The History of Witchcraft

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The consequence was that in deleting good relations with the dead, people were inspired to a greater level of fear than before about the passing of time. The visible figures of the poor, elderly, disabled trundling around, looking as though they weren’t long for this world, came to represent old age and death for them. Let’s not forget that in Norse myth, old age is an old woman. And she beats Thor at wrestling because even Thor can’t top old age! White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi: “ In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly – Slipping away from them – And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.” Among many findings that can be drawn from his research are that, outside the peculiar spike in trials in the mid-1640s (the subject of my book, Witchfinders), English witch-trials peaked in the 1580s, especially in the county of Essex. We also learn that less than a quarter of indicted witchcraft suspects were convicted, suggesting considerable scepticism, at least in the value of testimonies presented as evidence in court. That kind of haunting of the landscape means that a narrative where the landscape is always haunted, by supernatural entities that transcend death, makes a lot of sense. Nor is it insignificant that World War One was a war in which people were heavily invested in the idea that those entities were present in battles. The very famous instance of that was the idea of the Angels of Mons; really, that was based on a short story about Agincourt bowmen written by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen. But people took it for a real report. And then they all started saying they’d seen it, too, because it fitted with the way the war felt to them—the explosive power of war to destroy people’s sense of who they were. I see how all that ties together and it’s marvelous. Let’s talk about your second choice by Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

All the men are called Tom, which is also kind of interesting. Some of the women are called Janet, and some are called Marjorie or Meg. What Garner is doing there is drawing on the Tam Lim ballad; in different versions, the girl’s called Meg, and in other versions, she’s called Janet. It’s like all these different figures are incorporated into a single story. The Tom characters start having glimpses of one another’s thoughts. One character—the modern character—is saying goodbye to the modern Jan on the bus, and the bus is blue and silver, and the Roman Macey starts seeing blue and silver in his epileptic fits.The third and last part of the book, already announced in chapter six (p. 158–61), zooms in on British topics: how witches relate to fairies, why there were fewer witch trials in Celtic areas than elsewhere on the British isles, and how the typical English witch's familiar came to be. In the following, I will restrict my discussion to what I regard as the main issues and will leave comments on entire chapters (on antiquity, or shamanism) to those more versed in these specific parts of the material; I will discuss the so-called 'night-flights' elsewhere. (5) In England, 90% of the accused were women. But in other countries, more than half of the accused were men” Again, if you’re doing stuff that Protestants think is bad, there’s no grey area. There’s no room for tolerance. You’re either right or wrong. In that sense, it’s quite terrifying. It’s a terrifying worldview. And it persists to this day—it’s very similar to what we saw when the Harry Potter books were published in America. But what I think Price understands (as Garner does) is that actually, a person is often a walking bag of complex relations to a body and to emotions—all of which won’t really be reproduced by uploading yourself to a giant computer somewhere. Particularly, Price’s take on the incredibly strange practices of what he calls ‘circumpolar shamanism’, is just endlessly fascinating. He retells dozens of stories, but the one that I’d really like to draw attention to is called ‘The Invisible Battlefield’. The story begins with “the nornir, or the terrible women of Darraðarljóð, [who] are spinning the web of war that will decide the outcome of battle”: There is no counsel for the defence. If you are found guilty, you could become one of the 30,000–60,000 people who were executed for witchcraft in the early modern era.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller: “ Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.” To put it simply, Murray’s books might have made you want to identify as a Witch! Her Witches loved the earth and the turn of the seasons, and while they did sacrifice a baby or two, she made it all come across as a giant misunderstanding. Many of the ideas expressed in her books were flat out wrong, but because her books contain transcripts from the Witch Trials of the early modern period, people continue to quote her work and bring the ideas in her books into the ritual circle. Also, she’s probably responsible for creating the idea of the Horned God as a figure encompassing many ancient deities. Even in these early times, was the phenomenon gendered? I’ve heard that a common misconception is that all accused witches were women—the trope of the witch as an evil woman, or dark seductress—when actually, there may have been many men who were thought to be witches as well. As an accused witch, you could be tried in a church court, at quarter sessions (local courts), or at an assize court, where you could be condemned to death. The process, however, was similar at every level. Somebody would complain to the local justice of the peace (JP) that you had bewitched an animal, or a foodstuff, or a child. Whether or not the complaint is taken any further depends on how energetic the JP is and how much he believes in witchcraft. Here again he’s talking about reading the landscape—not just the natural landscape that engulfs his physical present, but the landscape as a sedimentation of history, too.

When orphan Lois Barclay lands in New England in 1691 she finds the ground as unsteady as the water. And well she might. Gaskell shows us a community in terrified opposition to its native forests and people. I love the way she refuses to condescend or simply condemn – she puts the reader in the middle of the panic, feeling it spread. The novella has been overshadowed by Gaskell’s novels, but it’s a small, bright gem. The easy equation of autism with madness was one of the most nightmarish aspects of the response to her. My eldest daughter is autistic, so I have to come out and say I have a vested interest in neurodiversity. But equally, I thought that a lot of it was about the same kinds of issues that crop up repeatedly in the witch trials, most famously at Salem, where little girls actually seize the opportunity to get their annoyingly, obstreperously bossy elders into tons of trouble. There’s a wonderful ballad by one of the descendants of the Salem witches called ‘I, But a Little Girl’. This is one of the things that the accusers at Salem say: “we be but little girls”. In England, 90% of the accused were women. But in other countries, more than half of the accused were men. If we’re talking about England, we’re mostly talking about a gendered image of what the witch is. In other places, we’re talking about an image of the witch that owes a lot more to racial and ethnic tensions, or religious denominational tensions, or even to land ownership disputes, and their gender becomes much less of an issue. Wicca for Beginners: A Guide to Wiccan Beliefs, Rituals, Magic, and Witchcraft by Lisa Chamberlain (2014)