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Chapter 3. Midgard 70
receive these herbs from me, do thou make them whole (my italics), and so
forth.” 14
Although the main body of the “Acre-Bot” is Anglo-Saxon, the rite, in varying
forms was fairly well known throughout the entire Teutonic realm and versions of
the ceremony can be found in manuscripts, “dating from the 6th century onwards,
Breslau, Florence, Montpellier, and Vienna” (Grattan & Singer, p. 432), also
there is another Anglo-Saxon version in the Cotton Collection.
Some of the “field charms” were yearly ceremonies to promote fertility as in
the well known ”Erce, Erce, Erce, mother of earth . . . .” version, and some were
conducted only when a field became ill:
“Here is the remedy by which you can improve your fields, if they will
not grow properly, or if any harm has been done to them by sorcery or
witchcraft.” 15
The reason for the rites or “charms,” as they are often called, is the same in both
cases: to bring the field and its lineage back into wholeness (health). A field whose
lineage has been crossed with another more unwholesome one becomes weak and
lacks access to the flow of the Waters of Life. This could happen through some form
of witchcraft or simply by the stewards of the field having broken some taboo. In
any case, the treatment of the field was the same as it would be for any other being
suffering from a similar disorder.
The scholarly interpretation of these charms has been varied but always along
similar lines. Storms, in hisAnglo-Saxon Magic, interprets at least one of the charms
as being hymns to the Sun and to Mother Earth. 16 Such views seem to be left over
from the scholastic interpretations of the late 19th century á la Frazer’s Golden
Bough where all mythologies were deemed to be related to a Sun God and an
Earth Goddess. In the mid-20th century, this particular view became the basis of
a pseudo Earth-Religion created by the Englishman, Gerald Gardener, known as
Wicca. These scholarly attempts at explaining the existence of the group of charms
collectively known as the “Acre-bot” neglected out of ignorance the idea of power/
luck, lineage (¸orlög), and the early Germanic concept that the earth or Midgard
was really part of a greater whole. It should be noted that there is no true form of
14 Grattan and Singer article as quoted in Bonser’s The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon
England, p. 431.
15 In Storms’ Anglo-Saxon Magic published by the Hague ca. 1941. This book is the classic
treatise on Anglo-Saxon magic from the anthropological and historical points of view. Granted,
it may have had some shortcomings but in view of some of the poorly researched texts being
published today as ”how-to” manuals of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, or Germanic magic it is still one
of the best. There is no nonsense here (as of 1941)!
16 Storms’ p. 48.