What did you collect When you visited the beach as a child?

Both as a child and adult I have been fascinated by stones that have a hole in them. The hours spent searching and then the excitement of having found one that I could peer through, a small opening to view a very small section of the world in front of me, acting like laser focus.

This morning, I began thinking about the larger implications of looking through a small opening, a limited aperture, a bit like when we look through a camera lens and we can see on the screen a small snapshot of the world. Sometimes in life we mistake that small snapshot of experience for the whole picture, when in reality it is quite literally a small snapshot of the territory but isn’t the whole map!

I discovered there’s a specific name for these stones and they’re steeped in myth and legend.  They’re calledHag Stones.  Although they are known by many names: a hag stone, holey stone, witch stone, adder stone, fairy stone, eye stone, nightmare stone and, in some places, simply a lucky stone!

For centuries, naturally perforated stones have occupied a curious place in both British and European folklore. They have been hung above doors, tied inside stables, placed beside beds, carried by fishermen and worn as charms because they were believed to protect people and animals from witches, spirits, nightmares and misfortune, but perhaps the most intriguing belief surrounding them is this: If you look through the hole, you may see what cannot ordinarily be seen! Such as Fairies, Spirits, The Otherworld and of course the true beauty of nature to show something concealed by enchantment.

Somewhere between the ancient superstition and our modern understanding of perception is something I find deeply compelling, which has been, that the enduring power of the hag stone isn’t simply that people believed it protected them from what they feared, it also gave them a potential different view of the world. And maybe deep down it reminds us that sometimes protection comes from learning how to see.

So, I did some research, and this is what I found…

A hag stone is a naturally occurring stone with a hole passing all the way through it. They’re often found on beaches, riverbanks and other places where water and erosion have worked upon the stone over long periods of time. The important traditional distinction is that the hole is naturally formed rather than deliberately drilled.

Over the years this entirely natural object has acquired extraordinary supernatural significance. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall holds examples collected around Britain during the early twentieth century. Records associated with them describe stones hung in houses and stables to keep witches away, placed on bedsteads to prevent nightmares and used as general good-luck charms. Examples from Northern Ireland were even hung from cows’ horns to prevent fairies stealing their milk. (Museum of Witchcraft and Magic)

What really piqued my interest is how persistent the practice was. These weren’t simply mysterious objects belonging to some imagined prehistoric past. Hag stones continued to appear in British folk practice until remarkably recently. Historical accounts record them being used in East Anglian stables into the twentieth century, sometimes long after the people hanging them may have remembered precisely why their ancestors did in the beginning. (Saffron Walden Historical Society) The belief had survived long after its explanation disappeared. It reminded me of how we inherit beliefs, continuing rules, fears and ways of behaving long past when the original circumstances disappear, generations before the behaviour does. 

The hag that rode in the night! The name itself takes us into a much stranger world! In European folklore, the night hag was a malevolent presence believed to visit during sleep. A person might wake unable to move, experiencing pressure upon the chest, difficulty breathing and the terrifying sensation that someone or something was sitting upon them. Today we recognise a striking resemblance to what we call sleep paralysis, they didn’t know any better hundreds of years ago! Have you ever woken up in the middle of a dream where you can see the room, you know you are conscious, but your body will not respond? Today we have neuroscience that can explain the experience so we no longer need to mis understand it as supernatural attack.

The mythology says, the sleeper had been ‘hag-ridden.’  Humans weren’t the only victims, horses discovered in their stables sweating, exhausted and with tangled manes were also thought to have been ridden through the night by witches, hags or supernatural beings, so protect from this people hung naturally holed stones in their stables and over the doors.

An account from Essex describes five hag stones found strung together on a leather thong in an old stable. Historical evidence suggests that such practices continued in parts of East Anglia even into the 1950s. (Saffron Walden Historical Society)

In Dorset, stones might be hung above stable doors, tied to horses or combined with iron, another substance traditionally believed to repel supernatural forces. (england.prm.ox.ac.uk) The stone had become a boundary that says ‘Whatever moves in the darkness cannot pass here.’

The same principle extended beyond the stable. Fishermen carried holed stones aboard boats as protection against storms, bad luck and supernatural interference. Accounts from Dorset describe fishermen attaching them to boats or threading ropes through them, while museum collections contain examples associated with fishing communities where they became known simply as lucky stones. (elementumjournal.com)

In homes they were hung over fireplaces, attached to keys, placed near entrances and suspended over beds. The locations were usually doorways, bedrooms, stable doors, boats, all of these are ‘Thresholds,’ and places where one moves from one state to another. From Inside to outside, from Waking to sleeping, from land to sea which signified a change in levels of safety and uncertainty, between the known and unknown.

Folklore repeatedly places protective objects at boundaries because boundaries are precisely where uncertainty has the opportunity to enter and perhaps this is our first clue to why the hag stone became so symbolically powerful because the stone itself contains a boundary, because it is solid matter and an opening right through it?

The mysterious adder stone, The history becomes more complicated when hag stones are associated with adder stones. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but we should be careful about assuming that every historical reference describes exactly the same object. One account comes from the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE. In his Natural History, Pliny described an object revered among the Druids of Gaul called the ovum anguinum, the serpent’s egg.

According to the story he recorded, large numbers of snakes intertwined together, producing a mysterious egg-like object from their saliva and foam. The person seeking it supposedly had to catch it before it touched the ground and then flee on horseback from the pursuing serpents. Pliny was decidedly sceptical about the magical claims surrounding it, but he said he had actually seen one of these objects and reported that Druids prized them highly. (Perseus)

Later British traditions associated similar ideas with glain neidr, adder stones or serpent stones and historians have attempted to connect them with various natural and manufactured objects. Whether the humble beach hag stone is historically identical to Pliny’s serpent egg is very doubtful, but I found the symbolic association interesting.

In my Medicine Woman studies I journeyed with the serpent. The serpent is itself one of humanity’s oldest symbols of transformation as it sheds its skin, it disappears into the earth and emerges again, It carries both poison and medicine depending on many variables. It has long been connected with death and renewal, fear and wisdom and can be seen depicted in the ancient worlds in their hieroglyphs throughout tombs in the valley of the kings and in the ancient temples all over the world. 

The hag stone was not only protective it was also associated with sight. According to later folklore and modern folk-magical traditions, looking through the naturally formed hole could allow someone to perceive fairies, spirits and the otherworld or to see through glamour and enchantment! The hole became an aperture between realities!

Of course, whether anyone has ever actually spotted a fairy through one is a question I shall leave between you, the fairies and the nearest available hag stone, lol! But psychologically and symbolically, there is something rather beautiful happening. As I alluded to at the beginning, when you look through a small hole, your field of vision changes, the world hasn’t changed, your frame has. Everything outside the aperture disappears temporarily and your attention becomes concentrated, and you notice only what’s inside the frame. And suddenly an object once used to protect people from enchantment becomes a rather extraordinary metaphor for discernment!

Perhaps seeing through enchantment doesn’t require supernatural sight, perhaps it begins whenever we learn to distinguish:

What happened from what I believe happened.

What I know from what I assume.

What belongs to me from what belongs to another.

What I am experiencing now from what I have learned to anticipate.

What is actually present from the story through which I have been interpreting it.

The world hasn’t necessarily changed but the aperture or the lens we’re looking through has.

There’s also another aspect of the hag stone that excites me, the hole wasn’t placed there intentionally. Something happened to the stone, quite literally water moved across it, sand rubbed against it and maybe marine organisms worked into it? The tides came and went, again, and again, and again! Until something that appeared solid developed an opening! That feels very different from the popular idea that difficult experiences automatically make us stronger, I don’t believe they necessarily do! Suffering can make us fearful; loss can make us guarded; betrayal can make us suspicious, and trauma does profoundly affect the way we encounter ourselves and the world. There is nothing inherently enlightening about pain but something else can happen when our lived experience is met by awareness!

What has happened to us eventually becomes part of how we learn to see, however,  the wound does not have to become our identity, nor do we have to pretend it was a gift but sometimes, the place where life has worn through, our certainty becomes an aperture, an opening, through which we begin noticing patterns we couldn’t previously see?  We can start to recognise the assumptions we once mistook for truth. We can begin to discover where fear has been making our decisions long before our conscious awareness arrived! We begin to notice which beliefs belong to us and which were inherited, as a result we begin to see where we have organised our lives around avoiding consequences that haven’t even happened yet, and suddenly all experience becomes information! And it wasn’t because the suffering was necessary, but because new awareness has transformed our relationship with what previously occurred.

Bringing it right up to date, The modern hag stone

Today you will find hag stones appearing in modern Paganism, witchcraft, nature spirituality and contemporary folk practice, some people still hang them beside doors for protection, some use them in ritual, and some look through them during meditation or divination. If you’re like me, you’ll simply collect them because finding one feels exciting. And plenty of people who believe none of the supernatural stories still experience something meaningful when they hold one and that makes me smile. 

We don’t have to decide whether our ancestors were literally seeing fairies through stones before we are allowed to receive something from the symbol and myth doesn’t always need to be either fact or non-sense, sometimes myth preserves a human observation in symbolic form. 

And because, the old story instructed us to: Look through the stone and you may see beyond enchantment. And if we changed it to a more modern interpretation, we might say: Change the frame through which you are looking, and you may just perceive something previously hidden?

If the old story instructed us: Hang the stone at the threshold and harmful forces cannot enter.  A modern interpretation might be Discernment protects our boundaries.

And perhaps those two ideas belong together because the clearer we become about what we are seeing, the less easily we are governed by illusion, Perception becomes our protection, and that is ultimately what the hag stone has come to represent for me after this research – to trust in my Perception as it becomes my protection! 

By changing the frame through which we view the world we are gifted the space to ask whether what we believe is actually what is happening and notice the architecture underneath our reactions. And perhaps most importantly, we remain curious enough to discover that reality might be larger than the interpretation we have been carrying. We then realise that we don’t have to dismiss everything either. We can learn to see the overlooked and perhaps that is why I’ve loved researching and writing about the hag stone, because somewhere along the way, a piece of rock encountered life, through water, through pressure, through friction and through time it was changed by those encounters, much as our own life is often changed by our encounters with life. It wasn’t just left with a scar, eventually with time there was an opening through which something could flow again, and through that opening, according to the old stories, a person could see another world. I cannot think of a more beautiful image for what can happen within a human life.

We cannot always choose what encounters us. We cannot prevent every loss, betrayal, disruption or ending. And I would never romanticise those experiences by insisting that they happened for us, but we can become curious about what we are now capable of seeing because we have lived through them. Hindsight helps us to recognise today what we could not have recognised twenty years ago. The patterns, the dynamics and the questions we now know to ask are all learned from experience. 

Our own inner knowing which can only come from weathering our lived experiences.

With love xx