Curious Creatures
Hooden horses at Broadstairs (photo by Mel Hiley)
Folk traditions are curious creatures. They can at first appear simple enough, even simplistic, but when looked at more closely they have a tendency to twist and turn, evading any capture of a precise meaning or a single interpretation. Any meaning can depend on how and why we are looking at them in the first place.
Morris dancing, for instance, long regarded as being a quintessentially English custom, is typically elusive. For a start, there is no real certainty about its origins. Perhaps the Morris began as a form of courtly entertainment in the 16th century – or perhaps it didn't. Perhaps it contains lingering traces of ancient, pre-Christian, traditions – or perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a dance tradition that began as an imitation of African, or “Moorish”, dances – or perhaps it didn't. So much has been lost, or rather been forgotten, in the miasma of folk history, that what people see in the Morris depends very much on what people want to see.
Yet whether it began as an invention of mediaeval aristocrats, or as a Pagan survival among the English lower orders, Morris dancing has taken root in the soil of English folk tradition, albeit in a contradictory fashion. On the one hand, it's arguably the most derided folk custom in Britain. There's a common misconception of Morris dance as consisting entirely of beer-bellied, bearded men of a certain age (and above), skipping around the car park outside a pub, with bells jingling and wearing a sort of forced jollity along with their vaguely outlandish costumes. On the other hand, there remains a haunting that resides deep in the English consciousness. Morris sides are often asked to perform at weddings, as their dances are thought to bring luck upon the newly-weds. Audiences will still turn out at the crack of dawn on May Day to witness Morris dancers “waking the summer”. Apparently the Morris, along with the other folk customs that linger around it, has resonance yet in the popular imagination.
Among the stranger aspects of folk tradition in Britain, and nowadays most often seen cavorting in the company of those aforementioned Morris dancers, are the “folk beasts”. Professor Ronald Hutton has defined such beasts into three broad categories. He's argued, in Stations of the Sun, that some are closely associated with Midwinter customs, for instance the Mari Lwyd in South Wales and the Oss in Cornwall; that hobby horses originated as entertainments at English courts in the late mediaeval period; and that representations of animal heads mounted onto sticks began with rural festivities in the 19th century.
But these weird creatures contain aspects beyond being frivolous public entertainments. As Professor Hutton writes,
“two of the simplest ways of expressing festive licence and signalling the existence of legitimate misrule have been for the sexes to cross-dress or for people to put on animal skins and masks. Both indicate the suspension of the normal.”
The Russian theorist Bakhtin, in his study of mediaeval folk culture through the work of the 16th century French writer Rabelais (Rabelais and His World, 1965), noted the role of carnival as a transformative moment of “the world turned upside down”, when the normal rules and morals of society may be suspended, and the beggar may be temporarily a king. The exact reasons for such periods of carnival might be ambivalent and debateable. Was it merely the common populace being permitted to let off steam, a nod to chaos as a frightening alternative to established order, or a tantalising glimpse of an alternative society?
Many survivals of tradition such as the Morris dance – with its accompaniment of cross-dressing “Mollies”, the Fool waving a balloon (originally an inflated pig's bladder) on the end of a stick, and a historical reputation for public mayhem – may now have lost much of that old, anarchic, carnivalesque spirit. But the folk beasts at least seem to have retained some stronger element of it, still keeping up a reputation for disruptive antics and public mischief.
There are two sides to the survival of the beasts' rebellious nature, I think. One is the power of masking or, to use a traditional term, guising. The other is the capacity that humans have for the suspension of disbelief.
In his book Earth God Rising, Alan Richardson writes:
“Masks obliterate the human personality with all its frail quirks, all its physiological imperfections. Made properly and used with skill on highly charged occasions, the effect on the consciousness of the celebrants can be staggering. Holes can be punched in the rational defences, and [the wearer] can be made to know that he is, beyond any doubt, in the company of gods.”
As a Border Morris dancer myself, I've regularly worn face paint for performance as an integral part of the dance costume (or “kit”, to use the correct term). There's a distinct, and definite, shift into what might be termed performance personality – a shift of consciousness from ordinary reality into a differentiated, non-ordinary, state of mind. It's akin to the shift into the magical persona, in the context of working ritual.
Arguably, that shift of consciousness is particularly marked for the traditional folk beasts, whose performers are taking on the mantle of a non-human creature. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to even suggest that there could be a shamanistic survival, in the folk beast traditions, that descends to us from the famed “Sorceror of Trois-Frères”.
It's also noticeable that the responses to such beasts tend to show an alteration of consciousness in their presence, too. Quite often they elicit some degree of fear, even in adults; there's a dark edge to them, beyond the mischief-making. I've witnessed small children happily trying to feed snacks to the tall, black-caped Hooden Horse as its wooden jaws clacked. Yet I've seen grown men and women flinch at the approach of that same beast, as if afraid of its bite or perhaps of the long and sinister shadow that it casts.
There's been something of a population boom among folk beasts, recently. Most notably, Boss Morris – a group of young women who've set out to modernise the image of the Morris dance and relate it to new audiences – have adopted what sometimes looks like a whole herd of beasts as an integral part of their performances. When Boss Morris performed at the Brit Awards in February this year, accompanying the band Wet Leg, their beasts were prominent on the stage. The Boss beasts, however, are mostly of a friendlier, more comfortable variety than the weird and threatening creatures of tradition. At the Brits, while there was one Hooden Horse, that was very much cutting a lone figure in the company of a bull, a sheep and an owl.
In spite of the mythology around such familiar animals, they don't carry the magical weight of the unfamiliar and lack the dark impact of the supernatural or the nightmare. And that, I can't help but feel, is missing the key point of the folk beast tradition. The beasts are meant to disturb and frighten, they are meant to jolt us out of ordinary reality as they apparently breach a flimsy barrier between our mundane world and their dangerous otherworld. The folk beast is an archaic terror, and that is at least a part of its continuing power and of its continuing appeal. They had almost completely died out by the early twentieth century, but they were revived because they remain necessary. We need such monsters, so that we may learn how to deal with monsters.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).