Stones with Holes - Chicken Gods

 

I wrote a post a while ago about how the holes came about in these stones from the beach but a comment from a previous "Corner View" post, from  Kerstin  was very intriguing, "We call them "Hühnergötter" - "chicken gods"

What's that all about, I thought? I translated a German Wikipedia article about it. The translation was a little unclear at points but I think the gist of it is that along the coast in Northern Germany, people would collect these stones with a hole in them as a kind of talisman to ward off evil. They would be hung in stables and animal enclosures. Usually the stones and the also the holes would be quite a bit bigger than the ones I collected.

It seems this tradition stems from Slavic folklore. Kikimora was a domestic spirit that caused trouble if you didn't run an orderly peasant household. I suppose she was a kind of gremlin. If you left your sewing and spinning  things out overnight, she would tangle up your thread. She would wake the children at night. She would hide small household items and break dishes as a punishment to lazy housekeepers. If you did not protect your chickens with a talisman of the "Chicken God",  she would upset the chickens, pluck out their feathers and in some cases steal them. A "Chicken God" talisman would consist of either a broken piece of pot, a stone with a hole in it or a baste shoe (woven peasant shoe).

Then I discovered from this article that in the UK we also have a name for these stones with holes in them... we call them "Hag Stones", "Witches Stones" or "Adder Stones". We also believed they possessed magical properties that would protect both man and beast from witch craft, disease and the evil eye. It was also thought that hanging one of these stones over your bed at night would protect you from "Hag-riding" which was a kind of nightmare where you awoke unable to move, as if a witch was sitting on your chest (now known as sleep paralysis).

I especially like the idea that we hung them in our stables to protect the horses from being ridden by hags at night!

The same article mentions a large stone with a hole through it in Cornwall, called Men-an-Tol. I have been to this place in Madron with my parents (back in July 2000) and passed through the hole. It is supposed to make you more fertile so we laughed about it as my mum, already in her fifties by then, went through it. And when my dad went through it, we joked that it should sort out his bout of scrofula. Then I seem to recall that my dad climbed on top of it. Yes! I know it's a historic monument and people shouldn't be clambering about on it but my dad is a big kid and you really can't stop him.

With all this history, it is no wonder we still have an attraction to these funny stones with the holes in them.