Witches

by Colin Wilson

  Witches

  UNA WOODRUFF

  Written by

  COLIN WILSON

  CRESCENT BOOKS

  New York

  This 1988 edition published by Crescent Books, distributed

  by Crown Publishers, Inc.. 225 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  © Copyright Dragon’s World Ltd. 1981

  © Copyright illustrations Una Woodruff 1981

  © Copyright text Colin Wilson 1981

  No part of this book may be reproduced in

  any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage

  and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from

  Dragon’s World Limited, except by a reviewer who

  may quote brief passages in a review.

  All rights reserved.

  Caution: All images are copyright by Una Woodruff or by

  publishers acknowledged in the text. Their use in any form

  without prior written permission from Una Woodruff or the

  appropriate copyright holder is strictly forbidden.

  Designed by Steve Henderson

  Printed in Singapore

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woodruff, Una.

  Witches.

  Includes index.

  1. Witchcraft—History. I. Wilson, Colin, 1931-.

  II. Title.

  BF1566.W78 1987 133.4'3'09 87-20191

  ISBN 0-517-65494-6 (Crown)

  hgfedcba

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Primitive Sorcery

  The Coming of The Witches

  The Lett Hand Path

  The Earliest Witches

  The Devil

  Erichto The Witch

  Merlin and Morgan le Fay

  The Destruction of The Templars

  The First Witch Trial

  Jehanne de Brigue

  The Malleus Maleficarum

  Magic and Magicians

  Werewolves

  Dame Alice Kyteler

  The Chelmsford Witch Trials

  Witchcraft in Germany

  Gilles de Rais

  Mother Shipton

  Isobel Gowdie

  Witches’ Salve

  Possession

  The Louvier Nuns

  Matthew Hopkins—The Rise and Fall of The Witchfinder General

  The Witches of Salem

  The Chambre Ardente Affair

  The Birth of Spiritualism

  Madame Blavatsky

  The Golden Dawn

  Aleister Crowley

  Gerald Gardner and The Modern Witchcraft Revival

  The Death of Jayne Mansfield

  Brazilian Magic and Witchcraft

  Afterword

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  The most unexpected bestseller of 1926 was a book called The History of Witchcraft and Demonology by the Revd. Montague Summers. Issued by Routledge and Kegan Paul as part of their History of Civilisation, it was an obviously serious work, full of Latin quotations, lengthy footnotes, and a comprehensive bibliography. What startled the reviewers was that the author clearly believed every word he wrote about the ‘enormous wickedness’ of witches, warlocks and devil worshippers. H. G. Wells was so incensed by the book that he launched a vituperative attack on it in the Sunday Express. The Times, equally disapproving, contented itself with the comment that ‘the more Mr Summers gives proof of general ability, of scholarship and of wide reading, the more the suspicion deepens that a mystification is in progress and that he is amusing himself at our expense’.

  Was it a legpull? Or a cynical attempt to achieve a succes-de scandale? Apparently neither. The Reverend Montague Summers was a respectable Catholic scholar, editor of several Restoration dramatists, and founder of a theatrical society called the Phoenix, which revived Restoration plays on the London stage. It is true that his name was not to be found in the clergy lists of either the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England; but this was not—as rumour had it—because he was an unfrocked priest; in fact he had been ordained a Deacon of the Church of England in 1908, a year before he became a Roman Catholic convert. It is also true he allowed people to suppose that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and used to say Mass in his own private oratory, in spite of the fact that he had been rejected as a Candidate for the priesthood by his superiors. The gusto with which he recounts sexual details of the satanic rites—even though most of them are decently clothed in Latin may suggest why his superiors had found him unsuitable. In spite of these foibles, Summers was a genuine scholar. And the views he expressed were the views held by the Roman Catholic Church in his own day—as they still are.

  These views were what enraged Wells. He simply found it incomprehensible that any sane person could swallow these preposterous superstitions. He could understand how an intelligent Catholic could believe in the existence of powers of evil; but the notion that human beings might have intercourse with these diabolic forces struck him as sheer intellectual perversity. Understandably he thought that Summers must be either a charlatan or an idiot.

  He was neither. The truth is that Wells and Summers were simply on different wavelengths. Wells was in love with the vision of science, and with the notion that science will one day uncover all the secrets of the universe. Like his mentor T. H. Huxley, Wells was a convinced Darwinian; which meant that he regarded with pitying contempt anyone who believed that life could exist apart from matter. Like the majority of modern biologists, Wells believed that life is a chemical reaction that takes place in matter, and that a dead body is simply a body in which this reaction has ceased. Since human beings are the highest form of life on this planet—and probably in the solar system—it follows that there are no spirits or demons—and no angels either.

  If we reject this view of the nature of life, the position of Montague Summers begins to look altogether less absurd. If life somehow exists apart from matter, then presumably it is somehow capable of controlling matter. That sounds obvious enough, until we remember that a genuine materialist—or behaviourist—believes that everything we do is as mechanical as water flowing downhill. I am not really writing these words because I want to, but because complex inner forces leave me no alternative; you are not reading them out of ‘choice’, any more than you are breathing out of choice; these words happen to be the intellectual equivalent ot air ... But the moment I believe I can do something because I want to, I am assuming that there is some principle inside me that controls this body just as I control a car when I am driving.

  But a man who taught himself to drive—as we all have to teach ourselves to live—might well be ignorant of some of the basic principles of the car. He might believe, for example, that it only has one gear, and that it can only travel at ten miles an hour. Where the body is concerned, I am inclined to believe it has a number of ‘gears’ that most of us do not even suspect. For example, I became acquainted a few years ago with a young man named Uri Geller, and became convinced that he could read my mind, and also could bend metal by merely rubbing it gently with his finger. I am fully aware of the possibility that he may be merely a conjuror; like the Amazing Randi—trying to duplicate his ‘tricks’, I end by feeling that he probably does have some ‘supernormal’ powers I do not understand. He tells me that I probably possess these powers myself, and I am willing to believe him; but I do not seem to be able to engage the right gear.

  Again, in a book called The Occult, I have described my visit to a ‘wart charmer’, Fred Martin, who lives on Bodmin Moor. Not only is he able to make warts disappear within a short period—say ten days—but he can also stop bleeding and cure snakebite. He is a ‘white witch’ who does not know how his powers operate; in fact, he
does not believe he has any powers. He tells me that the ‘charm’ was passed on to him by two old ladies in the 1930s, and that it is a text from the Bible. It seems possible that the disappearance of the warts is ‘psychosomatic’—that is, that his belief that the warts will vanish is communicated to the unconscious mind of the person with warts, which then erases them.

  While writing The Occult, I became convinced that ‘psychic powers’ are far commoner than we realise: for example, ‘second sight’—the power to know what is going on somewhere else—and the power of prediction.

  Powers of prediction are probably far more commonplace than we realise. A musician friend, Mark Bredin, who was returning home late one night by taxi when he suddenly knew that a taxi would shoot across the next traffic light and hit them. He was tempted to tell the driver, but felt it would ‘look silly’. And at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to rush across on the yellow light, and rammed their own taxi ...

  In this case, it seems clear that the reason for the flash of prediction was that he was tired—after playing in a concert—and his concious mind was utterly relaxed. His unconscious mind somehow sensed what would happen, and managed to communicate it to his conscious self.

  Since writing The Occult, I have become aware of the work of Sperry and Ornstein on ‘split brain research’, which seems to me to offer even more plausible hypotheses about the working of the ‘sixth sense’ or ‘paranormal powers’. What their researches have revealed is basically that we all have two different people living in the left and right hand sides of the brain—more specifically, the cerebral hemispheres. The person you call ‘you’ lives in the left—the half that deals with language and logic. The person who lives in the right—which deals with intuitions and meanings—seems to be, relatively speaking, a stranger. If the bridge of nerve fibre joining the two halves is cut—as it is sometimes to cure epilepsy—the ‘split’ now becomes very obvious. One split-brain patient tried to embrace his wife with his right arm, while his left hand pushed her away. Another tried to button up his flies with his right hand, while the left unbuttoned them. (The left side of the body is connected to the right side of the brain, and vice versa.) A split-brain patient who is shown a square with his left brain, and a circle with his right, and asked to draw what he has just seen, will draw a square with his right hand, a circle with his left.

  We are all split-brain patients, to some extent; communication between the two hemispheres is poor. I am a writer by profession, which means that my right brain is now sending up the meanings I am trying to explain, while the left brain—the ‘me’—turns them into words. But I am saying something I have written about many times before, so the process is partly mechanical. If I wanted to capture really deep intuitions about how my mind works, I might struggle for days, and still only express them in clumsy fragments.

  Why is communication between the two hemispheres so poor, when there is an enormous bridge of nerve fibres joining them? The reason, I suspect, is that better communication would be, at this stage in our evolution, no advantage. In The Occult I discussed the case of Peter Hurkos, a Dutch house painter who fell off a ladder and fractured his skull. When he woke up in hospital, he found he could read other people’s minds, and ‘knew’ all kinds, of things about them. He could also ‘psychometrise’ objects—read their history—by holding them in his hand. The trouble was that this new ‘psychic’ faculty prevented him from being able to take a normal job of work; he was simply unable to concentrate. Hurkos has since become a famous clairvoyant, and has been able to make a living through the use of his new faculty; but his case illustrates why psychic powers are often a nuisance. There is interesting evidence that many animals possess such powers—perhaps most of them—which suggests that man himself once possessed them. It seems that he has deliberately got rid of them because they are not particularly useful to a creature who has to spend his life concentrating upon minute and rather boring particulars—catching trains, adding up figures, shopping in supermarkets (all left-brain activities). Uri Geller told me that he had a severe electric shock from his mother’s sewing machine when he was about three—it knocked him unconscious. Matthew Manning, another well-known psychic, told me that his mother suffered an electric shock when she was carrying him. Other psychics have had severe illness in childhood, or been deeply unhappy—all of which suggests that psychic faculties are an accidental by-product of physical or psychological damage—a kind of short circuit. Felicia Parise, a New Yorker who discovered that she could move small objects by concentrating on them—an ability known as psychokinesis—has described how her efforts were unsuccessful until she received a severe emotional shock—news of the death of her grandmother; then a plastic bottle she reached out for moved away from her hand; after the funeral she tried again, and found she now had the ‘knack’ of moving things with her mind. And—like the episode of the taxicab, described on a previous page—this also provides strong corroborative evidence that it is that ‘other person’ in the right brain who is responsible for ‘psychic powers’. It was her conscious ego—the left brain—that tried and failed; but a sense of crisis aroused the hidden powers of the right ...

  H.G. Wells would no doubt have found a dozen reasons for dismissing all this as hopelessly unscientific; and I personally am inclined to sympathise with such an attitude. The world would somehow be a more comfortable place if everything could be tested in the laboratory. But after fifteen years of reading and writing about the paranormal, I personally have no doubt whatever that many weird and preposterous phenomena really occur. Poltergeists do exist. People do accurately foresee the future. Some houses are haunted. And a great many people possess a ‘sixth sense’ that can provide them with information not available to the other five.

  And what about witchcraft, the ability to cause paranormal events? In a sense, Uri Geller and Felicia Parise are ‘witches’ (the word applies equally to male and female). But this not what is generally meant by the word. Fred Martin is a ‘witch’ because although he does not regard himself as being in any way psychic or unusual, he does make use of a ‘charm’ to cure warts. This is the kind of power that seems to outrage common sense, even if we can accept the possibility of such oddities as telepathy, dowsing and ‘second sight’.

  Even in the days before I had started to take an interest in the paranormal, I had met a number of people who were convinced of the reality of African witchcraft. The travel writer Negley Farson told me how he had seen a witchdoctor conjure rain out of a clear sky. Another friend, Martin Delany, told me a similar story of a witch doctor who predicted that heavy rains would cease for precisely two hours for a garden party; the rain—which had continued for many weeks—stopped over a fairly small area for the precise period of the garden party. It seems clear that witchcraft is still a living force in Africa and that it has been witnessed by many balanced and level-headed western observers. In a book called Ju-ju in My Life, James H. Neal, former Chief Investigations Officer for the Government of Ghana, tells some baffling stories. His first acquaintance with African witchcraft occurred when he visited a port being built at Tema and was told that a certain small tree had defied all efforts to move it. The most powerful bulldozers failed to tear it out of the ground. The African foreman explained that the tree was a Fetich—that it was inhabited by a spirit, and that the only way to move it was to ask the spirit to leave it for another tree. Finally, the Fetich Priest was called; he asked for three sheep, three bottles of gin, and a hundred pounds if he succeeded in moving the tree. The blood of the sheep was sprinkled round the base of the tree, then the gin; then the priest went into a semi-trance, and begged the spirit of the tree to vacate it for a better tree, on the grounds that the port would afford employment for many blacks. After various rituals, the priest announced that the spirit had agreed to leave. To Neal’s astonishment, a small team of men then had no difficulty in pulling the tree out of the ground with a rope ...

  This story is interesting because it makes c
lear the place of ‘spirits’—often nature spirits—in witchcraft. This aspect, I am inclined to believe, is more important than anyone has given it credit for. It emerges again clearly in an episode in Laurens Van Der Post’s book The Lost World of the Kalahari, in which he describes how a guide offered to take him to a mysterious region called the Slippery Hills—the one condition being that there must be no killing of animals. Van Der Post forgot to tell the advance party, who shot a warthog; from then on, everything went wrong. The camera and tape recorder jammed continually, although they had given no trouble before, and the camera swivel failed. They were attacked by bees. Their guide warned them that the spirits were angry; when he tried to pray, some invisible force pulled him over backwards. Finally, he threaded a needle, placed it in his hand, then went into a semi-trance, staring at it. He began to speak to invisible presences, and told Van Der Post that the spirits would have killed him if they had not known that his intentions—in visiting the Slippery Hills—were pure. Van Der Post suggested that he wrote a letter of apology, which they all signed, and buried in a bottle at the foot of a sacred rock painting; from that moment, the ‘jinx’ went away. The guide remarked later that the spirits were now far less powerful than they used to be—once they would have killed on sight anyone who had approached so unceremoniously.

  The notion of elemental spirits—inhabiting trees or hills—strikes the western mind as totally preposterous. Yet it was not always so. In Ireland—even in Cornwall, where I live—there is still a great deal of belief in fairies and nature spirits in remote country areas. In the 1920s, a psychic named Geoffrey Hodson specialised in describing elementals and nature spirits, and his book about them—entitled, rather off-puttingly, Fairies at Work and Play was taken seriously by many people involved in psychical research. (Hodson himself was a Theosophist.) Here is a typical description of what he calls a ‘nature deva’, encountered in June 1922 when climbing in the Lake District: