Haga, Haxan, Hag, Hawthorn
‘Haga, Haxan, Hag, Hawthorn’ in Common Salt
Content notes: violent death. Please take care when reading this piece.
‡
The witch comes in her winding sheet; her shroud.
Her fingertips are stained the colour of mourning. The soil is running with dark juices, there is dirt on the hem of her party dress.
She has been patient, but now it is time. Her neighbour has been targeting her with ritual aggressions: hawthorn cut down from their shared hedges and piled up as a warning, a stone through the back window, finally, an arm around her neck. If someone grabs you by the throat – it is not if but when they will kill you.
Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative. She likes to feel overwhelmed, to feel powerless in the presence of unruly vegetation. Hawthorn is a native of this island. To cut its branches is a death sentence, to violate it is to incite supernatural wrath.
The country is under siege from a beautiful infestation of rhododendron. The plant is so dense that it blocks light, strangles roots, overwhelms rare, ancient life with its voracity. Whole species annihilated, people are injured, trapped, and killed in these fairytale forests springing up in place of complex bog-land, of lush, flowering meadows.
The emergency was declared acute, was when two hillwalkers were trapped in foliage, unable to escape, the paths they had walked hours earlier overwhelmed by new plant life.
The rhododendron, stolen from colonial devastations, has no natural predator in the acidic soil of the rainy west coast.
Feudalism thrives on pink and red blossoms, on hawthorn and rhododendron.
The psychoactive mixture of rhododendron pollen and honey creates euphoria—the body’s palliative response to toxic shock, a softening of the edges of reality as death creeps into major organs, causing irregular heartbeat, low blood pressure, nausea, fatal coma.
There is a murder ballad about a swarm of bees full of rhododendron pollen, swallowed up by carnivorous figs, their crystallised proteins smeared along a knife, the knife plunged into the heart of a faithless wife, her final moments cinematic with stills from their slow ingestion, their torn abdomens spraying atrial blood as the hallucinogen washed through her.
There is a fairy tale about a daughter exchanged for a rhododendron plant, craved by an expectant mother who drinks nothing but rhododendron tea for her final trimester and she gives birth to a forest.
The rhododendron plant is one of the earliest recorded biological weapons. In 63 BC, Roman soldiers were tricked into eating mad honey—a deadly mistake.
Haga, means enclosure, a portion of woodland marked off for cutting. Haga becomes hawthorn, quickthorn, thorn-apple, May-Tree, hawberry: a supernatural portal, where the hag straddles the boundary of both worlds, is a hedge-rider or a witch or a ghost. She is a hægtesse: a woman of prophecy. Oracle.
Her mother wanted to call her Medea, but her father was spooked by the association with the Greek myth. She had been the eldest, their first. She had been their object of indulgence and affection, and joy. They made a compromise with Maedbh, still a mythical goddess, but a more appropriate figure. A wife, a mother, and martyr as well as a warrior queen. But her mother knew that Maedbh’s name also meant intoxicating one: specialist in poisons, herbs, and drugs from mead: a fermented honey drink, used as an aphrodisiac and symbolic of sexual love in wedding ceremonies. A period of intoxication followed the wedding, in the month of mead or the honey moon.
Maedbh will become mead, Medea, haga, haxan, hag, hawthorn, hedge rider, honey-eater, martyr, priestess, bringer of death.