Radicle is an alternative gardening newsletter from the UK. I was intrigued by a recent piece on goodman's crofts:
Once a fairly common tradition through the British Isles and parts of Europe, the goodman’s croft referred to a section of arable land set aside to go untilled, uncultivated, and ungrazed in hopeful exchange for the health of one’s cattle and crops. There were many names for this practice: the given ground, the gun rig, the clootie craft, the devil’s craft, the gudeman’s craft, the guidman’s fauld, the black faulie, the guidman’s grunde. The “goodman” referred to the devil, named respectfully so as not to offend him and incur his spite. But the practice likely originated long before the advent of Christianity, invoking the protection of pagan deities and spirits.1
Best practice is to give the devil his due.
This made me wonder why our image of the devil looks like Pan, the god of the wild.
Christians believed rival pagan gods like the Egyptian Bes and the Greek Pan were, in fact, demons, responsible for wars, disease and other human and natural disasters. Hundreds of years later, when the devil arrived in Western artwork, some depictions feature these gods' physical attributes – such as Bes's facial hair and Pan's goat legs.2
When I was fifteen, I went to a boarding school on the outskirts of Washington, DC. I was unhappy, mostly from being fifteen, but also because I missed the natural wildness that surrounded my small town. At home, I could set out from my house and walk for miles down dirt roads, over farmland, through forest. The boarding school was surrounded by busy city streets, office buildings, a heavily built environment that made me feel like I was starving. There was a patch of woods on the school property. It was very small - not enough to muffle the traffic noise. I would visit there just to be under trees and to walk through fallen leaves.
We may not call them goodman's crofts, but we leave dead plant stalks over the winter to make a home for insects. We reserve uncultivated space where animals can live. We turn off outside lights at night so that, high above us, migrating birds can find their way, and creatures on the ground can find each other.
In darkness, the untameable universe reveals itself.
I think of these practices as our way of making an offering to Gaia so the injured and enraged earth goddess doesn't destroy us all.
Even when we don't arrange it, the wild gods have their ways of slipping in. It doesn't take long for grasses to pop through the cracks in asphalt. Moles tunnel their insurrection, leaving long lumps in pristine lawns. New spiderwebs drift from the doorways of rooms vacuumed a week ago. Coyotes howl beneath bedroom windows, Deer decapitate flowers in suburban gardens. In corporate offices, crowds of ladybugs festoon the ceilings every spring.
Footnotes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/the-changing-faces-of-satan/zk7p7nb
Love this. MJ's photo is gorgeous.