Table Of ContentL
Spirituality/Folklore $16.95 e
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“There is no other author alive who so thoroughly examines the subject as o
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Claude Lecouteux.”
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rebecca elSon, publisher/writer of The Magical Buffet website
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Why do we hang horseshoes for good luck or place wreaths on our doors? Why
does the groom carry his new bride over the threshold? These customs represent
the last vestiges from a long, rich history of honoring the spirits of our homes. They
show that a house is more than a building: it is a living being with a body and soul.
Examining the extensive traditions surrounding houses from medieval times
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to the present, Claude Lecouteux reveals that, before we entered the current era
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of frequent moves and modular housing, moving largely from the countryside into
cities, humanity had an extremely sacred relationship with their homes and all the e
spirits who lived there alongside them—from the spirit of the house itself to the
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mischievous elves, fairies, and imps who visited, invited or not. He shows how
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every aspect of constructing and keeping a house involved rites, ceremony, cus-
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toms, and taboos to appease the spirits, including the choice of a building lot and
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the very materials with which it was built. Uncovering the lost meaning behind
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door and window placement, the hearth, and the threshold, Lecouteux shares t
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many tales of house spirits, from the offerings used to cajole the local land spirit o
into becoming the domestic house spirit to the good and bad luck bestowed upon n
those who seek the help of the “Little Money Man.” He draws on studies and
classic literature from old Europe—from Celtic lands and Scandinavia to France o
and Germany to the far eastern borders of Europe and into Russia—to explain f
the pagan roots behind many of these traditions. H
Revealing our ancestors’ charms, prayers, and practices to bestow happiness
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and prosperity upon their homes, Lecouteux shows that we can invite the spirits
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back into our houses, old or new, and restore the sacred bond between home and
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inhabitant.
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CLaUdE LECoUTEUx is a former professor of medieval litera- h
ture and civilization at the Sorbonne. He is the author of numerous o
books on medieval and pagan afterlife beliefs, including The Secret l
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History of Poltergeists and Haunted Houses. He lives in Paris.
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InnER TRadITIonS r
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RoCHESTER, VERMonT t
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Tradition
The of
Household
Spirits
Ancestral Lore Practices
and
Claude Lecouteux
Translated by Jon E. Graham
Inner Traditions
Rochester, Vermont • Toronto, Canada
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Inner Traditions
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
www.InnerTraditions.com
Copyright © 2000 by Éditions Imago
English translation copyright © 2013 by Inner Traditions International
Originally published in French under the title La maison et ses génies: Croyances
d’hier et d’aujourd’hui by Éditions Imago, 7 rue Suger, 75006, Paris
First U.S. edition published in 2013 by Inner Traditions
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lecouteux, Claude.
[La maison et ses génies. English]
The tradition of houshold spirits : ancestral lore and practices / Claude
Lecouteux ; translated by Jon E. Graham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62055-105-9 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-62055-144-8 (e-book)
1. Jinn. 2. Haunted houses. I. Title.
GR549.L4313 2013
133.1'22—dc23
2012046362
Text design and layout by Brian Boynton
This book was typeset in Garamond Premier Pro with Barbara and Legacy Sans as
display typefaces
All photos in color insert are courtesy of Nigel Pennick unless otherwise noted.
Inner Traditions wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the
government of France through the National Book Office of the Ministère de la
Culture in the preparation of this translation.
Nous tenons à exprimer nos plus vifs remerciements au gouvernement de la France
et au ministère de la Culture, Centre National du Livre, pour leur concours dans la
préparation de la traduction de cet ouvrage.
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Contents
Foreword by Ronald Grambo vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: More Than a Simple Building 1
Part One
The house and ITs Grounds
1 The House and Its Construction 12
2 The Building 36
3 The Openings of the House 48
4 The House Interior 67
Part Two
The house spIrITs
5 Domestic Spirits in Antiquity
and the Middle Ages 88
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6 The Origin of House Spirits 108
7 The Manifestations of Household Spirits 126
8 The Purveyor Spirits 153
9 Haunted Houses 168
Once Upon a Time . . . 175
❖
appendIx 1 Sayings and Beliefs 178
appendIx 2 The Alf 185
appendIx 3 A Brief Summa 187
❖
Notes 189
Bibliography 208
Index 221
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Foreword
In Jean Giraudoux’s charming comedy Intermezzo, the druggist
exclaims: “All symbols have their meanings. We only have to interpret
them.” (Act I, Scene 1) But it was man who created symbols when fash-
ioning his sociocultural world. Human fantasy remains an excellent
subject of study for those with a real desire to become immersed in the
medieval imaginal realm. As Évelyne Patlagean points out: “The imagi-
nal realm is formed by all the representations that pass beyond the lim-
its established by the lessons of experience and the deductive sequences
they authorize.”1
Those seeking to solve the problems associated with studies of the
Middle Ages are confronted by many almost insurmountable difficul-
ties. For example, descriptions of folk customs and beliefs were provided
primarily by the representatives of the scholarly culture, which is to say
monks, priests, clergymen, and bureaucrats—essentially the spokespersons
of law and order. But as a result of their tendency to write in Latin, the
sources were made literary. At the same time, folk expressions were altered
to agree with the grammatical and syntactical requirements of the Latin
tongue. The Christianization of popular terms, often in dialect, repre-
sents a huge obstacle to understanding medieval civilization. We should
also note the incorrect interpretations on the part of clerics who did not
grasp the key terms of the vocabulary of preindustrial culture. There is a
kind of dialectic at work between the clerical culture and the folk culture
throughout the entire Middle Ages.
vii
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viii ❖ Foreword
It is certainly inadvisable to exaggerate this social and intellectual
distance between scholarly culture and folk culture, because there were
ideas, sentiments, and attitudes shared by all. Every detail of daily life
in the Middle Ages was fraught with meaning. The medieval man was
surely greatly influenced by religion, but at the same time he maintained
ideas with roots that are to be found in folk mythology. People believed
that dwarves, werewolves, fairies, the undead, and other marvelous and
grotesque beings were all around them. Legends, tales, and ballads are
narrative forms that teach us about the mental attitude of the people of
this time toward these supernatural phenomena. We should also observe
the impact of secular literature—medical and pharmaceutical treatises,
treatises on astrology, grimoires, herbals, lapidaries, bestiaries, and bird
books—on popular culture. In any event, behind the inconsistency of the
sources we have at our disposal, and behind the array of beliefs, we can
see resilient structures and enduring ideas. These beliefs are clearly mental
structures that embrace values, norms, and attitudes considered valuable
by the different strata of society.
Claude Lecouteux is engaged for the long haul2 because he is quite
familiar with Jacques Le Goff’s dictum that “the Middle Ages never
ended.” There is nothing paradoxical about this. There are customs,
trends of thought, and sentiments dating as far back as classical antiquity
that still exist today in isolated regions of Europe.
As a Germanic scholar, historian, and folklorist, Claude Lecouteux is
first and foremost an expert on the Middle Ages, and this study proposes
to provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the house and
its spirits, between man and the supernatural world. The corpus collected
here is rich and diverse. On this point, the author says it is necessary to
shed light on the literature by means of the civilization and vice versa, by
excluding no kind of writing, and he adds that we should not reduce the
perspective to clerical literature and historical texts. Nor does he confine
his research to the Latin elements (chronicles, literature, historiography,
catechesis, and exempla). We should take into account folklore traditions
and myths, and refrain from dismissing the human substratum that pro-
duced these elements.
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Foreword ❖ ix
Here in a few words is the scientific credo of Claude Lecouteux.
He never ceases to emphasize the predominant importance of philol-
ogy as an analytical instrument for understanding the content and
value of the texts studied. The linguistic contribution is decisive in his
work. It is the lexicon that interests him, and this book on household
spirits provides an eloquent testimony to that fact. The etymologies of
the terms used to label supernatural beings and often obsolete notions
are extremely important for clearly grasping the corpus, according to
Claude Lecouteux. The names of the domestic spirits indicate their ori-
gin, appearance, and functions. In his analysis of this corpus, he dis-
cerns the mental structures of a patrimony common to all of Europe,
despite the heterogeneous nature of these spirits. The notion about the
sacred nature of the house is certainly universal. The house is a micro-
cosm of the world. These domestic spirits have a very long and extremely
complicated history. Belief in them is a religious, social, ecological, and
economic fact.
Thanks to the erudition and meticulous nature of Claude
Lecouteux, we have a better understanding of the fundamental facts of
the historical evolution of these spirits over the centuries. They defi-
nitely belong to folk religion. On countless occasions I have been able
to see striking and significant resemblances between the continental
ideas and those of Norway on domestic spirits.3 In passing, I should
note that the author uses Scandinavian sources in his study. This
book serves as a sequel to his earlier book on dwarves and elves, which
inspired him to examine the demons and spirits of the land more
closely. Now we have a trilogy on place spirits, which provides us with
an overall view of them. Regional studies already exist on this subject,
but to the best of my knowledge this is the first time we have at our
disposal a magnificent and folkloric work on genii loci, and it covers
the whole of Europe.
Alas, domestic spirits no longer exist. In Norway, we say that the
house spirit called the nisse has gone into hiding because no one believes
that it exists anymore and no longer cares about it. However, in eastern
Norway, we have a roadside sign depicting a specter in its shroud that
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x ❖ Foreword
says, “Watch out for the Ghost!” In Iceland, a major road was recently
constructed but fear lingered about the supernatural beings in its vicinity.
For this reason, additional expenditures became necessary to divert the
road around the mound in which they had chosen to live.
Ronald Grambo
Oslo University
Folklore Institute
Ronald Grambo, Ph.D., is a Norse folklorist and a retired professor who taught
at Kongsvinger College and the University of Oslo. He has received many aca-
demic awards including the Hedmark Author Award in 2006, and is the author
of many books and academic articles including the Folkloristisk håndbok.
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