REINCARNATION
Some years ago, in the 1950s, Mr Geoffrey Gorer made an enquiry into the current religious beliefs of the English people. Its results were printed in The Observer; and Mr Gorer wrote that the most surprising thing he had discovered was the prevalence of the belief in reincarnation. Thinking that this idea belonged exclusively to the creeds of the East, he was at a loss to account for its widespread acceptance in modern England.
The work of occultists such as Madame Blavatsky, and popular romantic stories like Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream, made the belief that we live more lives than one known among the public generally. However, this is far from giving such an idea widespread and serious acceptance; unless it was not in reality an alien idea to the soul of the British race at all.
In fact, reincarnation is a very old idea indeed; and it is part of the Old Religion of Western Europe, as well as of the faiths of India and Asia. Charles Godfrey Leland has testified to its survival among the secrets of La Vecchia Religione in Italy; and Leland’s own beautiful poem, “One Thousand Years Ago”, is evidence of his own belief in this doctrine. The last verse of it runs:
Thou and I but yesterday
Met in fashion’s show.
Love, did you remember me,
Love of long ago?
Yes: we kept the fond oath sworn
One thousand years ago.
So general was the acceptance of reincarnation throughout the civilised world at the beginning of the Christian era, that the Early Christian Church had many eminent members who subscribed to the belief. Only slowly did it fall into disfavour, and become replaced by the doctrines of death, judgement, heaven and hell, final and fixed for eternity; of vicarious atonement instead of working out one’s own destiny; or of the dead sleeping in their graves until the Last Judgement.
All of these latter doctrines were frightening and depressing, but they were very good for keeping people in order, and submissive to the rule of the Church. Also, however monstrously wicked a medieval nobleman, for instance, might have been, he had only to make a good death-bed repentance and die fortified by the rites of Holy Church, and all was well. He had no need to fear the destiny he had made for himself catching up with him in subsequent lives on earth, as the pagan philosophers had taught. It was the Pope who held the keys of heaven and hell, and delegated his power to the bishops and priests. The old powers of Fate, Destiny or Nemesis were just accursed heathen notions.
As for the serf, it was God who had appointed his servitude to his feudal lord; and his chief virtue was to know his place and submit. There was only one life, in which some were appointed lords and barons, and others artisans and serfs. The one blood was noble, the other base. To contemplate the possibility of more than one life, meant that things might get dangerously mixed up, to the subversion of the social order.
Subversion is what the witch cult was constantly being accused of by its ecclesiastical critics. In other words, there were doctrines being secretly taught and disseminated among the common people, which were not orthodox doctrines. Ideas were being kept alive, against which the Church had pronounced its anathema.
The old Druidical teachings, for instance, very definitely contained the idea of reincarnation. So did the Qabalistic teachings, secretly studied by the Rosicrucians. The Gnostics and Neo-Platonists retained much of the philosophy of the ancient world. This philosophy had as one of its most respected masters Pythagoras, who taught reincarnation and claimed to remember his past lives.
In Dryden’s version of the Roman poet Ovid, Pythagoras speaks as follows:
Death has no power th’ immortal soul to slay,
That, when its present body turns to clay,
Seeks a fresh home; and with unlessened might
Inspires another frame with life and light.
So I myself (well I the past recall),
When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy’s holy wall,
Was brave Euphorbus: and in conflict drear
Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides’ spear.
The shield this arm did bear I lately saw
In Juno’s shrine, a trophy of that war.
Virgil, in the Sixth Book of his Aeneid, also expounds the doctrine of reincarnation, and describes how the souls in the Otherworld gathered to drink the waters of Lethe, which made them forget the memories of the past, before being reborn in new bodies upon earth.
Apollonius of Tyana, the famous philosopher and Adept of the first century A.D., also believed in reincarnation, and said he could remember a previous life in which he was a ship’s pilot.
Thus it can be amply shown that reincarnation is not an idea confined to the religions of the East. Herodotus, who was an initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries, claimed that the Ancient Egyptians were the first to teach immortality of the soul, and its evolution through a cycle of many lives; and that the Greeks later adopted this opinion as if it were their own.
The old versions of reincarnation sometimes also involved the transmigration of souls, or metempsychosis. The latter teaches that the soul may be reborn in the body of an animal or even a plant or tree; whereas present-day believers in reincarnation generally hold that, while the soul may ascend to the human level through other life-forms, once that level has been reached there is no going back. Evolution continues by means of other human lives; until this earth’s level is transcended, and the soul is confined in flesh no more. Between earthly lives, the soul dwells upon the planes of the Unseen, at such a level, high or low, as its attainment is fitted for.
The Eastern doctrine of Karma has been much misunderstood in the West. It does not mean ‘reward and punishment’; at least not in the way that many people think. It says nothing about our limited earthly ideas of reward and punishment at all. The Sanscrit word karma simply means ‘action’. This carries the implication that every action must produce its appropriate reaction, sooner or later; and if this process is not worked out in one life, then it will be worked out in succeeding lives.
We cannot dogmatise about the deep things of human destiny, from our limited viewpoint. This is why the pagan religions conceived of Karma in the form of Fate, Destiny, or Wyrd, being dispensed to mortals by the triple goddess. The Greeks had their idea of the Three Fates, who were also called the Moirai. The Romans called them the Parcae. Romano-Celtic Britain had the Three Mothers, the Matres. To the Old Norse peoples who were our northern ancestors, the three goddesses of Fate were the Nornir; and the Old English concept of them was ‘The Weird Sisters’, combined eventually into one goddess, Wyrd, meaning ‘Destiny’. There is still an old expression, ‘to dree one’s weird’, meaning to fulfil one’s destiny.
The triple goddess of Fate was associated with the phases of the moon, probably because the moon is man’s oldest meter-out of time. As they revered the moon goddess, so the ideas of reincarnation and destiny naturally commended themselves to witches. Also, they provided an alternative idea of life after death, and the destiny of the soul, to that of the Christian Church; an idea, moreover, which was much older, and part of the racial mythology of Western Europe.
Caesar, in his brief references to the Druids, tells us: “As one of their leading dogmas, they inculcate this: that souls are not annihilated but pass after death from one body to another, and they hold that by this teaching men are much encouraged to valour, through disregarding the fear of death.”
Diodorus Siculus says of the Druids: “Among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevails, according to which the souls of men are immortal, and after a fixed term recommence to live, taking upon themselves a new body.”
In some ancient Gaelic stories, we find the idea of reincarnation appearing. For instance, the men of Ulster urged their hero Cuchulainn to marry, because they believed that “his rebirth would be of himself”; that is, he would be reborn as one of his own descendants. They wanted the soul of this great warrior to remain with their tribe.
Also, another great warrior, Finn MacCoul, was said to have been reborn after 200 years, as an Ulster king called Mongan. This king was an historical personage, who died about A.D. 625.
The story is well-known, of the inscription which was found upon the tomb of King Arthur, “Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus”; meaning, “Here lies Arthur, the once and future King.”
However, it has generally been argued by commentators upon our Celtic past, that the Celts did not believe in reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, in quite the same way that the peoples of the East do. The Celtic genius cast its own glamour over all things that it touched, hiding its beliefs in legends and tales. The atmosphere of haunted twilight, and the peat-fire flame, that comes with Celtic things, is very different from that of the Orient or of Ancient Greece or Alexandria. But this does not mean that the arcane traditions of the British race are in any way belittled, rather the reverse, by being of their own nature. The diamond of Truth is a jewel with many facets, flashing now one colour and now another; but the jewel does not change.
Commentators have also frequently stated that the idea of Karma is peculiar to the Far East. However, it can be found, either implied or openly revealed, in Western beliefs as well.
For instance, Plotinus, who was born in Egypt in 205 or 206 A.D., tells us in his works: “The gods bestow on each the destiny which appertains to him, and which harmonises with his antecedents in his successive existences. Every one who is not aware of this is grossly ignorant of divine matters.”
RITUAL MURDER
In recent years, the western world has been appalled by the slaying of the beautiful film star, Sharon Tate, and the other victims of ritual killings in California. (See MANSON, CHARLES.) Ritual murder has been all too much in the news. One of man’s most primitive and truly savage rites has been shown, in the grimmest manner, to have survived into our own day.
Hideous as these stories are, they are by no means the only evidence of ritual murder in connection with black magic, to be found in modern times. There are still sorcerers who believe that ‘the blood is the life’, and that the life-force of a sacrificed victim can give their dark rituals the power to succeed.
It is idle to pretend that black magic does not exist. There are many power-hungry people in the twilight regions of the occult, who seek merely the most direct means to get what they want. Sometimes they put forward the old argument that the end justifies the means, forgetting that the means also conditions the end.
In more primitive days, the sacrifice of living things was a regular part of religious ritual of all kinds. Blood sacrifice on a considerable scale is enjoined in the Old Testament upon the worshippers of Jehovah. On one occasion, in the case of Jephthah’s daughter, it is quite clear that a human sacrifice was demanded and given.
The sacrifice of the Divine King was distinguished by the fact that in this case the victim was a voluntary one. He knew what accepting the office of king meant. In the eyes of his subjects also, his death would not have been murder at all; simply the following of ancient and sacred custom.
Some Egyptologists now believe that the earlier Pharaohs of Egypt died sacrificial deaths, probably by the bite of the sacred serpent. This sheds a new light on the way in which Cleopatra, the last heiress of the Pharaohs, died. By accepting the fatal bite of the asp, she met death in the traditional manner of her proud ancestors.
The cult of the Thugs in India, who worshipped the goddess Kali, regarded ritual murder as a sacred religious duty. This cult survived until the early nineteenth century, and accounted in its day for the killing of literally thousands of people. Its organisation was complex and thorough, and the slaying of the victim was carried out according to a strict prescribed ritual. He was swiftly and expertly strangled by a scarf, in which a silver coin, dedicated to Kali, had been knotted.
In many primitive societies ritual murder was closely associated with ritual cannibalism. Garry Hogg, in his book Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice (Robert Hale, London, 1958), points out that the motive for cannibalism, while sometimes sheer hunger for tasty flesh-meat, was more often a magical one. It was based upon the belief that by eating the body, or some part of it, or drinking the blood of a sacrificial victim, one could acquire that victim’s ‘soul-substance’ or life-force. An example of this was found in England, when archaeologists investigated a long barrow near the great earth-work called Maiden Castle, in Dorset. It was evidently a burial-place of some importance, as it extended for nearly a third of a mile. The skeleton of a man was found buried within it; and from the condition of the bones, the archaeologists formed the conclusion that ritual cannibalism was involved. The man had been killed and eaten. He was probably a sacrificial victim; perhaps a Sacred King.
Such ceremonies belong to our primitive past. When ritual killing takes place in our own days, its aspect is truly dark and terrible, and belongs to the realm of black magic. Yet take place it does, as many of the police forces of the world could amply verify.
In 1963, a well-attested story of human sacrifice for black magic came from Spain. On 21st May of that year, a 10-year-old girl called Maria Diaz, of Figueras, disappeared. She was never seen again; but a piece of her dress was found, in strange and suspicious circumstances, upon the Holy Mountain of San Salvador. This mountain is crowned by an old, roofed-over sanctuary or altar-place, built in former days by monks. In the small hours of the morning after Maria disappeared, a shepherd heard strange sounds coming through the darkness, from the summit of San Salvador above him. He listened in fear to shrill wailings, a kind of chanting, and wild cries. The next day, he climbed up to the old altar-place, to see what had been happening. He found various symbols drawn upon the dry earth of the floor. The embers of a fire were still smouldering. A smell of incense hung in the air. There were the burnt-down remains of black candles. And there was a piece of charred cloth, with a faded pattern of pink check. Maria’s mother later identified this as being from her daughter’s dress. Police enquiries unearthed the fact that Maria had been last seen getting into a large car, driven by two men in bright-coloured summer shirts. The authorities believed it to be a case of black magic, and probably ritual murder.
One of California’s Satanist cults has found a nastily ingenious way to hold a ‘human sacrifice’ and yet keep within the law. Their Satanic chapel is the basement of an old building, where a 6-foot-tall crucifix hangs upside down over an altar made of oak, and adorned with weird carvings. Skulls are used as chalices, and the scene is dimly lit by flickering candles. But the naked girl victim who lies upon the altar is actually a realistic, life-size plastic doll.
The doll is hollow, and inside is a plastic bag filled with fake ‘blood’ and ‘entrails’. In the course of the ritual, the self-styled priest of Satan gashes the figure open with a knife, and the ‘blood’ flows freely, to the accompaniment of wild yells from his congregation, many of whom are young girls. Magic signs are drawn upon the girls’ bodies in ‘blood’, and the ritual ends with a sexual orgy.
One may dismiss this sort of thing as merely childish mumbo-jumbo; but what ideas might it suggest to a person of precariously-balanced mind, who attended a ritual like this?
When the bodies of Dr Victor Ohta and his family were found in Santa Cruz, California, in October 1970, the Santa Cruz authorities had no doubt that they were dealing with yet another ritual killing. Five people died in this massacre; and at the scene of the crime police found a note which read as follows:
Today World War Three will begin as brought to you by the people of the Free Universe. From this day forward anyone and/or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the Free Universe.
I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anything or anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will.
The note was signed “Knight of Wands”, “Knight of Cups”, “Knight of Swords”, and “Knight of Pentacles”. There was much speculation as to what these strange signatures meant. They are, of course, the four knights or horsemen of the Tarot pack. (See TAROT.) My own theory is that in this context they were meant to symbolise the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the embodiments of Plague, Warfare, Famine and Death.
Another grisly idea from the distant past has appeared in the horrific series of murders in San Francisco, perpetrated by a killer who calls himself Zodiac. Evidently influenced by the occult, this man sent messages to the police claiming that when he died he would be reborn in paradise, and all those whom he had killed would be his slaves. This is reminiscent of the beliefs behind ancient sacrifices carried out at the tombs of kings, when their slaves and concubines were sent to accompany them in the next world.
The combination of a smattering of occultism and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, without any deep knowledge of either, can undoubtedly produce a kind of uprush from the abyss of the collective unconscious, with highly dangerous results. This, it seems to me, is a possible explanation of the events in California which have shocked the world.
Another form of ritual murder was the foundation sacrifice; that is, a sacrificial victim killed when the foundations of a building were laid. The blood of the victim was offered to the gods, and his soul was believed to become a guardian ghost, keeping watch over the building.
In 1966 archaeologists excavated the remains of a Roman fort at Reculver, on the coast of Kent. Beneath the foundations of the building no less than eleven skeletons of infants, young babies between two and eight weeks old, were discovered.
The archaeologist who made this discovery, Mr B. J. Phelp, gave his opinion that three of these infants were definitely foundation sacrifices, laid down sometime during the third century A.D.
A strange sidelight on this grim discovery was afforded by a local ghost story. There was a tradition that the ghostly crying of a child could be heard by night on the shore, where the fort once stood. People avoided the place after dark. This is one of many instances, where an old ghost story has been found by archaeologists to have some sort of basis in fact.
Today, the ceremony of laying a foundation stone is still carried out; and apart from the speechmaking by the mayor or some distinguished visitor, there still remains an echo of the older rites. Very often coins, or some objects of interest or value, are laid beneath the stone. This is the modern form of the foundation sacrifice.
A remarkable thing is that the custom of foundation sacrifice, and even of a human victim, did not by any means cease with the coming of Christianity. Quite a number of old churches have yielded proof of this, when their foundations were for some reason dug up. Many strange details on this subject can be found in Builders’ Rites and Ceremonies: the Folk Lore of Masonry, by G. W. Speth (privately printed for the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, London, 1931).
A notable example was Holsworthy Church in Devonshire. When some restoration work was being done here in 1885, a skeleton was found beneath one of the walls. The evidence indicated that it was that of someone who had been hurriedly buried alive, undoubtedly a foundation sacrifice.
Sometimes animal bones have been discovered, concealed in old churches and other buildings. We may deduce from this that as time passed, animals were substituted for human victims; and later still the bones of animals were supposed to be sufficient, perhaps with the original purpose half forgotten.
When the roof of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, was repaired in the nineteenth century, some bones of animals were found concealed there. A similar discovery was made when Old Blackfriars Bridge, over the River Thames in London, was pulled down in 1867. The foundations of one of the arches were found to have been laid upon a quantity of bones, some of which were human.
This custom of foundation sacrifice prevailed all over Europe and also in Eastern countries. Nor is it entirely forgotten in the present day. It was reported in 1969 that a bizarre rumour was frightening people of Mexico City. A new underground railway was under construction; and fantastic stories were being circulated, that children and adults were being kidnapped and buried under the foundations of the subway, in order to make it safe against earthquakes and subsidences. Official denials of the ‘human sacrifice’ story were made; but some superstitious Mexicans remained unconvinced.
ROYALTY, ITS CONNECTION WITH WITCHCRAFT
The name of King William Rufus has often been linked with witchcraft. ‘Rufus’ means ‘red’, which, as the colour of life, is sacred to the Old Religion. Rufus was the Red King. The grandson of Robert the Devil, he was openly pagan, and disliked by the Christian monks who compiled the chronicles of history. Hence his notoriety as a ‘bad king’, though in fact he was no worse a king than most of his contemporaries.
His death in the New Forest “on the morrow of Lammas”, one of the Great Sabbats of the Old Religion, is still one of Britain’s historical mysteries. (See LAMMAS.)
Less well-known is the tradition that the Plantagenet kings favoured the Old Religion, and some of them actively, though secretly, followed it. The name Plantagenet is derived from Planta genista, the old name for the broom plant, which was their badge. Another old name for the green broom is hag-weed, meaning ‘witch-weed’, because it made the brooms that witches were popularly supposed to fly upon.
Evelyn Eaton’s remarkable historical novel The King is a Witch (Cassell, London, 1965) is based upon the connection of the Plantagenets and especially Edward III, with witchcraft.
The foundation of the Order of the Garter by Edward III certainly seems to have been connected with the Old Religion. (See GARTERS AS WITCHES’ SIGNS.) His son, associated with him in the Order, was always known as the Black Prince. No really adequate reason for this title has ever been given; except that it was supposedly because he wore black armour. It could, however, have had quite another significance. The male leader of a coven was sometimes known as “The Man in Black”.
The lady whom the Black Prince married was called ‘The Fair Maid of Kent’; and again, the female leader of a coven was sometimes known as ‘The Maiden’. All these things, taken singly, could be mere coincidence. Added together, they make a significant picture.
Their son, who became the tragic Richard II, adopted a badge, the White Hart, which is an emblem directly connected with the Old Religion. As the white roebuck hidden in the thicket, it appears in bardic myths, sometimes as a symbol of the human soul, sometimes representing the secret of the Mysteries, and sometimes standing for the sacrificed Divine King himself.
The idea of the Divine King, who has to die at the end of an appointed term, in order that his blood may bring prosperity and fertility to the land, goes back to the remotest antiquity. The whole mystique of royalty and kingship is involved in it. So is the feeling of the sacredness of the king’s person, the belief in the Divine Right of Kings, and so on.
Margaret Murray, in her book The Divine King in England, argues that Britain’s earlier kings were in fact ritually killed. Sometimes, she says, another victim was offered in their place, so that the king might live for a further term of years; but eventually he had to make the supreme sacrifice, because that was the real purpose and secret of kingship.
A suggestion of witchcraft in connection with the Plantagenet dynasty appears again in the time of King Edward IV. The story began in a place which to this day has a reputation for hauntings and uncanny happenings, namely Whittlewood Forest in Northamptonshire. Here Edward IV first met the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, under a tree which was long after known as the Queen’s Oak.
She was a widow, whose husband had fought on what proved to be the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses. On his death in battle, his estates had been forfeited. Elizabeth pleaded with the king to restore them, for the sake of her orphaned children. The king, enchanted by the fair lady he had met under the oak tree, did far more. He fell headlong in love with her, and they were secretly married, early on May Day morning, in the nearby town of Grafton.
The circumstances of this romantic meeting in the fairy-haunted forest, and the secret marriage on the morrow of one of the witches’ Sabbats, no doubt suggested to many people a connection with the Old Religion. Moreover, Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, was later accused, during a troubled period of rebellion, of practising witchcraft; though at the time the affair came to nothing.
It was not forgotten, however. When King Edward IV died in 1483, by the terms of the king’s will his brother Richard was named as Protector of the Realm and guardian of the young prince who was heir to the throne. But before the boy could be crowned Parliament proclaimed the late king’s children illegitimate, saying that his marriage with Elizabeth Woodville was unlawful.
One of the grounds for this declaration was that the marriage “was made of great presumption, without the knowing and assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford, as the common opinion of the people, and the public voice and fame is through all this land”.
It has often been presumed by historians that because the accusation of witchcraft against Elizabeth Woodville was instrumental in placing Richard III on the throne, it was therefore without any foundation. However, the circumstances of her marriage to King Edward IV were certainly unusual, and it seems possible that it was a marriage according to the Old Religion rather than a Christian one. No adequate reason was ever given for Henry VII’s action in depriving the widowed Elizabeth Woodville of all her possessions, and shutting her up in a nunnery for the rest of her life—even though he had married her daughter by Edward IV.
Richard III, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, was the last of the Plantagenets. His famous banner of the White Boar is another example of a device connected with the Old Religion. The boar’s curving tusks, resembling the crescent moon, are still valued as amulets and luck-bringers; and white pigs were sacred to the Druidic moon goddess Cerridwen. Some historians now believe that Richard was by no means as villainous as the Tudors made him out to be. There is even a society which exists for the purpose of clearing the name of Richard III.
With the arrival of the Tudor dynasty, many changes took place in England. One by one, any possible claimants to the throne that remained of the older stock were ruthlessly eliminated. But the sovereigns of England continued to be crowned, with Christian ceremony, upon the pagan Stone of Destiny that forms the basis of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. King Edward I brought this mysterious stone from Scotland in 1297; and it was sanctified by a legend that it was the stone upon which Jacob had rested his head at Bethel. However, the Saxon kings were also crowned upon a sacred stone, which is still preserved at Kingston-on-Thames. According to ancient Celtic legend, the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, is one of the four treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan, the people of the goddess Dana, and its origin is certainly pagan. (See TAROT CARDS.)
One of the ancestors of our present Queen, Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was burned as a witch. Her execution took place in 1537 on the Castle Hill at Edinburgh. She was accused of having plotted to take away the life of King James V of Scotland, by poison and witchcraft. Her beauty and her noble birth made the case long remembered. By some accounts, she was entirely innocent of the charge, and the motive behind the accusations against her was political intrigue.
Others, however, have claimed that Janet Douglas was indeed a witch, and that some part at any rate of the famous haunting of Glamis Castle is attributable to her. A spirit that was her familiar, the legend says, continues to trouble the castle, and so does the phantom of the lady herself.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries accusations of witchcraft in high places were numerous. They were often made against someone the ruling monarch wanted to get rid of; because a charge of witchcraft was a very difficult thing to disprove. Frequently, too, people in high positions did employ witches, astrologers and other practitioners of occult arts, for their own purposes. If anything went wrong and awkward revelations became public, it was usually the low-born witch who was hanged or burned at the stake, while their aristocratic employer escaped the severest punishment.
King James I, in whose reign the most severe law against witchcraft was passed, had good reason to fear witches. Some years earlier, in Scotland, a number of witches had conspired against him, in the hope of putting their own Grand Master, Francis, Earl of Bothwell, on the throne. Bothwell had a claim to the Scottish throne if James died without an heir. However, their plot was discovered, and many of them were burned at the stake, having confessed that they had made an image of the king “so that another might rule in his place, and the government might go to the Devil”.
Bothwell himself was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. But before he could be brought to trial, his friends organised his escape. For some time the king lived in terror of Bothwell. But when a son was born to James and his queen, Bothwell realised that his chances were slender, and decided to leave the country. He settled in Naples, probably because it was near Benevento, the witch centre of Italy; and he continued to be known there as a practitioner of magic.
King James had, very naturally, taken a close personal interest in the examination of the North Berwick witches who had been Bothwell’s followers. One leading witch, Agnes Sampson, he questioned himself, and she told him such strange things, says a contemporary account, “that his Majesty said they [the witches] were all extreme liars”. Stung by this remark, Agnes Sampson had proceeded to prove her powers to him. “Taking his Majesty a little aside, she declared unto him the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at Upslo in Norway, the first night of their marriage, with their answer each to other. Whereat the King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed that all the Devils in hell could not have discovered the same: acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest which is before declared”.
James I virtually declared war on witches; and under the Puritan Commonwealth they had an even worse time. But the restoration of Charles II must have seemed to them as if the old connection between royalty and the Craft of the Wise had returned. The incident of the fugitive king being saved by hiding in the oak-tree at Boscobel is often depicted in contemporary designs. The way in which the king’s face looks through the foliage very much resembles the old picture of the Green Man, the pagan god of the woods. (See GREEN MAN.)
The belief that the sovereign’s touch could cure diseases is certainly connected with the sacredness of the royal blood, and this again goes back to the ideas of the Old Religion. The last British monarch to carry out public ceremonies of touching the sick was Queen Anne. The chief, though not the only disease supposed to be healed by the royal touch, was scrofula, which was called ‘the king’s evil’ for this reason.