#religion and magic

The Sacred Twenty Eight: The Noble and Most Ancient Houses of Nott and Rowle

Ergi, the Rowles called them
And sneered,
But the Notts only smiled
And wove on in silence.
They might be ergi,
but they were seiðmenn
And they would never be blót.

The common wizards and witches of Britain had their own version of a very muggle saying - out of the frying pan and into the fire. Theirs was a little… different. For it went like this:

Fleeing the Blacks
only to cross the Notts.

The Blacks were dangerous, but nine times out of ten you knew precisely where you stood with them - they wore their hearts on their sleeves. If you insulted them, you could rest assured they would curse you, probably using some obscure dark curse no one had heard of and things would be well. Mostly.

But if you crossed a Nott, you’d never know it. They merely smiled and continued as though nothing were wrong at all. Excessively well-bred, always courteous - haute ton. But once you had left, they would return home, still smiling, and take down an ancient distaff and spindle; magical objects passed down from generation to generation for each Nott versed in the magical art of Seiðr.

Magical Britain laughed at divination and called it a fuzzy art with no magical grounding, for charlatans and their ilk, and the Notts agreed with them. Crystal balls, tea leaves, reading sticks - amateurs. The future was what people made it, what a talented seiðmenn orseiðkonurcould make it. The future was whatever the Notts chose to weave on their tapestries. Each thread, carefully placed, turning thought into reality, fiction into non-fiction, lies into truth.

None knew this better than the Rowles. They had learnt firsthand, many centuries ago, that mocking the Notts - these students of Odin - came with a price. A blood price that might have been honor to those who paid it but was a blood price nonetheless.

The Rowles might have been warrior-shamans; berserkers invulnerable in battle; but the might of the sword or even crude magical power could not withstand the implacable weaving and reweaving of reality and fate that the Notts took part in. Theirs was deeper magic, darker magic, terrifying magic and when the Rowles and Notts came to England with the first of the Vikings to rule Scotland, they brought rumours of what the Notts could do to people when crossed and people fearedthem.Fearedthese mild mannered men and women who refused to let this new religion called Christianity and its sociopolitical order sway them; who failed to conform to the new order’s strict regimentation of gender and male and female occupations; who smiled when people spurned them and smiled even wider when their mockers were slowly ruined piece by piece.

So not a murmur was heard when Proserpina Nott, aged 16, took up the family seat in the Wizengamot in 1734 though she was the youngest of the Notts and had not yet finished her schooling. The Ministry kept mum when Tiresias Nott refused to use their curriculum when teaching divination and instead taught his pupils trance magic and weaving: the beginnings of Seiðr. Wizengamot members cast their eyes downwards when Isembardus Nott stood up to make speeches, lest he see the judgement in their eyes when he painted his face and persisted in wearing pompadour wigs in public (it was 1854). People turned the the other way when Cantankerus Nott, pureblood fanatic extraordinaire, put half his fortune into muggle stocks and bonds. And no one dared say a word when Charles Nott stood a little too close to Antinous Lestrange at Ministry press conferences. 

No. Only the foolish with a death wish ever crossed the path of a Nott. For they would have their revenge, these children of Guðrún, protégés of Odin and their revenge would be cold, dark and terror-filled as the houses of Hel.

[Picture sources: Shadows on Parade by Nicol Vizioli, CALLE 20 by Jose Herrera, The Essence by Spencer Hansen, Norns Bruk, A Golden Thread by John Melhuish Strudwick, screencaps from Vikings and 1066: the Battle for Middle Earth]

Myths on Magic: The Web Of Time from THE HOLY BIBLE, Containing the Old Testament, AND THE NEW: Newly Translated out of the Original tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, with some Account of the Histories, Teachings and Workings of magic, by the Chief Warlock’s special commandment, Translators Unknown, 1715.

Now in those days, it was such that the eyes of men were loosened from the bonds of time and for them, night and day was as naught but a blinking of the eye, for they were as God and as for him, a thousand years is but one day, so for them, a thousand years was as a single day.

And it came to pass that those who walked among them and possessed the gift of magic grew discontent and they said unto themselves, “Come, let us fashion for ourselves a future after our fancy.” For they had been given such power as to steward time itself and thus, turn the future to their liking.

“For why,” they said, “Should we be mere stewards, when we might be lords?”

So saying, they began a great weaving with time and sought to bind it to their will with their threads.

And the LORD came among them to see the weavings they wove for the future.

And the LORD said “Behold, the people are as one, and they have such Sight; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

“Come, let us go down, and there, set a restraint upon their eyes, that a day be no more than the turning of a night and a day in their eyes and a thousand years be vaster than they may conceive of.”

So the LORD set a restraint upon their eyes and cast them thence from the weaving they had begun. And there he appointed three angels to guard the weaving, lest there return one who sought to bend the will of the world to his will.

And so struck with blindness, they turned to the LORD in terror and begged him to have mercy upon them.

“For we sought only to be as you,” they cried.

And the LORD had mercy upon them.  To some he gave the gift of Sight, loosening the restraints upon their eyes, that they might see and that they might serve as but stewards and not lords of time, but to them he tied their tongues that they may speak in riddles so only those who heard would understand.

So it was that the Sight first entered the world and time was set as straight as a builder’s line: for the LORD declared that a day was to be no more to the eye as but the turning of a day and a night and a thousand years, a countless number of days, too great for the eye to see and to comprehend.

(The idea of time as a web owes its genesis to the webs that appear in LightningOnTheWave’s Sacrifices Arc. The story is a loose allegory to the story of the Tower of Babel.)