Weird Walsingham

• Pilgrimages to Walsingham have been going on since before the Romans left.* They were originally to a shrine of Mercury. Of the European Celts in his own time, Julius Caesar writes

Deum maxime Mercurium colunt. Huius sunt plurima simulacra: hunc omnium inventorem artium ferunt, hunc viarum atque itinerum [i.e. "pilgrimages"?] ducem, hunc ad quaestus pecuniae mercaturasque habere vim maximam arbitrantur.

[De Bello Gallico, VI, xvii] 

The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Mercury was Woden. The Norse version of Woden was Odin.  According to Norse mythology, Odin hung for nine days and nights on the world-tree, the great ash tree Yggdrasill. According to Neil Price, there is a modern theory that the tree Yggdrasill was in fact the Milky Way. It's possible that an old name for the Milky Way was "the Walsingham Way". 

 

Deeply surely I need to deplore it,

Wondering why my master bore it,

The riving off that race

So at home, time was, to his truth and grace

That a starlight-wender of ours would say

The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way

And one–but let be, let be:

More, more than was will yet be.–

O well wept, mother have lost son;

Wept, wife; wept, sweetheart would be one:

Though grief yield them no good

Yet shed what tears sad truelove should.

But to Christ lord of thunder

Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:

‘Holiest, loveliest, bravest,

Save my hero, O Hero savest.

And the prayer thou hearst me making

Have, at the awful overtaking,

Heard; have heard and granted

Grace that day grace was wanted.’

Not that hell knows redeeming,

But for souls sunk in seeming

Fresh, till doomfire burn all,

Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'The Loss of the Eurydice'] 

• There is a stretch of Roman road that runs between Castle Acre and Great Massingham along which pilgrims to Walsingham still walk. The road is known as Peddars Way.

• Some versions of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham depict her with her foot not on a serpent but on a frog. The frog may well be one of the frogs that appear in Scripture.

Et vidi de ore draconis et de ore bestiae et de ore pseudoprophetae spiritus tres inmundos in modum ranarum. Sunt enim spiritus daemoniorum facientes signa et procedunt ad reges totius terrae congregare illos in proelium ad diem magnum Dei omnipotentis. 

 

[Revelation XVI, xiii-xiv] 

• A spindle-whorl has been discovered in a house in Nazareth, of the sort in which Our Lady would have lived. It is quite possible that Our Lady was herself spinning when the angel Gabriel appeared to her. What we do know is that spindle whorls in Iceland, essential for use in seiðr rituals, went from having old Norse protection spells written on them ('Óðinn and Heimdallr and Þjálfa, they will help you', etc.) to having cheery little Latin good luck charms ('Pax Portanti, Salus habenti!') to having finally just one word of protection - 'Maria', followed by the whole of the runic alphabet. (This last is from a spindle whorl made from Icelandic sandstone, found at Stóramörk in Rangárvallasýsla during the summer of 1926 and delivered to the National Museum the following year.) The haunting impression is left that as our northern cousins finally gave up on the Æsir and turned to Christ and His saints, they tended to invoke the aid of their new supernatural allies in much the same way as they always had the old.

*The "baptizing" of places of pagan cults by Christian missionaries is hardly unique to England, after all. A good example on the continent, in Głogówko in Poland, is that of the Holy Mountain (Świętej Górze in Polish) Basilica of the Mystic Rose (Róży Duchownej) - better known to the rest of the world perhaps as the Gostyń Oratory.