Tag Archives: witchcraft

“The Occult Experience” of 1985

A friend pointed me to the Vimeo page where you can see The Occult Experience (95 min.), an Australian television documentary from 1985, researched and co-produced by Nevill Drury, on witchcraftandprimitivepeopleandsatanismandexorcismandallkindsofspookystuff.

Watching it was hard, because I kept turning away after encountering such portentous statements as “The search for supernatural powers continues in spite of science and technology” or that people practice “ancient Celtic traditions of nature worship.”

No one unpacks these assertions at all. Rather, they are just delivered as though they were the Final Word.

At one point, the narrator intones, “How does it feel to be a witch in the computer age?” (At the time the documentary was made, I thought my KayPro II portable personal computer was cutting-edge.)

It has its historical interest. Hey, there’s Herman Slater doing ritual in a Manhattan street. Why? You won’t learn from the film!

And at about the 20-minute mark, Alex Sanders delivers version number 1,045 of the original “I was initiated by my grandmother” story, which has been imitated so many times.

Back then, boys and girls, to be a Craft leader you had to have some special story to tell about your magical heritage or you were nobody.

And look, there is Janet Farrar taking her clothes off while chatting with her late husband, Stewart. And the paintings of Rosaleen Norton—can’t have an Australian production without those. Drury would build his later academic career on them.

Margot Adler, Olivia Robertson  . . .  so many names. But no context.

The whole film is thunderingly pretentious and yet basically content-free. You would not learn anything systematic here about the development of contemporary Paganism—which might be Satanic and which might be “primitive” and might involve “altered states of consciousness” (quick clip of Esalen), and is certainly spooky spooky or silly silly, depending on your perspective.

It make me wish that I could take those clips and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. Maybe some day someone will.

Babies, Bathwater, and the Reclaiming Community

Of all American Witchcraft traditions, Reclaiming seems to be the most prone to self-criticism. Perhaps that is because, as Anne Hill writes in her brief blog-memoir, The Baby and the Bathwater, there was always much conflict over different visions for Reclaiming.

What started with one foot in the Faery/Faerie/Feri Witchcraft tradition of Victor and Cora Anderson also co-existed with a social vision of growing organic vegetables in a solar-powered paradise fueled by consensus decision-making, pushing the boundaries of gender-theory and overcoming enemies with the power of  love and passion.

Hill, one of the original group’s long-term members, writes things that only an insider could say. The Baby and the Bathwater combines blog posts that she wrote from 2006 to 2010, including the comments that readers left on her Blog O’Gnosis.

We’ve seen good people come and go over the years, and have noticed that mostly the good people go after they realize that Reclaiming is a victim of its own idealism and there’s nowhere to “advance” once you have experience and skills. I said that I have been struggling to clarify my present-day involvement with Reclaiming, particularly trying to discern what is baby and what is bathwater and not throwing away that which is of lasting value.

My friend responded instantly: “But there is no baby in the bathwater,
and there never has been.” I was stunned at that, and have been thinking about it ever since. Can it be true that what started as a grand experiment in creating a spirituality that was Goddess-centered, egalitarian, politically and socially radical would have absolutely nothing to show for itself 25 years after the fact? Could it be that a community and religious movement which has been at the center of my identity for over two decades consisted all along of nothing but our intense willingness to believe our own promotional language?

The Baby and the Bathwoter sees an up side to Reclaiming too, as Hill visits groups seeded in other areas and savors their enthusiasm.  You can download the PDF file for $2.99.

Five Kinds of “Witch” and Other Reflections on the Academic Study of Contemporary Paganism

Australian writer, blogger, and scholar Caroline Tully continues her interview with Professor Ronald Hutton on the history of witchcraft and related topics.

On the perceptions of conflict between scholars and practitioners:

When some Pagans now express hostility to academics, they are generally doing so in defence of ideas which were originally articulated by other academics. Most often, they are defending what was the general scholarly orthodoxy about historical witchcraft in the mid twentieth century, represented finally and most famously by Margaret Murray of the University of London. What bewilders and angers some members of the public most about professional scholarship now is not actually that it is entrenched and manufactures consent, but that it has overturned many of the received truths of previous decades. To challenge orthodoxy effectively is currently the fastest and most certain way to make an academic career, and the pace of argument and change can be bewildering for people on the outside who want stability and certainty, or at least to continue to believe what they were originally taught about something.

Read the rest.

The forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate will include Tully’s own article on this topic, and it should be available as a free download.

The Cat Buried in the Wall

One of the most fascinating papers I heard at an archaeological conference in England once was about the early modern (say 1500s-1700s) practice of putting items in buildings under construction, apparently for good luck.

Cats are well-documented, but so are items of clothing—in fact, such deposits are often the only way to find specimens of ordinary clothing of the period.

But when you have cat and a possible connection to a well-known case of folk witchcraft, then you have a news story.

Doing What the Spirits Request

An interesting post from Walking the Hedge on daily practice, medicine bags, and the demands of tutelary spirits:

That’s a whole other bother … fellow witches and pagans who don’t get it. Who think that it all must be done elegantly, flowing and … and not weird. Do something odd or awkward like blowing on your divination set or baby talking to a crow skull and all your validity goes right out the window in their mind. Nevermind that fact that the elegant shit is just for show and the spitting, swearing, shaking, whispering, sweating, bloodletting, pissing and such is the real deal! It’s supposed to look like the white witch on TV with her perfectly rhyming poetry and not the crazy voodoo chick with her eyes rolling back into her head on that documentary we watched once … right? Bullshit.

Read the rest.

Please, No Nose-Wiggling Jokes

Bewitched is coming back to the small screen, but the inside word is that it is more about riding Mad Men’s coattails than making witchcraft seem appealing to a new generation. Follow the link to see the intro to the original Bewitched, which ran from 1964-1972.

Or go watch How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying to see a young Robert Morse (Japan-ophile Mr. Cooper of Mad Men) if you want the early 1960s as interpreted in the mid-1960s.

What Is It?

The brass rod with "horns"

Close up of the hand — or grip

Sometime in the late 1970s I read in a book by Doreen Valiente how she found discarded ritual artifacts in a Brighton antiques shop.

Unfortunately, I did not visit Brighton until shortly after her death, and while palling around with Evan John Jones, the only antiques shop I visited was one specializing in militaria, tucked away in The Lanes.

But back in the 1970s, still wet behind the ears, I edited a monthly magazine for antique collectors and made the round of many shops. I never found any obvious ritual artifacts—but there was this.

It looked magical—but what was it? I asked various senior Witches, particularly those born outside the United States, and got various answers, none of which was particularly satisfying.

Was it some kind of indicator of cuckoldry? A swizzle stick for a Really Serious cocktail? Or—and this one I could almost accept—part of an antique toasting fork, lacking the part with the tines? (Compare this brass toasting fork from the 1940s.)

Alas, it probably is not the artifact that will prove the existence of a pre-Gardnerian Pagan Witchcraft.

Quick Review: Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps

Karen Palmer, author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps, is a veteran journalist, not a historian of witchcraft, so for me to read the book from the latter perspective is to do her a slight disservice. (As an inside, the subtitle might  better read “Inside Ghana’s Witch Camps,” but maybe some editor thought that “West Africa’s” had more punch.)

From her website:

With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa’s witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp [a sort of refugee camp for accused witches] with an outsider’s sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a women who confessed she’d attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft that she believed helped her kill dozens of people.

One troubling thing about studying the Renaissance and early modern witch trials (1500s-1700s) is that we never hear from the victims except through the filter of witch-trial testimony.

Now if you can assume that the phenomenon of witchcraft in northern Ghana is analogous to “our” witch trials—and it certainly sounds that way to me—then once again there are no clear answers about what is going on.

There was Ayishetu, chased from her village by a violent mob, whose life was destroyed by the accusation that she practiced witchcraft, and Winangi, a tiny splinter of a woman who’d gne seeking witchcraft to protect herself and her children. She pleaded to her husband to move her to the camp when she felt she’d lost control of the dark gift. A smart businesswoman named Asara had ended up at the camp when a debtor accused her of causing a meningitis outbreak. Napoa, mannish and grumpy, readily identified herself as a witch and caused fear among the other women living at the camp (41).

The surrounding culture is mostly Islamic but with lots of magical practitioners. Muslim polygamy also contributes to the problem. How do you get rid of the oldest wife? Accuse her of being a witch!

Another analogy with the European witch trials is this: The village shaman-herbalist is not the witch but rather the person who accuses the witch. Or if someone has accused her (usually it is her), the shaman-herbalist conducts a ritual (e.g., watching the death throes of a chicken) to pronounce whether she truly is a witch or not.

So I recommend Spellbound both for a look at contemporary West African issues with witchcraft but also for thinking more about its history in Western culture.

 

Witches Keeping Silent

One coven that I used to circle with when visiting their city was big on the old Magicians’ Pyramid: To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent.

Sarah Lawless, the “Witch of Forest Grove,” thinks that there should be more silence, writing in a post called “Oversharing Witches“:

I was taught not to share. Specifically, I was taught not to share who my familiar spirits are, to not share the exact names of my deities, not to share what my unique abilities are, not to share recent spells I’ve performed, and to only talk about my tradition when asked (especially by elders) and never say more than the absolute least I possibly can. You’re probably laughing at me because I write a witchcraft blog that’s all about sharing knowledge, practices, and experiences… but hold that laughter. Have you ever seen me state exactly what all of my animal and plant familiars are? Have you ever seen me list the names of all the ancestors I work with? Have you ever seen me state exactly which traditions I trained in? You may have even noticed that I tend to use nicknames and epithets for the deities I work with rather than their actual names. I tend to skirt around a lot of things about myself. This blog is more of a giant Sarah iceberg and you’re only ever seeing the tip.

I see her point, although what I see in too many Craft blogs is just recycling of other people’s stuff instead of sharing secrets!

Hoodoo You Read?

Hoodoo & Conjure Quarterly is a new journal on Southern magic and folklore, and you can buy it on Amazon.com (follow link above).

Contents of the first issue:

Denise Alvarado: “The Origin of the Root,” “Dirt Dauber Nests,” “Conjure Artist profile: The Georgia Mojo Man,” “A Goetic Ritual: Magickal Doll to Raise the Ghost of a Loved One”

Sharon Marino: “Bat’s Blood,” “Secrets of Sex Magick: Explore Your Sexual Fantasies with the Help of the Guede,” “St. Martha Dominadora Love Domination Candle.”

Matthew Venus: “What is Real Hoodoo?” “Bottle Spell for Prosperity”

Madrina Angelique: “Buying Cemetery Dirt”

Alyne Pustanio: “Haunted New Orleans Folklore: The Devil Baby of New Orleans: Fact or Fiction?”

Chad Balthazar, “Planetary Magick and the Venus Love Tub Lamp”

Papa Curtis, “A Short Look at Witchcraft and Self-Defense in the Diaspora”

Carolina Dean: “Shoe and Foot-Track Magick”

Dorothy Morrison,: “The Real Dirt on Visiting the Dead”

Aaron Leitch: “The Return of Psalm Magick and the Mixed Qabalah”

H. Byron Ballard: “Cove-Witches and Curanderas: Traditional Healers and Magic-Women in Modern Appalachia”

And there are several formulas for magickal oils and powders, a little lagniappe (that’s Cajun for a little something extra) magick, a free conjure doll baby template, and a historical text related to Voodoo in New Orleans by Lafcadio Hearn.

Maybe these are people who don’t worry about whether there are pentagrams on the tombstone—they are there for the graveyard dirt.