Old English Dragons, Serpents, Wyrms – and Magic Charms
In mythic terms the Old English wyrm stands for chaos and disorder, for unjust inversion of the social order, and the violation of social bonds. As such the wyrm is also the enemy of the god Woden, the divine Æsir champion of patriarchal law and order, to be enforced by repression when necessary. There is a surviving Old English magical incantation known as The Nine Herbs Charm,which can be read as an affirmation of
- a desired victory of Odinic order over chaos,
- good faith over treachery,
- regularity over randomness, and
- structured society over the unstructured wild in nature.
It reads, in part, as follows:
The Nine Herbs Charm
These nine spikes [are] against nine poisons.
A worm came crawling. He tore a man apart.
Then Woden took up nine glory-rods.
He struck the adder then,
so that it flew apart into nine pieces.
There, apple ended it, and its poison,
So that it could never wend its way into a house.
Chervil and fennel, two of great strength:
The wise god shaped these plants, whilst he was hanging,
Holy in the heavens, he set them down
And sent them down into the seven worlds,
For the poor and for the wealthy,
As a cure for all.
In this verse Woden’s victory using his magical ‘glory-rods’ or wuldortanas, is the triumph of the male sky-god over chaos, where the wooden wuldortanas rods represent firstly a divine weapon of war (usually a club, mace, or hammer), but also (secondly) the nine (possibly sacred?) healing herbs of ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition. One aspect of the dragon-serpent is clearly a spirit of disease and illness, and Woden’s splitting of it into nine pieces, which “flew apart” into the world, may have been thought by the Anglo-Saxons to be the origin for nine dragon-wyrm related maladies for which healing plants were needed. It was thought that worms inhabited the human body, and caused sudden unexplained pains such as toothache.
The nine herbs listed in the full version of the charm, most of which are recognisable still today (but with the names of two of the plants remaining more mysterious) are:
- Mugwort
- Waybread (plantain)
- Cress
- Nettle
- Crab Apple
- Chervil
- Fennel.
- Atterlothe (?)
- Maythe (?)
There also survives a second Old Saxon magical charm against serpents which clearly draws on the same traditional Old English view of the dragon-wyrm:
Against a Serpent
Go out, worm, with nine small worms
Out from the marrow into the bone
Out from the bone into the flesh
Out from the flesh into the skin
Out from the skin into this arrow.
Lord, let this become so.
Note that the number nine, which was associated by the Anglo-Saxons with magical properties, appears in both the Nine Herbs Charm and the Against a Serpent verse.
The Wheel of the Year and Protective Dragons [click on link to continue reading] or: