Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - June 26, 2026


Pine Cones： Hagstones ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Episode Fifty-One： Monuments & Ley Lines w⧸Heather Wildflower Episode Fifty-Two Pt.1： Damsels [feat. Fairy Tale Fix] - F＊ck Perseus!

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

133.85

Word count

1,783

Sentence count

80

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 There is a special joy in beach treasure, a rare shell, a shark's egg sack, or an interesting
00:00:14.380 rock. But what is extra special is finding a stone steeped in folk belief and holding
00:00:21.940 it up to spy through it to the sea beyond.
00:00:30.000 Witch stones, or as they are commonly called hag stones, have for centuries been believed
00:00:39.680 to have magical uses. They've been called hex stones, lucky stones, pledge stones, or
00:00:46.580 druid stones. In German they are hooner gotter, or chicken gods, but in Latin they were called
00:00:53.660 Silex Pertussis, meaning perforated flint. Some know them as Odin stones, or Eye stones,
00:01:01.660 Kalyuk stones, Adder stones, or Wish stones.
00:01:07.560 Names vary from place to place, but they all tie in folk superstitions and beliefs. People felt
00:01:13.860 there was something divine or otherworldly about a stone with a naturally occurring whole,
00:01:18.560 and so they became symbols and tools of magical prowess, protection or warding against witchcraft.
00:01:34.120 Tradition claims that hagstones are the hardened saliva of serpents produced when large numbers of them gather together.
00:01:42.940 The holes, it was said, were made by their tongues.
00:01:46.680 Another version insists that an adder stone comes directly from the head of a serpent,
00:01:51.800 or is created by the sting of an adder itself.
00:01:55.640 The more modern explanation is far less dramatic and far easier to verify.
00:02:01.160 Most hagstones are formed by old-fashioned water erosion and elemental forces,
00:02:06.680 while others are perforated with aid of living organisms.
00:02:12.600 Those formed by seawater are slowly assisted by the movement of tides, sediment and other stones
00:02:19.660 When a particular part of the stone has been worn sufficiently away by the natural elements, the hole appears
00:02:26.120 In Europe, bioluminescent, clam-like mollusks, known as angel wings, bore into rocks
00:02:33.620 leaving hagstones behind when they die
00:02:36.600 Some hagstones are fossils which happen to be just the right shape
00:02:40.600 and larger-than-life hagstones can be seen among the magical megaliths of Great Britain and Ireland,
00:02:47.600 such as the Odin Stone of the Orkney Islands or the Tobernaveen Holdstone in County Sligo.
00:02:53.960 It's not hard to understand that those who came before us saw these unusual formations
00:02:59.800 and at once thought magic.
00:03:08.480 There is a caveat.
00:03:10.980 The hole in the hagstone must be created by nature alone.
00:03:15.300 Human interventions such as drilling, carving or even directing the flow of water
00:03:20.080 disqualifies the stone from magical status.
00:03:23.660 Only a naturally formed perforation is believed to hold protective power.
00:03:28.700 And the magic supposedly lies in the iconic hole itself.
00:03:32.420 Their uses are many, from the ability to heal a snake bite or a nosebleed,
00:03:37.260 to protecting pigs from swine fever or sheep from foot rot,
00:03:41.540 to a sailor's charm or protection against lightning,
00:03:44.700 to a talisman against nightmares or thwarting other evils.
00:03:55.460 One theory posits that only good things can pass through the hole.
00:04:00.340 So, while good fortune and good wishes will find you through a hagstone,
00:04:04.040 bad luck and evil thoughts are too big to be able to pass through
00:04:08.120 they become stuck in the middle
00:04:09.520 this belief may be bolstered by the centuries old superstition
00:04:13.800 that magic cannot work on moving water
00:04:16.120 so since the hole in hagstone was created by moving water
00:04:20.740 it works as a sort of shield against hexes and magical nonsense
00:04:25.840 Pliny was already writing about whole stones in 77 BCE, calling them the serpent's egg,
00:04:37.260 in his famous work Natural History.
00:04:40.200 Later writers treated these pierced stones as the same objects now known as hagstones,
00:04:46.360 long believed to protect against the nightmare, a nocturnal assault in which a witch or hag
00:04:51.540 presses on the sleeper's chest.
00:04:53.560 And it wasn't just people who were targeted. Horses found at dawn, sweating, shaking and
00:05:00.360 exhausted, were said to have been hag-ridden, attacked in the night by the same unseen force.
00:05:06.920 Humans described waking, unable to move or cry out. You and I know it now as sleep paralysis,
00:05:15.360 but for anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis, that horrible, trapped-in-your-body
00:05:20.980 feeling that occurs usually at the witching hour, it's easy to understand why people
00:05:26.440 back then sought a way to keep the hag at bay.
00:05:36.160 The belief persisted well into the modern era. In 1888, the Journal of the Anthropological
00:05:42.820 Institute recorded Scottish perforated stones known as merestains. One had two human teeth
00:05:49.140 lodged in its holes and had been kept in a single household for 70 years to ward off bad dreams.
00:05:55.620 Others came from coastal fishing villages where women kept them in their beds or used
00:06:00.260 them during pregnancy for protection. The stones were even hung behind cows expected to calve,
00:06:05.780 extending their supposed safeguarding power to livestock.
00:06:09.300 The Horniman Museum in London has an old stone collected in County Antrim in the north of
00:06:14.820 Ireland, which was hung from the horn of a cow to prevent pixies from milking her,
00:06:19.940 and another worn by a soldier as a good luck mascot during World War One.
00:06:30.980 Their uses really varied. If hagstones were nailed to the front door,
00:06:35.220 hung from a house key, or placed discreetly on a windowsill,
00:06:38.500 they were believed to keep evil from entering the home. Threaded on a cord and hung beside a bed or
00:06:43.940 or in a stable, they were thought to stop the night hag from approaching sleepers, human or
00:06:48.720 animal. Mariners tied hagstones to shipmasts and boughs to ward off sea witches and dangerous
00:06:56.120 storms. And when hung on the eaves of barns or chicken coops as adder stones, they were said
00:07:02.800 to protect cattle and poultry from both mundane and magical predators.
00:07:06.920 but despite their reputation hagstones required no ritual preparation and maybe that was their
00:07:17.860 attraction their power was believed to be inherent simple objects acting as a barrier
00:07:23.860 against whatever troubled humans and animals in the dark the existence of these charms tells us
00:07:30.340 the dangers and deep-seated fears that people at the time were facing and what they wanted to be
00:07:36.080 protected from. But the most out there use of hagstones was to see through the disguise
00:07:41.360 of a witch or a fairy by looking through the hole.
00:07:51.320 The folklore claims that peering through the centre of a hagstone pierces the veil,
00:07:56.800 allowing you to see through the true forms of witches, fairies, mermaids and other hidden
00:08:01.900 supernatural entities, normally obscured from human sight. The unusual little hole was treated
00:08:08.380 as a portal linking the human world with the more than human. This comes from the stone's
00:08:14.720 inherent strangeness. Looking through a hagstone by day was said to strengthen ordinary vision.
00:08:20.960 Looking through it at night revealed the unseen forces shaping daily life.
00:08:26.500 People used this practice to detect hidden dangers or to make contact with helpful spirits. 0.82
00:08:31.900 They were kept near cribs just in case the fairies tried swapping an infant with a changeling. 0.50
00:08:39.520 As we've seen, hag stones have been tied to doorways, windows, thresholds and other 0.99
00:08:44.820 liminal spaces.
00:08:46.760 These are, as our listeners know, places that sit between one state and another.
00:08:52.340 The stones themselves were seen the same way, both guardians and gateways.
00:08:58.200 That idea appears in older mythic material too.
00:09:01.660 In one ancient poem, Odin orders a dwarf to drill a hole through a magical auger stone.
00:09:07.880 Once it's done, Odin transforms into a snake and slips through the opening, emerging on
00:09:12.700 the other side as a handsome young man.
00:09:15.940 The stone allows him to cross worlds, change shape and ultimately steal the mead of poetry.
00:09:33.320 In folk healing, hold stones were credited with protecting against eye diseases, breaking
00:09:38.940 disease hexes and even curing whooping cough.
00:09:43.140 The famous Odin stone in Orkney became a centre of local ritual.
00:09:47.700 Couples swear the oath of Odin by joining hands through its opening,
00:09:51.740 and infants are passed through the hole for health and protection.
00:09:56.280 Hagstones appear throughout folk magic as apotropaic tools,
00:10:00.340 used to turn back bad luck and filter out harmful forces.
00:10:03.860 As we've heard, they were commonly hung over beds and placed near doorways,
00:10:08.900 but they were also kept on the person as a charm.
00:10:11.960 In healing traditions, holed stones were called upon to ease pain like rheumatism and arthritis,
00:10:17.740 and to soothe childhood illnesses.
00:10:20.040 They were worn for fertility, both for conceiving children and for encouraging a fertile creative mind.
00:10:27.620 Some traditions even claim that meditating with one can reveal personal insight or guidance.
00:10:33.100 from ancient megaliths to medieval nightmares from merestains and scottish fishing villages
00:10:45.440 to the visionary stones of fairy lore hagstones serve as a delicious combination of archaeology
00:10:51.980 superstition treasure hunting and lived experience in a world that moves quickly and prizes convenience
00:10:58.560 hagstones stand as quiet reminders of patience and the passage of time. Each one is shaped by
00:11:04.980 water, stone and chance. An object created slowly without human hands yet carrying centuries of
00:11:11.880 human belief. They protected homes and stables, revealed hidden beings, eased illnesses,
00:11:19.160 guarded thresholds and offered a way to glimpse the unseen. Whether viewed as charms, portals or
00:11:25.000 simply a remarkable natural object they show how deeply people have always tried to understand and
00:11:30.320 influence the forces around them. If you are lucky enough to receive a hagstone and superstition
00:11:38.200 holds that they find you not vice versa treat it the way tradition always has with respect
00:11:44.640 intention and never without gratitude that a little bit of magic has found its way into your life.
00:11:55.000 This has been your June edition of Pinecones, whimsical, magical folklore shorts from Rowan
00:12:02.300 and Pine. If you have access to a beach, please have a little look for a hagstone. You might get
00:12:07.620 lucky and definitely send us a photo if you do. I was recently lucky enough to find one along with
00:12:14.200 a mermaid's purse on the same day, so I should definitely play the lottery, right? Until next
00:12:20.300 time bring a hagstone on your next first date don't let the hag keep you up at night and you'll 1.00
00:12:25.820 hear from me next month thanks for listening and fuck yeah folklore 0.96
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