Witches

by Colin Wilson

  Holzer goes on to describe a ‘black mass’ performed in LaVey’s sitting room, with a naked girl, her legs apart, spread comfortably on the altar, while LaVey intoned ‘In nomine dei Satanas. Lucifer excelsi..’, and a man in a black hood sprinkled the congregation with a mixture of urine and semen, using an instrument shaped like a phallus. The congregation repeated invocations to Samiel and Moloch, then a queue of suppliants asked for things they wanted most—such as a better job, more attention from a girlfriend and—in one case—the death of an enemy. (‘The high priest nodded gravely, and the request for the man’s death was made, cheerfully supported by the congregation.’)

  LaVey’s Satanic cult underlines the basic problem about Satanism or Devil worship: that it is, of necessity, enfeebled by an internal contradiction. Plato stated the view that most thoughtful human beings would accept, that there is no such thing as evil per se. For all living creatures, ‘good’ means that which brings satisfaction; for a person to ‘do evil’ would mean to pursue the unsatisfying, which seems contradictory. Men seek their own version of ‘the good’, and if they happen to be stupid or corrupt or merely confused, then their satisfactions may well involve inconvenience to other people—and usually to themselves. In short, evil is another name for stupidity.

  According to Bernard Shaw, there are two types of moral reformers: those who tell people that something they have always regarded as harmless—like whistling on the Sabbath—is wicked; and those who tell people that something they have always regarded as wicked—like adultery—is harmless. The former type—the Calvins and John Knoxes—cause most misery. The latter type—like Blake, Ibsen and Shaw himself—cause a great deal of indignation at the time, and occasionally (like the founder of Mormonism) get lynched; but sensible people usually come to recognise the sense in what they are saying. LaVey, on the whole, belongs with this latter type of moral reformer, and is not therefore a true Satanist (like the Yezidi sect, who genuinely worship the Devil). Even De Sade, who made determined efforts to sound wicked, is widely respected by French intellectuals for his moral courage and honesty—hardly ‘evil’ qualities.

  Magic is a slightly different matter. LaVey told the journalist David St Clair that his attempts at magic enabled him to conjure up parking places in front of theatres, make business deals come his way, and even cause two people to marry when they disliked one another. This has nothing to do with Satan, but with the hidden forces of the human will. (People who practise the Silva method of mind control claim that it can produce similar results—I know an American college professor who swears by it as a method of finding parking spaces.) This was the kind of magic that Crowley himself practised. But it can also be practised quite unconsciously, without any of the usual magical disciplines or rituals. The novelist John Cowper Powys remarks in his autobiography that he soon discovered that awful harm befell people against whom he felt resentment, so that he ended in a state of ‘neurotic benevolence’, terrified of losing his temper.

  At the time of her death, Jayne Mansfield was being groomed by the studio as a successor to Marilyn Monroe, and her lawyer, Sam Brody, had the utmost objection to her involvement in LaVey’s Satanic cult, which might cause embarrassment to the publicity department. When he threatened to start a newspaper campaign, LaVey retaliated by pronouncing a solemn ritual curse. He told Brody that he would be dead within a year, and warned Jane Mansfield not to share Brody’s car. After her death he commented laconically: ‘She was the, victim of her own frivolity’. LaVey’s Satanic image was reinforced when he played the Devil in Polanski’s film of Rosemary’s Baby; but his Satanic Bible, like his comment on Jayne Mansfield’s death, suggests a moral reformer with distinctly puritanical leanings.

  CHAPTER 32

  Brazilian Magic and Witchcraft

  An American journalist, David St Clair, has described his first impressions of Rio de Janeiro in 1959. Strolling along with some Brazilian friends, he came upon some burning candles on the pavement, and a small clay statue of the devil.

  When he reached out to touch the statue a friend grabbed his arm, saying it was ‘despacho’—an offering to a spirit. ‘But surely you don’t believe that?’ asked St Clair, ‘You’re all college graduates.’ ‘Of course we don’t believe in it—but don’t touch it all the same.’ St Clair soon discovered that even a starving man would not touch the offerings of food placed for the ‘spirits’—in the middle of busy streets or on beaches—and he has seen dogs approach the roasted chicken or steak, sniff it, and go away.

  In a chapter called ‘The Psi Underworld’ in The Indefinite Boundary, Guy Playfair tells a story of a psychology graduate named Marcia who picked up a small plaster statue of the sea god Yemanja on the beach at Sao Paolo and, against the advice of a friend, took it home. A run of appalling bad luck began as soon as she had placed it on her mantelshelf: first, food poisoning, then tuberculosis, then burns from an exploding pressure cooker, then an exploding oven. She began to experience suicidal urges, having to struggle to prevent herself flinging herself in front of cars or out of a window. Then the bedroom seemed to be full of ‘presences’ that touched her body under bedsheets; one night, she felt a body lying on top of her, and an erect penis penetrated her. It happened again on successive nights. Finally, she decided to visit the local Umbanda centre, Umbanda being Brazil’s own form of voodoo. She took along the statue. The director of the centre told her that her sufferings were ‘revenge’ for her unlawful removal of the statue, and advised her to take it back to the place where she had found it. When she did this, her life quickly returned to normal.

  It was only after the Umbanda director warned her about the statue that she noticed something odd: the paint was worn off the face and arms of the statue; patches remained in exactly the same places she had suffered burns; even the ‘spot’ on her lung corresponded to a remaining patch of paint.

  One of the most widespread religions in Brazil is Spiritualism, or (as they prefer to call it) Spiritism; and the Brazilian form is based specifically on the writing of ‘the father of Spiritism’, Allan Kardec. Kardec’s real name was Hypolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, and he became successful in his early twenties when he opened a private school. In 1850, when the excitement about the Fox sisters reached the Continent, Kardec was a highly respected educator in his mid-forties; he became fascinated by ‘spirit communications’, particularly automatic writing. When two daughters of a friend showed unusual ability in this direction, he persuaded them to devote two evenings a week to ‘sitting’ with him. It struck him that the resulting body of information constituted a clear and coherent doctrine, based on reincarnation; so he set it all down in a work called The Spirits’ Book; achieved considerable influence in France for two decades or so after its publication (in 1857)—although Kardec’s dislike of trance mediums (whom he regarded as unreliable) retarded the growth of organised psychical research in France. But it gradually became half-forgotten. His work took some decades to reach Brazil; but it seems to have caused far more excitement there than in Europe, and soon became the basis of the Brazilian version of Spiritualism. Candomble and Umbanda may also be regarded as forms of ‘spiritism’, but with more in common with voodoo. In fact, a Brazilian may find nothing contradictory in regarding himself as a good Catholic, a Spiritist, and a believer in Umbanda.

  A representative story of Umbanda in action can be found in David St Clair’s Drum and Candle. He had taken on a pretty Brazilian girl—whom he calls Edna—as a maid-housekeeper, and found her in every way satisfactory; their relationship remained strictly one of employer and employee. She joined a dance group, went on television, and became something of a star; St Clair advised her to ‘better herself’ instead of remaining in his rather unstable household.

  Then things began to go wrong—everything. A book failed to sell, a legacy failed to materialise, a girl spurned him, and his health began to deteriorate. A Brazilian woman told him that someone had put the evil-eye on him and that ‘Your paths have been closed’. A
nd a Spiritist friend who came to stay told him that it was Edna who was responsible. He had learned this at a spiritist session. Edna was determined not to be abandoned by St Clair when he went on a projected trip—she was hoping he would marry her, and had been attending Quimbanda—black magic—sessions to that end.

  With some difficulty, St Clair induced Edna to take him to an Umbanda session—she insisted she knew nothing about such things. In a closed room, there was chanting and the sound of drums. A negro woman came in and danced—the ‘witch doctor’; some people began to jerk and moan as they became ‘possessed’ by spirits. Finally, a ‘possessed’ medium told him that the person who had ‘closed his paths’ was the one who had brought him there that night. Edna walked out, whereupon the ‘witch doctor’ (who insisted she was really a man) sang and chanted to the drums to get rid of the curse.

  After that, everything began to go right again; the legacy came, the book sold, the girl who had rejected him asked to come back. But Edna became very ill. She had a growth in her stomach which had to be removed—St Clair paid the bill. An Umbanda priest told her that she would remain sick as long as she remained with St Clair—the curse she had put on him had returned two-fold. So Edna walked out.

  From St Clair’s Drum and Candle and Playfair’s The Flying Cow, it is clear that witchcraft, in the widest and most ancient sense of that word, still flourishes in Brazil.

  Playfair remains convinced that Brazilian witchcraft ‘works’ because the witch-doctors are able to persuade certain ‘discarnate entities’ to perform services for them. ‘Any Brazilian is well aware that the country is full of backyard terreiros of quimbanda (black magic centres) where people use spirit forces for evil purposes.’ After a candomble exorcist had successfully driven out a poltergeist that had practically wrecked a household, he explained that ‘an exu morcego was a type of pagan spirit dwelling in the shadows, probably that of a former criminal who had nothing better to do than bother people’. Playfair adds: ‘Probing into the background of the case, researchers found that as so often where there is a poltergeist, there is, or was, somebody with a grudge..’ Another exorcist remarked: ‘You can use a knife to cut bread or to cut a man’s throat, and so it is with the hidden powers of man.. To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits prepared to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist. Black magic is really a serious social problem iri Brazil ...’

  It is unnecessary to add that if Playfair is correct, it throws a completely new light on the history of European witchcraft.

  A Brazilian ‘witch doctor’ contacting spirit forces.

  CHAPTER 33

  Afterword

  I am personally acquainted with four witches, three practising 'magicians’, and with three ‘psychics’ who would certainly have been burnt as witches four hundred years ago. All of them appear to be perfectly normal human beings, and there is certainly nothing frightening or formidable about any of them.

  How does one become a witch? The story of my friend Lois Bourne is probably typical. When she was five, her eldest brother fell to his death from the top of a building, and he later came to her in the garden with his arms outstretched. When she became a nurse, she found she always knew in advance when patients would die, and often saw them after death—in one case she thought the patient had got out of bed until she checked and found that she had died. She felt ‘drawn’ to reading books on parapsychology, and it gradually became clear to her that she could ‘make things happen’ if she wanted them enough. She then found it would work for other people; one friend consulted her about her boss, whom she found attractive, but seemed unaware of her existence. Lois got to work with a photograph of the man and two of his hairs—that was all she needed. He quickly invited his secretary to dinner, they spent the night together, and she subsequently married him.

  Although she considers herself a white witch—that is, she has never used her powers to do harm—she has to keep a watch on her emotions. In her autobiography Witch Among Us, she tells of an occasion when she was trying out a new car, and had stalled it at a traffic light; a man behind her honked loudly and finally shot past her cursing. In a rage she yelled ‘Pig, I hope your radiator runs dry.’ Three miles further on, she saw the car parked by the roadside, the puzzled driver looking at the radiator, from which steam was pouring.

  Now this kind of power is what I am inclined to call a ‘controlled poltergeist effect’. After styding Uri Geller, I concluded that this explains his powers—not only of metal bending, but of causing objects to appear out of the empty air (apports). I still keep an open mind about whether such effects are caused by a juvenile delinquent who lives in the right brain, or by ‘spirits’ in a jocular mood. Lois Bourne believes that ‘There is a great residual force within the human body, that it possesses an energy far in excess of its everyday requirements, and that this force can be released by concentration and stilling of the mind’. She also remarks ‘One of the greatest barriers to mediumship is the intellect, and the most serious problem I had to learn in my early psychic career was the suspension of my intellect. If, during the practice of extra-sensory perception, I allowed logistics to prevail, and permitted myself to rationalise about the impressions I received, and the things I said, I would be hopessly lost within a conflict. It is necessary that I totally by-pass my concious mind and allow the subconcious mind to (come to) the surface ...’

  Another witch of my acquaintance, Marion Weinstein, was fascinated by witches as a child, began to research ‘the occult’ in high school, and plunged into serious reading—Jung, Gardner, Margaret Murray—during an unhappy period as an actress when her career was marking time. But when I asked her how she first suspected she was a witch, she replied that, as a child of ten or eleven she had noticed ‘how things seemed to be able to just ‘work out’ sometimes when I managed a certain attitude towards a problem, a sort of all-encompassing belief which seemed to take on a life of its own and shape my own life thereby’. She says she wondered how she could control this process, and sees this as the origin of her interest in witchcraft.

  So it seems that the decision to become a witch usually starts with an observation—that in certain moments you have an odd flash of power or insight. You may simply ‘know’ something; or you may know that, in some odd way, you can influence the course of events.

  In that sense, I am convinced that witchcraft is less the exception than the rule. I would go further and say that in this sense, we are all witches. Then why is witchcraft relatively rare? The answer, I think, is that few of us attempt to develop these abilities, just as few of us ever learn to ski. And the chief reason is that we find it so hard to believe in such powers. We are inclined to take a naturally pessimistic view of ourselves and our power to influence events. People like Lois Bourne and Marion Weinstein started out with a tiny spark of inborn conviction that they could, in some odd way, influence events, and they have had the courage—and perhaps the romanticism—to try to get to grips with it to understand it more deeply. They became ‘witches’ by a simple process of personal evolution, just as I became a writer by struggling to express myself until it began to come easily.

  This, for me, is the important aspect of witchcraft, the one that deeply influences me. I recognise, at the same time, that there is another, with which I find it far more difficult to come to terms. The late Tom Lethbridge lived next door to a witch in Devon, and one of the things she taught him was how to ‘throw pentagrams’—that is, how to carefully ‘draw’ a pentagram in the imagination. The witch told him that pentagrams have strong defensive powers. One night, Lethbridge lay in bed idly practising drawing pentagrams around the bed. A couple of days later, the witch called on him, and said that somebody had been ‘putting protection’ on him. He asked why. Because, she said, she had projected her ‘astral body’ into his bedroom a few nights before, and found the bed surrounded by triangles of fire
...

  Lethbridge’s wife Mina tried using a technique, suggested by the witch, for keeping away unwelcome visitors; she said that all that was necessary was to ‘draw’ (in your head) an inverted pentagram on the gate, or in the path of the unwelcome guest. Lethbridge himself claims he saw one such guest stop dead in his tracks, then turn and go away. Mina Lethbridge also claims that the method is effective.

  When I asked a friend who practices ‘magic’ what he thought of the idea, he admitted he had never heard of ‘throwing’ inverted pentagrams on gateposts, but said that it would undoubtedly exercise a repellant effect.