Review: Claude Lecouteux, (trans. Jon E. Graham) Demons And Spirits Of The Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions 2015, ISBN: 9781620553992

by Craig ‘VI’ Slee

Claude Lecouteux is something of a legend amongst those of us who love folklore, myth, and magic. He is Professor Emeritus and Chair of the Literature and Civilization of Medieval Germanic Peoples at the Sorbonne and his studies of mediaeval folklore and literature have a breadth and depth, combined with easy readability, which, in this reviewer's opinion, verges on the unique in the Anglosphere. One does not have to be a specialist to enjoy his works – they flow easily from concept to concept, providing a tantalising glimpse of the ‘haunted world’ of our ancestors. Of course, much of this is down to the translation skills of Jon E. Graham and the work of the publishers in bringing these French texts to an English speaking audience. 

Originally published in French in 1995 under the title Démons et Génies du terroir au Moyen Âge, in the words of the late specialist in Nordic and Viking Age literature Régis Boyer, this text deals with:

[T]hose more or less tenebrous inhabitants that dwell in the back regions of our collective unconscious and which we are incapable of expelling from our representations or easily incorporating into our “religious” world […] Although their contours may have deteriorated over time they assume a status like that of gods and their history is as worthy as that of the greatest myths […] They have only been victims of a devaluation, largely brought on by the Church, but they remain vitally alive, despite our lack of awareness, or they continue on in all kinds of disguises that we do not necessarily recognize. (p. vii)

To be sure, Boyer is referring to the whole of Lecouteux’s work – he has written on vampires, fairies, the undead, and many more. But the above quote is especially relevant given that this volume deals with “land spirits”, those entities and spirits of place which the Christian church referred to as “demons”. However, “land spirit” is not limited to a single class. Rather it is an inclusive category for all those beings related to landscape; it is synonymous with “demon, elf, fairy”, yet also includes a tutelary deity attached to an individual. It is Lecouteux says, his translation of “[G]enus loci, a numen, a daimon, attached to a specific place it owns and protects against any incursion.” (p. 3).

Lecouteux makes it clear that by “place” he is referring to the wild, uncultivated space, in distinction to the cultivated and household in what may seem like an arbitrary decision, given that land spirits may become household spirits. It is his contention that this is a diversionary path given the subject matter of this book, since there is vast amounts of lore about both “kinds” of spirits. This reviewer finds that a reasonable division, but this may be the benefit of hindsight – since Inner Traditions has released The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices by Lecouteux in 2013.

Regardless, having established what is meant by land spirit, making connections between terroir and territory as markers of particular qualities of landscape, Lecouteux initiates us into discovering the haunted, animated world of our ancestors. By taking a philological standpoint, he teases apart the medieval-romances-and-literature-as-entertainments to discover something beneath. Rather than suggesting the latter entertainments were necessarily believed-to-be-as-such. He suggests that these entertainments emerged from folklore, experience, cosmologies and ontologies. In the words of Boyer: “Clearly something persists in all these transformations that a god, a sacred concept, a myth, or a rite can undergo. Obviously, that ‘hard core’ comes from a spirit and essence that is deeper than all the superficial fantasies inscribed in our texts. That is what we need to learn how to read.” (p. viii)

It is the relationship of the human to that “hard core” that the book seems to explore – Lecouteux describes it succinctly in his Introduction, entitled “We Dwell in a Haunted Place”:

“In the beginning there was space and the space was frightening.” (p. 1) 

It is this fear, he suggests, which caused us to develop our “religious sensibility”, forming bonds and relationships with other entities by naming, observing, and gaining knowledge about them. Lecouteux states that: “The spirits became perpetually mutating beings. Their shape, names, and appearance were protean, but their role, duties and localization remained unchanged.” (p. 5)

Here then, comes perhaps the first of a few critiques this reviewer has with Lecouteux’s theses in this book. Such phraseology bothers me as a practitioner precisely because, if we are to take the notion that we or our ancestors dwelt/dwell in an animated, haunted world, then the landscape is/was not static. Perhaps this is mere semantics, but to suggest that the “hard core” does not move and change in response to the environment in which it is embedded seems to rob these supposed agents of some of that very same agency.

It is almost as if it is implying a kind of spiritual stasis, masked by an essentialism of the numinous. In raising this, we do not wish to imply an anthropocentric model, or that land spirits solely exist to be acted-upon as passive entities. Myth and folklore are replete with examples of humans being forcibly corrected of this misapprehension after all, something that the sources Lecouteux refers to highlight very well.  

However, notions of objects and space outlined here do not always seem to consider the full implications of the animist conceptions being discussed. Of course, as far as this reviewer knows, Lecouteux is not a magical practitioner, nor someone who operates within an animist worldview, so certain latitude must be given. Likewise, many readers may not operate within a similar worldview, so we will attempt to focus critique on specific examples rather than the whole of the ontology in which Lecouteux is embedded as a 20th/21st Century French academic!

As regards the spirits themselves, after citing several texts, he writes: “These simple examples show that unknown forces exist that sometimes assume a shape such as that of a human, an animal, or even inanimate object.” (p. 9)

Again, we see the protean nature of the land spirit highlighted; cohabitants whose “presence and existence requires explanation.” (ibid.) That this explanation is via mythology is not coincidental, since “Mythology is a discourse, therefore the fruit of a way of thinking and of a civilization.” (p. 14)

But for Lecouteux this is not merely an intellectual or discursive thing, rather the text repeatedly shows the physicality and materiality of topography and structure as part of mythology – for all the talk of spirit as protean, there is a materiality to the land spirit which sits uneasily with popular conception of spirits as immaterial. Lecouteux himself often speaks of spirits “inhabiting” objects or landscapes. 

Does this mean an implied difference in substance of the imaginal or spiritual? Or as possessing a non-embodied substance which can “take on” an embodied form?

It’s not entirely clear (to this reviewer) where Lecouteux might stand on the materiality of spirit, nor whether this is an issue of a translator’s choice of words, but it was a thing that kept nagging at the back of the mind as I read.

For example, he points out the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin and its attribution of the remnants of an ancient civilisation to giants (p. 17) as an illustration of the interrelations involved with materiality and myth. Given the work of Lotte Hedeager et.al. regarding the Iron Age archaeology scholarship in Scandinavia (Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality, Abingdon: Routledge 2011) it seems increasingly likely to this reviewer that notions of the numinous as immaterial may be a modern conception projected backward.

Whether or not this is an artefact of this work originally being produced in the 1990s, or of dealing with literature rather than archaeology, ultimately this does not invalidate the whole of Lecouteux’s argument – far from it. We might even argue that he was ahead of the curve in such matters.

For those of us with in an interest in chthonic sorcery, there are several lovely nuggets: “It is easy to see the implications of these facts: the underground world is inhabited by the gods and their descendants and their world opens at regular intervals […] Furthermore, anyone who ventures into a cave or excavation into the earth can very easily find himself in their realm.” (p. 20).

Here, Lecouteux suggests that as humankind expands into space, and regulates it, those land spirits which do not become civilisationally-integrated remain on the fringes, albeit on a horizontal plane.

That the gods exist below, at the roots of a given civilisation, in archaic fashion and also that the numinous is the ur-ground of the very civilisation that tries to regulate it, seems to hint at something profound for this reviewer.

However, at first glance, this wild/civilised schema seems woefully un-nuanced, and not a little rooted in the same sort of processes as Western colonialism and all its attendant horrors. Lecouteux points out at least two mediaeval Islamic examples where Allah drives recalcitrant djinn to the fringes or sends angels to bind and capture the rebels against divinely inspired orthodoxy, thus causing them to be intimately associated with place, stating: “In the deserts we find the ghūl, in the thickets we find the si’la; the udar are on the coasts of Yemen[…]” (p. 24)

He also makes an important point regarding interpreting spirits in general that all practitioners should sit with for a while:  

It is extremely important to avoid clinging to the clerical interpretation that characterizes the whole of the European Middle Ages […] The Latin names – which represent a tributary of the traditions of classical antiquity and the interpretatio christiana – are deceptive because they are approximations of the indigenous spirits’ names. This point is extremely important and has stirred up many difficulties for those seeking to grasp what those Latin terms are concealing. (p. 27-28)

It is from here that he begins to discuss pagan cult remnants revealed by the prohibition laid upon them by the Church and various law codes – pointing out that even the most intense propaganda contains relevance to the propagandised. To stray too far from the reality of the practices at least at first, might invite ridicule – in short there is always something to these prohibitions and law codes, even if exaggerated.

That so-called “pagan” practices were carried out in some form was undeniable, driven by the hope to have enough, provided by these spirits. Enough water for the crops and sun for them to grow. Enough health and healing to survive. “Neutrality or kindness was desired from the local spirits. People wanted the spirits to leave them alone, which is to say they did not want the spirits to send illness with their invisible arrows or pester livestock.” (p. 33-34)

From this, the discussion of place names as evidence of recognition of land spirit presence is perhaps shorter than some might like, though mention is made of land spirits being syncretised with gods, or gods descending to/serving as daimon-as-land spirit in a Greek sense. 

In this regard there is a sense of an embarrassment of riches – vast amounts of philological material throughout European history forces a somewhat overly broad view within the context of this text. Longer, more in depth books than this have been written on Scandinavian or Greek lore alone, without attempting to cover the whole of a continent. 

This is perhaps both Lecouteux’s greatest weakness and greatest strength at the same time – the breadth of his studies highlights generalised shapes throughout history, shapes which, more often than not, have specific nuance at localised level. In one sense, he runs the risk of many of his contemporaries (such as Georges Dumézil) in using broad schema to highlight connections, but abstractifying out some of the localised potency of those same connections.

This is not to say that this book is a mere overview. Rather, as readers, Lecouteux encourages us to think about landscape and land spirits in a very particular way – a way which, for all its seemingly simplistic wild/civilised dichotomy nonetheless stimulates excitement and experimentation. This seems to be his aim, especially when he not only critiques Christian interpretations, but also interpretatio romana:

The interpretatio romana hides many things, of course, but the regularity with which it is applied makes it apparent that it masks something else. There is one clue that offers a glimpse of why that might be: The authors who wrote in Latin were uncomfortable when dealing with local beliefs and often used at least two terms to render something that had one name in the vernacular. (p. 55)

This Latin doubling ultimately lead to reductionist glosses, where a multitude of supernatural figures were combined on grounds of habitat (Lecouteux uses “dwarf” as an example) and may go some way to explain the ambiguity of some mythological and folkloric figures – the distinction between elves and dwarfs in later Norse lore as one example.

Likewise, he thus suggests that numinous powers become increasingly conflated, until eventually all such non-Christian spirits are demonised to devils. There is perhaps a lesson here for pagans and magical practitioners too – many spirits are popularly regarded as “former pagan gods” precisely because of this reduction and conflation. 

Outside of a Christian oeuvre, the go-to expression of numinosity in occulture is a god. To even express anything other than that is to require a knowledge of landscape, tradition and folklore which many do not have in the West, precisely because of the reductionism of terms and experience.

We are all, in a sense, still suffering the after effects of what Lecouteux refers to as “collective anathematization”, an impoverishment of language and ability to relate to the world which we have actively continued to enforce on other cultures under the guise of universalism.

This also applies, Lecouteux contends, to the relationship with the dead. A buried person might become the tutelary of a given area, eventually being regarded as spirit as memory fades, thus the individual becomes collective; post-mortem tutelaries become grouped as the “Good Dead” in an area and a kinship is recognised with pre-existing beneficial land spirits (elves etc.). These are situated in distinction to malign spirits/dead and the entire complex is then leveraged further by the Church to suggest all spirits are anathema.

The debate about whether the dead or the spirits “came first” is born of misunderstanding according to Lecouteux. When considering such a debate from a non-anthropocentric view, it seems self-evident to this reviewer that arguments over ontogenic primacy in this case make no sense. So, I personally would lean towards Lecouteux’s point, though I am by no means entirely convinced it is the sole answer for the complexities involved.

After this, we move into Part Two of the book – Conquering and Defending the Land:

The spirits of the land – women when it concerns a body of water – and the spirits of the mountains are the legitimate owners of these places and the masters of the animals, which can be viewed as their herds […] In hagiographic texts, the local land spirits most often take the forms of monsters, but some details make it possible to see what they are disguising. Demonized, they turn into the dragons that the saints vanquish or drive away. (p. 71)

Leaving aside issues of ownership within Western notions of property – fraught for many reasons – here we are presented with a notion of an animate world. A world which, despite Lecouteux’s later reference to “virgin” land-as-uncultivated, suggests not land which is untouched but which is already teeming with inhabitants.

Despite notions of wild/civilised, or cultivated vs uncultivated, it is clear that the landscape already has participants – that is to say an ecology of agents which, by their actions, make the landscape as it is.

Lecouteux presents us with myriad stories of these participants coming into contact with humans, before he leads us on a consideration of tales and actions taken by those humans to either tame, drive out, or come-to-terms with those pre-existing inhabitants. Note that, in all cases Lecouteux mentions, these humans bring their own numinous allies to bear. This is not a simple matter of the human against the supernatural. The humans are already embedded within a numinous assemblage – whether that be Christian or pagan. As an intra-actional process, it is always More-Than-Human.

The practices of land claiming, whatever the ritual form – be that beating bounds with fire, throwing a spear, circumambulation, building an enclosed sacred space, digging with plough, or making offerings and accord with land spirits – require turning space into territory; a significant restructuring in relation to environment.  

The choice of where humans should settle is entrusted to supernatural beings, to God, or to gods, or in liaison with them (saints, the dead, fairies). Behind the various rites – demarcation by furrow, strip, or by riding – there is an element that stands out: the creation of an enclosed space, a cultivated space in all meanings of the word. (p.102)

This cosmicization, so Lecouteux argues, stands in opposition to primordial chaos. Again this binarism conceals a complexity which is worth highlighting; the wild uncultivated is not disordered – it has its own prior legitimacy. 

Again, for those of us with an interest in the chthonic, it is worthwhile to consider the base of the furrow as meeting point with the underworld, a fundamental flow-point. There is something to be said for the archaic notion of chaos, rather than its modern sense of absolute disorder. 

If we consider it constantly shifting primordial state – perhaps an implicate order in distinction to explicate order, invoking physicist David Bohm – then the sheer multiplicity of the wild makes sense; that is, the protean, mutating forms of the land spirits are generative, chaotic in the sense of primordial – the first order. 

When we contemplate this, the notion of oppositional binarism doesn’t seem to cut it – something myth tells us all around the world. Spirits can move from being world-orderers to world-mutators and world-destroyers and maintainers as they will (and there and back again). Chaos and Cosmos become inextricably entwined, inseparable and permeable.

Lecouteux himself acknowledges this in Chapter 14: Boundaries and Their Markers:

We find everywhere the legend of the dishonest surveyor who has stolen land from its legitimate owner by establishing false boundaries, and similarly widespread are the stories about greedy peasants who move borders to their neighbors' detriment. In both cases the punishment is the same: they are condemned to wander endlessly after death carrying the illegally relocated boundary marker on their backs and asking everyone they meet: “Where should I put this?” They are only freed […] when someone answers: “Back where you took it from!” (p. 103-104)

The boundary marker serves as the point where the two realms meet. It is sacred not solely because it marks an enclosed space, but it is also a crossing place – a place beyond which the Otherworld lies. Thus, one might argue that the enclosed space is sanctified by its enclosed nature as not-Outside, but this is only possible because there is an Outside. To move the boundary is the ultimate crime, not because it lessens the wild, the Outside, but because proper protocols have not been observed.

Proper protocols allow interaction and intra-action with the sacred. Without them it is unavailable. There is no interface by which the More-Than-Human may be engaged, propitiated, or driven away. It is thus unintelligible. Note that from a non-anthropocentric view, this does not mean human ritual ‘makes’ the More-Than-Human; it does not bring it forth, or resolve it ex nihilo. The act of enclosure is revelatory – a rendering into intelligibility. 

Lecouteux spends subsequent chapters elucidating the materiality of such treatment – giving examples of settlement construction as space-ordering which enables the inhabitants to contract with the spirits. It quickly becomes clear that, for our ancestors, there were always spirits – the modern idea of banishment as a psychic “clean room” would have been foreign to them. Even the spirits that were driven off were not destroyed, only placed in situations where they could not interfere. In many cases, they returned and needed to be treated-with anew, in recognition of the new circumstances. He lists a variety of Scandinavian folk practices before stating:

It is therefore easy to see that the purpose of all these rites is to neutralize [i.e. make neutral] or attract the favor of local spirits so that they may be transformed into guardian powers. The farm and its inhabitants’ prosperity in fact depends on the mood of these spirits, so it is sometimes necessary to renew the signs of esteem or worship at regular intervals, most often once a year at Christmas. (p. 120)

In the third section of the book, he moves to the survivals and transformations of land spirits in literature, dealing with several domains: Waters and Fountains, the Forest, the Mountains, and the composite site that is the fen-lair of Grendel and his Mother. He examines the problem of externalised vitality, or situations where one sibling must be dealt with before the other can be touched. This reviewer found these chapters deeply interesting, alas, discussion would require importation of entire pages at a time, so we shall leave those to future readers.

Likewise, his interesting suggestions that Oberon and Merlin have their roots as land spirits are fascinating, if perhaps not entirely compelling in the same way as the rest of the text. As mentioned before, the strength of Lecouteux’s work is the possibilities he seeds in the mind of the reader, and I would urge anybody interested in considering the role of land spirits as part of a wider spiritual cosmology and practice to obtain this text – the bibliography and references will provide paths to explore for a long time to come.

Approaching this book with an open mind is wise, because you may be surprised where it takes you, regardless of practice. Furthermore, in this reviewer’s opinion, it serves as a great introduction to Lecouteux’s work, and jumping off point to the other books Inner Traditions have translated for us, and provides us really nice access to non-Anglocentric scholarship.