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    Witchcraft
    Witchcraft
    Witchcraft
    Ebook303 pages4 hours

    Witchcraft

    By Charles Williams

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    "These pages must stand for what they are-a brief account of the history of that perverted way of the soul which we call magic, and with the reaction against it. No one will derive any knowledge of initiation from this boook. I have not wished to titillate or to thrill; so far as I can manage it, this is history, and accurate history." -adapted from the Preface Charles Williams was one of the finest -- not to mention one of the most unusual -- theologians of the twentieth century. His mysticism is palpable -- the unseen world interpenetrates ours at every point, and spiritual exchange occurs all the time, unseen and largely unlooked for. His novels are legend, and as a member of the Inklings, he contributed to the mythopoetic revival in contemporary culture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn R. Mabry
    Release dateMar 29, 2016
    ISBN9781940671154
    Witchcraft
    Author

    Charles Williams

    Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 1945) was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was born, but in 1939 he moved to Oxford with the university press for which he worked and was buried there following his early death.Charles Williams was born in London in 1886, the only son of (Richard) Walter Stansby Williams (18481929) and Mary (née Wall). His father Walter was a journalist and foreign business correspondent for an importing firm, writing in French and German, who was a 'regular and valued' contributor of verse, stories and articles to many popular magazines. His mother Mary, the sister of the ecclesiologist and historian J. Charles Wall, was a former milliner (hatmaker),[4] of Islington. He had one sister, Edith, born in 1889. The Williams family lived in 'shabby-genteel' circumstances, owing to Walter's increasing blindness and the decline of the firm by which he was employed, in Holloway. In 1894 the family moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire, where Williams lived until his marriage in 1917.

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      Book preview

      Witchcraft - Charles Williams

      WITCHCRAFT

      By Charles Williams

      the apocryphile press

      BERKELEY, CA

      www.apocryphile.org

      apocryphile press

      BERKELEY, CA

      Apocryphile Press

      1700 Shattuck Ave #81

      Berkeley, CA 94709

      www.apocryphile.org

      First published in March 1941 by Faber and Faber Limited.

      Apocryphile Press Edition, 2005.

      For sale in the USA only.

      Sales prohibited in the UK.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      OCR conversion by Francesco Tosi.

      ISBN 0-9764025-7-2

      eISBN 978-1-940671-14-7 (Kindle)

      eISBN 978-1-940671-15-4 (ePub)

      Ebook version 1.0

      To the immortal memory of

      ALONZO SALAZAR DE FRIAS

      NICHOLAS DE LA REYNIE

      ANDREW ELIOT

      Contents

      PREFACE

      I. BACKGROUND

      II. THE ARRIVAL OF THE DEVIL

      III. THE DARK AGES

      IV. WITCHCRAFT AND HERESY

      V. THE CENTURIES OF NOBLE TRIALS

      VI. THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

      VII. THE GOETIC LIFE

      VIII. THE GRAND WAR

      IX. IN ENGLAND

      X. THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY MOVEMENT

      XI. THE SUSPENSION OF BELIEF

      XII. SALEM

      XIII. CONCLUSION

      INDEX

      PREFACE

      These pages must stand for what they are — a brief account of the history in Christian times of that perverted way of the soul which we call magic, or (on a lower level) witchcraft, and with the reaction against it. That they tend to deal more with the lower level than with any nobler dream is inevitable. The nobler idea of virtue mingled with power either worked itself out eventually as experimental science (but the extent to which experimental science was at any time denounced has probably been exaggerated), or it was kept carefully secluded in its own Rites (and to know these one would have had to share them), or it did in fact degenerate into base and disgusting evils (as I have here and there tried to suggest). No-one will derive any knowledge of initiation from this book; if he wishes to meet ‘the tall, black man’ or to find the proper method of using the Reversed Pentagram, he must rely on his own heart, which will, no doubt, be one way or other sufficient. I have not wished to titillate or to thrill; so far as I can manage it, this is history, and (again as far as I can manage it) accurate history. I have tried to make no statement that was not justified by reputable editions of original documents, and neither to exaggerate nor minimize events or contemporary opinion on events.

      There are two authors who have laid the most casual student of the subject under heavy debt — the late Dr. Montague Summers and the late Dr. Henry Charles Lea; the first chiefly by his various translations, especially of the Malleus Maleficarum, the second by the great collection which was edited (after his death) by Professor A. C Howland and published as Materials towards a History of Witchcraft. The relevant chapters in his History of the Inquisition and History of the Inquisition in Spain also illuminate the subject. Both Dr. Summers and Dr. Lea held fixed views; those views, it is true, were in absolute opposition. I am not myself convinced either by Dr. Summers’s credulity or by Dr. Lea’s contempt. But both were sincere and learned men, and neither of them would willingly have altered a single fact in order to support his own view.

      The double acknowledgement is the chief purpose of this preface. I have given other references in their proper place. The whole subject, however remote it may seem, is not without value at the present time. It is one exhibition among many — and more flagrant than some — of a prolonged desire of the human heart; few studies of the past can present that heart more terribly — whether on one side or on the other — in its original and helpless corruption.

      Chapter One

      THE BACKGROUND

      In the years of the Divine Tiberius Christendom had already come into being. There existed, scattered over Southern Europe and the Near East, companies of united disciples. They were known by certain beliefs and certain rites; they were also known by a certain mode of life which aimed at a particular and, it was thought, eccentric strictness. The centre of those beliefs, rites, and manner of life was asserted to be their peculiar and intense individual relationship to a historic (though almost contemporary) being. It was this, and one other thing, which distinguished them from the followers of the many mystery-religions and the many philosophies of the time. There were other groups which depended on rites, and there were many others which aimed at a strict moral life. The conflict of man’s worse desires with his better was not confined to Christians. It was a commonplace of the Roman world as it had been a commonplace of others. Conflict and division were obvious to all moral thinkers.

      What distinguished Christendom was (i) its relation to the Crucified Jew, and (ii) its assertion of a supernatural Will. The use of the word supernatural has been rebuked, and indeed it is a little unfortunate. It did not imply then, nor should it ever have implied since, any derogation from the natural order. But it did imply that that order was part of and reposed on a substance which was invisible and which operated by laws greater than, if not in opposition to, those which were apparent in the visible world. Substance was love, and love was substance. And that substance of love was disposed by conscious and controlling Will, which had yet so limited itself, by its own choice, as to leave the wills of men and women free to assent or not to assent to its own. The nature of that final and supernatural Will was not at all clearly imagined or defined by the passionate thinkers and orators of the early Church, except in two or three points. It was absolute; it had created all things; and in that historic being Jesus it had set itself in a special relationship of love to mankind. It had, by a sacrifice of what was more and more beginning to seem itself, operated to restore to men a state of goodness and glory of which they had miserably deprived themselves. It intensely and individually desired the salvation of all men. The one thing necessary, besides its own sacrifice, was the will of the creature to accept and unite itself with that sacrifice. And the death of Jesus, called Christ, had been that sacrifice.

      Such ideas were in no sense repugnant to the age. The introduction of the supernatural was common enough. What was not so common was the single absolute Will, the historic personality, and the intensely exclusive demands which the new bodies of believers promulgated.

      It was not the mysteries of Christendom but its definitions that were alien to contemporary thought and feeling. The supernatural was allowed, was even welcomed, so long as it was not intellectually and dogmatically defined. The half-allegorical gods of Rome, the symbolical and feverish divinities of the East, were very ready to welcome another god. It was the new god who refused to welcome them. On the whole the Roman world might accept myth, but it refused metaphysic as part of a religious creed, and dogma, in its repelling and formulated sense, was utterly alien to it. There was therefore at best a symbolism, at worst a cloudiness, about its divine beings; whether those beings were the lords of Eastern rituals or the even less credible gods of Roman public tradition. They could almost be believed to be idealizations of man’s desires and emotions. The highly sceptical section of the great world found no difficulty in that interpretation. It was content to allow the mass of men to believe as they chose — always assuming that the safety of the Empire was preserved.

      There was therefore, in our sense of the words, hardly any ‘good’ or ‘evil’ about the world of divinities. Myths of evil supernatural beings might exist. The Furies might, in Virgil’s poem, chastise the souls of sinners. The mysteries might supply means by which the devotee entered into ‘blessedness’ — of one kind or another. There were rites of a dangerous nature, invocations of awful and appalling deities. There were ghosts and curses, night-travellers and night-pestilences. But all these came rather under the head of Power than of Will. And if that were true even of the more respectable gods, it was much more true of the less respectable. Charms and amulets, necromancy and divination, were popular, and their makers and professors were many. Popular also, though perhaps chiefly among a different and smaller class, were the literary reflections of such things; to the incredulous an amusement for their leisure, to the credulous a thrill of delicious fear.

      In the very great poem in which, some fifty years earlier, Virgil had celebrated the restoration of the Julian line and the re-foundation of Rome, there is much of the supernatural. There indeed the Will of Jupiter might almost seem to approach the Christian idea of omnipotence; especially in the noble passage where the vocation of the Roman Empire in the world is related to the necessity of the Jovian commands. But perhaps the final resolution is never made. Or if it is, then it is made precisely in terms of justice here and not of supernatural substance nor of love. Piety and propriety Virgil understood; he pushed both very far; the very feel of his verse seems to hover on some greater mystery. But, could he have heard of Christianity, there seems little doubt that he would have recoiled from it, and would have relegated it to the train of obscene evils which attend on the traitor Antony and his Egyptian paramour.

      But he knew much — at least he knew much poetically and for his literary purpose — about the darker power of enchantments. The beautiful, dangerous and fatal Queen of Carthage who nearly captivated Aeneas and prevented Rome knew about it. In her distress she had recourse to a woman of occult power. ‘I have found’, the queen said to her sister Anna, ‘a priestess who was the guardian of the Hesperides, who can use spells to free minds from love or to bring them into slavery to love. She can stop flowing streams and turn the stars back in their courses. She can call up those spirits who wander by night; she can cause the earth to shake and trees to fall from the mountains. Be witness, gods, and you, sister, how unwillingly I turn to these sorceries.’

      And now (the sacred altars placed around)

      The priestess enters, with her hair unbound,

      And thrice evokes the powers below the ground.

      Night, Erebus and Chaos she proclaims,

      And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names,

      And three Dianas; next, she sprinkles round

      With feigned Avernian drops, the hallowed ground;

      Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe’s light,

      With brazen sickles reaped at noon of night;

      Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl,

      And cuts the forehead of a new-born foal,

      Robbing the mother’s love. The destined queen

      Observes, assisting at the rites obscene:

      A leavened cake in her devoted hands

      She holds; and next the highest altar stands;

      One tender foot was shod, her other bare;

      Girt was her gathered gown, and loose her hair.

      Thus dressed, she summoned with her dying breath

      The heavens and planets conscious of her death,

      And every power, if any rules above,

      Who minds or who revenges injured love.¹

      This example is from literature, and literature does not always directly and accurately reflect the social or moral content of a culture. In fact, however, the activities represented in that image, whether or not they existed, were certainly feared in the public life of the time. The newly established Empire took measures against invisible as well as visible dangers. The invasion of Rome by religions and superstitions from the East was still regarded, as it always had been, as undesirable and improper, and the Aeneid itself had with great power denounced the rallying of the East at Actium. The imperial government, as much as was possible, barred its door against the intrusion, though it could not prevent the oriental myths and rituals drifting in not so much by the back door as by a thousand windows. The Emperors, with some reluctance, allowed themselves to be deified, at first in eastern cities, presently in Rome; and the deification, which had been so reluctant, presently became the very test of every Roman’s fidelity to the State. But this ceremonial godhead, however it might conflict with the Christian Faith, did not much involve the idea of supernatural power or supernatural knowledge. It was indeed the practice of supernatural knowledge against which the government set itself, from motives of public policy. The insatiable curiosity of the Divine Julius might examine, with a detached mind, all matters of the intellect With which he came in contact. His successors were compelled to guard their interests more carefully. The enemy, for them, was divination, the foretelling of the future, by whatever means. It was highly undesirable that recourse should be had to diviners, whether by groups or individuals. Such diviners might too easily become centres of disaffection. Inquiries concerning the probable length of life of the Emperor, for example, whether made of the heavenly bodies or of the souls of the dead, might obviously become dangerous to the stability of the State; much more might inquiries concerning the immediate future of the Empire. The great Maecenas, cautious of the newly instituted peace, advised his master Augustus to forbid all kinds of divination and sorcery. Augustus consented to the decree. He rebuilt the ancient Roman temples; he restored the ancestral rites; and at the same time he caused all books of divination to be burned — to the number, it is said, of some two thousand. All consultation of sorcerers and diviners was prohibited on pain of death. Neither the Emperor nor any of his subjects were to be harried by any power or knowledge derived from another world. His successors from time to time renewed the decrees and put them into action.

      Nevertheless, it was the political result and not the religious with which the government was concerned, whether public or private; the maleficium, the evil acts done against life or property. In principle the government had no objection to anyone studying the stars any more than to his studying the Greek poets, just as in principle it had no objection to the Christian worshipping Jesus instead of Jupiter. As things worked out, it had to take measures to suppress both Christians and diviners, and for the same reason — the political danger they were thought to involve. An example is given in Tacitus’s account of the conspiracy of Libo Drusus. This youth was deliberately inveigled by a friend Firnicus Catus into dangerous paths. Catus talked to him of the greatness of his family; he urged him to magnificent living; and he encouraged him to turn to sorcery and divination — astrologers’ promises, magicians’ rites, and interpreters of dreams. Libo at last went so far as to approach a certain Junius, ‘for the purpose of evoking by incantations spirits of the dead’ — perhaps Libo’s own great-grandfather Pompey, his aunt Teribonia, who had been married to Augustus, or other great ones of his house. The necromancer betrayed him to another informer, who went to the consuls. Libo was summoned before the Senate and invited to explain. The prosecution, amid other evidence of his dealing with diviners, with inquiries whether he would be so wealthy that he would cover the Appian Way to Brindisium with gold, produced a paper on which had been written the names of Caesars and of Senators, and against them signs of dreadful and mysterious significance. Order was given that his slaves should be formally sold, in order that they might be put to the torture, which could not legally be done otherwise in any case affecting a man’s life. The case was adjourned; and that evening the unhappy young fool killed himself. As a result fresh decrees were passed against all practitioners of magic. Some were seized; one was flung from the Tarpeian Rock; one was put to death by the consuls, to the ceremonial sound of trumpets, outside the Esquiline Gate. Yet the official consultation of omens continued, and even the official consultation of magians. Astrologers were frequently found in the imperial train and even in the close imperial circle. There they were harmless and even useful, since the occult dealing of the Emperor was, by definition, no treason, being part of his dutiful care of the State. And when even darker things were rumoured to have happened, the same excuse was invoked. In the reign of the Emperor Hadrian the young favourite Antinous died mysteriously in Egypt. It was whispered that his death had not been accidental; the master of Antinous was learned in the arts of magic, and his best-loved servant had been awfully sacrificed to ensure the good estate of the Emperor himself.

      In the second century both the literary and social aspects of sorcery were represented in the career of Lucius Apuleius, a Roman and an African; he was born in Numidia, about a.d. 125. He had travelled in the Near East, and had been initiated into the mysteries of Isis and of Osiris. He had written one of the most famous novels of the world, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which (as a modern novel might do) dealt both with religious initiations and with black magic.

      It is a romance in the best style; it not only demands the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, but also defeats it. The first description of a witch is after the earlier Virgilian manner — ‘She can call down the sky, hang earth in heaven, freeze fountains, melt mountains, raise the spirits of the dead, send gods to hell, put out the stars, and give light to Tartarus itself.’ But this is not to be taken seriously; the examples of her art which follow are meant for laughter. ‘She turned a neighbouring innkeeper, whose competition damaged her trade, into a frog: and now the poor old fellow swims about in a vat of his own wine and, squatting deep in the lees, summons his former customers with hoarse importunate croak.’ The next example is wilder yet. ‘She turned another — a lawyer — into a ram because he had spoken against her, and now he pleads in the shape of a ram.’ It is a world where such things can happen, a world of every-day shot with fantastic twirls of metamorphosis. That, however, does not prevent the world from being at times terrible; the very style hints at the reality of those awful powers, and the laughter, even when apparently whole-hearted, is found to be half a defence against the energies which, were they once believed in, would be effectual. The ninth book holds what is perhaps the best example. There a certain adulterous wife, driven from her husband’s house, plots with a witch against his life. It is the means which are frightful. A dead woman, herself murdered, is evoked and sent to the house. ‘About midday a woman suddenly appeared in the mill. She was clad in the garb of mourning worn by persons accused of some crime; her face was strangely disfigured by grief, while her raiment hardly covered her and consisted of deplorable shreds and patches. Her feet were naked and unshod, her countenance hideously thin and pale as boxwood, and her grizzled hair was tom and foully besprinkled with ashes, and hung over her forehead so as to cover the greater part of her face. She laid her hand upon the miller as though she would speak to him in private and led him to his chamber.’ When, at last, the slaves break into the room where the two are supposed to be, they find their master hanging dead from a beam and the woman gone.

      Such a passage might certainly be paralleled by many modem ‘ghost’ stories. In these, however, the victim is usually himself a sinner; a supernatural propriety exercises itself through the apparition, and ‘the manner of the death’, in the words of Apuleius, ‘that sends him as a ghost to dwell in the world below’ is justified by the nature of the original sin. Here, however, there is no such justice; there is only malevolence made powerful by rare control of secret means. In the mill, to the slaves grinding the corn and the honest miller, ‘an excellent fellow of a very modest disposition’, the evoked phantasm of the unfortunate dead appears, and, like the later vampires whose bite drew their victims without their will into their own company, works on the living, in ways which Apuleius will not describe, till the dead body hangs strangled from the beam. Against such malevolence, in that world, it seems there ‘is to be imagined no protection, except perhaps in the end for those who, like Apuleius himself, have been able to concern themselves with the other mysteries, the sacred ritual of the supreme goddess — Isis, who among all her divine manifestations is also Proserpine, ‘to whom men render shuddering reverence with howls by night, whose three-fold visage awes the wild rages of the goblin-dead, and holds fast the gates of hell, who wanders in many a diverse grove and is propitiated with varied rites.’ It is this goddess who frees Apuleius at the end from his own metamorphosis, reminding him that when he at his proper term descends to the world below, he shall see her ‘shining in the darkness of Acheron and reigning in the inmost halls of Styx’.

      The solemn conclusion, coming so to a tale which had played with every kind of emotion, bestows on them all an additional seriousness. The three-fold visage overlooking the goblin-dead accentuates the earlier terror of the dead woman. There is, certainly, no reconsideration; there is no suggestion that the miller is blessed among the dead, and we have no right to ask for it. Apuleius was writing a romance, not a philosophy. But the dead are made more real by that great office of Isis, and therefore, as it were upon the edge of her divine operations, the loathly operations of witchcraft are made more credible. And this, in that particular age, was one of the books the world enjoyed.

      It would be easy to dismiss the book as a mere literary tour de force, a metaphysical holiday, if there had not fortunately been preserved to us another work by the same Apuleius, his Apologia. His literature, it seems from this, was then too much like life, and what was fearful fun in the study might be a serious danger in the law-courts. Apuleius, at a later period of his life, came to Tripoli, and there married one Pudentilla, a wealthy widow. An action was brought against him by her relatives, accusing him of immorality and sorcery, of having used magical arts to ensnare Pudentilla, and of having married her for her money. The case was tried at Sabrata, which is now called Zowara, in the ordinary courts, before the proconsul Claudius Maximus, somewhere between a.d. 155 and 161. The defence remains.

      As far as the sorcery charge went, he began by arguing that it could not necessarily be said that the magic was harmful. A magician was nothing but a priest, for the word (he said) was the Persian word for priest, and meant therefore one skilled in ceremonial law and the sacrificial practice of religion — ‘an art acceptable to the immortal gods, full of all knowledge of worship and prayer, full of piety and wisdom in things divine, full of honour and glory since the day when Zoroaster and Oromazes established it, high-priestess of the powers of heaven’. The common herd, he said, thought that a magician was one who by ‘communion of speech’ with the immortals, had power to do such marvels as he would. The ‘communion of speech* is noteworthy. It is the sense which is at the bottom of all incantation, of all ‘words of power’, the power which powers acknowledge, the right utterance of sounds whose energy drives supernatural things to obedience. Apuleius himself pointed out, in defence, what was afterwards to be so widely and dreadfully felt, the fear that must He on all who dare to attack a magician of such a kind. The man, he said, who really believed in the charge he brought should be the last to bring it; ‘no escort or care or guard can save him from unforeseen and inevitable disaster’.

      But in fact his enemies did not accuse Apuleius of such tremendous energies. Their complaints and their evidence dealt with lesser images and practices. They declared that he had procured certain curious fish for his spells. Apuleius retaliated by declaring that fish were not mentioned in the magical authorities as having any value. The second charge, that he had bewitched a boy with a magical incantation, was more dangerous; the boy, it was said, had gone mad. Apart from the facts of his own action Apuleius was less certain about the principle. He held that there were certain divine powers, midway between gods and men, from whom all divination and magic came; also he held that a child or young lad — healthy, beautiful, intelligent — might be cast into a trance, or what we should no doubt call the hypnotic sleep, ‘and be reduced to its primal nature, which is in truth immortal and divine’; and thus, as it were in a kind of slumber, it might predict the future. But it was not such a solemn

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