. . . but rarely about the witch’s dustpan. Some interesting costuming from the 1870s at Sexy Witch.
Tag Archives: witchcraft
Practical Magic, a Blogging Roundup
• From Lupa at Therioshamanism, “How to Talk to Dead Things.” Dead animal things, that is.
• From Strategic Sorcery, on why setting goals is not the same as accomplishment.
• From Gangleri’s Grove, thoughts on working with ancestors and a ritual for “elevating” them.
• From Witchful Thinking, a reminder about the basics of Moon phases in practical magic.
Can You Prove that Witches Exist in Canada?
Somehow I missed this, but last September an organization of self-proclaimed Canadian skeptics challenged the world to prove that witches exist—along with Bigfoot, voodoo, and the Easter Bunny.
OK, all this fun hinges on the difference between “anthropological witchcraft” and capital-P Pagan religious capital-W Witchcraft.
But still.
Of course, if anyone shows up and says, “I’m a witch,” the professional skeptics will set the bar so high: “Can you fly? Can you turn me into a frog?” You know the drill. And no, metaphor will not be good enough.
On Misreading ‘Triumph of the Moon’
An earlier post of mine about writings on Wicca that lacked authority generated some responses around the Pagan blogosphere.
Some bloggers, however, simply do not understand scholarly writing. For instance, this:
For over a decade, Professor Ronald Hutton’s study on the history of Wicca, Triumph of the Moon, has been considered by most Pagan scholars to have closed the book on the issue of the survival of elements of Paganism from Pagan antiquity.
Let’s think about that. Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is probably the one book on the topic that every educated person has at least heard of.
It was published in installments between 1776 and 1789. It is a classic. By the blog writer’s standards, therefore, it should have “closed the book” on writing about ancient Rome.
Yet new books on ancient Rome are published every year. How can that be?
No topic is ever “closed.” Historical works—which is how Prof. Hutton would describe Triumph—are not holy scriptures. New thinkers and new generations bring new scholarship and new interpretations.
But what Hutton has done is establish a standard. Anyone who challenges his conclusions (and given that ten years have passed, he has challenged some of them himself, I expect) must do at least as much in-depth research as he has done. They can’t just snipe from the sidelines.
Rhetoricians talk about “invented ethos,” by which a speaker or writer displays their qualifications to engage a topic: I have studied such-and-such at this or that level. I have done such-and-such. I have experienced such-and-such. (“Invention” does not imply falsification in this context.)
It is that level of ethos I see lacking in his critics—so far.
Another problem, probably too big to tackle here, occurs when people approach a book like Triumph looking for “right answers” or for information on which to base their personal religious practice.
Oh, you can do that. “The reader constructs his own text,” as all the postmodernists say, sure. You can also use a Stradivarius violin for a canoe paddle.
But I think one is better off reading a Triumph as a history of ideas, a history of the ways that English people, in particular, thought about and constructed the idea of “witchcraft.”
A Ritual Against Hitler That Really Happened?
Via the Pagan Newswire Collective (should I just have a dateline with “PNC” in it?) comes this link to a witchcraft ritual reportedly performed against Adolf Hilter and the Nazi regime in Maryland in January 1941, which is almost a year before the United States officially declared war.
It was inspired by William Seabrook’s Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, originally published a few months before—Seabrook himself is in the photos.
In other words, this is not the Wiccan religion nor any variation thereof but witchcraft in the purely magic-working sense.
Having once worked briefly for one of the old-school, cigar-chomping big-city “press agents,” I immediately wonder if the whole thing was not a collaboration between some publicist and the photographer. In other words, was there media involvement from the beginning? So often, things that seemed to have “just happened” in fact did not.
Second, whether contrived or not, this magical working is better sourced than the more famous Lammas 1940 working supposedly performed by British witches. It was during the summer of 1940 when German invasion of southern England was imminent, until the German High Command canceled the invasion.
That Lammas ritual was fictionalized in Katherine Kurz’s Lammas Night. It was described in Gerald Gardner’s 1954 book Witchcraft Today, in which he coyly describes it as being performed by “witches” but does not say if he was there. (Although he was Wicca’s chief founder, his pose in the book is that of an ethnographer/historian, not a participant.)
They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the the thought at Hitler’s brain: “You cannot cross the sea,” “You cannot cross the sea,” “Not able to come,” “Not able to come.” Just as their great-grandfathers had done to Boney [Napoleon Boneparte, 1804] and their remoter forefathers had done to the Spanish Armada” [in 1588] (104).
The problem is, the only knowledge that we have of the 1940 is Gardner’s say-so. All accounts of it trace back to him. My old friend Evan John Jones was skeptical that more than half a dozen people participated, but I am more skeptical. I think that it is equally likely that Gardner, who served in the Home Guard (before moving inland away from the coast) and wrote letters to newspapers advocating desperate resistance to the expected invasion, described the ritual as something that should have happened.
It is more attested that Dion Fortune’s ceremonial magic group (and possibly others) were trying to affect the course of the war by magical means.
Brewer Reconsiders Witches’ Wit Label
I stood in Cheers Liquor Mart, a supermarket of things alcoholic in Colorado Springs, last Wednesday wondering if I should try a bottle of Witches’ Wit beer.
The “controversial” Witches’ Wit beer, that is, with the witch-burning scene on the label. The brewery had defended the design, and even the artist commented on one blog, in essence, “How dare you insult my artistic vision?! If you could see the painting full size, you would understand.” (Can’t find the link—will add it if I do.) But of course, it’s bottle-label size.
“We have been accused of inspiring violence against women, and we have been compared to the violence in Darfur,” said Sage Osterfeld, a spokesman for Port Brewing. “It has run the gamut from people saying politely, ‘This is offensive to pagans,’ to people saying we are responsible for all that is wrong in the world.”
Now this tempest in a beer glass has even reached The New York Times. Bowing to the pressure campaign started by Vicki Noble, the brewery will have a contest to choose a new label.
Is the design “hate imagery” against today’s Pagan Witches? Honestly, I don’t think so. And if it is, it is nothing to do with the modern religion of Pagan Witchcraft in its various forms. (If you want to argue that it is anti-women, go ahead.)
When it comes to the word “witch,” we want it both ways—safe and edgy. As the Dutch scholar Léon van Gulik writes in a paper that will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate,
The acquired taste of Paganism is rationalized by upholding a self-image that perpetuates a tension with the secular world without, and sometimes even the non-initiated world within. This tension can for instance be observed in the clinging to the term “witch” in Wiccan circles, the meaning of which clearly differs between insiders—and outsiders.
There in the aisle at Cheers, however, I decided not to reinforce the current label imagery of Witch’s Wit. Because right next to it was another beer with a folk-Catholic-themed label: Maudite (“the damned one”) Belgian-style ale from Quebec. I acquired a taste for Maudite when in Montréal about a year ago, but had not seen any in a Colorado store until now, so into the shopping cart it went.
UPDATE: No, apparently they are going to consider changing the label.
The Most ‘Snarkalicious’ Antiphon
I was going to post Mistress Elvira’s video response to the Christine O’Donnell “I’m not a witch. I’m you” video, but Apuleius at Egregores has a much better round-up, so go watch it there. (Other video responses were corralled at The Wild Hunt a few days back.)
Synchronistically, I was just checking something about the original Apuleius for a book proposal that I am writing. Yes, with the American Academy of Religion annual meeting only a week away, I suddenly feel impelled to show up with something.
Nikki Bado, my co-editor in the Equinox Pagan Studies book series, and I will be meeting with at least one author and one co-editor of an edited collection (not an “anthology,” properly, since it is all or mostly new material).
Veronica Lake for Halloween
The Australian blog Sexy Witch has featured some promotional materials from the 1942 movie I Married a Witch lately.
It starred Veronica Lake, who filled the “perky petite blonde” slot in several “screwball comedies” of the 1940s, together with banker-turned-actor Fredric March as the descendant of her 17th-century persecutor. Internet Movie Database has more about it.
I saw it years ago, was thinking along the lines of “Let’s rent it for Halloween,” and discovered that Netflix does not have it.
Apparently I rented it in the 1990s from another mail-order video-rental company that no longer exists, but which had a large library of off-beat, foreign, vintage, and “art” movies.
So we will watch Sullivan’s Travels instead.
UPDATE: “Why You Should Watch Classic Films.”
The ‘Old Religion’ of Pendle Hill
In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion.
Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I of England.
Considerations of treason would go over the heads of the Pendle witches, however, a group of mostly poor rural women in northern England caught up in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and fear of invasion from Catholic Spain.
Based on court trial records, Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill tells a generational family story of “cunning women,” folk healers in a popular Catholic tradition (like Mexican curanderas) whose conduct becomes criminalized after the “stripping of the altars” and the destruction of popular Catholicism in the mid-1500s.
In a way that reminds me a bit of some of Mary Stewart’s work, Sharratt follows three generations of women struggling with poverty and seeking the doubled-edged respect and fear of being capable of healing—and thus also of cursing.
To be honest [says Bess Southerns, the grandmother] I didn’t give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then [before the Protestant Reformation], the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we’d been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.
When Bess, also known as Mother Demdike, risks teaching the making of clay images to a friend’s daughter, Annie, the girl responds, “Are you saying that anyone who moulds clay might work witchcraft, Mother Demdike? Then there’d scarely be a landlord left alive.”
Whatever we might say about the talk of familiar spirits appearing as dogs and boys that the accused witches revealed at their trial, Sharratt treats these as real elements of the plot, giving the story a Gothic edge that moves it beyond the Christian world and suggests why today’s English Witches might still look back four hundred years and wonder just what was happening in Lancashire.
This publisher’s video “trailer” lets you see the novel’s physical setting.
Imagined ‘Witches’ Affected by Ukrainian Law
Jason Pitzl-Waters recently mentioned a new moral panic in Ukraine that includes laws against psychics and divination.
Gambling and artistic depictions of nudity are also affected.
The Pagan connection to the latter? Igor Gaidai, a Ukrainian photographer whose compositions claim to invoke pre-Christian times, is the reporter’s example of who the crackdown is affecting, as noted last July.
In his photo studio and gallery in the center of the Ukrainian capital, he displays his various projects, including one called “Saman,” which hearkens back to a “pre-Christian era” when “witches” roamed the earth. In it, naked women are depicted in various poses with brooms, as if in mid-flight, and are meant to glorify “the power of feminine energy, beauty and wisdom.” His main display window also exhibits four young nude mothers, partially covered by their equally nude infants.
(Link may be NSFW, depending. Via Sexy Witch.)