Membership of the society required an initiation ceremony, during which Horsemen read passages from the Bible backwards, and the secrets included Masonic-style oaths, gestures, passwords and handshakes.
During the twentieth century, the Word attracted the attention of several folklorists and historians, among them J. M. McPherson, George Ewart Evans, and Hamish Henderson.
Although a number of these scholars initially suggested that the society represented a survival of a pre-Christian religious order, later historical research established the group's nineteenth-century origins.
[2] Freemasonry had influenced a range of friendly societies and benefit clubs which were established with the purpose of providing working people with care if they fell sick or got old.
[4] The Freemasons and these friendly societies were weakest in the rural hinterland of Scotland, and it was here that several groups emerged to cater for local conditions while embracing the basic Masonic model.
Designed to restrict entry to their trade, the Miller's Word formed into a system of local groups each of which had initiations, passwords, and internal secrets, also meeting at night and spreading the claim that they were in possession of magical powers that they acquired through reading the Bible backwards three times over a period of three years.
[5] During the early nineteenth century, the draught horse became the primary working animal in the farming areas of Northern Scotland, replacing oxen in the hinterland of Aberdeen and the Moray Firth and ponies in Caithness and Orkney.
They were bodies of men that acted as a primitive trade union, as a cooperative veterinary service, as a repository of traditional knowledge, and as folk clubs – long before that revivalist phrase came into being."
[5] The group gave men who otherwise were of lowly economic and class status a sense of personal and social authority based on their knowledge, skills, and occupational importance.
[16] As literacy rates grew during the nineteenth century, information about horsemanship gained from published books filtered into the Word to supplement its oral traditions.
Among the Horseman's Word group in Angus, initiation ceremonies typically took place at night, preferably at the time of the full moon, in an isolated barn, byre, stable, or steading.
[21] The apprentice was then stripped to the waist and blindfolded, and spun around by his fellows in order to disorient him before being brought into the ceremonial space and made to stand before the High Horseman.
[25] Turning to the initiate, who is made to kneel and has his blindfold removed, the High Horseman then commanded the newcomer to provide vows to keep to the group's secrets.
[17] The historian Ronald Hutton suggested that these diabolical elements may have derived in part from folk stories of the witches' sabbath, which could have been absorbed either directly from Scottish folklore or from published accounts discussing witchcraft.
[30] A common aspect of the initiation was a trick played on the postulant; after they had been made to swear that they would never reveal the hidden word that was the alleged source of the group's power, they would later be commanded to write it down.
There were also pleasant smelling and inviting materials, such as sweets, that the horseman could keep in their pocket in order to calm, attract, and subdue a crazed horse.
[32] Keeping these techniques secret, along with the myth that there was a word that only the horseman knew that gave them and them alone power over horses helped guarantee their reputation, prestige, job security, and pay.
McPherson, published his findings and theories in his Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (1929), in which he outlined the idea that it was a survival of an ancient pagan cult that had been persecuted in the witch trials in the Early Modern period.
[37][38][39][40] Neither Davidson nor Evans had examined the Horseman's Word through the original Scottish sources, while McPherson had only relied upon observations made in the late nineteenth century.
[41] Nonetheless, around the same time that Evans was publishing his theory of a pagan survival, there were also researchers who had examined the origins of the Society and criticised the idea that it had ancient roots.
In 1962, Hamish Henderson detailed how it had arisen in the eighteenth century,[42] with his information being expanded upon by Ian Carter in his 1979 study of agricultural life in Scotland.