Somebody tells you that amethyst has been used for sobriety since ancient Greece. Somebody tells you the druids gathered mistletoe at the winter solstice. Somebody tells you that a particular herb has been used by Highland women for a thousand years for a particular purpose.

One of those is true, one is invented, and one depends entirely on what you mean by used. Being able to tell the difference is a practical skill, not an academic one, and I think it makes for better practice rather than colder practice. This is the method I use, and I am publishing it because I want every claim on this site to be checkable.

The five tiers

I grade every claim in my own notes and databases on this scale. It takes seconds and it changes how you read.

  • Tier 1: Primary source. An original text, an excavated object, a court record, a first-hand account. Pliny writing about the druids. The Greenwich witch bottle. A trial transcript from 1618. This is the bedrock, and it is much smaller than people think.
  • Tier 2: Peer-reviewed or scholarly secondary. A historian, archaeologist or folklorist working from primary material with their sources shown. Ronald Hutton. Owen Davies. Brian Hoggard. Roy Vickery. If you only ever read Tier 2 you would be in excellent shape.
  • Tier 3: Documented practitioner tradition. A practice recorded from living practitioners, with a named source and a location and a date. Alexander Carmichael's collecting. Cat Yronwode on conjure. Family tradition, when the person telling you can say who taught them.
  • Tier 4: Modern synthesis. The great twentieth century correspondence books. Cunningham, Beyerl, and the enormous body of work that assembled, standardised and in places invented the systems most modern practitioners use. Genuinely useful. Frequently unsourced. Often circular, because later books cite earlier books which cited nothing.
  • Tier 5: Unverified modern claim. The blog post, the shop description, the deck insert card, the reel. Sometimes right. Never checkable.

None of these tiers is worthless. Tier 4 and Tier 5 material is where a great deal of living practice actually happens, and I use it. The point is not to discard the lower tiers. The point is to know which tier you are standing on when you make a claim in public.

The three questions

For any specific claim, ask these in order.

1. What is the earliest source?

Follow it back. Genuinely follow it back, click by click, until you either hit a primary text or hit a wall.

Most of the time you hit a wall, and the wall is somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century. That is not a scandal, it just means the claim is modern practice rather than ancient tradition, and it should be described that way.

The classic pattern is citation laundering: Book A states something without a source. Book B repeats it and cites Book A. Book C cites Book B. By Book F it has an impressive footnote trail and there is still nothing at the bottom.

2. What is the source's own agenda?

Every source has one, including this one.

Pliny was a Roman writing about a people Rome was conquering and whose priesthood it was suppressing. James VI wrote Daemonologie as a king justifying prosecutions. A shop describing a crystal is selling the crystal. A Victorian folklorist collecting Highland charms was working within a Romantic project about a vanishing Celtic past, and that project shaped what he wrote down and how.

Agenda does not make a source useless. It tells you which way to correct.

3. Has the wording drifted?

This is where most invention happens, and it is almost always invisible.

Watch Pliny's mistletoe passage travel. He writes the sixth day of the moon. One translator renders it the fifth day. A folklorist paraphrases it as the sixth day of the new moon. A popular writer adds following the solstice. A modern practitioner writes the druids gathered mistletoe at midwinter.

Nobody lied at any point. Each step was a small reasonable-looking rewording. And the end result is a claim with no relationship to the source.

Warning signs

Things that should make you slow down:

  • "Ancient". Ancient when? Ancient where? This word is doing almost no work and hiding a great deal.
  • "The Celts believed". Which Celts, over roughly two thousand years and half of Europe, and how do we know, given that they wrote almost nothing about their own religion.
  • A precise number with no source. "Used for 5,000 years." By whom, recorded where.
  • A perfectly tidy system. Real tradition is patchy, regional, contradictory and full of gaps. A complete, symmetrical, gap-free correspondence table is almost always a twentieth century construction. Which is fine, as long as it says so.
  • Etymology as proof. A word's derivation tells you about the history of the word. It is not evidence about practice.
  • "Suppressed by the Church." Sometimes true. Also the universal explanation for why there is no evidence, and therefore unfalsifiable.
  • Consensus across the internet. Twenty sites agreeing usually means one source and nineteen copies.

A worked example: Carmina Gadelica

I want to demonstrate this on a source I love and use constantly, because the method is worthless if it is only applied to things you already dislike.

Carmina Gadelica is Alexander Carmichael's collection of Gaelic charms, blessings, incantations and lore, gathered in the Gàidhealtachd (GAY-ul-tuchk) between 1860 and 1909 and published from 1900. It is magnificent. It is the single richest source for Scottish Gaelic charm tradition. I quote from it and I always will. It is also not a transcript.

Carmichael's editorial methods were questioned in his own lifetime by John Gregorson Campbell and Alexander Macbain. In 1976 Hamish Robertson published a study in Scottish Gaelic Studies comparing published charms against surviving manuscript copies and concluded that hardly one had escaped being touched up in some way, sometimes drastically.

So what tier is it?

It is Tier 3 material that has been rewritten by a Tier 4 hand. The underlying tradition is real and was genuinely collected from real people in real places. The words on the page are Carmichael's Victorian literary rendering of it.

What that means in practice:

  • Use it. It is irreplaceable.
  • Cite it as Carmichael, not as anonymous ancient tradition.
  • Where a charm matters, cross-check against Campbell, or against Ronald Black's annotated edition of Campbell in The Gaelic Otherworld.
  • Do not build an argument about pre-Christian practice on Carmichael's wording alone.

That is the whole method. Not rejection. Calibration.

Why bother

Two reasons, and neither is about looking clever.

  • The first is that unsourced claims are fragile. If your practice rests on the druids having done something at the solstice, and you find out they did not, the practice wobbles. If your practice rests on mistletoe being a plant that grows without touching the earth, which is observable and true, nothing can take that from you. Practice built on things you have checked is practice that survives finding things out.
  • The second is that we are custodians. Scottish and Gaelic tradition has been romanticised, invented, appropriated and sold back to us for three hundred years. A great deal of what circulates as Highland lore was written in the nineteenth century by people who had never been north of Perth. If we are going to hold this material, we owe it the courtesy of knowing which parts are real.

I would rather have one paragraph of Pliny that I can point to than a hundred confident sentences with nothing underneath.

Sources

  • Hutton, R. (2009). Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. Yale University Press.
  • Hutton, R. (1999, rev. 2019). The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press.
  • Robertson, H. (1976). Studies in Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica. Scottish Gaelic Studies, 12(2). Summary of the controversy: Carmina Gadelica, Wikipedia.
  • Carmichael Watson Project, University of Edinburgh — Carmichael's digitised manuscripts, against which the published charms can be compared.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Davies, O. (2003). Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Hambledon.
  • Trevor-Roper, H. (1983). The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland. In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Contentious and worth arguing with, but essential on this specific problem.
  • Vickery, R. (2019). Vickery's Folk Flora. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Free companion archive: Plant-Lore
  • "Mistletoe" — Digital Medievalist, a model worked example of tracing a claim back to nothing.
  • Useful for checking claims yourself: Internet Archive, Internet Sacred Text Archive, Project Gutenberg, JSTOR (free tier available), Biodiversity Heritage Library.

This article sets out the Source Tier system used throughout the slynkycat reference databases.