The Spirits of the North Wind
Aerial Daemons in Mythology and Folklore
The onset of serious cold weather on a homestead is always a time fraught with a certain level of anxiety for the smallholder. One wonders if the stocks of accumulated biomass, the summer sunlight stored in the form of hay, firewood, and stored grain, will last through the dark and cold months until the sun returns on its northward course again in the spring. The arrival of the frigid weather systems which bring the snow and howling winds from the northern regions has been shrouded in myth and mystery and associated with the coming of spiritual forces that are indifferent to human and animal life, if not downright malevolent. The Earth centered cultures of the temperate and subpolar regions of the world have developed a number of technologies of spiritual defense against these powers of cold, darkness, and death that lurk just outside the frosted windows of our brightly lit homes. Many of these magical defenses against the demons of frost and darkness, especially those that involve light, have become enshrined in our beloved winter holiday traditions.
The cunning farmer sits ensconced comfortably in his cottage, listening to the fell voices of wind demons howling in the gale outside. The fire in the stove brightens ominously with each rising gust as snow is thrown with force against the windows. Prayers, enchantments, banishings, and blessings are all voiced in earnest because, having passed through many winters now himself, our cunning farmer knows that this very night the forces of darkness are afoot and are seeking their prey among the living. The coldest days and nights, it seems obvious, are some of the most dangerous times of the year. Times when we are utterly dependent on whatever technology we use to heat our homes, technologies that are fallible and even dangerous when called upon to crank out enough heat to keep extreme cold at bay. House fires, whether due to faulty overloaded wiring or poorly designed and maintained chimneys are common occurrences on the coldest of nights.
Our own home is mostly heated with wood by a Jotul wood stove, with electric mini-split units for backup. The electric units are nearly useless in the event of extreme cold and it is my duty to operate the woodstove with the obsessive concern of (as I often joke) the bilge pump operators on the Titanic. When temperatures outside crash into the single digits Fahrenheit the wood stove needs to be putting out its maximum rated heat output of 37,000 BTU in order to keep our well insulated modern home warm enough for comfort. At night, when the stove is banked down because everyone is asleep, piled under blankets, the temperature plummets to the uncomfortable range, because even the bilge crew needs some rest. But morning finds the hungry stove fed again and temperatures once again on the rise.
In the Old World, banking the turf fire for the night was serious business among the Scottish Highlanders interviewed by Alexander Carmichael for his classic 19th century collection of Highland songs, prayers, and spells, recorded in the book Carmina Gadelica. Carmichael recorded several examples of prayers said by the housewife as she smoored, or smothered the fire to preserve the embers for the morning, at night before turning in. To lose one’s fire at night wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was life threatening, and an occasion of spiritual as well as physical danger. The fire not only kept the family warm, it kept at bay whatever bogles or other supernatural assailants may have been creeping around the edges of the firelight.
Here is one of the smooring blessings recorded by Carmichael. This one is poignant in its unadorned simplicity and beauty. It easily could be adopted for homesteaders of whatever spiritual persuasion to bless the fire for the coming night.
“The sacred Three
To save,
To shield,
To surround
The hearth.
The house,
The household,
This eve,
This night.
Oh ! this eve.
This night,
And every night.
Each single night.
Amen.”
(Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 84.)
One model of the Norwegian made Jotul wood stove, the F 118, comes equipped stamped with a traditional Norwegian prayer, believed to keep dark forces at bay, to be said when banking the fire at night:
In English it runs something like this:
“I bury my embers
Late in the Evening
When the day is done
May God ensure my embers
Never go out.”
As we can see from these two examples, banking the fire, whether of wood or of peat on a winter’s night was serious business, requiring the voicing of a charm for divine protection. The fire in the hearth is in a sense the living heart of a home (indeed the concepts are linked etymologically), and it requires magical protection to preserve its fragile life against the roaring forces of chaos outside.
For traditional cultures, magic is a way of seeing the world, an interpretation in which the physical phenomena of the world have a symbolic sense, as omens or theophanies, which disclose the latent intelligible structure of the cosmos and reveal the hidden operation of spiritual entities which arrange phenomena according to an occult layer of meaning, and with whom we can interact to alter the outcome of events in the physical world of manifestation. Even seemingly mundane physical events can be the outward sign of a deeper order at play. This way of seeing is so far removed from our modern understanding as to be tantamount to heresy and madness. And so it must be adopted with no small amount of discernment and wisdom. As Heraclitus said over 2500 years ago, “latent structure is the master of obvious structure”. There is an inner pattern to events revealed to the wise upon deep reflection, and to which one can conform one’s life and conduct.
For our ancient ancestors the air was the abode of spirits. Indeed, the very English word “spirit” is derived from the Latin word spiritus, which also carries the meaning of “breath”. The linking of the word for breath with the metaphysical principle which gives rise to life is found in Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew as well. We can assume since human life begins with the first breath taken at birth and ends with the last breath expired at death that this association is nearly universal. But the idea that the winds, the breath of the living earth are animate and possessed of agency is also nearly universal.
We all live embodied on this living Earth. Many of us take the weather for granted, especially when we live in urban centers, far from the rhythms of the natural world. Like everything else, weather too has become for us disenchanted, simply the movement of air masses which vary in temperature and humidity across the land, ruining sports games, weddings, and other outdoor events. Weather, which is the all important play of greater than human forces interacting with the landscape, regulating the growth of the natural world and all the living plants and animals in an ecosystem, is no longer understood as the play of the gods. Many cultures which are dependent on rainfall for crop production or fair weather for food gathering activities such as fishing and hunting have had sky gods and storm gods and goddesses to whom prayers and sacrifices were made to ensure cooperative weather.
The winds and storms themselves were seen to be divine beings because they are ceaselessly moving and invisible, spirits in the literal sense. The first century CE Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote “This air is the abode of incorporeal souls, since it seemed good to the Creator of the universe to fill all the parts of the universe with living creatures… It is full of imperishable and immortal citizens, souls in equal number to the stars.” (Philo of Alexandria, De Somniis, 136,137) This ancient view of the air as full of intelligent and ensouled beings, originating as it does in the ancient animism common to all humankind, has entered deep into our esoteric and spiritual traditions, including the magical systems which come down to us today in the West.
As has been noted, many of the ancient gods of the winds and the air were considered by our ancestors to not only be indifferent to humankind, but were seen to be positively malevolent. From ancient Babylon, recorded in cuneiform tablets unearthed at Nineveh in the 19th century, incantations describing the operations and activities of the Seven Demons of the Wind, servants of the Storm God, Adad, who brought disease, destructive weather and misfortune. The text from the tablet describes them as follows:
“Seven are they! Seven are they!
In the Ocean Deep seven are they!
Battening in Heaven seven are they,
Bred In the depths of Ocean.
Neither male nor female are they,
But are as the roaming windblast,
No wife have they, no son can they beget ;
Knowing neither mercy nor pity,
They hearken not to prayer or supplication.
They are as horses reared among the hills . .
Of these seven [the first] is the South Wind .
The second Is a dragon with mouth agape
That none can [withstand] ;
The third is a grim leopard
That carrieth off children ....[Indicates missing lines of text in the tablets}
The fourth is a terrible serpent
The fifth is a furious beast (?)
Which [knows]no restraint ....
....
The sixth is a rampant. . .
Which against god and king.
The seventh is an evil windstorm
These seven are the Messengers of Anu, the king,
Bearing gloom from city to city,
Tempests that furiously scour the heavens,
Dense clouds that over the sky bring gloom,
Rushing wind gusts,
Casting darkness o'er the brightest day,
Forcing their way with baneful windstorms.
Mighty destroyers, the deluge of [Adad], The Storm God
Stalking at his right hand.”
The aerial nature of these fearsome spirits is clear from the text. 19th century Assyriologist Sir Reginald Campbell Thompson, in whose charmingly titled book, Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, we find the above excerpt, tells us that it is these Seven demons, “who rush over the city like stormclouds, bringing devastation in their train, and from them come all hurricanes and tempests. They unsettle everyone they meet, bringing unrest, disorder, and confusion into the world…” (R. Campbell-Thompson, Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, )
Here in Eastern North America where I live, there is a particular type of winter storm called an Alberta Clipper, a fast moving low pressure system that sweeps down across from the continent from the North at rapid speeds, bringing drastic temperature changes, high winds, and snow. The harsh conditions associated with these storms wreak havoc on communities by bringing rapidly deteriorating road conditions, freezing plumbing, power failures, and on farms they cause misery for livestock. To me they are the physical embodiment of the wind demons of ancient times, bringing not just physical misery, but often, strangely enough coinciding with other types of misfortune. The last two weeks have seen several of these storm systems pass through the land where I live, and have just happened to coincide with the sudden death of several livestock and an outbreak of illness in my family. The sickness has passed and the tide of misfortune has abated, thank gods, but last week saw the cunning farmer working hard to dispel the chaotic energies that had passed over the land with prayers for banishing and rituals of purification. A practice, which as we will see has an ancient history among the magically minded farmers of all times.
Everything in the spiritual ecology of the natural world has a purpose, including the harsh wind spirits that sweep over the land, trailing destruction in their wake. We are reminded that humans and their mundane concerns are not important to the ancient powers of the world. Often, after the storm tide passes the land feels cleansed and purified, and peace descends on the place. Accumulated toxic energies have been swept away and the land breathes the cold, fresh air that settles in after the winds move on. The sky is clear and blue and the cold world sparkles with vitality. Upon reflection, from a point of view that reaches beyond our all-too-human concerns, destruction is necessary for regeneration to proceed, it is the alchemical death from which life emerges. And so the wheel turns.
The Seven have had a long and storied history in middle-eastern demonological lore, morphing into the seven kings of the djinn and then jumping from there into the grimoire culture of the European Middle Ages. But before we dive down that particular rabbit hole, let us first discuss the Seven Spirits as they appear in prayer found in a Syriac manuscript which made its way into a collection in the British Museum from its original home in what was then Turkish Kurdistan. It was translated from the Syriac by the British Rabbi and scholar of Hebrew, Hermann Gollancz and published in 1912 with the other spells found in the manuscript in a fascinating little book called The Book of Protection. The prayer is a charm intended to provide magical protection for cattle from the Seven, who, after more than two millennia were still harrying the livestock farmer folk of the Levant. In addition to their many other crimes listed in the cuneiform tablets, they were also fond of, in the words of Campbell-Thomas’s translation, “smiting the sheepfold and cattle pen.” The spell is Christian and binds and curses the demons in the name of the Trinity and the archangels Gabriel and Michael, as well as another unnamed angel. It is to be carried written as talisman and recited as needed.
“Seven accursed brothers, accursed sons!
Destructive ones, sons of men of destruction!
Why do you creep along on your knees and move upon your hands ?
And they replied:
‘We go on our hands, so that we may eat flesh, and we
crawl along upon our hands, so that we may drink blood.’
As soon as I saw it, I prevented them from devouring,
And I cursed and bound them
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, saying:
‘May you not proceed on your way, nor finish your journey,
And may God break your teeth and cut the veins of your neck
And the sinews there of, that you approach not the sheep
Nor the oxen of the person who carries [sc. these writs]!
I bind you in the name of Gabriel and Michael.
I bind you by that angel who judged the
Woman that combed (the hair of) her head
On the eve of Holy Sunday.
May they vanish as smoke from before
The wind for ever and ever. Amen!”
(Gollancz, Hermann, The Book of Protection, lxxi.)
The gods or demons associated with the winds in Middle Eastern demonology are often grouped in sevens, but also in fours, with considerable overlap in the two groups. Groups of seven entities are often classified according to the seven classical planets, and groupings of four are with the four elements of ancient science or magic, as well as the four cardinal directions from which the winds originate. This four/seven arrangement goes back to the very earliest sources and continues down to this day in the classification of both Archangels and demon Kings in modern occult practice. Some traditions regard the Seven as definitely distinct from the Four, but space does not allow for exploring this further here.
Pazuzu, the Babylonian wind deity/demon is shown with four wings and in some traditions is himself one of the wind demons, and in others the father of them all. In other texts the cardinal winds are represented by still other gods. Scholar Scott Noegel tells us, “Each of the cardinal winds accounts for certain seasonal or other atmospheric phenomena, when united, they possess a special cosmic import. In Mesopotamia, the four winds are the “sons of one mother” and messengers of the skygod Anu. They also are linked to major gods: Ninlil (or Adad or Ninurta) with the Northwind, Ea with the Southwind, Anu with the Westwind, and Enlil with the Eastwind. They embody the healing powers of the stars, and one can invoke them ritually for protection while traveling long distances. Marduk raises the four winds in order to clear a temple’s foundation of sand. In Enūma Elish, he employs them as weapons to slay Tiamat, whose body he uses to construct the universe” (Noegel, Scott, “On the Wings of the Winds: Towards an understanding of Winged Mischwesen in the Ancient Near East”, Kaskal, Vol. 14, 2017.)
The four cardinal wind gods were known to the Ancient Egyptians as well, Represented, as was Pazuzu, with four wings, and animal heads on human bodies. According to a spell in the Coffin Texts of Ancient Egypt they are primal forces of creation who predate even the gods, who are called upon to assist the deceased in the journey to the next world. “Hail to you, Four Winds of the sky, Bulls of the sky! I say to you your name and the name of the one who gave them to you. I know your origins. Your name came into being, before people were born and gods came into being, before birds were trapped, before longhorns were lassoed, before the jaws of Matjeret, the daughter of the great god, were subdued, and before the doing of the potentate, lord of sky and earth. I asked them from the lord of powers, and he is the one who gave them to me. Come you, voyage with me!” (De Buck, Coffin Texts, spell 80)
After a long historical process of mythic transformation, in which the traditions of both the Seven and the Four shifted from from being the Shedu feared by ancient Babylonians to being the Djinn Kings of their successor cultures in the Islamicate world, to becoming both the Seven planetary spirits of Medieval Grimoires such as the Heptameron, as well as the Four Demon Kings of the Cardinal Angles of the material realm, mentioned by the medieval Italian mage and astrologer, Cecco D’Ascoli, “Zoroaster discovered those spirits of great virtue who stand in cruciatas locis, that is in east, west, south, and north, whose names are as follows: Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon, and Egim, who are spirits of the major hierarchy and have under them twenty-five legions of spirits each.” (Cecco D’Ascoli, quoted by Thorndike, Lynn, in History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vol. 2, p. 964.) And thus these ancient middle eastern wind deities enter into the spirit lists of the Western Magical tradition.
The four principal archangels, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel, also preside over the winds, the elements, and the cardinal directions, but in a more transcendent manner, ruling and limiting the potentially destructive force of the Four Kings in some mysterious manner. In the Christian Neoplatonism from which the Western Magical Tradition arises, nature is fallen and ontologically distant from the Creator. Therefore the Kings of the Angles, being more elemental in nature, are also more distant from the Source, and hence “fallen” and “demonic”, embodying the chaotic, sometimes destructive force of the elements as they operate here in the lower realm. It must be remembered that in this dualistic spiritual milieu, a world in the thrall of “the prince of the power of the air”, the Devil, the powers of the air were considered to be very much demonic. We do not, as we have remarked elsewhere, consider this dualistic spiritual taxonomy to be helpful, preferring to adopt a more “Eastern” classification of spirits, as existing on a continuum between “peaceful” and “wrathful”, embodying forces which, because they exist in God’s divine cosmos as it is, must be somehow necessary.
The 14th Century grimoire, the Liber Iuratus Honorii (The Sworn Book of Honorius), the third book of which deals with the summoning of spirits of the air for a variety of magical purposes has the following to say about the element of air and the spirits thereof: “The air is a corruptible element, fluid, and subtle, capable of receiving influences from others, but it is seen to be composed of parts of itself. In which are spirits, which the holy mother church calls damned, but they themselves assert the opposite to be true, and therefore we call them neither good, nor evil…. There are certain daemons established for the disturbance of the air, which Solomon has called winds, because they raise up the winds, and behind which the air is moved…. There are two kinds of aerial spirits, for some are good while others are evil, some are mild, others wild. The good, mild, faithful ones are the eastern and western ones, and are called good….The evil, arrogant, and wild ones are the southern and northern ones, and are called evil.” (Peterson, Joseph, The Sworn Book of Honorius, p.227-228) Here we have intelligent spirits who raise the winds, spirits with personalities and moral qualities, classified according to the cardinal quarter from which they come. The familiar Kings of the Cardinal Directions appear here as well, in names which vary slightly from those given by Cecco. They are in charge of legions of subordinate spirits, and associated with the elemental humor of the quarter from which they come, an idea taken up in the next bit of wind spirit lore we will discuss.
16th Century English alchemist Robert Fludd developed an esoteric theory of disease that postulated that the Four Kings of the Angles were the spiritual agents of disease which was carried along by evil winds, which laden with evil spirits assaulted the fortress of health, the human body, resulting in a variety of sickness. According to Fludd’s Hermetic worldview, the Macrocosm corresponds to the microcosm and the Four Cardinal angles share the nature of the four elements and the four humors of the body. The North was Cold and Dry, related to the element of Earth and the melancholic humor, the South, hot, dry and choleric, to Fire, and the East, hot and wet, to Air and the sanguine humor, and finally the West, cold, wet, and the phlegmatic humor. He considered the winds to be the carriers of disease, which brought the unbalanced properties from the quarter from which they blew. For example, the North wind brought melancholy and sadness, and the South wind brought choleric passion and diseases like syphilis, plague, and fever. The winds, although subject to the dominion of the archangels, were also under the power of the aerial demons, the Kings, mentioned by Cecco D’Ascoli, namely; Oriens, Paymon, Amaymon, and Egin. Health is thus a battle between the archangelic forces and the demonic forces of the elements to restore balance to the humors and when the latter prevail the patient sickens, conversely when the former prevail, he improves.
The Four are known worldwide, however, in every tradition, on every continent by different names and in different shapes, but the idea remains the same. The powers of the four directions are the primal forces which shape material creation, bringing fortune and misfortune, as well as changes in the weather. We find them in Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, where deities reside in the Four directions and also all of those in between. The Lakota people of North America have the Four Brothers, sons of the Wind, who “established both time and space and act as intermediaries between the people and the spirits.” In Mexico, Mayan hmeen call upon the Chaaks of the Four Directions in order to summon rain for their crops. Traditional people the world over consider the winds and the cardinal directions to be the foundational powers of the cosmos, divine but sometimes chaotic, forces to be feared, yet the very living spirit of the holy earth. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” The scripture compares the wind to the Spirit of God, in Greek, the language of the New Testament, the comparison is implicit, as the word for both “wind” and “spirit” is pneuma. Mysterious, subtle, invisible, palpably alive, capable of great destruction, but sometimes gentle as a Zephyr on a May morning.
As the winds of winter sweep over the land, so too the winds of fortune and fate, good and ill, sweep over our lives, according to the threads spun, measured, and cut by the three Fates, who have the highest power over our mortal flesh. The cold blast of Boreas, the North Wind, eldest child of the Elemental King of the North, and the commander of his legions, roars across the land, breathing his chill breath on animals and humans. He brings wicked elves, frost giants, night hags, and the restless dead in his train. Close your doors, stoke your fires and say your prayers. Chant psalms and litanies, light candles, burn incense, call the angels and the gods of light, keep the spark of life alive while the wolf stalks in the cold darkness just outside the door. Beware the Wild Hunt.
In conclusion, I would like to leave you with the following charm from the 14th or 15th Century, for protection against all of the dark forces which creep about on winter nights:
May the supreme Numen divinum,
may the holy sanctus spiritus,
may the sacred sanctus dominus,
again protect me this night
from the evil creatures that roam the darkness
and I sign myself
against the black ones and the white ones
whom people call the Good ones
and who leave from Brockelsberg,
against the bilwizze,
against the moon eaters,
against those who walk outside the paths,
against the hedge riders,
against resounding incantations,
against all the evil spirits!
Glôzan and Lodevan,
Trutan and Wodan, Wodan's Army and all its members
Who bear wheels and rags,
Dead broken on the wheel and hung,
Go far from me!
Elf and small elf,
Do not tarry long here!
Sister and father of elf
leave by the gate! Mother of elves, (night)mare
Go out by the roof!
May the (night)mare not crush me,
May the (night)mare not pull me,
May the (night)mare not ride me.
Hooked-nose elf,
I forbid you to blow,
hairy elf, I forbid you
to scale me and blow your breath in my face!
And you, Weeper,
muse well on me!
Herbrot and Herebrand,
go to another land!
And you, infamous milk thief,
Avoid my door!
May fever and cramp
stay outside with you!
Don't touch me,
nor lead me astray
nor carry me off,
do not cut the foot from the living
nor suck in his heart
and slip straw there in its stead!
I forbid you today and everyday,
I prefer to trample you, not carry you.
Go away, foul spirit,
There is nothing for you to do here!
l implore you, monster,
by water and fire,
you and your companions,
by the great name
of the fish called zelebrand
in the Mass.
I implore you with all my strength
by the Miserere, by the Laudem Deo,
by the Voce mea,
by the De profundis,
by the psalm Coheuntes,
by the Nunc dimittis,
by the Benedictus,
by the Magnificat,
by the ancient Trinity,
by the noble psalms,
to go off beyond the sea
and touch me nevermore .
Amen
From the book Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Dead, by Medievalist Claude Lecouteux. Published by Inner Traditions International