In my previous post, I suggested that the making of string figures goes back 70,000 years or more and represents both an ancient mode of performance art and a very early exercise in abstract thinking. However, string figures are far more than that. They are also a form of magic.
Nearly a hundred years ago, the mathematician W.W. Rouse Ball delivered a lecture on string figures in which he noted:
Among existing aborigines, it is usually the women who teach the passtime to the children, and in most cases now-a-days the lads and men, though familiar with the methods used, do not of their own accord make designs in the presence of strangers. …
The Eskimo … have a prejudice against boys playing the game for fear it should lead to their getting entangled with harpoon lines, and hold that such figures, if made at all should be constructed in the autumn so as to entangle the sun in the string and delay the advent of the long winter night.
The notion that knotted strings can be used as a form of voodoo to entangle and hold things back is both very old and more widely distributed than string figures themselves. For example, the Scottish ballad “Willie’s Lady” tells of a man whose mother is jealous of her son’s young wife and uses several kinds of binding magic to prevent the girl’s baby from being born. With the aid of a friendly household spirit, Willie manages to learn the secrets of this “vile rank witch” and successfully undoes the binding spells:
O Willie has loosed the nine witch knots
That was amo that ladie’s locks …And Willie has loosed her left-foot shee,
And letten his ladie be.And now he’s gotten a bonny young son,
And mickle grace be him upon.
The ballad suggests both the positive and negative sides of what is sometimes known as female magic. In its positive aspect, it has a close association with midwifery and childbirth. But in its negative aspect, it is feared — particularly by men — as “vile” witchcraft that can cause crops to fail to grow and cows to cease giving milk. In both aspects, it is closely bound up with the imagery of knotting and unknotting, binding and releasing.