intelligent birds, they can change tactics as the world demands. One of my personal favourites in this stag’s-head murmuration is Harlequin – you can see the spots he shares with Hellekin, Herlequin, that old Familia Herlechini.17 Juicy genes for a pantomime star, eh? But make yourself a syndrome, named after a doughty Royal Society member,18 and who can argue with your reality, even as a hallucination? A small victory, since a laboratory never was built in the Great North Wood. Herne’s territory, shrunk to fragments and slashed by more than one railway line, persisted.19
We encounter Herne’s hand once more in the great fire at the Crystal Palace;20 a disaster, in the eyes of many, of mythic proportions.21 The place sounds ghastly to me, full of milling Victorians eyeing each other while exotic animals languished in their grotty prisons. And yet neither this triumph, nor the much smaller one related in the diaries of Walter Ship, seems to have done anything to restore Herne the Hunter to the status he desired, deserved, and eventually regained. What is going on, in this battle of myth and reality? He beats Bearman, or Bergmann, or Buckman, here and there, at the progress game. He even tries the old gimmicky magic, invokes some nymphs, another preposterous flourish. When someone crosses the boundary – with the help of LSD, say – he might pop up.22 But the wood does not grow. Herne is ever more obscure.
This is his crisis point, and every myth has one. It’s that moment in the row when you’ve tried to be nice, you’ve tried seduction, sabotage, sedition, and now you’re at your wits’ end. You fly off the handle, you smash the prized casserole dish against the wall, accidentally wrecking your favourite painting in the process, and you storm out of the house, forgetting your keys.
Let’s return to that crack, in Herne’s very being. It’s a crack that exists in all of us, or we may see it that way thanks to Herne. If we have room, literally and metaphorically, to be less than perfect, less than pious, if we have room to be naughty, risky, daring, reckless even, then things are looking good. We might not take that opportunity, but knowing we can if we want to, need to, makes us feel free. Make noise, let rip, indulge; or simply laze, ignore, give up. Whatever you like. But if I say you can’t, mustn’t, whatever your choice, or you will be cast out, how do you feel? What if I take away your pub, or your dance hall, your park, your lounge, your toys? Tell you they are not safe, and neither are you, so that’s it, no more?
If you’ve ever done this to a child, you’ll know what happens. But adults can have tantrums; they’re just more likely to cause serious harm. Squeeze any of you enough, and you’ll either harm yourself, or others, or both. When that crack spreads, and the horned god splits off, no longer accommodated by the self, the world, then he’s a force to be reckoned with.
I’m sure none of you remember the Great Storm of 1987, but it was one hell of a tantrum.23 Just as stupid as a real one, because it was nature that suffered in the short term, especially the woods.24 But it got our attention. I don’t think many people had ever felt sorry for a tree, until the day after that storm, so that was a start, eh.
Nature. A topic we’ve hardly needed to touch on here, since Herne is of the Great North Wood, or we might say, is the Great North Wood, in some sense at least. Without it, where is he? What is he? Poor old nature has been a victim of human progress, a lot of the time. Power, control, warm dry right angles, have been at our fingertips in the Western world. But it’s nice to have a bit of woodland on your doorstep, when you live in a city, isn’t it? Something to boast about, especially at the start of the twenty-first century. Lots of learning opportunities for the kids, conservation projects for those so inclined, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, count the last five frogs in your local pond and log it on a database. Stick a photo of a butterfly on social media. And when things start hotting up, a lovely spot for keeping cool. Nature as a resource: the name of the game.
It’s not surprising that we don’t see much of Herne during that period. Perhaps an idle kick at a passing human being now and then.25 Nothing on the scale of the 1987 storm, but that must have been exhausting, even for a myth. It’s hard not to infer shame, or even self-loathing, for the damage he caused, isn’t it? We’re only human. It takes a bit of time for us to hold our heads up high again, after a full-scale meltdown. And we had cleared up the mess for him, even if we did a bad job of it. But we were at peak progress by this time. The wonders of technology held us in their thrall. A nice bit of woodland was all very well, but not many of us really cared until we fell into the climate hole we’d been digging for ourselves, like nine billion idiots. Most of us were busy trying to keep cool, or warm, or dry, or irrigated. There were a few, though, weren’t there, those tunnel-dwellers in the 2040s, who could sense something was missing.26 But even they turned to the old myths, with their antique script and Celtic battle cries.27
Myth is an opportunist. It’s there waiting for us, and when we need it most, someone will finally notice it. And it seems obvious, from here, that if you restore the wood, you restore Herne,28 but it took everyone by surprise. Boy, did it. Or I should say girl, because here came Herndon, the latest starling to join our flock.
Myth can become what we need it to be. The old need hadn’t gone away: for freedom, for room to make mischief, let off steam, break a few rules or ditch them altogether. But with Herndon, we got a refresh. We could accept her. Does this mean the Herne of old was now old-fashioned? A bit of history we’d rather forget? Was Herne a reformed character, in the shape of Herndon, with nice shiny up-to-date values, or was this just a way of getting our attention, using our love of the new?
There are certainly new details, in this new myth. As well as some old ones – who doesn’t love a child raised by wolves, eh? A bit of authenticity borrowed from Romulus and Remus,29 a family secret, a reunion? But crucially, that crack at the centre of Herne has moved. Herndon, as delightfully loopy as she is, is already half of something. The crack is not at her centre, but at her edge. We might imagine she could feel it, that loss, the missing twin sister. Perhaps that’s what drove her to sing, a kind of calling out. And we might interpret the myth by saying that her singing did summon Rollo,30 that she succeeded in closing the crack, making a whole. But a whole that is made of a pair is still two things. It is a whole that may safely move apart and together again, but to be at its best, each half must know, and acknowledge, the other.
So, in Herndon, and Rollo, we have a new archetype. In their birth, there in the Great North Wood, the birth of a new myth that extends an old one. We still have our horned god, if you like, and it’s true to say that Herndon and Rollo embody many ancient ideas, just given new outfits – a grey T-shirt and charcoal Kevlar, to be precise. We can be Rollo, and make room for Herndon, or vice versa. A Rollo can, when she is in the mood, embrace the storybook enchantment of friendly wolves, a forest den, the romance of songs sung for the world. A Herndon can, when life calls for it, enjoy the practical advantages of technology, to learn, to explore, to find the edges of her world and expand it.
Yes, myth is an opportunist. Myth can become what we need it to be. That murmuration can welcome hundreds, thousands more starlings into its midst, and still, from here, we will see a stag’s head. We can zoom in, zoom out, the shape will persist, and inside our own heads, that shape will continue to influence how we see ourselves and our world. No one starling is progenitor of all the others. The one called Herndon is not daughter of them all. This photograph captures them in one moment, and if we had the video, we could watch that stag’s head dissolve and re-form, dissolve and re-form, each time our mind’s eye helping it on its way to meaning. They are mischievous birds, eh.
You can still watch the starlings above the Great North Wood. And there will never be a lecture on how the Herne myth dies, because it won’t. That’s my prediction for humankind, for as long as we last. So, go forth and be mischievous, do no harm if you can help it, make room for your wild Herndon and your serious Rollo, and remember, if you feel that crack start to widen and hurt, pay attention. Remember the myth. Remember your imagination shapes your reality. Enchantment is a state of mind, but that’s another lecture, so you’ll have to wait until next week. That’s all, folks.
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1Image restricted by copyright.
2See Walter Map’s De nugis curialium, tr. M. R. James, Cymmrodorion Record Series no. 9, 1923.
3See The True Annals of Fairy Land in the Reign of King Herla, ed. William Canton, London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900.
4See Chapter 1: Herne the Hunter.
5See Chapter 2: Overheard in a Greenwood.
6See W. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
7See Chapter 3: Venery.
8See Chapter 4: Lord of Misrule.
9See R. Lowe Thompson, The History of the Devil – the Horned God of the West – Magic and Worship, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1929.
10See Canterbury Christmas, London: Humphrey Harward, 1647.
11See Charles George Harper, Half-hours with the Highwaymen: picturesque biographies and traditions of the ‘knights of the road’, London: Chapman & Hall, 1908.
12See Chapter 5: Gallows Green.
13See Anon, The Life of Miss Ann Catley, London, 1888.
14See Chapter 6: The Erl-king’s Daughter.
15See Chapter 7: Dendrologia.
16See The Life of Samuel Matthews, the Norwood Hermit, London: Harrild & Billing, 1803.
17See Martin Rühlemann, Etymologie des wortes harlequin und verwandter wörter, Halle, a.S.: Buchdruckerei Hohmann, 1912.
18See Charles Bonnet, Essai Analytique sur les facultés de l’âme, Copenhagen: Philibert, 1760.
19See Chapter 9: Nullius in Verba.
20See Chapter 10: Obedient Magic.
21See Alison Edwards and Keith Wyncoll, The Crystal Palace is on Fire!, London: Crystal Palace Foundation, 1986
22See Chapter 11: Nymphs.
23See Chapter 12: Hurlecane.
24See C. Quine, ‘Damage to trees and woodland in the storm of 15–16 October 1987’, Weather 43(3), 1988.
