Why Are Crossroads So Dangerous in Folklore?

Nov 29, 2023

7 min read

Gods received supper there. The unwanted dead were buried there. Magicians left things there. Musicians supposedly met the Devil there.

There is an instruction in an English book of magic from around 1600 that is so funnily matter-of-fact:

“Burye this plate in a crosse waye wher 2. wayes meete.”

No explanation of why a crossroads.

For people reading and writing such instructions, the junction of two roads was already the sort of place where you might reasonably leave a magical object. Early modern spellbooks sent things there; rituals were performed there; stories placed spirits there. Crossroads also attracted gallows, graves, shrines and offerings. For a patch of ground whose principal job was helping people get somewhere else, an extraordinary number of things were expected to happen in the middle of it. Cambridge University Press

The obvious explanation is that crossroads are liminal: neither one road nor the other, a place between destinations. This is true, but “liminal” is too serious a word in this context.

The stranger question is what people actually did there. And that is where I think the crossroads becomes interesting.

Hecate was already waiting

Long before an English magician was burying plates at road junctions, ancient Greeks were already leaving food there.

Hecate had a rather strong association with roads, thresholds, the dead and magic. Ancient sources place her shrines outside houses and where roads met; later representations frequently gave her three bodies or faces, well suited to a goddess watching several directions at once. Around the new moon, food known as Hecate’s suppers could be placed at crossroads. Bread, cakes, cheese and other offerings were left there, both for the goddess and, in some accounts, for the restless dead associated with her. (Perseus)

Now, there is an important correction to make here, because modern witchcraft imagery has made Hecate at the crossroads feel almost automatically sinister. A crossroads shrine was not merely the ancient equivalent of a haunted motorway exit.

It could be protective. Hecate could guard entrances. Offerings could be made because people wanted dangerous forces kept outside the household. Rome had its own very public crossroads religion:

the Lares Compitales, guardian deities honoured at neighbourhood junctions during the festival of Compitalia. These crossroads could be centres of worship, neighbourhood life and even politics. (Penelope)

So already we have the first problem with the question in the title. Crossroads were not necessarily dangerous. Rather, they were important.

England put its unwanted dead there

For several centuries in England, a crossroads could acquire a much grimmer resident.

People judged felo de se (legally responsible for taking their own life), could be denied ordinary Christian burial. One notorious custom was burial at a crossroads, sometimes even with a stake driven through the body. Executed criminals and other people excluded from conventional burial could likewise end up near roads, boundaries and places of execution. Archaeologists have found unusual burials at routeways and territorial edges dating back into the early medieval period. (Parliament News)

There were practical and symbolic reasons for choosing such places, and it might be difficult to untangle them, but let's try some: A major road made a gibbet visible, a boundary put the dead away from the centre of a community, unconsecrated ground solved a religious problem for people who were not permitted churchyard burial. And folklore supplied another anxiety: certain dead people might not remain comfortably dead.

The crossroads offered a peculiar solution: Put the troublesome body in a place of perpetual passage.

It belongs to no single direction. Travellers continually cross it. Roads divide and disperse. In later folklore, the stake becomes part of the same logic that the dead person is fixed to the spot while everyone else keeps moving.

The practice survived disturbingly late. Parliament abolished the old crossroads treatment of suicides in 1823, allowing burial in a churchyard, although initially at night and without the usual Christian service. Parliamentary debates from the period show that even contemporaries regarded the older treatment as cruel and degrading. (UK Parliament API)

By then, however, the association had had centuries to settle into the heads of everyone: A lonely junction after dark was no longer merely somewhere roads met. Somebody might be underneath it.

Crossroads were useful for getting rid of things

Now I admit that this may be one of the least glamorous explanations for their magical reputation. Sometimes you just need somewhere to put something.

A magical cure might require an object to be removed from the patient and discarded. A protective rite might generate materials you did not want brought back into the house. An offering had to be placed somewhere outside ordinary domestic space. A charm needed to be buried where its action could begin.

Meaning, the crossroads was extraordinarily convenient.

It was public, but not domestic. Familiar, yet not intimate. People passed through and didn't stay. Roads could also mark property lines, parish limits and political boundaries, giving their junctions a genuine legal and geographical ambiguity. Bill Angus, whose history of crossroads culture follows these practices through early modern Europe, notes how often crossroads served as places for materials society wanted pushed outward: ritual waste, unwanted remains, objects carrying dangerous or transformative meanings. (Cambridge University Press)

There is even a surviving English folk cure in which a person suffering from ague was supposed to go silently to a crossroads at night and bury an egg there. The disease, in the logic of the rite, was not merely treated. Something of it was carried away and deposited elsewhere. (Wellcome Collection)

This doesn't make the crossroads as much a supernatural power station as a transfer point.

Something arrives.

Something leaves.

(well, preferably it does not follow you home.)

But not every crossroads means the same thing

This is where folklore writing can go badly wrong.

Find a crossroads goddess in Greece, a crossroads deity in West Africa, a magical crossroads in England and a devil story in Mississippi, then place them all beside one another, and suddenly the internet thinks of it as a single ancient worldwide belief.

It is not always like that.

Among the Yoruba, for example, oríta is commonly translated into English as “crossroads,” but scholar Rowland Abiodun and others have pointed out that the English word can be too narrow. An oríta is not merely a mathematical point where two lines meet. It is an arena of encounter and exchange, a place through which different paths, people and forces enter into relation. (Cambridge University Press)

The crossroads is strongly associated with Èṣù, the orisha of communication, change, uncertainty and mediation. Smithsonian material describes him as present wherever change or conflict is possible; markets, doorways and crossroads among them. His position makes sense: messages pass through him, choices get consequences, one course becomes another. (Smithsonian Institution)

That does not make Èṣù a Yoruba version of the Christian Devil.

The equation has a long and damaging history, helped by missionary translation and later popular retellings. Nor should Hecate, Èṣù, Legba, Roman Lares and the wandering dead all be collapsed into one supposed “crossroads spirit.” Their religions, stories and ritual functions couldn't be more different.

What is worth comparing is the place. Again and again, a junction gives us an avenue for thinking about encounter, uncertainty, movement and exchange.

What happens there all depends on who is standing in the road.

And then somebody sold his soul

No article about crossroads is allowed to glide over talking about Robert Johnson.

The version everybody knows is excellent folklore. A young blues guitarist goes to a crossroads in Mississippi at midnight. A mysterious man, eventually, explicitly, the Devil, takes his guitar, tunes it, plays, returns it. Johnson walks away with impossible ability and a soul that no longer belongs to him.

There is just one inconvenience with that story: We have very little reason to think it happened.

Johnson recorded “Cross Road Blues” in 1936, but the song itself does not describe a pact with Satan. The famous story grew around a musician whose short life left plenty of space for myth, and scholarship on the blues has repeatedly warned that the devil-at-the-crossroads story has come to overshadow the rather less supernatural explanation for Johnson’s playing: he worked at it. Smithsonian curator John Troutman has gone further, noting the racial implications of crediting a Black musician’s astonishing craft to demonic intervention rather than to the musician himself. (Cambridge University Press)

There were crossroads traditions in African American conjure and Hoodoo, and African religious ideas certainly survived and transformed in the Americas. But scholars including Adam Gussow caution against the equally tidy modern correction that simply replaces “the Devil” in the Johnson legend with Legba or Èṣù. That still turns several complicated traditions into props for a story we want to be true. (DOI)

The Robert Johnson story tells us something important anyway; By the twentieth century, Western audiences already knew what sort of thing should happen at a crossroads.

A bargain.

A transformation.

A consequence

The location does half the storytelling before the Devil even arrives.

So why the crossroads?

Probably because a crossroads is one of the few places humans build specifically around possibility. Let's look at places; A house has an intended use. So does a field, a church, a graveyard.

A crossroads exists because there is more than one way to go. That simple fact is the most important.

Ancient Athenians could leave a goddess her supper there, Romans, establish neighbourhood shrines there, English officials could put bodies there that did not fit comfortably into the ordinary cemetery, magicians could bury objects there, a Yoruba oríta could as well be a space of encounter and exchange, a blues legend would send a guitarist there.

Now none of these practices needs to descend from the others. We did not require one prehistoric crossroads religion, carried intact (which never happens) around the world, to notice the oddness of standing where paths divide.

The tantalising factor is this: You arrive from somewhere, several futures are suddenly available. Someone else may be arriving from a completely different direction. You choose one road to go, someone choses another, someone else remains.

Perhaps that is enough to explain why crossroads have gone on to accumulate gods, ghosts, offerings, legends, executions and bargains. They are just ordinary pieces of infrastructure with one unusually provocative feature: something can meet you there.

And afterwards, you may or may not go home by the same road.