by Colin Wilson
‘After a scramble of several hundred feet up a rocky glen we turned out to one side, on to the open fell where it faces a high crag. Immediately on reaching the open we became aware, with startling suddenness, of the presence of a great nature-deva, who appeared to be partly within the hillside.’
‘My first impression was of a huge, brilliant crimson bat-like thing, which fixed a pair of burning eyes upon me.’
‘The form was not concentrated into the true human shape, but was somehow spread out like a bat with a human face and eyes, and with wings outstretched on the mountainside. As soon as it felt itself to be observed it flashed into its proper shape, as if to confront us, fixed its piercing eyes upon us, and then sank into the hillside and disappeared. When first seen its aura must have covered several hundred feet of space ...’
We find such notions absurd; but they would be accepted by most primitive peoples. From the Eskimos to the Ainus of Northern Japan, from the Orochon of Siberia to the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, the shaman is the intermediary between this world and the world of spirits. A man became a shaman through painful ordeals, both physical and spiritual. An Eskimo shaman told the Danish explorer Rasmussen: ‘I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my enlightenment, the shaman’s light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same bright light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings, but visible to all spirits of earth and sky and sea, and these now came to me as my helping spirits. ’ The idea of being able to see the world of the spirits ‘of earth and sky and sea’ can be found in all shamanistic religions.
This curious oneness with nature enables the shaman or witch-doctor to exert his power over animals. In The Occult I have quoted that amazing passage from Sir Arthur Grimble’s book Pattern of Islands, describing how a ‘porpoise caller’ withdrew into his hut for several hours, where he went into a trance; in this trance, apparently, his spirit went out to sea and summoned the porpoises. Finally, he rushed out of the hut calling ‘They come, they come’. And to Grimble’s astonishment, they did come. The villagers waded into the sea and stood breast deep and hundreds of porpoises swam slowly into the beach, apparently in a state of hypnosis, allowing themselves to be beaten to death.
Ross Salmon, a British explorer who spent much of the 1960s and 70s in search of the ‘lost world of the Incas’, has described in a book called My Quest For El Dorado a ceremony among the Callawaya Indians of northern Bolivia which reveals this same intimacy between man and nature. A girl named Wakchu had been accused of being unfaithful to her husband during his absence, and the village elders decided that she would be ‘tried’ by the condor, the sacred bird of the village, which was believed to embody the spirit of a famous hero. Ross Salmon was given permission to film the whole ceremony. He described, in a television interview accompanying his film, his incredulity at the idea that the priests could summon a condor—a shy bird, which he had never seen at close quarters. Wakchu was tied to a pole at the top of the cliff, wearing only a loincloth, and the three priests began a ceremony to call the condor, supported by a chorus of women. For half an hour, nothing happened, and Salmon became convinced it was a waste of time. Then, to his amazement, an enormous condor flew overhead, together with two females. It landed near Wakchu, strutted around for a while, then ran ran towards her and pointed its beak at her throat. The villagers murmured ‘Guilty’. One of the camera crew threw a stone at the bird, which flew off. Wakchu committed suicide a few days later by throwing herself from a cliff. She evidently accepted the judgement of the condor. 1
Another account of life among South American Indians conveys this same sense of intimacy with nature. Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce Lamb tells the story of Manuel Córdova-Rios, who was kidnapped by the Amahuaca Indians of the Amazon, and who lived among them for many years. Much of their ‘magic’ was involved with hunting, and apparently worked. Rios witnessed a method of luring pigs.
It was important for the hunters to kill the sow who led a band of pigs. Then her head was buried in a hole, facing the opposite direction from which the hunters are travelling. The hole is filled in while the hunters sing chants to the spirits of the forest. If this is done correctly, the pigs will continue to pass over this spot at regular intervals, in the circuit of their territory.
It also seems that the Amahuaca Indians are capable of group telepathy as well as of this kind of direct contact with nature. Clearly, their modes of perception are more ‘right brain’ than ours. But since we now know that our left-brain perception has been developed by the pressures of civilisation, and that the being who lives in the right is virtually a stranger, there is less reason for dismissing these stories of primitive empathy with nature as old wives tales.
It now becomes possible to understand the ceremonies performed by our Cro-Magnon ancestors before setting out on hunting expeditions, and those cave paintings of shamans performing ritual dances and wearing the skins of animals.
The purpose is not simply to locate the herd of animals to be hunted the next day (shamans should be regarded as mediums rather than magicians), but to somehow lure it to a place where the hunters can find it, as Grimble’s porpoise caller lured the porpoises.
Recent research has demonstrated fairly convincingly that circles of standing stones like Stonehenge and Avebury were intended as solar and lunar calendars. The discoveries of ‘ley hunters’ like John Michell seem to suggest that there were also temples for the performance of fertility rituals. But I remain convinced that if we are to understand the real purpose of the standing stones, we have to put ourselves into the state of mind of the Callawayas or Amahuacas, and understand that the ancient priests were probably shamans who went into a trance and conversed with nature spirits, asking them to guarantee the abundance of the harvest.
Once we begin to understand this, we can also understand the origins of ‘witchcraft’. A shaman who has the power to converse with ‘spirits’ to ask them to bless his tribe may also make use of them to revenge himself on an enemy. In The Occult, I have described the theory advanced by anthropologist Ivar Lissner about why our ancestors suddenly ceased to make images of human beings. They reasoned that if ‘magic’ could be used to destroy a reindeer or bear, it could also be used to destroy another human being. So the making of images became taboo—or something carried out in secret by ‘black’ magicians—what would later be called ‘followers of the left hand path’. (It is significant that our ancestors equated the left with the sinister—sinister in Latin means left—while right was synonymous with goodness; they were clearly aware that the two aspects of the human mind are separate, but had no means of knowing that the right half of the brain governs the left half of the body and vice versa.)
Neal’s Ju-ju in My Life describes his own gradual conversion to belief in the malevolent power of witchdoctors—in this case, through unpleasant personal experience. After causing the arrest of a man who had been extorting bribes from farmers, Neal was told that he had now become the target for ju-ju. On three occasions he found a black powder scattered on the seat of his car, which his chauffeur carefully brushed off, urinating on it to remove the ‘spell’. Then Neal became seriously ill—he actually describes an ‘out of the body’ experience—although the European doctors could not diagnose the illness. A black subordinate offered to call in his uncle, an expert on ju-ju attacks. The uncle performed certain rituals, then described in detail the man who was behind the attacks—a man he had never seen. But the attacks continued. One night, Neal felt himself bitten as he lay in bed, but could find nothing in his bed. Powerful forces seemed to be attacking his solar plexus and draining his vitality. He began to see the creatures that were attacking him—long-snouted things, which he took to be on the astral level. He became seriously ill again.
This time, his subordinate brought a Moslem holy man, who asked for three sheep and three bottles of gin, as well as a pound note, which was
to be changed into pennies and given to innocent children. This seemed to work, and Neal slowly recovered his strength.
Stories concerning the power of witch-doctors over snakes can be found in Mitsinari, an account by Father André Dupreyat of his years in Papua, New Guinea. Father Dupreyat challenged some local sorcerers, and was warned that he was in danger from black magic. One day, about to enter a village, he was surprised to see the villagers scattering. A snake with silvery skin was on the path, rearing towards him. Dupreyat knew it would have to lower its head to wriggle in his direction, so he waited until it did this, then killed it with his stick. The villagers assured him that it had been sent by the sorcerers—which he was unwilling to believe.
The next day while lying in a hut in another village and smoking a pipe, he became aware of the head of a snake a few feet away, hanging from the roof-beam. It dropped on to his chest as he lay still, then wriggled on to the floor, where he was able to kill it with his stick. A few days later there was another ‘snake attack’, when two black snakes writhed up the support of his hammock; another man in the hut warned him, and he was able to kill them with a knife that was cautiously handed to him. Dupreyat describes the technique the Papuan sorcerers use to persuade snakes to attack their enemies. The snake is placed in a closed vessel with a loin cloth belonging to the intended victim, and left for days until it becomes frantic to escape. It is maddened by blows on the pot and by being heated over a fire, and repeatedly attacks the loincloth in its fury and frustration. Then finally, the pot is placed close to a spot where the intended victim will pass, with a length of liana attached to the lid to release it at the vital moment; at which the maddened snake recognises the smell of the man and attacks him ...
These stories of witchcraft and magic among primitive peoples provide us with an insight into the history of witchcraft in Europe. Most modern books on the subject take the view that the ‘witchcraft craze’ (as the historian Trevor-Roper calls it) was a matter of superstition. The most comprehensive encyclopedia on the subject—by Rossell Hope Robbins—accepts it as a basic premise that witches were simply unfortunate old women who suffered because of the superstitious ignorance and credulity of their neighbours. And indeed, there is some historical truth in this view, for witchcraft began—as we shall see—as a hunt for heresy. But if our primitive ancestors really could perform ‘magic’, then the ancient belief in witchcraft is not merely a matter of superstition. Witches were the descendants of those shamans who lured the quarry into the ambush of the hunters, and who later used their magic to ensure a good harvest.
In a book called Strange Powers I have explained my own conversion to the view that witchcraft often ‘worked’. In the earlier book The Occult, I had discussed the case of the North Berwick witches, and accepted Rossel Hope Robbin’s view that they were innocent. Yet in The Occult, I also cite stories of African witchcraft told to me by Negley Farson and Martin Delany, and accept that these are true. When I re-read the Berwick case, I saw that it has some very puzzling features.
What happened was this. A young maidservant named Gilly Duncan was able to cure various ailments by some form of faith healing. In 1590 her master David Seaton, deputy bailiff of Tranent, near Edinburgh, tortured her with a rope around her neck to make her ‘confess’ to intercourse with the devil, which eventually she did. She was handed over to the authorities, and soon confessed that her accomplices—about seventy in number—included many highly respectable citizens of Edinburgh, including one Agnes Sampson, an elderly gentlewoman of good education. Under prolonged torture, Agnes Sampson finally confessed—although not until her inquisitors found on her a ‘devil’s mark’ in the area of her vagina. John Fian, a schoolmaster from Saltpans, and two other women, Euphemia Maclean and Barbara Napier, ‘reputed for as civil, honest women as any that dwelled within the city of Edinburgh’, were also accused. Agnes Sampson now gave a full account of her attempts to bewitch the king—James the Sixth of Scotland (later James the First of England)—who, understandably, took an active interest in the proceedings. Fian confessed under torture, but later managed to escape; when recaptured, he recanted his confession, and the most appalling tortures failed to make him change his mind. He was strangled and burned. Euphemia Maclean was burned without being first strangled—probably because she was a Catholic—but Barbara Napier managed to get her sentence delayed on the grounds that she was pregnant, and finally escaped.
Certainly, this sounds like a case of horrifying injustice. James the First, who wrote a famous Demonologie, later decided that most witchcraft was superstition, and persecution of witches almost ceased towards the end of his reign.
Fuller examination of the case raises doubts about their innocence. John Fian had been secretary to the Earl of Bothwell, a man with a reputation for dabbling in black magic, and who had every reason for wanting to kill the king, since he himself was heir to the throne. James was himself sceptical about the confession of Agnes Sampson until—according to the chronicle Newes from Scotland—she took him aside and whispered in his ear certain words that had passed between him and his bride, Anne of Denmark, on their wedding night. No one but the king and his bride knew what they were. Naturally, James was convinced.
Agnes Sampson also confessed that she and the others had raised a storm to attempt to drown the King on his way back from Denmark—and indeed, the king had almost been drowned in a tremendous storm. She described how she had tied a toad by its back legs, collected the venom that dripped from it in an oyster shell, and kept it until some occasion when she could get hold of some of the king’s soiled linen, which would enable her to bewitch him to death, making him feel ‘as if he had been lying upon sharp thorns and ends of needles.’ The method is reminiscent of the one still used by African witch-doctors.
Fian himself seems to have declared that the devil appeared to him in his cell on the night after his original confession. Since he had already confessed, he was not under the threat of torture, which again leads to the suspicion that he may not have been as innocent as Robbins assumes.
Montague Summers is, of course, convinced that the witches were guilty as charged. He writes: ‘The most celebrated occasion when witches raised a storm was that which played so important a part in the trial of Dr Fian and his coven, 1590-1, when the witches, in order to drown King James and Queen Anne on their voyage from Denmark, “took a cat and christened it,” and after they had bound a dismembered corpse to the animal “in the night following the said cat was convayed into the middest of the sea by all these witches, sayling in their riddles or cives ... this doone, then did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seene”.’ It all sounds preposterous enough, particularly ‘sailing in sieves’; but if African witch-doctors can cause rain—or stop it—then Summers could well be basically correct. There is at least a fifty per cent possibility that Fian was involved in a real witchcraft plot to kill the king; and if witchcraft sometimes works, then we cannot rule out the possibility that Agnes Sampson and her associates really caused the storm which almost wrecked the king's ship.
And what of this statement of Fian that the devil appeared to him? This would seem to brand the confession an invention wrung from him by fear of further torture. Yet again, we should not assume that this is the only possible explanation. In his book about magic and witchcraft in Brazil The Flying Cow, Guy Playfair advances the theory that he himself has come to accept through the study of many cases that ‘black magic’ involves the conjuring of ‘low grade’ entities or spirits. And this is, of course, consistent with the view of magic held by witch-doctors and shamans. If we are willing to admit, as a possibility, that magic involves nonhuman entities, then Fian may have believed that he saw—or heard—the devil on the night after his confession. We may reject Summers’ view that the devil actually exists as the adversary of God—after all, most of what we call evil can be regarded as stupidity or the outcome of frustration—but there is a certain amount of evidence in physical research for �
��mischievous’ entities (who, in many cases, seem to be halfwitted). ‘Evil’ spirits may be exhibiting the same kind of stupidity and malevolence as evil human beings.
To accept this possibility does not, of course, mean accepting that all ‘black’ withcraft involves ‘spirits’ or demons. That would mean accepting the logical corollary that all white witchcraft involves angels or benevolent spirits. And this is obviously unnecessary. If it is easy enough to believe that a ‘healer’ is calling upon unrecognised powers of the unconscious mind, then it is no more difficult to believe that a black witch is doing the same. At the moment, our knowledge of these matters is comparable to, say, the state of chemistry in the year 1800, before Dalton had stumbled upon the atomic theory. We know just enough to know that one enormous chunk of the jigsaw is missing.
Historically speaking, the oddest thing about witchcraft is that nobody bothered much about it until around the year 1300. An early Church document called the Canon Episcopi denounced the notion that ‘certain abandoned women perverted by Satan’ really flew through the air at night ‘with the pagan goddess Diana’ as an absurd delusion or dreams. In practice, local healers and ‘wise women’ were a common feature of country life. The ‘witchcraft craze’ began when the Church decided it was time to stamp out a heretical sect called the Cathars—also known as Bogomils, Albigenses and (later) Waldenses. The Cathars were religious ‘purists’, the mediaeval equivalent of Quakers or Methodists; they denounced the wealth and corruption of the Church and insisted that the only way to get to heaven was by leading a godly life. Understandably, this worried the princes of the Church. The Cathars also believed that everything to do with matter is evil, while everything to do with spirit is good. The world, they said, was created by the devil, and the truly religious man should reject all worldly things. One of the odder beliefs of the Cathars was that since Jesus was wholly good, he could not have possessed a physical body; so they taught that Jesus was a phantom. In 1208, the Pope—Innocent III—declared a crusade against the Cathars—and in particular, against Count Raymond of Toulouse, one of whose squires had assassinated the Papal Legate. In 1209 and 1210, twenty thousand crusaders swept across Languedoc, storming towns and massacring their inhabitants. A monk named Dominic Guzman—later St Dominic—set up the Inquisition in Toulouse in 1229, and his agents went around Languedoc rooting out heresy and burning heretics. Rather like the late Senator Joseph Macarthy, Dominic got carried away by his mission until he saw heretics everywhere. It was easy to distort the Cathar belief that the world was created by the devil into the notion that the Cathars worshipped the devil. But it was another century before a new Pope—the paranoid John XXII, who believed his enemies were plotting to kill him by magic—finally gave the Dominicans his support. The ‘witch hunt’ now really began: at first in the Pyrenees and the Alps, into whose valleys the remnants of the heretics had retreated. The aim was no longer merely to root out heresy—unsound doctrine—but to destroy the servants of the devil. And during the next four centuries, many thousands of ‘witches’ were strangled and burned—many of them, perhaps most, undoubtedly innocent. In England, the repeal of the witchcraft act in 1736 put an end to the persecutions; the same thing happened all over Europe. The spirit of science, symbolised by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, made belief in magic seem absurd.
