3

Power and the Powers of Witchcraft

Everyone who follows a religious or magical pathway can feel some kind of energy or power that comes through and into them but that clearly has its source outside them. Whatever their pathway, all believe that there is a power that can be accessed and used through the performance of a set of practical techniques. What this power is, and where it comes from, has several interpretations, some of them incompatible. There are theories that come from the Christian worldview that the witch’s power comes through God. The witch’s power may come through the power inherent in nature, which in Christian terms is an imperfect, fallen creature of God, but in some pagan interpretations the witch’s power is a direct manifestation of nature divine, numinous in its own right. Another source of power may be channeled through autonomous spirits that can be good, bad, or neutral to humans. These spirits must be contacted by rites and ceremonies that either supplicate or command them. This can involve making a pact or deal with the spirit, as in the Christian witch hunters’ interpretation of witchcraft, or compelling the spirits to perform the operator’s will, commanding them with words of power, often Jewish or Christian in origin, accompanied by the appropriate rites and ceremonies at the proper place and time. Another means of gaining and using power may involve the operator becoming temporarily possessed by a spirit, as in shamanism.

Christian dualists promoted the theory that all power comes from God, who created everything in existence and is exclusively good. By that theory, everything that goes wrong or is of bad intention cannot possibly come from God. Yet clearly “badness” exists and must come from somewhere. So, according to this theory, everything bad must come indirectly or directly from a source of evil, which the clerics personified as a rather human entity or intelligence, the devil. In 1972, Bishop Robert Mortimer’s church commission on exorcism defined evil and its origin as a distortion of right orderliness that proceeds from created, intelligent wills, either human or demonic. These may act independently or in some form of collaboration. The exorcists claimed that human beings may accept demonic temptations, while black magicians sometimes actively attempt (perhaps with success) to obtain the assistance of demons (Mortimer 1972, 17).

Fig. 3.1. Witchcraft in the seventeenth-century imagination

Certain Christian sects asserted that only ordained clergymen could deal with spiritual matters and that anyone performing any kind of unauthorized spiritual procedure for good or ill therefore had a power that emanated from the devil. An extension of this is that because the church insisted on its members being baptized—that is, undergoing a magical ritual to bind them to the Christian god—those practicing magic must also have undergone a comparable ritual to bind them to the devil. In ancient and medieval times, initiation rituals were universal for the membership of craft and trade guilds and rural fraternities, so it was unthinkable that someone could gain knowledge and power without undergoing one. In former years the theory that witches and magicians sold their souls to the devil to gain knowledge and power was popularized by stories and plays about Doctor Faustus. Modern practitioners of pagan witchcraft subsequently removed all of the Christian elements and references to the devil that once were present from much of traditional witchcraft. On the other hand, those who believed in and actively worshipped the devil restyled themselves as Satanists. We are all active participants in the construction of meaning.

In his The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton expressed all the fears of the age ascribed to the horrendous power of witches. In a section titled “Of Witches and Magicians, How They Cause Melancholy,” he wrote of the powers and activities ascribed to witches.

Many subdivisions there are, & many several species of Sorcerers, Witches, Enchanters, Charmers, &c. They have been tolerated heretofore some of them; and Magick hath been publickly professed in former times, in Salamanca, Cracovia, and other places, though after censured by several Universities, and now generally contradicted, though practiced by some still, maintained and excused . . . that which they can do, is as much almost as the Devil himself, who is still ready to satisfy their desires. . . .

They can cause tempests, storms, which is familiarly practised by Witches in Norway, Ireland, as I have proved. They can make friends enemies, and enemies friends, by philtres . . . enforce love, tell any man where his friends are, about what employed, though in the most remote places; and, if they will, bring their sweethearts to them by night, upon a goat’s back flying in the air . . . hurt and infect men and beasts, vines, corn, cattle, plants, make women abortive, not to conceive, barren, men and woman unapt and unable, married and unmarried, fifty several ways . . . make men victorious, fortunate, eloquent . . . they can make stick frees, such as shall endure a rapier’s point, musket shot, and never be wounded . . . they can walk in fiery furnaces, make men feel no pain on the rack or feel any other tortures; they can staunch blood, represent dead men’s shapes, alter and turn themselves and others into several forms at their pleasures. . . .

Fig. 3.2. Death and the Devil Chain the World, a symbolic painting in a monastery at Fussen, Germany

I have seen those that have caused melancholy in the most grievous manner, dried up women’s paps, cured gout, palsy, this and apoplexy, falling sickness which no physick could help, solo tactu, by touch alone . . . one David Helde, a young man, who by eating cakes a Witch gave him . . . began to dote on a sudden, and was instantly mad. . . . The means by which they work, are usually charms, images, as that in Hector Boethius of King Duff; characters stamped on sundry metals, and at such and such constellations, knots, amulets, words, philtres &c. which generally make the parties affected melancholy. (Burton [1621] 1926, vol. I, ii, I, sub. III, 1926 ed., v. 1, 231–34)

Fig. 3.3. Formula for exorcism found beneath a brass plate on a tombstone in Lancashire in the nineteenth century

It appears that some people known as witches did follow the Faustus stories and create rituals in which they believed that they had sold their souls to the devil. If we are to believe the testimony of a folklorist-clergyman, the Reverend R. H. Heanley, at least one wise woman, Mary Atkin, believed on her deathbed that the devil was coming to take her. This is the classic tale of the end of one who has sold her soul. Heanley wrote:

It fell to my lot in 1885 to attend old Mary on her deathbed. In fact, she sent for me from another parish “to lay the Devil,” whom she believed to have come for her. If nothing else had come, the hour of an evil conscience had undoubtedly arrived. She, at all events, firmly believed in her own powers, and, had it not been for the greater presence which she asserted was in the room, would, I fear, as little have regretted the use she had made of them. Her last words to me were: “Thou hast fixed him, Master Robert, for a bit, as firm as ivver I fixed anny; bud he’ll hev’ me sartain sewer when thou art gone.” [Standard English: You have fixed him, Master Robert, for a while, as firm as I ever fixed anyone, but he will have me for certain, sure when you have gone.] And she died that night shrieking out that he had got her. (1902, 13–17)

Catherine Parsons, in her accounts of witchcraft in and around the Cambridgeshire village of Horseheath, stated:

In Horseheath witchcraft is by no means a lost art. One is told that the chief difference between a witch and an ordinary woman is, that if the latter wishes her neighbour misfortune, her wish has no effect, but the same wish in the mind of a witch has effect, because the witch is believed to be in league with the Devil, she having made a contract to sell her soul to him in return for the power to do evil. (1915; 1952)

But there is a tricky liminal way out of this if one sells one’s soul to the devil, for “if a person sells his soul to the Devil, to be delivered at a certain specified time, the vendor, if wary, may avoid payment by putting in the contract ‘be it in the house or out of the house’ and then when the time arrives, sitting astride on a window sill or standing in a doorway” (Peacock 1877, I, 84).

The matter of who the devil was in these cases complicates our interpretations of witchcraft and magic, for at secret initiations into rural fraternities, such as the Millers’ Fraternity, the Horseman’s Grip and Word, and the Confraternity of the Plough, a man personating the devil officiated. In one recorded horseman’s initiation is the question “Who told you to come here?” and the answer was “the Devil” (Singer 1881; Rennie et al. 2009, 86). Perhaps the terrified candidate believed that he had seen the real devil, but it was one of the leading members of the fraternity who had terrified him. Similar confusions over the identity of “a black man” and “the devil” exist in American traditional rituals at crossroads (Hyatt 1974). Devil characters such as Beelzebub and Little Devil Doubt also appear in mummers’ plays (see chapter 12).

The Huntingdonshire folklorist C. F. Tebbutt observed that one form of witchcraft with no menace to others was used in the Horsemen’s Guild. Members of this guild or cult had the power to control horses and claimed that it came from the devil. This power gave them great advantages as farriers or horsebreakers (Tebbutt 1984, 86). When he was personated in a rural fraternity’s initiation ritual, the devil’s reported name describes a role, not an actual name of power. Of course, this character was invariably assumed by the clergymen who heard about it to be the ecclesiastical devil, and thus the guildsmen were always misinterpreted as being devil worshippers. It is likely that the question “Have you ever seen the devil?” is a rural fraternity watchword that asks for a particular answer (Randall 1966, 109–10). Every secret fraternity has ambiguous questions that must be answered with a proper form of words that assures the questioner that the other person is an initiate. A wrong answer shows that he is not a member.

Fig. 3.4. Symbols of horsemanry in pargetting work at Thaxted, Essex

It is clear that when an immaterial entity is being referred to rather than a guiser (a person in disguise), this figure is a conflation of perhaps a number of pagan deities with the ecclesiastical principle of evil. The epithet old (auld in Scots) prefixes many of the names given to this being: Old Nick, the Old ’Un, the Old Lad, Old Scratch, Old Ragusan, Old Sam, Old Horny, Old Bargus, Old Bogy, Old Providence, the Auld Chiel, and the Auld Gudeman. Old is clearly a reference to something ancient, most likely the belief in a god of the elder faith. Sometimes this being is the Halyman, the Black ’Un, or without the epithet “Old,” as Nick, Samuel, Bargus, Him, and Daddy. The possible origin of these names for pagan deities is further confused by the common practice of never saying “devil.” Fear of using this name is present in folk custom all over Great Britain. “Talk of the devil, and he will appear” is an old adage that warns us of the consequences of so doing. But different districts had different levels of prohibition. In Lincolnshire, it was not strong; indeed, there is a tune in a 1780 music manuscript by Thomas Dixon from Holton le Moor in that county called “As Sure as the Devil’s in Lincoln.” In the city of Lincoln is the tradition that at the cathedral, the devil has the wind waiting outside for him. The expression “as sure as the Devil’s in Lincoln” means a certainty, and certain clumps of trees in that county are called “the Devil’s Holts.”

Certain villages have a reputation for witchcraft. In Essex, the village of Canewdon is called “the Village of Witches,” where there are said to be always living six (or nine) witches (Howe 1952, 23), and in Cambridgeshire, Horseheath has a similar reputation. The infamous witch trials at Warboys in Huntingdonshire are commemorated by a weather vane in the form of a witch riding a broomstick, and so it is said there is always a witch in Warboys. A commonly told story is that “the office of witch” is a permanent one and must be handed on to a successor before the incumbent can die, however old she is. This is told at Horseheath and Bartlow (Porter 1969, 161). The power is sometimes said to be passed from father to son and mother to daughter, but this is by no means a universal principle (Howe 1952, 23). Although these are often dismissed as mere stories with little if any substance, they may be told from some knowledge of local realities, especially in places where the population has remained stable for a long time and knowledge and practices of many things are handed down in families. Those who claim to be members of hereditary witchcraft families will assert its truth. According to E. W. Lidell, who wrote under the pen name Lugh and claimed to be a hereditary witch, George Pickingill, who died at Canewdon in Essex in 1909, founded nine covens of witches in East Anglia and southern England (Lugh 1982, 3; Gwyn 1999, 19). Pickingill is said to have been an influence on the prominent twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley (Lugh 1982, 5–6) and also on contemporary Wiccans, but this, like much about the transmission of witchcraft, is disputed.