Sacrifice and the Sacred
Turning up for work to find everything you did yesterday deliberately damaged and destroyed must be disheartening, but that’s exactly what happened to a group of 12th century builders who had cleared the site for a new church close to the river Dee at Cynwyd, a village near Corwen – historically in Meirionnydd but today in Denbighshire. In just one day they had dug the first trenches for the foundations, there had even been time to sort stones for the building to begin in earnest. But it was indeed chaotic next morning, earth had been thrown back into the partly-dug footings and the carefully sorted stones flung around the site.
There seemed to be nothing to do but start over – then the next morning the work was undone again, and after a third night of apparent vandalism the builders decided to consult y Dyn Hysbys – the Cunning Man. It’s said that even before they spoke he told them: “You’re building in the wrong place. You must search for and hunt a white stag that will be sent as a sign to tell you where to build the church, or this will just keep happening.”
So the men went off to hunt, and soon came across a magnificent white stag at the confluence of the rivers Alwen and Dee. It stared boldly at them, but soon bounded away as they approached. After an arduous hunt the stag was brought down and the building site moved to the location where the animal had first been spotted. In some versions of the tale the stag’s blood was to be sprinkled around the site to ensure the stability of the building.1
Llangar Church
The name of the church is said to derive from Llan y Carw Gwyn – Church of the White Stag – shortened over the centuries to become Llangar.
Not an uncommon event, if all the tales are true. A well-known story from the 5th century is based at the fortress of Dinas Emrys in Eryri (formerly Snowdonia). King Vortigern, on the run from his many enemies, found a suitable place for a fortress with visibility over surrounding land. But when the work began all that was done during the day vanished overnight, and this happened several times. Finally, Vortigern approached a wise man for advice and was told that he must find a child born without a father, kill him and sprinkle his blood on the ground where he wished to build. The child they eventually found, however, cleverly revealed why the construction kept crumbling: two dragons in a pool below the site were fighting, a white one representing Vortigern’s enemies and a red dragon for the king’s own army and people. Thus the sacrifice of the boy was avoided and he, of course, grew up to become Myrddin, or Merlin.
View from within Dinas Emrys
Their rarity leads to any sighting of a white deer to be widely reported, but one stag seen on Exmoor in 2007 and nicknamed Snowy was soon found decapitated, with the poacher thought to have sold the head and antlers. Not surprisingly, one seen in Scotland the following year had its location kept secret to avoid this fate.5
A blood sacrifice to ensure strength and stability in newly built walls may well have been common at one time, not only in Wales but worldwide. In the Old Testament the man who rebuilt Jericho laid his firstborn son, Abiram, in the foundations while much more recently in Lincolnshire the complete skeleton of a man was found in the foundation of the west wall of Wickenby parish church.6
The folklorist Alice Bertha Gomme suggested that the nursery rhyme/game “London Bridge is Falling Down” reflected a tradition of human sacrifice connected with the bridge; the game includes the capture of a “prisoner”, perhaps the person chosen to be immured in the foundations. However, no human bones were found by archaeologists in the foundations of Old London Bridge or its predecessors, but a large number of animal and human bones, including a horse’s skull, were found during the demolition of the old Blackfriars Bridge in 1866.
In the Balkans and Hungary it was most commonly a woman who was sacrificed while in Western Europe a child, normally an orphan, would be walled in. Even today, there is a popular urban legend about bodies being immured in motorway bridges both in the UK and elsewhere, and indeed, this is supposed to have been the fate of American union leader Jimmy Hoffa in the 1970s. But that sounds less like sacrifice than a way for criminal gangs to fit their victims with concrete wellies!
Returning to our white stag, what would this have meant to our 12th century builders, and what do the animals signify to us today? The sighting of such a deer is said to occur when one is transgressing a taboo or perhaps as the impetus to a quest, for example sending Arthur’s knights off on an adventure. The stag in Pwyll Penduc Dyfed, the first branch of the Mabonogi, is white with red ears, the typical colours of otherworld creatures in Celtic areas.7 They are also thought, as with other white animals, to represent purity. An article about the 2021 white buck shooting on the Wild Hunt website notes also the tale of a Siberian shaman being suckled by a white reindeer during his initiatory vision and also of a Georgian goddess, Dali, who often takes the form of a white deer and is goddess of hunting and protectress of hoofed animals.8 I knew little of Dali before researching this piece and found some interesting correspondences to our own Elen Luyddog, or Elen of the Ways. Both are very much associated with gold and said to be of surpassing beauty, both described as queens – even empress, in Elen’s case. And both are ancient. In Wales, at least, it seems impossible for me not to see traces of Elen everywhere in the wilder places I love to visit.
J G McKay believed that there were two distinct deer cults in the Scottish Highlands, with the deer-goddess cult administered only by women. There are tales of huge old women, perhaps each the Cailleach of their particular district, who herded and milked the deer, thought to be associated with the fairies and to be their cattle. McKay also asserted that stag dances, once more common in Britain, were later performed at the doors of churches by men dressed as women.9
Llangar church was abandoned in 1865 after a new church was built in Cynwyd, and by the 1960s was in a parlous state. The Welsh Office took ownership at this point and restoration work began in the 70s, mainly because of the importance of the wall paintings found inside, some of which are thought to date to the 14th century. During the careful restoration there were found to be many layers of paintings and of course in medieval times many people would have been illiterate so that such paintings were a way literally to illuminate bible stories and warn of the perils of bad behavour, perhaps best represented by the huge figure of death that greets you on entering the church. The figure carries an hourglass and a spear, all meant as reminders that life is short and for Christians the threat of hellfire if a good life has not been led.
The tour bypassed some beautiful ancient yew trees, but you can be sure that I didn’t!
Now in the care of Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service, the church is only open for a few days a year for guided tours and I managed to visit recently. Like most people I assumed that the Death figure was probably male, even though a skeleton, but one woman also on the tour spotted something interesting – within the wide pelvis of the skeleton it’s possible to interpret shapes as an unborn child. The guide said that no-one had mentioned this before, but I could see exactly what the other visitor meant and have included an extracted image zoomed in on the pelvic area and the more I look at it, the more I think she was right!
I’ve never seen a white deer but suspect I’d react just as Fran Lockhart of the John Muir Trust reported about her own dog. It apparently stood transfixed for 45 minutes watching the stag, rather than its usual scampering around.10 Not that I scamper a great deal these days!
[1] Collins, F. (2011) Denbighshire Folk Tales. Stroud: The History Press
[2] Male fallow deer are normally referred to as bucks rather than stags
[3] White deer are not normally albinos with pink eyes but have a condition known as leucism, which causes loss of pigmentation, but doesn’t affect the eyes.
[4] White Deer killed by police after running through Merseyside Streets (2021) The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/27/rare-white-stag-killed-by-police-after-running-through-merseyside-streets (Accessed: 12 July 2024)
[5] UK | england | cornwall | ‘Disgust’ over White Stag Death (2007) BBC News. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7064650.stm (Accessed: 12 July 2024).
[6] Brewster, Paul G. “The Foundation Sacrifice Motif in Legend, Folksong, Game, and Dance.” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie, vol. 96, no. 1, 1971, pp. 71–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25841298. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024
[7] (No date) Pwyll pendeuc dyfed. Available at: https://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/pwyll.html (Accessed: 10 July 2024)
[8] Williams, L. (2021) Killing of a rare white stag in England upsets some pagans – living, news, Paganism, U.K., witchcraft, world, The Wild Hunt. Available at: https://wildhunt.org/2021/10/killing-of-a-rare-white-stag-in-england-upsets-some-pagans.html (Accessed: 10 July 2024)
[9] McKay, J.G. (1932) ‘The Deer-Cult and the Deer-Goddess Cult of the Ancient Caledonians’, Folklore, 43(2)
[10] Ghost-like white stag spotted in Scotland | reuters (2008) Reuters. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/ghost-like-white-stag-spotted-in-scotland-idUSKIM251369/ (Accessed: 29 July 2024).
Image Credits:
White Stag, Dunham Massey by David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Dinas Emrys: Llywelyn2000, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (dinas emrys)
The remaining photos are my own.