Backcountry Magic Ways: The Border Obsession with Sorcery

As recently as 1920 a traveler in the Ozark mountains observed a startling sight. Early on a spring morning as the birds began to sing, he watched in astonishment as a farmer and his wife hurried from their cabin to a new-ploughed field, stripped off their clothing, began “chasing each other up and down like rabbits,” and then copulated on the ground. The couple were known as “quiet, hardworking folk,” who came of good family and went to the local church.

In southwestern Missouri, Ozark ethnographer Vance Randolph collected many similar reports:

A very old woman said that before sunrise on July 25, four grown girls and one boy did the planting. “They all stripped off naked,” she told me, “The boy started in the middle of the field patch with them four big gals a-prancin ‘round him. It seems like the boy throwed all the seed, and the girl kept a-hollering ‘Pecker deep! Pecker deep.’ And when they got done, the whole bunch would roll in the dust like some kind of wild animals. There ain’t no sense to it,” the old woman added, “but them folks always raised the best turnips on the creek.”¹

This type of magic has persisted in the backcountry even to our own time. It may serve to remind us of an important theme in this history. Each Anglo-American folk culture was the product not merely of a place but of a period. The people of the back-country brought with them the magic that existed on the borders of North Britain in the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. These beliefs included an interest in witchcraft, wizardry and other forms of diabolical magic—but not the same sort of witchcraft obsession that had flourished among the Puritans a century earlier.

Witchcraft still survived in this culture. Daniel Drake remembered meeting a borderer in the American backcountry named Old Billy Johnson who was “an implicit believer in witchcraft, and ‘raising’ and ‘laying’ the Devil.”² The folklore of the southern mountains was full of witches and goblins for many generations. As late as the 1930s, collectors of folk beliefs in the southern mountains were told of many witch-beliefs:

If an old woman has only one tooth, she is a witch.

If a warm current of air is felt, witches are passing.

If you are awake at eleven, you will see witches.

The twitching of an eye is a sign that one is bewitched.

If there are tangles in your hair early in the morning, the witches have been riding you.

The howling of dogs shows the presence of witches.

If your shoestring comes untied, the witches are after you.

If you see a cross-eyed person you must cross your fingers to ward off the evil eye.³

Many backcountry folk dabbled in witchcraft themselves.

Wet a rag in your enemy’s blood. Put it behind a rock in the chimney. When it rots your enemy will die.

To work evil upon one, get the person’s picture.

Take seven hairs from a blood snake, seven scales from a rattlesnake, seven bits of feathers from an owl, add a hair from the person you desire, a bit of nail paring, and cook these for seven minutes over a hot fire in the first rainwater caught in April. Sprinkle the concoction on the clothes of the person to be charmed. It cannot fail.

To point an index or dog finger of the right hand at a person will give that person bad luck.

In early settlements, there was apt to be a specialist in superstition called the witchmaster whose services were much in demand. Samuel Kercheval recalled: “I have known several of these witch-masters, as they were called, who made a public profession of curing these diseases, inflicted by the influence of witches.” The practice of witchmasters was often as fixed and regular as those of physicians in the twentieth century. Witchmasters were expected to make house calls. When their services were not available, the backsettlers were trained to administer a sort of magical first-aid.

If you want to keep witches away, lay a straw broom in the doorway.

To kill a witch, draw a heart on a holly tree, and drive a spike into her heart for nine mornings.

But these practices had nothing like the urgency that had existed in seventeenth-century New England. No person is known to have been executed for witchcraft anywhere in the southern highlands, though a goodly number were hanged for other crimes. Here was an important difference from the culture of an earlier period.

Backcountry folk also showed an intense interest in astrology and divination. It was widely believed that the stars and planets had a power over earthly events:

Plant flowers in the blooming days [under the sign of Virgo].

Never castrate stock when the sign of the zodiac point to the loins. Bleeding will be profuse. … Altering hogs is best when the zodiac sign is in the head [Pisces].

Zinnias should be planted when the sign is in the scales [Libra].

Never gather fruit in the watery signs, or in the new moon, because the fruit will spoil.

These beliefs were never cultivated with the same degree of refinement that had existed among Virginia planters or Renaissance gentlemen throughout western Europe. In its highest pitch of development, this also had been the obsession of an era which was passing when the back settlements were born. But it persisted in more popular forms.

The folk culture of the backcountry ran strongly to another category of magic, which might be called experimental sorcery or secular superstition. It consisted mainly in the pragmatic use of conjuring, sorcery, charms, omens, spells, potions, incantations and popular astrology to change the course of events, or to predict them.⁴

This magic contained a vast repertory of practices for any imaginable occasion—for troubles with animals, crops, neighbors, children, weather, illness. It recommended actions for the control of any possible emotion, and for the execution of any imaginable purpose in the world. In the early twentieth century, one group of folklorists collected nearly 10,000 of these prescriptions in North Carolina, from which a few examples might be selected. A few of these prescriptions have been confirmed by science:

Eating cornbread causes pellagra.

For scurvy, apply uncooked potatos sliced and soaked in vinegar.

To cure snake bite, if no wound is in the mouth, suck out the poison and spit it out; cauterize, cut so as to make the place bleed freely.

Others were positively lethal:

A cure for homesickness is to sew a good charge of gunpowder on the inside of the shirt near the neck.

To cure a fever, climb a tall tree with your hands (do not use feet), and jump off.

Many were contradictory:

It is lucky for a bird to come into the house.

If a bird flies into the house there will be bad luck.

It is bad luck to kill a cat.

For good luck, boil a black cat alive.

Many charms and potions showed a spirit of extreme brutality:

Against epilepsy wear a bit of human cranium.

A piece of rope by which a person has been hanged will cure epilepsy by its touch.

For fever, cut a black chicken open while alive, and bind to the bottom of a foot. This will draw the fever.

The blood of a bat will cure baldness.

Eating the brain of a screech owl is the only dependable remedy for headache.

For rheumatism, apply split frogs to the feet.

To reduce a swollen leg, split a live cat and apply while still warm.

Bite the head off the first butterfly you see, and you will get a new dress.

Open the cow’s mouth and throw a live toad-frog down her throat. This will cure her of hollow horn.

These good-luck charms, whatever they may have done for their human users, brought very bad luck to large numbers of back-country cats, bats, frogs, owls, snakes, chicks and puppy dogs. Samuel Kercheval remembered that the first glassblowers in the backcountry “drove the witches out of their furnaces by throwing live puppies into them.” He also recalled that “there was scarcely a black cat to be seen, whose ears and tail had not been frequently cropped off for a contribution of blood.”⁵

Other magical folk-beliefs shaped the manners, dress, diet and appearance of backcountry folks in ways that startled visitors from other cultures:

Some old people let the nails of their little fingers grow very long, and they called it “a luck nail.”

It is good luck to put a garment on wrong side out and leave it that way all day.

It is bad luck to say thank you.

It is bad luck to bathe on your wedding day.

A small piece of shit worn in a bag round the neck will keep off disease.

Water is poisonous during dog days.

Some of these customs tell us about conditions of life in crowded backcountry cabins.

When three people wake up abed together, the oldest will die first.

If two people wash their hands in the same water, they will be friends forever.

Others were often desperate attempts to control one’s destiny.

If a woman is pregnant, and drinks some of her own urine, she will miscarry.

To sit over a pot of stewed onions will cause a miscarriage.

But most were innocent omens and harmless charms.

To cure sore eyes, kiss a red-head.

To take away freckles, wash your face in cobweb dew.

If a butterfly comes into the house, it means a stranger is coming to visit.

Three drops of your own blood, fed to another, is an effective love charm.

If you carry a lock of hair of a person, you will have power over that person.

Get the ugliest person you know to look in the cream jar so you can churn it.

Potatoes should be planted on St. Patrick’s Day.

Much of this folklore was brought from Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. But backcountry magic was an eclectic body of beliefs, constantly growing by borrowings from Indians, Africans, Germans, and other cultures. Novel folk practices were continuously invented within this culture. It is important to note that when these “traditional” backcountry prescriptions were recorded in the twentieth century, some were not very old. The people of Appalachia endowed many modern industrial products with magical properties. A particular favorite was kerosene:

Take kerosene for asthma.

To stop a wound from bleeding, pour kerosene on it.

To cure a burn use kerosene oil.

Rub your feet with kerosene and salt for chilblain.

Take a teaspoonful of sugar wet with kerosene, and it will cure a bad cold.

Take kerosene as a cure for the colic.

Kerosene will prevent swelling in a snake bite.

It is bad luck to leave a kerosene lamp burning until all the oil is burned out.

Hang up a bottle of kerosene in a tree to prevent blight.

Umbrellas were also endowed with special powers:

If you open an umbrella in the house, you will not get married that year.

If you drop an umbrella, let someone else pick it up, or disappointment will come to you.

Raising an umbrella in the house is bad luck.

To put an umbrella on a bed causes disputes.

The railroad and the motor car acquired a magic of their own:

If one walks sixteen railroad ties without falling off, any wish made will come true.

[If] a cat cross [es] the road in front of your automobile, make a crossmark on the windshield.

This self-renewing backcountry magic needed none of the institutional apparatus which the Puritans of New England brought to bear upon witchcraft. It did not require any of the intellectual refinement which country gentlemen in Virginia devoted to the study of fortune. The magic of the backcountry was a simple set of homespun superstitions, designed for use by small groups of unlettered people.

The magic of the backcountry was remarkably secular in its nature and purposes. It retained vestigial beliefs in the Devil, witches, stars and planets. But mainly it sought to control worldly events by the manipulation of worldly things.

Backcountry magic was highly materialist, experimental and empirical in its nature. Its ancient rituals and homespun remedies were mainly a device by which these people struggled to understand and control their lives in the midst of many uncertainties of their world.

Any modern social scientist might be able to “explain” the persistence of backcountry magic in half a dozen ways—Marxian, Freudian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, structuralist, empiricist. But mainly this folk magic flourished because none of those other “explanations” was intellectually available or acceptable within this culture. Active and highly intelligent backcountry minds had no better system of accounting for the secular uncertainties that surrounded them. A mountain woman has written:

Speaking for my own people, I am sure that almost every one has had some experience he can not explain away. Perhaps he has heard a warning of some one’s death, a strange noise, a shriek on the roof. Perhaps a man has passed him in the open road and disappeared suddenly, leaving no tracks. … My people, like the Hindoos and the Scotch Highlanders, have the faculty of dealing with the occult, of seeing and hearing that which is withheld from more highly educated minds. Always there is some souvenir of the spirit-world in a nook of the mountainer’s brain. He is unwilling to accept it, never believes quite all that it seems to imply. Still, there it is.⁶