The Land between God and the Devil

The prehistoric barrows of England were places of fear, dread and suspicion in early medieval times. Holding the bodies of the pagan dead, medieval people – who were Christian – saw the barrows dotting the landscape as liminal, shadowy in-between places: between living and dead, life and afterlife, good and evil, God and the devil.

Witches, the great tenth-century writer Aelfric of Eynsham said, met at these barrows to summon the devil, who would appear to them disguised as the dead buried in these mounds. Calling back to the Torah’s tale of the Witch of Endor, who called the spirit of the prophet Samuel for Saul to consult in his war against the Philistines, Aelfric believed the Witch of Endor had instead summoned a demon in the shape of the prophet: ideas later echoed by Martin Luther and John Calvin. To Aelfric, this story echoed what he feared in the world around him – and what witches attempted to do at barrows and landscapes in his own time.

The landscape and the dead it concealed conducted evil visions from the devil. Exploring these places and ideas, ‘Land between God and the Devil’ will connect the reader to this unease in the past wrought by the summoning of demons, and the experiences of encountering the barrows of England as places neither living nor dead.