The Strange Michaelmas Folklore Behind Blackberries, the Púca & an Ancient Autumn Warning
There comes a point every autumn when, according to old British and Irish folklore, you should stop eating blackberries.
Not because the harvest is officially over. And not because someone inspected the hedgerows and issued a blackberry recall.
Because the Devil has spit on them. (Wait, what?)
This is a great rabbit hole.
So, depending on where you heard the story, he may have stamped on them instead. In less polite versions, he urinates on them. Irish tradition sometimes hands the job over to the púca, an unpredictable otherworldly creature with its own complicated relationship to humans and the harvest.
Either way, the message is remarkably consistent…once Michaelmas arrives, leave the blackberries alone.
Michaelmas falls on September 29, the traditional feast of St. Michael the Archangel.
For centuries, it was much more than a church observance. It marked a hinge in the agricultural year, a time when harvest work was ending and autumn was settling in for real.
Rents came due around Michaelmas. Hiring fairs were held. Geese appeared on dinner tables. In parts of Ireland, people visited holy wells or marked the end of harvest work.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, people were told not to touch the blackberries.
Which, obviously, requires an explanation.
Let’s Start Here: What Exactly Is Michaelmas?
Michaelmas is the feast associated with St. Michael the Archangel, celebrated in Western Christianity on September 29.
The September feast has very old roots. Its Western observance became associated with the dedication of a sanctuary to Michael near Rome, and medieval devotion to Michael eventually spread widely through Europe.
By the Middle Ages, Michael was deeply woven into religious art, local legends, pilgrimage sites and the seasonal calendar. (Johnson, 2005)
But Michaelmas also became something much more earthly.
September 29 was one of the traditional quarter days used in England and Ireland to divide the year for legal, agricultural and financial purposes.
Contracts began or ended. Accounts were settled. Farm workers might be hired for another term. Autumn fairs gathered communities together.
The timing made sense. Michaelmas sits just beyond the Autumn Equinox, when the light is visibly changing and the growing season is winding down.
So although Michaelmas belongs to the Christian calendar, it also occupies a much older human territory. It’s the moment in the year when abundance starts giving way to scarcity.
And that’s where the blackberry thing start getting interesting.
Who Is St. Michael?
You’ve probably seen Michael even if you had no idea who you were looking at.
He’s the winged figure standing over a dragon or serpent, usually holding a sword or spear.
Michael appears in Jewish and Christian scripture as a powerful heavenly figure. In the Book of Revelation, Michael and his angels battle a dragon identified with Satan. Later Christian tradition greatly expanded Michael’s role as a defender and guardian, which is why his imagery became so strongly associated with protection.
For our purposes, you don’t need to go deep into theology. The important piece is the image. Michael is the force that confronts chaos. He guards the threshold.
And Michaelmas falls at exactly the point in the year when the landscape itself is crossing one.
Summer is finished. The fields have been cut. Darkness arrives earlier every night.
It’s threshold season.
No wonder Michael found a home there.
And Where Does Lucifer Enter This Story?
Here’s where folklore gets a little messier than Sunday school.
The word Lucifer originally comes from Latin and means something like “light-bringer” or “morning star.” Its later identification as the personal name of Satan developed through centuries of interpretation and tradition.
Folklore generally skips that entire footnote.
In the blackberry story, Lucifer is the rebellious heavenly being cast down after Michael’s victory. He falls from heaven and, through a stroke of absolutely magnificent folkloric bad luck, lands in a blackberry bush.
A. Blackberry. Bush.
(Have you met a mature bramble? That’s NOT a soft landing.)
The story goes that the furious fallen angel finds himself tangled in hooked thorns and responds by cursing the plant.
In many versions, he spits on the berries.
Elsewhere he kicks them, tramples them or throws his club over them. Some traditions get considerably more anatomical about what happens next. Folklorists Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud note that the cruder versions involving bodily fluids may actually preserve the older form of the belief. (Simpson & Roud, 2000)
And this is why, people said, you should never eat blackberries after Michaelmas because they’ve been spoiled by the Devil.
Honestly, as agricultural warnings go, it has considerably more staying power than “please note that fruit quality may decline with seasonal conditions.”
Except Michaelmas Has a Calendar Problem
Because folklore is never satisfied with being simple, there’s another date lurking in this story. Old Michaelmas Day.
Britain changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Eleven calendar days were dropped during the transition. The religious feast of Michaelmas continued to be observed on September 29, but some seasonal fairs and customs kept their older relationship to the agricultural year.
That moved them roughly eleven days later.
So, Old Michaelmas became associated with about October 10, with October 11 appearing in some traditions and later accounts. The original 1752 legislation specifically accommodated fairs and marts tied to the old seasonal timing.
This matters because some blackberry folklore attaches Lucifer’s visit not to September 29, but to Old Michaelmas.
A nineteenth-century collection of northern English folklore, for example, records the belief in Sussex that October 10 was the end of blackberrying because on that day the Devil went around spitting on the bramble bushes.
So if you were hoping for one clean, universally agreed upon supernatural blackberry contamination date, I regret to inform you that folklore has failed us, lol.
On the other hand, that disagreement tells us something useful. The date isn’t really the point. The end of the blackberry season is.
Meanwhile in Ireland, Enter the Púca
Ireland adds another character to the hedge.
The púca, sometimes written pooka, is one of the more wonderfully slippery beings in Irish folklore.
It can appear in different forms, often animal-like (like a black horse with glowing eyes), and its temperament ranges from mischievous to genuinely frightening depending on the story.
It belongs to that old category of beings that doesn’t behave neatly according to human morality. (And apparently, it has opinions about blackberries.)
Records from the Irish National Folklore Collection preserve several versions of the belief. A County Limerick account bluntly says that blackberries shouldn’t be eaten after Michaelmas because “the Pookas have soiled them.”
A record from County Wexford says children were warned that after Michaelmas the púca guarded the berries and bad luck would follow anyone who ate them.
One Irish record even refers to Púca na Sméara, the púca associated with the blackberries.
There’s an important regional wrinkle here. In other Irish traditions, the púca spoils the blackberries around Halloween or Samhain, rather than Michaelmas. The folklore never became completely standardized.
Again, the supernatural deadline moves. The underlying rule doesn’t.
There comes a moment when the berries no longer belong to you…so leave them alone.
The Folklore Was Probably Doing Something Very Practical
This is my favorite part.
Because underneath Lucifer and the púca, there’s good seasonal observation: Late-season blackberries change.
As autumn advances, colder nights and wetter weather legit affect the fruit. Berries can become soft, watery or sour. Overripe fruit is more vulnerable to decay and fungal damage.
The old people gathering blackberries from hedgerows didn’t need a laboratory analysis to notice this. They had their taste buds.
One astonishingly matter-of-fact record from the Irish Schools’ Collection explains the belief almost completely.
Children were warned that the púca guarded the berries after Michaelmas because the berries had begun to decay and weren’t considered fit to eat anymore. Another collector described the púca story as a way of preventing children from eating overripe fruit.
There it is.
The supernatural story functioned as ecological memory.
You can tell a child, “Seasonal moisture and declining temperatures may adversely affect Rubus fruit quality.” Or you can tell them the púca peed on the blackberries.
One of these will be remembered seventy years later. Folklore knew its audience.
But the Blackberry Was Never Simply “Cursed”
This is where the story becomes much more interesting than Devil versus berry.
Because the bramble itself carried considerable power in British and Irish folk belief.
Blackberry plants are extraordinary boundary makers. Their canes arch outward and snag whatever passes. Some shoots touch the ground and root again, creating natural loops or gateways.
People noticed that, too.
In British folk medicine, naturally rooted bramble arches were sometimes used in healing rites.
A person might be passed beneath or through the arch while the illness was symbolically transferred away from the body. Different regions recorded versions involving whooping cough, rheumatism and other complaints. (Vickery, 2010)
The Woodland Trust also notes traditions of brambles planted around graves, practically to discourage grazing animals but perhaps symbolically to contain what lay within.
There’s something wonderfully contradictory about blackberry folklore.
The plant feeds you lavishly. Then it catches your clothes.
Its thorns protect the sweetness growing inside them. Its canes can form a doorway.
And eventually, according to tradition, a boundary is crossed and the fruit becomes forbidden.
That doesn’t feel accidental.
Blackberry Magic Is Boundary Magic
For modern magical practice, I wouldn’t reduce blackberry to a neat correspondence table. The plant itself tells a better story.
Look at how it grows.
Blackberry is generous, but well defended. It sprawls wherever conditions allow it. Its thorns create a living edge between open ground and whatever lies inside the thicket.
So, I think its strongest magical language is discernment and protection.
Not building an impenetrable wall. More knowing what gets through.
That makes blackberry especially appropriate around Michaelmas, when the seasonal year is asking the same question:
- What gets carried forward?
- What’s reached the end of its season?
- And when do you stop gathering because enough is enough?
There’s a surprisingly sophisticated lesson hidden inside the ridiculous story about the Devil throwing a tantrum in a hedge.
Some things become sacred again when we stop taking them.
Try This Simple Michaelmas Blackberry Practice
If you can find yourself a blackberry bush before the traditional cutoff date, gather a small amount respectfully. Leave plenty behind for wildlife and for the plant itself. Or grab a container of good berries from a farmer’s market near you. (Or frozen berries in a pinch.)
Make a small jar of blackberry jam, blackberry syrup, or blackberry compote and treat it as the final taste of late summer.
While it cooks, think about what has ripened in your own life over the past several months.
Then consider where harvesting needs to stop. That distinction matters.
We talk a lot about abundance as if spiritual maturity means learning how to receive endlessly. Nature doesn’t work that way.
There’s a season when reaching into the hedge makes sense.
Then there’s a season when it’s time you pull your hand back.
If you don’t have easy access to berries, work with the image of the bramble instead.
Draw one across a journal page or place a photograph near your altar. Let the thorns represent the boundary around whatever you want to carry safely into the darker half of the year.
You don’t need to invoke Michael. You don’t need to invite Lucifer over to demonstrate. The hedge has kind of already made the point.
Maybe the Devil Didn’t Ruin the Blackberries After All
Folklore often preserves information by making it impossible to forget.
“Stop gathering these berries because autumn weather is beginning to spoil them” is useful.
“The Devil fell out of heaven into a blackberry bush and has been spitting on the fruit ever since” is a story.
Stories survive.
So does the púca prowling the Irish hedgerows after harvest, making sure humans understand that the landscape is changing hands. Maybe that’s the piece worth carrying forward.
The old seasonal calendar wasn’t only concerned with what humans could gather. It also contained limits.
Michaelmas said the year had turned. The blackberry bushes said the feast was nearly over. And somewhere beyond the cultivated fields, the wild world reclaimed what remained.
If that required a furious Devil tangled in brambles to make the message stick?
Well. Apparently it worked.
References
Johnson, Richard F. Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend. Boydell & Brewer, 2005.
Mac Coitir, Niall. Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends & Folklore. Gill Books, 2017.
Mahon, Bríd. Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink. Mercier Press.
National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin. The Schools’ Collection, various accounts concerning Michaelmas, blackberries and the púca.
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Vickery, Roy. Garlands, Conkers and Mother-Die: British and Irish Plant-Lore. Continuum, 2010.
Disclaimer
This article explores folklore, mythology, spirituality, historical traditions and folk practices for educational and personal reflection purposes. Folklore varies considerably by place, time and storyteller, so there may be multiple versions of the traditions discussed here. Any spiritual or magical interpretations are offered as invitations for exploration rather than statements of fact. Nothing in this article is intended as medical, psychological, legal or religious advice. As always, use your own judgment, respect the land and living plants you work with, and take what resonates while leaving the rest.
