A Welsh Snakestone, Its Tradition and Folklore

Author(s): Prys Morgan

Source: Folklore, Vol. 94, No. 2 (1983), pp. 184-191
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.
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Folklorevol. 94:ii, 1983 184

A Welsh Snakestone,its Traditionand Folklore

PRYS MORGAN

THE FAMILY of the presentwriterare the hereditarykeepersof a snakestoneof great

antiquity which has remained in use until within living memory. It is made of what
appears to be opaque glass, in the shape of a small ring, 26 mm in diameter, 9 mm
thick, the hole in the middle being 11 mm wide. Aroundthe hole are tracesof mustard
yellow with some black spots, the colouring being highly reminiscent of that of a
snake. It is said that formerly it was rather larger, but had shrunk when it was left
overnightin water, the waterbeing used for medicinalpurposes. The home of the ring
was the village of Llansamlet(Glamorgan),a heavily industrialisedsuburb of Swansea
since the middle of the eighteenthcentury, where the writer'sfamily had been farmers
for many centuries. Its local name is Mamacal(with the accent on the second syllable),
and this is SwanseaWelsh dialect for Maen Magl, maenbeing a stone and magl being
an archaic word for an eye ailment such as a stye. Maen Magl was formerly the
common name for this kind of amulet in Glamorganand Monmouthshire,but in other
parts of Wales it was known as Glainy Neidr (or Glainy Nadroedd)which means 'bead
of the adders.' These amulets are often called in English snakestonesor adderbeads.'
The writer'sfamily moved from Llansamletin 1914 to a neighbouringtown, but up
to that date the snakestonewas in considerabledemandin the neighbourhoodas a cure
for all kinds of eye ailments. The waterin which it had been soakedmight be used, but
most commonly it was revolved several times on the eyelid, and was considered an
infallible cure. Marie Trevelyan in 1909 referredto severalof these snakestonesin use
in Glamorgan at that time (unfortunatelycalling the stone Maen Magi not Magl),
adding that they were cures for ulcerated eyelids as well.2 The Mamacal from
Llansamletwas consideredby the family to be a greattreasure,supposedto bring good
luck, and strenuous efforts were made to protect it and ensure its return when
borrowed, and its great importance was (and is) impressed on each generation by
repeating the traditionof how the snakestonehad first been discovered. The writer's
grandmotherJane Rees (1873-1952) believed the story implicitly that an ancestress(in
her words her 'mother'sgrandmother,'but the implicationwas that it was far back in
the mists of time) had one summer's day heard some snakes making a great noise,
somewhere in Llansamlet, and had turned back to watch. She observed the snakes
meeting in a cluster, their tails meeting in the middle, turning and tossing a dead
snake, graduallyturning the dead snakewith their spittle into a ring. She knew exactly
what they were doing and waited quietly until she could rescue her prize, for she knew
full well how valuable the ring would be for herself and her neighbourhood, and
indeed the little snakestoneshe found had been in constant use down the generations.
The writer's family knew nothing of folklore, and had no notion that snakestones
had been objects of interest to historians for some centuries, and that the iradition of
the snakestoneis one of the longest attested folklore traditionsof the Celtic peoples.
The words Maen Magl and Glainy Nadroeddappearin Welsh dictionariesfrom 1753

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A WELSH SNAKESTONE 185

ii':ii':"iiiiiAwi

:s::::jME
... .
.....
...
"Mij?
......

The Mamacal or Snakestone in the palm of the author's hand. (Picture:Roger Davies)

onwards,3and a number of books on Welsh traditionsand folklore mention them, for

example the Welsh religious history book Drychy Prif Oesoeddby Theophilus Evans
(first published in 1716).4This is almost certainlybecause of the long discussion of the
tradition of the snakestone by Edward Lhuyd (or Lhwyd) in his additions and
5
correctionsto Camden in Edmund Gibson's edition of Camden's Britannia in 1695.
Lhuyd, who also illustrates some snakestones (one of which, amulet (a) from
Aberffraw,is identical in appearancewith the Mamacal of Llansamlet), discusses the
snakestoneunder the heading of Cerrig y Drudion in Denbighshire and the possibility
that the placenamemight be connected with the Ancient Druids. He says:
These Druid-stones put me in mind of a certain relique of their Doctrine I have lately observ'd to be yet
retain'd amongst the vulgar ... In most parts of Wales we find it a common opinion of the vulgar, that
about Midsummer Eve .. 'tis usual for snakes to meet in companies, and that by joyning heads together
and hissing, a kind of Bubble is form'd like a ring about the head of one of them, which the rest by
continual hissing blow on till it comes off at the tail, and then it immediatelyhardens, and resembles a glass
ring; which whoever finds (as some old women and children are perswaded) shall prosper in all his
undertakings. The rings they suppose to be thus generated, are called *GleineuNadroedh, i.e. Gemmae
Anguinae,whereof I have seen at several places about twenty or thirty. (*Glunein the Irish signifies Glass.
In Glamorganshireand Monmouthshire these Rings are call'd Maen Magl.)

Lhuyd then adds that they are 'small glass Annulets' about half as wide as finger
rings, but thicker, usually green, but also of other colours, and supposes that they had
in some cases been glass beads worn as ornamentsby the Romans. He continues:
It seems to me very likely that these Snakestones(as we call them) were used as charms or amulets amongst
our Druids of Britain on the same occasions as the Snake-eggsamongst the Gaulish Druids. For Pliny, who
liv'd when those Priests were in request, and saw one of their snake-eggs, gives us a like account of the
origin of them, as our common people do of their Glain Neidr ...

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186 PRYS MORGAN

He then quotes the passage from Pliny's Natural History6where Pliny describes the
strangeegg, well known in Gaul, unknown to the Greeks,which was said to come from
the process where, in summer, numberless snakesentwine themselves into a ball held
together by the secretion of their bodies and by their spittle, and this ball was called
anguinum.The Druids were said to claim that the hissing serpents threw this up into
the air and it had to be caught by a human in a cloakbefore it touched the ground, and
whoever wished to catch the snake-egghad to flee on horseback,for the serpentswould
pursue him until they were cut off by a stream.Pliny said that he had seen one of these
snake-eggs,that it was round, about as large as a small apple, the shell cartilaginous,
pocked like the arms of a polypus. He said that the Druids prized it highly, and it
ensured success in lawsuits and favourable reception with princes. Lhuyd then
observed, after quoting from Pliny, that if one compared the current Welsh
superstition with the lore described in Pliny, one must conclude that it was a 'relique
of the Superstition,or perhapsImpostureof the Druids.' He thought that possibly the
lore had been applied originally to something else and only later had become attached
to the snakestonesor adderbeads.Pliny's OvumAnguinum,he thought, was probablya
shell, marine or fossil, possibly echinusmarinus, of the type called in Wales Wyeu'r
Mbr or 'sea-eggs'in his day.
Edward Lhuyd's achievement as a scientific pioneer was so great, his observation
and intelligence strikeus as so modern, that we forget that he was an enthusiasticnot a
clinical man, and that he was deeply moved, as he travelledabout the Celtic lands, by
the possibility that some traditions which went back to the Ancient Druids still
survived. He found no evidence for the snakestonesin England save in Cornwall,and
there, in the far west of Cornwall, he found the tradition of the beads called milprev
(literally 'a thousand snakes') used as amulets. In Scotland, in the lowlands and
highlands, he found an enormousvarietyof these amulets, with many differentnames.
The 'snail-stones,'for example, were hollow cylinders of blue glass and used to cure
sore eyes.' That he did not find the traditionof snakestonesin Irelandmerely proved
to Lhuyd that since there were no snakes in Ireland, the ancient tradition could not
have meant anythingto the Irish and could never have takenroot there. Lhuyd was not
the first to observethe milprevin Cornwall,for RichardCarewof Antony as farback as
1602 had noted:
The countrey people of Cornwall have a conceit that snakes by their breathingarounda hazel wand makea
stone ring of a blue colour with a yellow figure of a snake in it. Beasts stung are given water in which the
snake stone is soaked.s

Carewwas clearly sceptical about the tradition,and so was Lhuyd. But Lhuyd more
than once in his letters remarkedon the amazingfrequencyof the snakestonesin Celtic
lands. Writing from Linlithgow, in lowland Scotland in 1699, Lhuyd remarked'Not
only the vulgar, but even the gentlemen of good educationthroughoutall Scotland,are
fully perswaded the snakes make them, though they are as plain glass as any in a
bottle.'9 Lhuyd could if he had needed have pointed out the survival of the mistletoe
traditionas anotherbelief which could go back to the Ancient Druids. He was in fact
much intrigued by the Beltane fires which had survived in Scotland and Ireland. His
notes on Welsh topography,called his Parochialiaby his moderneditors,"'have many
unexplained references by his Welsh correspondentsto bonfires on hilltops called
mwdwleithin (literally 'gorse ricks'), and it may be that he was seeking evidence in
Wales for the Beltanetradition.
Other antiquaries after Lhuyd's time began to gather information about various

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 A WELSH SNAKESTONE 187

snakestones. It was discoveredthat the Scottish Highland clach-nathrach (snakestone)

was found on the long ling, a peculiar steel grey knob on the heatherroots, soft when
young and hard when old, that was supposed to arise from a snake emitting spume
around the roots of the heather twig. The knob, which had a hole in it, was greatly
treasured. Lhuyd was not quite correct in stating that snakestoneswere unknown in
England. W. W. Skeat discussed the tradition in 1912" and reported many places in
England where fossil ammoniteswere found which were prized by the local people as
'snakestones.'In Whitby it was believed that the ammoniteswere the snakeswhich had
been expelled and turned to stone by the abbess Hild. In Keynsham (Bristol) it was
believed that the Celtic Virgin Saint Keyne had likewise turned the snakes into stone,
and these were the ammonites or snakestones. It may be added here that Keynsham
and Whitby were both places influenced by British or Celtic Christianity.
James Frazerdiscussed the snakestones,perhaps ratheroddly, under the heading of
the magic propertiesof objects which retain their magic only while they do not touch
the ground,12 but he found that the snakestonebeliefs were almost entirely confined to
Celtic lands. T. D. Kendrick in his study of the Druids" naturally had cause to
examine the Ovum Anguinum, and suggested that some kinds of snake-egg amulet
could be found as far afield as Ceylon. More recentlyKenneth P. Oakleyhas suggested
that there is a widespread belief in the magic properties of naturally-holedstones,
called hagstonesor witches-stones,and that prehistoricman attachedmagic properties
to fossils. Edward Lhuyd had made a similar observation. Oakley also refers to the
populartendency to grab at any ancient object and to venerateit, and to give the name
'adderstone'to a large number of diverse objects, such as ancient spindle whorls or
Saxon glass beads.'4 If an object is found the function of which is unknown, it is a
naturaltendency to give the object a magic property.Thus it was observed in 1872"5
that in the isles of Lewis and Harristhe purposes of the ancient spindle whorls having
been forgotten,they were now supposed to be magicalsnakestones.With regardto the
Mamacal, it should here be added that in the Swansea area, and in the absence of a
snakestone,it was commonly believed (perhapsstill is believed today) that twisting a
wedding ring on the eyelid would cure the eye ailment. Thus there is a profound
tendency to grasp at a common object and lend it the magic properties which once
belonged to an amulet that the object resembles.
ProfessorStuart Piggott in his more recent study of the Druids'6has suggested that
Pliny's OvumAnguinummight have been a ball of agglomeratedwhelk egg-cases,since
these would have been native to Atlantic shores but unknown in the Mediterranean,in
all probability.But it is surely likely that since in moderntimes such a large variety of
objects have gone under the name of 'snakestone,'in Antiquity too a large variety of
objects, such as rarefossils or strangenaturally-holedstones, were called Ova Anguina.
What is remarkableis the continuity of the story of the snakes having created the
amulets. Welsh museums today do contain a selection of the beads called snakestones.
They also contain glass beads from archaeologicalfinds, which are identical with
snakestones, but which have never been used as amulets in modern times. The
National Museum of Wales, for example, has a small glass ring in its collections which
exactly resembles the Llansamlet Mamacal. It is the same size, give or take a
millimetre, also of opaque glass with a central core of yellow. Accordingto George C.
Boon"7it is an Iron Age bead, of the first century B.C. or first century A.D., and it
comes from a find at the cave of Culver Hole (not to be confused with a more famous
cave of that name nearby) in Llangennith, Gower, a few miles west of Swansea. The
type of bead is not common in Britain, though well-known,and it has been studied by

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188 PRYS MORGAN

Elisabeth Haevernick in 1960 in her work on glass arm rings and ring pearls of the
middle and late La Tene periods.
So much for the tradition and the folklore of the snakestbnesin Britain, and for the
probableorigin of the Mamacalas an Iron Age glass bead. But one must ask what is the
reason for this ancient tradition. Why was the snake the centre of this kind of lore? Is
there any basis for the story of the congregationof writhing snakes in zoology?
The paradoxicalplace of the snake in animal folklore is well-known. The most
widespread snake in Britain, the adder, is also the only poisonous snake in these
islands, and hence the immemorial fear of the creature.The snake's ability to slough
off its skin, however, appears as a miraculous kind of rejuvenation. The Oxford
English Dictionary gives the phrases 'to feed on snakes' and 'to eat on snakes' as
seventeenth-century English expressions meaning to renew one's youth or one's
vigour. By a simple system of homoeopathy, if there were snakebites,there must also
be remedies for snakebites from the snakes themselves. From the snake's ability for
self-rejuvenation, the snake was always associated with healing. The staff of
Aesculapius, the Classicalgod of healinig,has snakesentwined about it. This snakestaff
is still taken by many medical services as their symbol at the presentday.'"As far back
as 1930 A. H. Krappe gave a detailed survey of all the cults from Antiquity onwards
which were associated with snakes, and only some of the lore or symbolism need
concern us here. He notes the curious ancient tradition associating snakes with
treasures,usually as guardiansof some hidden treasure. He says this comes from the
belief that the souls of the dead appearedin the form of snakes.Anciently treasurevery
often was nothing other than gravegoodslooted from tombs, and since snakeswere to
be seen creeping in and out of old tombs, they were taken to be the guardiansof the
treasure. A common ancient belief, held in many parts of the world in addition to
Europe, was the myth of the snakestone, which was a precious jewel, sometimes a
crown, carriedby the snake, perhapsthe snake king, in his head, and bold indeed was
the man who snatchedit from the snake.'19Marie Trevelyan, writing of Welsh folklore
in 1909, noted that the Welsh believed that the snakestoneif discoveredwould give the
finder propheticvision and would help him discover hidden treasure.So far, thus, we
have ascertainedthat the snake is associatedwith healing and with treasure. A third
element of importancein the lore is the resemblanceof the glass bead to the human
eye, the hollow of the bead correspondingto the pupil. As we have said, an enormous
variety of objects have over the years been used as amulets, and a large variety called
adderbeadsor snakestones, but the Llansamlet Mamacal has one additional feature
which must have identified the object with the snake, and that is its snakelike
colouring. The common snake Natrix torquatais greyish olive with black spots on its
upper side, and greenish yellow tesselated with black on its underside.20
What is the zoological evidence for a congregation of snakes? One of the most
striking features of the life of these reptiles is their fighting or sparring, formerly
thought to be between male and female, but now known to be between males only.
Even slow-wormswill fight in the open in the mating season, April to June.21 This
form of rivalryis apparentlyunknown in one species of British snake, the Natrix, but
in the other two species which we have, Coronella(the smooth snake) and Vipera
(adder),it is well-known,the spectacular'dance' of the adderbeing supposed to be an
exhibition of territorial rivalry. The snakes also lay eggs, sometimes in very large
numbers. In Llanelli in 1901, for example, forty bunches of eggs were discovered
together, and each bundle contained about thirty eggs. In winter, the addersoften coil
up together in large bundles, perhaps as many as seventeen reptiles all together. This

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A WELSH SNAKESTONE 189

hibernatingbundle of snakesmay be the origin of the symbol of the coiled snakewhich

appears in history. In Welsh heraldry, for example, the well-known arms of the
patriarchEdnowain ap Bradwen were 'gules, three snakes entwined proper.'22The
greatestcongregationof snakes,however, would come togetherfor the mating fights of
the adders. A Yorkshireobserver in 1933 stated that he saw a group of four adders
writhing together in a frenzy, weaving in and out of one another at high speed, for
perhaps ten minutes, and then departing to fetch the females, though coition took
place in secret. A Germanobserverin 1941 stated that he saw vipers crawling over one
another in great heaps, and then pairs would slope off together for coupling. C. H.
Pope illustrates in his book23the fight between two male adders, but gives no
illustration of the writhing heaps of snakes which one finds in the observations of
naturalists. There is much evidence of hissing and writhing, but none of saliva or
spittle such as is found in the folklore stories. In the recent television programmesof
Mr. David Attenboroughabout the world of nature, viewers saw Mr. Attenborough
approacha writhing bundle of young snakes in such a frenzy that they lashed about
wildly over one another, even writhing around a twig or a stick. In a Welsh language
radio programmeon the world of nature, Byd Natur, during 1979, the panel were
askedto give their opinion of the recent observationof a farmhandin the far west of the
Lleyn peninsula in north-westWales: he had watched a bundle of young snakesrolling
down a sunny rock face, regroup,crawl up again, and repeatedlyroll down the rock in
a bundle. The panel's suggestion was that the snakes were perhapstrying to discover
who the strongestand weakestof their number might be. There does not seem to be in
any of the reports of naturalistsany suggestion, which one finds in the story of the
Mamacal,of the snakesturning and tossing a dead snake. That appearsto be a macabre
addition by the storyteller.
The observantcountryman of the past would have been familiar with the sight of
fighting snakes, for this ritual takes place in the open ground (in contrast to coition
itself), but it must always have been a most striking and memorable sight, and it is
hardlysurprisingthat it should give rise to magicallore, like the extraordinarydanceof
the March hares. In more primitive times, the snakestone may have been a fossil
ammonite, for those fossils closely resemblesmall snakescoiled up and turnedto stone;
it may be that later on, when glass beads with colouring resembling a snake were
discovered,these too were taken for snakestones.In any case, the logic of the situation
required some form of reason for their existence. If snakes sloughed off their skins,
why too should they not createbeads? It was but a short step to see the rings or beads
arising from the wonderful congregationof snakes in the mating season. Since snakes
were known to be guardiansof treasureand symbols of healing or rejuvenation,and
since the beads looked like human eyes, what could be more logical than to suppose
that the snakestonescould cure the ailments of the eyes?
We can see, thus, that many different elements went to make up this very ancient
and long-lasting tradition. In the period of the Renaissance,reading Pliny's Natural
History made scholars aware of the snake-egg of the Ancient Druids. In the 1690s
Edward Lhuyd had no great liking for the Druids as such, for they seemed to him to
have been obscurantists and mystifiers, but he was deeply moved by this apparent
proof that there was some sort of continuity of belief from the time of the Druids down
to the present day amongst the Celts of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. Lhuyd's
enthusiasm or thrill was communicated to Welsh scholars such as Henry Rowland,
whose Mona Antiqua Restaurata(published in Dublin 1723) was written about 1704.
A number of later Welsh historians and antiquaries repeated Lhuyd's proof for the

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 190 PRYS MORGAN

continuity of Druidism amongstthe Celts.24The snakestonethen played its part in the

Celtic antiquarianrevival of the eighteenth century, which was to be so importantfor
all things Welsh.
Lhuyd, as we have seen, scoffed at the naive way common people (and even well-
educated gentlemen in Scotland) believed literally in the origin of the snakestones.It
might have been expected that under the pressure of modern rationalism, and even
more, under the pressureof the widespreadevangelical campaigns against magic and
witchcraft, such beliefs would have disappearedduring the eighteenth century. The
snakestone of course is nothing to do with black magic, but it is a most striking
example of the white magic which was often the object of evangelical attack, for the
core of the Christianobjection to magic or witchcraftis that the Christianshould not
believe that by possessing an object or an exclusive formulahe has power over people
or things. It is fairly clear that the campaigns of the evangelicals against magic and
witchcraft beliefs lasted much longer in Wales than they did in England,25and yet
amulets such as the Mamacal continued in use right through all these campaignsand
long after they had ceased. The Mamacal was used by families who were for
generations puritanical dissenters, and Marie Trevelyan confirms that many similar
snakestoneswere in use up to the late nineteenth century in Glamorgan,which was a
county deeply influenced by puritanismfor about two hundred years. It is interesting
that Lhuyd said that beliefs in the snakestone (or similar amulets) were extremely
common not only in the still Catholic Highlands of Scotland,but also in the Lowlands
which had been considerablyinfluenced by Calvinismby the 1690s. One might in fact
suggest that the anti-witchcraft campaigns of the post-Reformation period
concentratedon black magic, and left largely undisturbeda great deal of the peasant
beliefs in white or healing magic.
It is ironicalthat the efficacyof the snakestoneshould die away in the earlytwentieth
century, at a time when the anti-magicalaspect of dissent or nonconformityhad been
quite forgotten, and then because of the cheap and ready availability of eye salves,
lotions and ointments, good strong lighting and reasonablyeffective spectacles.So it is
that in a very short time a traditionwas broken which had gone back some thousands
of years.26
History Department,
UniversityCollegeof Swansea, Wales

NOTES
T. J. Morgan, 'Glain y Nadroedd,' Bulletin of the Board of CelticStudies, ix (2) (1938), 124-5.
1. Marie
2. Trevelyan, Folkloreand Folk Stories of Wales(London, 1909), 170-1.
3. Thomas Richards, Antiquae LinguaeBritannicae Thesaurus(Bristol, 1753), s.n.
4. Theophilus Evans, Drychy Prif Oesoedd(2nd ed. Shrewsbury, 1740), i, 152.
5. Camden, Britannia (Gibson's ed., 1695), 683 and engraving p. 697, especially amulet (a).
6. Pliny, Natural History, XXIX, 52.
7. R. A. Gunther, ed., Early Scienceat Oxford, xiv, being the life and letters of Edward Lhwyd (sic),
(Oxford, 1945), 247, 401, 419, 424, 430, 442 and 464.
8. Carew (1602 edition), 21.
9. Gunther, op. cit., 424.

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A WELSH SNAKESTONE 191

10. E. Lhuyd, Parochialia,supplements to ArchaeologiaCambrensis(London 1909-11), passim.

11. W. W. Skeat, 'Snakestones and Stone Thunderbolts as Subjects for Systematic Investigation,'
Folklore,xxiii (1912), 45-80.
12. James Frazer, The GoldenBough:Balder the Beautiful (2 vols. London, 1923 ed.), i, 15, ii, 311-2.
13. T. D. Kendrick, The Druids (London, 1927), 89-90, 125-8.
14. K. P. Oakley, 'Animal Fossils as Charms,' in J. R. Porter and W. M. S. Russell, Animals in Folklore
(Ipswich, 1978), 208-42, esp. 234-5.
15. James Murray, ed., New English Dictionary (Oxford, 1919), s.n. 'snake-stone,' quoting J. Evans,
AncientStone Implements(1872), 381.
16. Stuart Piggott, The Druids (Harmondsworthed., 1974), 107.
17. G. C. Boon, 'Two Iron Age Glass Beads in the National Museum,' Bulletin of the Board of Celtic
Studies, xxviii (4) (May 1980), 745-6, and illustratedbead 2 from Figure 2. The occurrencesof glass beads
in Anglo-Saxon graves, and their possible amuletic functions, have recently been discussed by Audrey
Meaney in Anglo-SaxonAmulets and Healing Stones (Oxford, 1981).
18. James Hall, Dictionaryof Subjectsand Symbols in Art (London, 1974), 285-6.
19. A. H. Krappe, The Scienceof Folklore(1930, reprinted New York, 1964), 256-8.
20. T. Bell, History of British Reptiles(London, 1839); A. d'A. Bellairs, Reptiles(London, 1957), 172;
C. H. Pope, The Reptile World(London and New York, 1957), 209 and illustrations 111 and 137.
21. Malcolm Smith, The British Amphibiansand Reptiles(London ed., 1954), 201-62, esp. 214, 246,
250-2.
22. Evan John Jones, MedievalHeraldry(Cardiff, 1943), Plate xxxii (b).
23. C. H. Pope, op. cit., illustrations 111 and 137.
24. For example Edward Davies, Rites and Mythologyof the British Druids (London, 1809), 210-11.
25. Stuart Clark and Prys Morgan, 'Religion and Magic in Elizabethan Wales: Robert Holland's
Dialogue on Witchcraft,'Journal of EcclesiasticalHistory, xxvii (1) (Jan. 1976), 31-46; and also Geraint H.
Jenkins, 'Popular Beliefs in Wales from the Restoration to Methodism,' Bulletin of the Board of Celtic
Studies, xxvii (3), (Nov. 1977), 440-62.
26. For a survey of witchcraft in Wales see Kate Bosse Griffiths, Bydy Dyn Hysbys [i.e. World of the
Cunning Man] (Talybont, 1977), esp. 68-73 where the Mamacal is illustrated and discussed in some
detail.

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