The Bolventor Ritual

Part eight: Of the Moon Raker's rake and the Moon Pool of Tanat

Cecil Williamson followed the smugglers’ route as he criss-crossed Cornwall from Polperro to the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle. High on the desolate moor lay the secret ritual site of the cult, the moon pool of Tanat.

Despite the missing photographs, I can identify it with certainty from the fragmentary references Cecil left us. It can only be the storied Dozmary Pool.

Here Tennyson had imagined a lady clothed in white samite, raising her hand to accept the returned Excalibur from a grieving Bedivere. The once and future king received his fatal wound at Slaughterbridge, some twenty miles distant as the raven flies, and was taken thence to Glastonbury and the Isle of the Dead. The sword, not fit for mortal hands, was passed through the mirror and back into the realm of the gods.

Cecil Williamson followed another time-track, one where a Phoenician goddess had made landfall at St Michael’s Mount, and imparted her witchcraft secrets to the wise. But the land possesses more ancient memories than these.

Bodmin Moor is the oldest pluton of the Cornubian batholith, along with the tin-rich Carnmenellis and Scilly. First the granite breast of the moor swelled up and melted an aureole of slate and shale about itself. Then quartz cooled the magma, as silicon and oxygen locked into tetrahedrons, forming triangular pyramidal intelligences. As the masses began to set, the glittering feldspar megacrysts seeded through the matrix grew into long finger streaks and oriented themselves like compass needles. Revealed over centuries from the soft blanket of sandstone and slate, ice-carved and water-weathered, the enigmatic tors emerged.

Dozmary, the great moon basin, is a perfect neolithic tear welling up from the surrounding hills and running off their eccentric summits. An ancient woman in the landscape, she is the daughter of a great glacial angel dragging his hoary wing a mile thick. Anomalous stones loosed from his leather apron fell as far west as Porthleven. When that angel departed he left a dish carved out by the retreating ice in which the moon could wash her face, amidst unsteady stones and impossibly stacked granite summits.

As a source of unfailing water since the Stone Age, Dozmary Pool is sacred to animals and birds. Each has a name for her, and so too did the Neolithic hunters who followed the retreating ice. Here they encountered monuments built by the race of giants that proceeded them. This was the landscape of the primordial masters of granite, which warmed and glittered in the sunlight. The pool is a jewel in the high ground.

Dozmary is the only natural freshwater lake in the county, feeding into the River Fowey and contributing to the tumble of Golitha Falls. The underfit rivers of today which spindle off the moor are bedded in valleys once cut by heavier flows. Otters insinuate upstream, following rivers, then streams, which spawn the spotted trout, whom some say generated out of the lightning. Merlins, peregrines, lapwings and snipe make these skies home, as do migrating great red kites who twitch at the stiff ailerons of their prehistoric tails as they hunt.

The now bleak moorland pool was fringed by a glade of low hazel and oak where our first kings hunted, where the deer bent their necks and water-birds clattered up from the reeds. Steadily fed on thunderbolts, it still yields up the flint-knapped elfshot of a previous and smaller people. The cunning folk would later make figures of yellow cornish butter and flick these fairy arrows into them.

The neolithic hunters were followed by farmers, who by the late Bronze Age hewed the great pluton clean and made the moor fraught with stone clocks all set by the solstice summit of the outcrops and cairns of Roughtor and Brown Willy. That starry script now seems as disordered as the clitter slopes of the tors where the calved blocks jumble into broken granite static.

In 1200 BCE another clock, that of the earth and allied weather angels, expelled the Bronze Age farmers from the moor. Unexpected by the holy men who watched the heavens, volcano Hekla spoke as a great black cloud issuing from distant Iceland. The climate cooled and wettened, creating a blanket bog of rotted sphagnum moss and cottongrass. Out of the sogging moor emerged hovering light beings and deceivers. The Mediterranean trade networks collapsed. Forever exposed, the rings, halls, cists, cairns and field boundaries were abandoned to the weather and the spirits.

The moor has endured, beyond the gnaw of quarries and the worrying at its flanks by the China clay. The choicest minerals had fortunately washed out further west. Though the shadows still stretch from the slowly sinking stone machines, their alignments go for the most part unobserved and unheeded. Grazed throughout the Iron Age, human settlements ventured back in the medieval period, relying on the swards of poor acid grasslands. Templar Knights built a desperate church here in 1150, a fact Cecil Williamson assiduously notes. It was a lonely outpost from whose ruin the bells were stolen, as if to return silence to the moor.¹

As for Dozmary, in spring she is become the mother of dragonflies. A pitcher of iridescent blue damsels and great green-yellow dragons whose larvae slept beneath the waters all winter long. In autumn she begets the winds which strafe the marshlands and mire. In the dark half of the year she receives few, if any visitors. A lone cottage watches over the lake shore, her shawl of trees is gone, only furze and thorn remain.

The Fairey Force

Cecil Williamson gives accounts of Dozmary across his notes and exhibit cards:

DOZMARY POOL near Temple on Bodmin Moor is a much favoured place by witches for calling Down the Moon and Raising the water spirits of Reflection. This is a Symbolic Picture indicating the pool, the Light and the Fairey force abroad at night.

Again, the symbolic picture referred to here is lost. But the accounts of practices in communication with the Moon and fairey force can be considered as part of his complex of ideas around Tanat and the piskies.

At times it seemed impossible to discover the actual practices of the Tanat cult beyond the pisky charming rite. But was such a ritual was ever carried out? Did the cult contain any members outside of Cecil and his imagination? I had begun to doubt it. But I know that Cecil was an experimenter, with spells and rites always on the go. Given that he was working with the Moon and a body of water, perhaps the infamous moon rake was employed?

There are many unusual ritual implements in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, and the moon rake is just such an oddity. The two and a half metre haft ends in a horseshoe. It has no practical use beyond witchcraft. He writes in a letter,

The Moon Rakers Rake, which I also make use of, came into my possession in 1941, when working on an MI6 undercover project in the Branscombe Coastal Area. The donor lived at Southleigh, and did her Moon Raking in the countryside close to Blackbury Castle, an ancient Hill Fort.

The Jurassic Coast must have been quite the lure for he and Gwen who were always on the look out for shells for the Buckfast museum. It dawned on me that I had perhaps dismissed the House of Shells a little too quickly. I am not alone, the kitsch displays all ended up in a skip, history didn’t care for them. Yet shells are an important part of our materia magica. I often find them left at the holy stones on Belerion, little treasures carried from a day at the beach, still full of warmth and laughter. Sure enough, Cecil’s witchcraft museum was chock-full of shells, fashioned into spells and talismans. Copious notes left by Williamson comprise a veritable grimoire of shells. He constantly refers to them as part of a witch’s equipage,

Witches like to have their tools and utensils made from natural materials so it is that one finds it laid down that one must use only the wood of fruit bearing trees, apple pear cherry etc. Stone copper brass and objects of nature such as shells horns nutshells etc.

Cecil’s home was festooned with personal talismans, including several important pieces made of shells. I will highlight two, this one against the evil eye fashioned by a charmer with delightful coloured threads and a clitoral nub of amber:

And second, this large house protection charm strung with cowrie shells interspersed with tassels, wooden beads and stuffed fabric birds, possibly containing magical substances.

We are more familiar with the common snail shell charm in Cornish folk magic, and Cecil and Gwen were avid beachcombers. Nonetheless, the more exotic the shells for their sea-witchery the better.

Delving deeper into the archive yielded the evidence that confirmed all my intuitions, and more besides, in an innocuous entry, once more describing shells,

Moon shells. These shells of foreign origin are used in the Bolventor ritual. They  are cast into the water and recovered by the Selena or Moon Maiden with her rake.

Bolventor is the location of Dozmary Pool. This one scrap of paper is the only mention of the ‘Bolventor ritual’ and it links Dozmary, the moonrake and a female assistant. We can imagine her cinching on the leather belt described in another display card,

CEREMONIAL BELT WORN BY THE "MOON MAIDEN" IN THE WORKING OF THE RITUALS IN HONOUR OF THE MOON GODDESS. NOTE THE EMBOSSED MOON MOTIFF.

The mythos of the Tanat cult is expressed in a cluster of rites. We have the sexual rite of the tableau; another ritual, the charming and baptism of a pisky talisman; and now the Bolventor ritual. The timing is with the Full Moon, the tools are the Moon rake and Moon shells employed by the Selena. The location is Dozmary Pool, a navel-shaped mirror set at the midpoint between Polperro on the south coast and Boscastle on the north.

I imagine that this is how the ritual went, like many of his recorded rites it is a kind of game. Cecil would send a flotilla of Moon shells out onto the waters and into the shimmering moonlight. Gwen would gently draw them back, caught in the horseshoe terminus of the rake. Those which the water over lipped sunk as offerings. Those that were recovered possessed the lunar and Fairey force.

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We assemble our bric-a-brac of exotic shells, dolls, and tools, and journey down the labyrinth of lanes behind Bolventor in the dwindling light.

It feels benefic, presenced, and the mercury surface stills through the dusk. We make our way around the lake. The water birds become one with the reeds. The various roosts make their calls. A wire running to a lonely farm is heavy with starlings who pour out their metal babble, and after some particular portion of light has been removed, with a wheal and singular shout are gone. In summer, the day feels as if it might forget to end, in November it is smudged out. The birds here, then gone. Night devours the last of the sheep.

The pool reduces the land to a rind, a rim that barely separates from the sky. There is just the pool, and it tells the story of the sky in its mirror. To stand here is to be held in a sphere that expands to all the heavens, a spy glass. This night it tells of cloud, the whole compass round in soft high cover. The moon is shy of her mirror, but the rays shoot through the clouds like a cathode ray tube of soft silver. She rises in Taurus, cresting the northeast shoulder of the moor, brushed unseen by the glitter of the Pleiades. We perform the necessary rites at the water’s edge, and as we leave the deserted shore, a peewit cries out of the dark. Cecil would have liked that.

1. There is one reference to a Templaric head in his notes, but it is not pursued further, I include it here for the sake of completion:

Talking heads seem to favour still silent Pools[.] There the Witch is a able to Reach Down gather up the head and converse with the this symbol of the World of Spirit.