The One Saint You Need on Your Side
The Occult Story of the Saints: Part Two
The English county of Suffolk might only be a mere fifty miles north of London, but the land has a tangible feeling of withdrawal and isolation. This rural, eastern-most part of Britain leans away from the rest of the country. There is a sense of it being turned towards itself; it looks inwards, concerned only with its own affairs. In the more remote parts of the county, where a mobile signal is still virtually non-existent, the old boys of the villages and hamlets – if you give them a chance – will talk to you in their broad, lilting Suffolk dialect and tell you how St Edmund should be England’s patron saint, rather than St George. Edmund’s patronal day is 20th November, and it is still celebrated in the three counties comprising the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia (Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire), over which he reigned from 855 to 869 CE.
The historic King Edmund was likely the last native East Anglian king, ending a line beginning with Wehha, legendary founder of the Wuffinga Anglo-Saxon royal dynasty. Wuffinga translates as ‘kin of the wolf’. The dynasty includes King Rædwald, the man interred in a great burial mound on a promontory overlooking the River Deben. Today, we know this better as the ship burial discovered within Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, along with a fabulous array of grave goods, including the world-renowned helmet. The Wuffingas likely originated from southern Scandinavia: the royal cemetery at Sutton Hoo bears comparison with the ritual complex at Old Uppsala in Sweden, a cult centre home to the Norse god Yngvi-freyr, and a royal burial site for Yngling kings. The grave goods recovered from Sutton Hoo also share parallels with Swedish Valsgärde and Vendel culture. Further, it has been suggested that the tale of Beowulf was authored in East Anglia in the reign of the Wuffinga King Ælfwald (713-749 CE), to explicitly establish a link between the Wuffingas and the legendary king.
The author of Edmund’s Passio – his hagiography or saintly biography – is the French monk Abbo of Fleury, and he describes Edmund as a near-perfect king. However, Edmund’s reign was cut short when, aged just 29, his troops were defeated by the so-called Viking ‘Great Heathen Army’, led by the notorious Ivar Ragnarsson, known also as ‘The Boneless’, a son of Ragnar Lothbrok and the völva Aslaug Sigurdsdottir. According to Abbo’s Passio, Ivar’s terms of surrender were that Edmund should hand over his treasure and submit to Ivar’s authority; if he agreed, Edmund could continue to rule his lands as a puppet-king. In reply Edmund told Ivar that he would only submit if the Viking accepted the Christian faith, although Abbo describes Edmund’s response slightly differently as:
It was never my custom to take to flight, but I would rather die, if I must, for my own land.
It is notable that Edmund cites his bond with the land as a motivating factor. Ivar sent his men to capture Edmund, then commanded that he be tied to a tree and scourged, shot with arrows and speared with javelins until he was covered with missiles ‘like the bristles of a hedgehog.’ Edmund was then decapitated, his head thrown into a bramble bush and his body left where it lay.
One of Edmund’s men, possibly his armour-bearer, observed the king’s death. He and others began the process of searching for the body and head. They found the former, but the latter caused them to track deep into the woods. They called out ‘where are you now friend?’ In response a voice cried ‘here, here, here.’ They went to the source and found Edmund’s head, still capable of speech, clasped between the paws of a great wolf. They took the head and the guardian-wolf followed them until both parts of the corpse were safe, whereupon it loped back into the woods. The head then became miraculously reunited with the body.
The great wolf guarding Edmund’s severed head is a clear allusion to the king’s dynastic heritage and can be interpreted as a kind of spirit-animal of the East Anglian dynasty; a guardian of the Wuffinga royal line.
Hagiographies are notoriously untrustworthy, but what grants Abbo’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi some veracity is that it is likely based on an eye-witness account. Abbo composed the work between 985 and 987, 116 years after Edmund’s death. But Abbo explains that he first heard Edmund’s story from the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan (previously Abbot of Glastonbury.) Dunstan himself heard it when he was quite young, told to King Æthelstan by a very old man who asserted on oath that he was armour-bearer to King Edmund. The dates just about stack up: Dunstan was roughly 16 when he met Æthelstan after the latter’s coronation in 925, some 55 years after Edmund’s death. The armour-bearer was probably in his early to mid-70s. When Abbo heard the story recounted, Dunstan was about 76. Therefore it is possible for two memories to cover some 116 years.
Edmund’s corpse was placed in a wooden church close to where he fell and various miracles were attributed to it. Later, in 903 CE, the body was translated to a monastery at Beodericsworth (Bury St Edmunds) where a shrine was erected, and further miracles occurred, giving rise to a popular grassroots cult. As a result of the saint’s strange, liminal alive-in-death state, Edmund’s hair and nails continued to grow; they were cut once a year by ‘venerable women’. Abbo describes how:
[Edmund] was entirely fresh as if he were alive, with an uncorrupted body, and his neck, which had been cut through, was healed. There was as it were a silken thread about his red neck, as an indication to the world how he was slain. Also the wounds which the heathens had inflicted on his body with their frequent shots, were healed through the grace of the heavenly God.
By 1198, thanks to St Edmund’s fame, a grand and wealthy monastery had grown around his shrine (it would ultimately become the fourth richest abbey in England.) Following a fire the body was once again disinterred, by Abbot Sampson, who observed ‘[Edmund’s] feet standing up, like the feet of a man who had died that day.’ All in all the body was unharmed and still incorrupt. Also:
Affixed to the outside, over the breast of the martyr, lay an angel of gold, about the length of a man's foot, holding in one hand a golden sword and in the other a banner. Underneath it, there was a hole in the lid of the coffin, where the ancient custodians of the martyr had been wont to lay their hands, for the purpose of touching the sacred body. And over the figure of the angel was this verse inscribed ‘Martiris ecce zoma servat Michaelis agalma [This is the Martyr's garment, which Michael's image guards].’
What made Edmund unique was his status as an incorrupt saint who was also a king and a martyr. Most incorrupt saints were founders of monastic houses, rather than royal figures or individuals who had died usually violent deaths for their faith. Furthermore, scholars generally accept that Edmund’s death bears the hallmarks of a ritual killing, a dubious honour shared only with King Oswald of Northumbria who, in 642 CE, was killed in battle by the pagan King Penda of Mercia and ritually dismembered.
Edmund’s executioner was Ivar the Boneless, known as ‘Hinguar’ (translating as ‘Warrior of Freyr’) in Anglo-Saxon texts. In a book published some years ago I argue that the reason for this difference in naming relates to Ivar’s ‘bonelessness’, a euphemism for his status as a literal castrate or ‘geld-man’. This act occurred in response to Norse folk-magickal concepts of castration, geldings, virility and male potency; the origins of seiðr as a female-only form of sorcery; traditions of magickal power residing in symbolic or actual horse’s penis’ (völsi / völ / völur); and in the symbolic sacrifices made by Yngi-Freyr to his wife Gerðr in the Eddic poem Skírnismál. In other words, Ivar / Hinguar was a Freysgoði, one of the androgynous ‘sons of Yngvi-Freyr’ who may also have been castrates.
Many of these themes may be traced back to Yngvi-Freyr: the Vanir god of fertility, sacral kingship and blood sacrifices, whose totem animals are the boar and the horse, and who symbolically gave up his sword / male potency as part of a ritualised sacred marriage or hieros gamos (leaving him with just an antler to fight the fire giant Surtr at Ragnarök.) Further, the Ingwaz / Ing rune of the Anglo-Saxon and Elder Futhark, explicitly associated with Yngvi-Freyr, may represent both fertility and a loss of virility i.e. the castrated male.
It is also probable that the timing of Edmund’s ritual slaughter was no coincidence, as Yngvi-freyr’s blot (the Fróblót) likely occurred in November. Bede confirms that November was Blōtmōnaþ: the ‘month of sacrifices’. Thus, I argue that Ivar / Hinguar the Freysgoði made Edmund a blood-sacrifice to Yngvi-Freyr as part of a seasonal fertility rite consistent with Germanic and Scandinavian traditions. If anything, this increased Edmund’s status as, through sacrifice, he became transformed into a sacral entity, a holy object. It certainly explains why he was venerated by the Viking settlers who established communities in East Anglia following its conquest.
As a saint occupying that strange state of life-in-death alluded to in a previous essay, St Edmund was a force to be reckoned with. One document attributes to him 55 miracles: 27 are related to healing, nine to revenge, seven to visions, six to salvations and one to liberation. Yet he was best-known as protector of the land and the people, hence the oft-used epithet ‘Shield of the East Angles.’ Perhaps the most renowned example concerns the Viking king Sweyn Forkbeard. According to Herman the Deacon, the Dane visited Bury St Edmunds and demanded tax from the lands of the monastery, threatening to burn the town. The townsfolk refused the pay, instead beseeching Edmund to protect them. A monk who daily attended to the saint’s corpse, by the name of Egelwyn, had a vision in which Edmund complained about the treatment of his people. Egelwyn communicated this message to Sweyn, who in turn delivered an insolent reply. Edmund then appeared to Sweyn as an apparition, wielding a lance, whilst the king was in bed:
Calling the king by his own name [Edmund] said, “Do you want to have a tribute, O King, from the land of St Edmund? Rise up, behold, take it.” He who was rising up sat down again in his bed, but soon began to cry out dreadfully when he saw the weapons. As soon as [Edmund] made the attack, he left him, pierced through with a lance, dying. Stirred up by his shout, we ran to it and found him defiled with his own blood, his soul belched forth.
St Edmund was also capable of dispensing supernatural justice or retribution to those he deemed in violation of his shrine. Recorded examples include: immobilising eight thieves; inflicting madness on an insolent noble; and paralysing the hands of a monk who attempted to open his tomb. Yet most bizarre of all is a curious fertility ritual, known as the Oblation of the Bull, which was practiced on Edmund’s patronal day into the Tudor era. A white bull, kept by the abbey, was made available for any married woman who wished to conceive. Led by a monk, the woman accompanied the bull, which was adorned with garlands of flowers and ribbons, through the streets to the west gate of the abbey. Inside she would proceed to the shrine of St Edmund and make an offering, then pray for a child, kiss the shrine and retire. The procession was always accompanied by singing monks and a large congregation of townsfolk. The ritual was likely a later confection by the abbey to generate revenue, but remains an interesting oddity nonetheless.
King Alfred declared Edmund patron saint of England within 20 years of his death, and this remained the case until Edward III selected St George as a new elite and aristocratic patron saint in the 14th century. At its height, the cult of St Edmund spread as far north as Scandinavia and Iceland. The Danish King Cnut was a significant benefactor. Edward the Confessor made substantial land endowments to the abbey. Richard I approached his shrine barefoot and prostrated himself before it, so holy was the ground surrounding it.
These examples illustrate how the praesentia of a saint – the holy presence or incarnation in place – sacralised the land and established a kind of hagiographic topography, with the saint’s resting place functioning as an adytum or holy-of-holies. This was very much in evidence in the case of St Edmund. Even though clerical and secular institutions exploited and expanded his prestige, the process of monumentalising Edmund’s resting place, and developing his legend, simply reinforced the fact that he remained sovereign, even in death. He was a semi-divine, independent and unpredictable power, who embodied the land and the locality. An area comprising around half of Suffolk’s parishes, known as The Liberty of St Edmund, was a powerful symbol of kingly authority and, in its naming, defined a realm over which the dead king retained a perceived sovereignty. Similarly, great linear defensive earthworks once bore his name. The king and the land were literally one.
Thus, the entire abbey, community, and encompassing lands were constructed around the symbolic centre of Edmund’s shrine, conforming to an almost mythic conception of a town or city. Ultimately, this myth-making process fashioned a new type of saint. Edmund became a divine warrior-king, a perfect and much-loved sacral ruler who, through his ritualised sacrifice, was more powerful in death than in life.
I can attest to the efficacy of entreating St Edmund, if time and attention are invested in establishing a rapport. In working with him, you will explore the true meaning of sainthood: the mysteries of sacrifice; the bonds between nature and spirit; the body as a gateway and vessel for supernatural power. But most importantly, you will be drawn into a contemplation of sovereignty. In my book Avalon Working I bang on about sovereignty and sacral kingship at some length, and conclude that our current leaders have forfeited any legitimacy, and that the mantle of sovereignty has passed to us, the people, as befits the incoming Age and Aeon. Our personal authority and sovereignty will always be constricted by the petits tyrans of the world, so an ally in the form of a vengeful, divine warrior-king makes a good deal of sense. Edmund is, as the colloquialism goes, a Bad Motherfucker. In my opinion, he is an intercessor, protector and ‘intimate, invisible friend’ you definitely want on your side.