WITCHCRAFT AND LYCANTHROPY
I have mentioned already that in the occult tradition women are regarded as evil. In numerology, the female number 2, which represents gentleness, submissiveness, sweetness, is also the Devil’s number. The Hindu goddess Kali, the Divine Mother, is also the goddess of violence and destruction. Women tend to ‘think’ with their feelings and intuitions rather than with the logical faculty. A female assessment of a situation or a person is likely to be more accurate and delicate than a man’s, but it lacks long-range vision. One might put it crudely by saying that women suffer from short-sightedness, and men from long-sightedness; woman cannot see what lies far away; man cannot see what is close. Thus the two are ideal complements. The association of woman with evil arises from the situation in which the female assumes the male role, when a short-term logic is applied to long-term purposes. William Blake portrays the situation in his ‘prophecy’ Europe. Los is the male god of poetry, the sun and time: his consort, Enitharmon, is inspiration, the moon and space. But although they are the ideal ‘man and wife’ in eternity, they often fail to understand the other’s nature in the realms of time. Blake seems to believe that ‘female reason’ came to dominate Europe soon after the Crucifixion, and continued to do so for 1,800 years, until the revolutions in America and France reasserted the healthier, more impersonal masculine will. But as a result of this female domination, all the less pleasant aspects of Christianity came into being – the idea that sex is sinful, sickly schoolmarmish notions of virtue and of eternal reward in ‘an allegorical abode where existence hath never come’. Creativity and adventurousness are stifled, for the female obsession with security makes them seem dangerous. Whether this situation is evil in itself, it certainly creates evil; the revolt of men like Sade and Crowley is the violent male reaction against this stifling female idea of goodness, and the triviality and spite that are its negative aspects. According to Blake, Christianity became a negative and female religion, a kind of landlady’s religion of prohibitions and ‘thou shalt not’.
If all this is true, if Blake and the occult tradition are correct in their view of women, the result is a completely new insight into witchcraft. Why do we always think of witches as women? The word applies to both men and women; but the idea of a man with magic powers conjures up a picture of a wizard or warlock, someone like Merlin or Tolkien’s Gandalf, or perhaps Lytton’s serpentine magician. The word ‘witch’ arouses visions of women on broomsticks, stirring cauldrons with toads and henbane, or offering obscene homage to the Devil. Why this association of ideas?
At this present point in human history, evolution is aiming at Faculty X. Human beings are partly animal; we are tied down to the present moment, like cows. But we also have a remarkable capacity that is not possessed by any other animal. Consider that passage in Dickens’s Christmas Carol, where Scrooge thinks about himself as a schoolboy, remaining behind in the schoolroom and reading the Arabian Nights with its visions of far cities and sultans’ palaces, Ali Baba and Sinbad. In such a moment he realises how far his own life has gone wrong. The human mind was meant to take wings and escape the mere present moment, soar away to other times and places.
If intelligent and vital people are denied this ‘holiday’ from everyday triviality, their creativity takes the form of an increasingly burning resentment against the life that imprisons them, and against its moral standards. But it is not only the human imagination that craves release; the human will needs aims and desires to stimulate it.
The result can be seen in the famous case of Isobel Gowdie, the Auldearne witch, who suddenly decided to ‘confess’ in 1662, and created a legend that retained its power for centuries. She seems to have been an attractive, red-headed girl who married a Scottish farmer, whose remote farm was near Auldearne, in Morayshire. Life on the farm was dull and she remained childless. Her husband was an unimaginative boor. Isobel claims that she met a ‘man in grey’ on the downs, and that he baptised her as a witch that same evening in Auldearne church; this was in 1647. She went on to describe witches’ sabbaths – with covens of thirteen witches – and her power to transform herself into a hare or cat. Significantly, her confessions are obsessively sexual; she had intercourse with demons at the sabbaths, and with the Devil himself; she even had intercourse with one of her demon lovers while lying in bed beside her sleeping husband. The sperm of these demons, she said, was icy cold. The Devil used to beat the witches, who were, of course, naked.
The picture that emerges is of an imaginative and highly sexed girl being driven half insane with frustration, until she evolves a whole fantasy about the powers of evil. It is a basically masochistic fantasy, in which she is baptised in her own blood, sucked from her by the Devil, and then is beaten and sexually possessed by demons. Eventually her whole life is dominated by this fantasy, which is reinforced by her strong masochistic tendencies; her sexual perversion develops until it becomes a kind of sweet poison, made all the more potent by the rigid Presbyterianism, the Calvinistic Bible-thumping, that dominates the community. She can have no doubt that she has sold herself to the Devil, for the fantasies that possess her day and night are diabolic: the Devil swishing his scourge through the air, and violating her with his immense, scaly penis, which produces pangs as excruciating as childbirth, yet at the same time indescribably pleasurable. After fifteen years of this, she is suddenly seized by a terrifying, an almost unthinkable idea. It is like the urge that drives some men to expose themselves to children, or that made Peter Kürten go back to the scene of his sadistic murders to savour the horror of the crowd. Why not make her fantasy public, shatter everybody by telling them what has been going on in their stolid, sabbatarian community? The idea appeals to her masochism. And why not involve other people in the community? – not, of course, out of spite, but merely because this would make it altogether more convincing. She confesses; the fantasies pour out of her in the six weeks between April 13 and May 27, 1662, and she gloats as she sees the shock they produce. They strip her and examine her minutely for devil’s marks, and she finds it all deliciously voluptuous.
It is not clear what happened to her, or to the other Auldearne witches she implicated: one authority says she was burned, and her ashes scattered; another declares that the records are incomplete, and that she may even have been released eventually. Probably she was executed. The case is remarkable chiefly for its detail – that is, for the fertility of Isobel Gowdie’s imagination.
But this is not to assert that all witchcraft from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries can be reduced to terms of imagination and sexual frustration. We know that a large percentage of people have occult powers, and always have had. These range from the ability to ‘read character’ to the ability to cause ‘supernatural’ happenings. Such powers are more common among simple country people than people in towns. We also know that when the will and imagination are gripped with some strong idea, reality often seems to conform to it. There is no need to doubt Crowley’s story about the dictation of The Book of the Law; it is equally certain that it was not the god Ra-Hoor-Khuit who contacted Crowley’s wife and finally dictated the book to Crowley. Crowley’s belief in magic was a deeply emotional obsession, the channel through which springs of creativity found their way to the surface. There are plenty of parallel stories of ‘inspiration’, from the prophecies of Nostradamus to those of Joanna Southcott at the end of the eighteenth century. Joanna Southcott’s reputation as an inspired prophetess ended in 1814, when she announced to the world that she was about to bear Shiloh, the Prince of Peace, in a virgin birth, and actually showed every sign of pregnancy – except a baby.) Strindberg’s autobiography Inferno reveals the way that an obsessional conviction about supernatural powers seems to cause events that confirm the reality of the powers. According to William Blake, a firm persuasion that a thing is so makes it so. Once the imaginative pattern has been set, and has stirred the creative obsessions, the rest follows.
It is worth noting that most of the male magicians we have considered in this book have been, on the whole, benevolent: Agrippa, Dee, Cagliostro, Saint-Germain; even Crowley asserted that his magic was strictly white, and there are no stories of his harming anyone through magic. When Powys discovered that he was harming people with his psychic blasts of anger, he became ‘neurotically benevolent’. Women, on the other hand, are more prone to personal obsession, and, in the case of ‘natural witches’, to the misuse of their power – not for personal advantage, but for the disadvantage of their enemies.
All this suggests a theory of witchcraft that differs fundamentally from the two hypotheses that have so far held the field. The first, represented by the ‘Reverend’ Montague Summers, holds that the Devil and his hordes of demons are real, and that witches are genuinely in their power. The second, to be found in Rossell Hope Robbins’s Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, holds the whole thing to be a delusion. The view I am here suggesting is that witches and their powers are real enough; the Devil and his powers are not. Montague Summers, that dubious and romantic clergyman, is not entirely wrong when he says that most witches deserved what they got. This is not to say that they deserved to be tortured and burned; no one does. But many of them may have believed themselves to be servants of the Devil. It is significant that all the ‘magic’ described by Isobel Gowdie is inspired by malice: the witches dug up the body of an unchristened child and buried it in a farmer’s manure heap to destroy his crops; stuck pins in a clay image to destroy the local laird’s children; ploughed a piece of land with a miniature plough drawn by toads to make it sterile. Whether or not Isobel Gowdie really took part in such magical exercises is a matter for argument; but there can be no doubt that many witches did. And in many cases, perhaps the majority, their spells must have been effective.
There is another aspect that must be taken into account. In small, lonely communities, superstition itself can create a kind of ‘magical ether’ that may increase the effectiveness of the spells. This can be seen in a case of our own century, the ‘witchcraft murder’ of Charles Walton in February 1945 at Lower Quinton, Warwickshire. Walton, a seventy-four-year-old labourer, was found under a willow tree lying on his back, with a pitchfork driven through his throat and into the ground; a cross had been slashed on his ribs, starting at the throat, and the bill-hook that had been used was still lodged between his ribs. Fabian of the Yard, who was sent to Lower Quinton, at first had every reason to suppose it an open-and-shut case, since if Walton had enemies, everyone in the district would know about it. Fabian’s team took four thousand statements and sent twenty-nine samples of clothing, hair and blood to the police laboratories for analysis, but all to no effect. People were tense and unhelpful. They waited a whole day to question a man, who peered out of his door and remarked, ‘He’s been dead and buried a month now – what are you worried about?’; then shut the door firmly.
The inference seems fairly clear: many people in the area know about the murder, and are not telling. Lower Quinton is in the middle of witchcraft country. A few miles away, on a high ridge, stand the Rollright Stones, a monument probably as old as Stonehenge and undoubtedly the site of witches’ sabbaths in the past. It is a country of wooded hills, winding roads, limestone cottages and sinister names: the Devil’s Elbow, Upper and Lower Slaughter; Meon Hill itself, in whose shadow the murder occurred, has a sinister reputation for witchcraft.
Donald McCormick, who wrote a book on the case, recounts a conversation in the village pub, in which one of the locals stated that he knew of two witches still living in the area, while another claimed that he had married a witch, who later left him. The dead man himself had had a reputation for second sight. As a boy he had seen a black dog for three nights on Meon Hill; on the third night it had changed into a headless woman, and the following day his sister had died. He bred large toads, and there were many of them in his garden when he died. Fabian himself saw a black dog running down Meon Hill, followed closely by a farmhand; but when he asked the farmhand about the dog, which had run out of sight, he went pale and asked, ‘What dog?’ That afternoon, the police car ran over a dog. The next day a heifer died in a ditch – the second since Fabian’s arrival.
The murder of Charles Walton is still unsolved, but it is possible to make an ‘informed guess’ as to what happened. Walton was believed to be a witch, and his solitary habits increased the impression. He bred toads – an odd occupation – and a local inhabitant told Donald McCormick that he sometimes harnessed the toads to a toy plough and allowed them to run in fields. Isobel Gowdie claimed to have used the same method to cause poor crops. The farmers certainly had poor crops the previous year; many of them complained to Fabian about it. It was 1945, the last year of the war, and for the past five years, southern Warwickshire had been exceptionally isolated – no foreign visitors to Stratford or Evesham, low gravity beer in the pubs and not much of that. In 1944 there was a bad harvest; 1945 began warm and wet; but somebody believed that Charles Walton and his toads would ensure another bad harvest. Southern Warwickshire has its own traditional methods of dealing with witches. There is a belief that if a witch is ‘blooded’ – made to bleed – her power is neutralised. In 1643 Parliamentary forces saw an old woman walking on the river at Newbury, and shot her, after slashing her forehead to drain her of her power. (Robbins suggests she was walking on stilts.) In 1875, seventy years before the murder of Charles Walton, a village idiot named John Haywood became convinced that an old woman called Ann Turner (or Tenant) had bewitched him; he pinned her to the ground with a hay fork, and slashed her throat and chest in the form of a cross with a bill-hook; this was only a few miles away from Lower Quinton – in Long Compton.
That Walton was a witch is doubtful; that locals believed he was is almost certain. To understand the murder, and how presumably decent people could condone it, one has to make an effort of imagination, and carry the mind back to the warm January and February of 1945, in an out-of-the-way village suffering the effects of five years of war. Walton was killed on February 14, which was not only St. Valentine’s day and Ash Wednesday, but the day on which the ancient druids made their sacrifices. (The druidic date was February 1, but their calendar was two weeks behind ours.) The sacrifice was for ensuring good crops. Walton’s murder was probably planned months in advance, perhaps the previous autumn, and the date fixed. It seems fairly certain that it was believed that his ‘familiar’ was a black dog, for a black dog was found hanged on Meon Hill a few days after the murder. And if anyone experienced remorse about the killing of a harmless old labourer, it probably vanished as the year advanced, and the harvest was bad, in spite of the good weather. McCormick quotes one old countryman: ‘Crops should have been the best ever with early spring. There’s no reason for bad crops. Summat’s wrong when crops go against nature.’
The Lower Quinton case is not particularly interesting for its own sake, but it enables us to understand something about witchcraft in Europe. For the ‘European witch-craze’ (as Professor Trevor-Roper calls it) is a baffling phenomenon that has never been satisfactorily explained. The Middle Ages did not believe in witches; the official Church doctrine, expressed in the ‘canon Episcopi’, stated that anyone who believed in witches ‘is beyond doubt an infidel and a pagan’.
The change in attitude began in the eleventh century, with the rise of a powerful sect called the Cathars. Doctrinally speaking, the Cathars were descendants of the Gnostics and Manichees, whom we have discussed in an earlier chapter. They believed that the Old Testament God was a demon, that the world was the creation of the Devil, the Monster of Chaos. They accepted that salvation could be obtained through Jesus, but apparently insisted that Jesus had not actually been crucified on the cross; his earthly form was a phantom, for how could the essence of goodness be embodied in matter, which is evil by nature? Like the Manichees, and the later Russian sect called the Skoptzi, the Cathars believed in sexual abstention, on the grounds that anything that prolongs physical existence is evil.
The amazing thing is that Catharism gained such immense and widespread acceptance. Originating, apparently, in the Balkans in the tenth century, they spread slowly over Europe. A sect of Cathars near the town of Albi, in southern France, became known as Albigenses. In various forms, this new Gnosticism spread as far as Constantinople (where they were known as Bogomils) in the east to northern France, where the first Cathar bishop was established in 1149. By the end of the twelfth century there were eleven Cathar bishops, six of them in Italy itself.
No doubt the misery and disease of the late Middle Ages helps to account for this success. Prosperous countries are content with an easy-going religion; where there is poverty and misery, something sterner and darker is required. This is why Presbyterianism later made such an appeal in Scotland, and why Methodism flourished among the bleak and rainy villages of Cornwall. There is also something in the Manichean doctrine that appeals to the deep romanticism in human nature, the feeling that this world is hell and that man’s happiness lies in ‘another sphere’.
When Count Raymond VI of Toulouse became a Cathar, the Pope decided it was time to do something about it, and called for a crusade. To many knights and barons of France, this was like being asked to a boar hunt; it would only last forty days (the standard specified time for a crusade), and there was sure to be plenty of rape and plunder. A vast army swept down on southern France, and whole towns were wiped out, heretics and faithful alike. Simon de Montfort (father of the De Montfort who formed the first English parliament) was the most brutal of these plunderers, and stayed on in Toulouse, causing a bloody war. The infamous Inquisition was born in Toulouse in 1229, and its most determined agents were Dominicans, who travelled around and reported heresy wherever they found it. The full story of the horrors of these years has never been told, and perhaps this is just as well. The Church was determined to stamp out this heresy at all costs. A cynic might take the view that cardinals dining on roast boar and good Italian wine felt threatened by the bleakly ascetic doctrine of the Cathars. At all events, the Cathars and Albigenses were bloodily stamped out; the few survivors withdrew to remote mountain villages, as did the Waldenses under similar persecution more than two centuries later. Dominic (later St. Dominic), founder of the Friar Preachers, who established his headquarters at Toulouse in 1215, vowed to dedicate himself to destroying Catharism by ‘persuasion addressed to the heart and mind’, but his secret police – for this, in effect, is what the Dominicans were – soon got the bit between their teeth, and saw Devil worshippers in every shadow. It was these Dominican ‘preachers’ who discovered that the Devil had changed his tactics; having lost his army of Cathars, he set out to create a secret army of evil old women, dedicated to his service and to the secret overthrow of the Church. Possibly they were not entirely wrong. Extreme cruelty and persecution is bound to produce an ‘underground’ dedicated to destroying the oppressors through secret means. And so we must think of the earliest ‘witches’ as a Cathar Resistance Movement, a kind of heretical I.R.A. This is not as absurd as it sounds. It is true that there had always been witches – in small numbers. But they were, so to speak, private practitioners. The Cathars believed that the God who created this world is a demon who had managed somehow to wrest his power from the Ultimate Godhead, which is far above such trivialities as creation. This is a comfortless doctrine. To whom are you to pray when in extreme distress? Not to the Supreme Being; why should he care what one of his fallen aeons has been up to? That leaves the wicket aeon himself, the Monster of Chaos, Old Nobodaddy. Perhaps some of the Cathar women, who had seen their husbands and children murdered, did pray to the Monster of Chaos for revenge. Two centuries later the Cathars no longer existed, but the Dominican inquisitors were fulminating against witches, whom they called Waldenses, who met together at Sabbaths or ‘valdesia’. (The Waldenses were also called Vaudois after the Alpine village of Piedmont where they established themselves.) In the Pyrenees, witches were called gazarii (obviously derived from Cathars).
The Dominicans kept asking the Church to give its official sanction to the crusade against witches, but the Church, remembering that the ‘canon Episcopi’ denied the existence of witches, held out for another century. Then, unfortunately, a superstitious paranoiac, John XXII, became pope. He was convinced that his enemies were plotting to kill him by magic; so it was he who finally gave way to the Dominican demand that ‘sorcery’ itself should become a crime, quite apart from the question of heresy. This was in 1326, in Super illius specula. It is significant that this same Pope had declared heretical the Franciscan doctrine of the poverty of Christ; anything to do with poverty was suspect.
Even so, the witchcraft epidemic began slowly. It started in the Pyrenees and the Alps – the territory of the Albigenses and Waldenses. The pattern emerged very early. In the first secular trial for witchcraft at Paris, in 1390, a woman called Jehane de Brigue was accused of sorcery by a man she had cured when on the point of death! Jehane explained that she was not a witch, but that she had simply used charms, taught to her by another woman, which included ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’ – from which it is clear that the fundamentals of ‘charming’ have not changed in six hundred years. Under threats of torture, confined in an icy and filthy dungeon over the winter months of 1390–1391, Jehane finally ‘confessed’ to having a demonic familiar named Haussibut. Ruilly, the man she had cured, told the court that Jehane attributed his illness to bewitchment by his mistress, by whom he had two children. Under threat of torture, Jehane confessed that it was actually she who had bewitched Ruilly, at the request of Ruilly’s wife, Macette, who wanted to pursue a love affair with the local curate. Macette was then also arrested, tortured on the rack, and confessed. It is not explained why Jehane bewitched Ruilly, and then saved him. Jehane and Macette were executed. There were undoubtedly many cases in which white witchcraft – the natural application of ‘occult powers’ – led to torture and execution. In 1618 a vagabond named John Stewart had a vision of a ship sinking near Padstow in Cornwall; he was in Irvine, in Scotland, at the time. When the news came that a ship from that area had sunk at Padstow, Stewart was arrested and charged with second sight. A woman who had muttered curses about someone on board the ship was arrested as a witch, and under torture she implicated two other women and the eight-year-old daughter of one of them. The child confessed that she had seen a demon dog that emitted light while her mother and Margaret Barclay, the accused witch, moulded wax figures. Margaret Barclay was strangled and burned, although she withdrew the confession that had been forced from her under torture. One woman she accused died after a fall from the church roof; she was escaping from the belfry. Another ‘confessed’, but withdrew her confession, and declined to forgive the executioner at the end. John Stewart managed to strangle himself with his own bonnet ribbon while awaiting execution.
After the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (already referred to on page 345) in 1486, the new science of printing played its important part in the expansion of the witch craze. Any writer with a vivid imagination could reckon on achieving a degree of celebrity with a description of the demons evoked by witches. Professor Trevor-Roper points out that the majority of these ‘demonologists’, who caused such incalculable suffering, were harmless, scholarly characters; Rémy was a Latin poet and a historian, yet when he died in 1616 he had sent nearly three thousand victims to the stake. Boguet and De L’Ancre are both mild scholars and Latinists.
The witch craze was so horrible and so widespread that the human imagination cannot encompass it. We find it hard enough to envisage Hitler’s murder of six million Jews over less than ten years, so it is quite impossible to imagine a campaign of torture and murder lasting for four centuries. It is true that witchcraft executions were on a smaller scale than the Nazi atrocities; but it must also be remembered that each witch was tortured individually. Rossell Hope Robbins seethes with moral indignation: ‘The record of witchcraft is horrible and brutal; degradation stifled decency, the filthiest passions masqueraded under the cover of religion, and man’s intellect was subverted to condone bestialities that even Swift’s Yahoos would blush to commit. Never were so many so wrong, so long But after reading a dozen or so pages of his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, the student feels that these words err on the side of mildness.
For atrocities on this scale, there can be no single cause. It was partly political; countries came first under Protestant, then Catholic domination and when the Church wanted to punish a Protestant populace, it sent Dominican inquisitors. Catholic reconquest caused witch purges in the Rhineland, Flanders, Poland, Hungary. It was the Church’s way of taking revenge on Protestants. It could also be used by a prince or baron as a method of taking revenge on rebellious subjects – a safe way, that would not lead to further rebellion.
But the psychological motivations are equally important. The beginning of the witchcraft craze corresponded with the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War. When people are oppressed and miserable, violence becomes a psychological necessity. And violence is always associated with sex, particularly in puritanical and repressive societies. Witches were made to confess to intercourse with demons, and minutely examined for the witch’s mark (a spot on the body insensitive to pain). Franz Buirmann, appointed witch-seeker by the Prince-Archbishop of Cologne in the 1630s, apparently used his position to seduce women who would otherwise be inaccessible. A Frau Peller who refused his advances was the wife of a court assessor. Buirmann acted swiftly; she was arrested one morning and was under torture by the afternoon; the hairs were all shaved off her body and head, and the torturer’s assistant was allowed to rape her while he did this. Buirmann, looking on, stuffed a dirty piece of rag into her mouth to stifle her cries. She was burned alive in a hut filled with dry straw, all within hours. Buirmann had been placed in a position where he could act out sexual-sadistic fantasies. It sounds like an episode from a novel by Sade.
With all the talk of demons, witches’ sabbaths, torture, the smell of burning flesh, witchcraft became a darkly alluring obsession. Its equivalent nowadays would be the particularly violent sex crime, which is nearly always followed (a) by imitative crimes, (b) by confessions from cranks. The murder of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, in Hollywood in 1949 was followed by six similar murders in the Los Angeles area and twenty-nine confessions to the crime. The particularly horrible nature of the murder – she had been hung upside down, tortured, then cut in half – had made it front-page news for weeks. Lonely men, brooding on the newspapers in stuffy lodgings, finally decided that it would be worth the risk. And in the same way, lonely, bored women like Isobel Gowdie, living narrow and comfortless lives, found the lurid pamphlets about intercourse with demons terrifying and increasingly fascinating. And since they believed that the air is full of invisible demons, it would not be long before they were convinced that their wishes were known to the Devil. A sexual dream would confirm this.
But why did all this happen after the Reformation? The Middle Ages may have been the ages of faith, but they were also ages of war, poverty, disease and belief in demons. All the conditions were there. Except one. The peculiarly human condition of freedom of imagination. In the Middle Ages, this had not yet evolved. Man plodded about his daily tasks, and did not see far beyond them. What happened after 1450 was not only a social but an evolutionary change, one of those periodic ripples that seem to run across the human race like wind across corn. Gilles de Rais, a baffling figure, signals its arrival in the first half of the century. His spirit wants to burst its prison, to commit crimes that no man has ever dared to commit, to establish contact with the Devil himself, to become the wealthiest and most powerful prince in Christendom. The peasants whose children he stole were patient, plodding, cowlike creatures who finally forgave the torturer. But during the next century, the unrest that drove Gilles to demonism reached the peasantry, and was amplified by their boredom. Why, asks Dr. Margaret Murray, are the accounts of the witches’ sabbaths so remarkably similar, whether they come from France in the fourteenth century or Austria in the fifteenth or Spain in the sixteenth or the Netherlands in the seventeenth? Why is the Devil always described as a huge, goatlike man (or, less frequently, as a huge toad) who speaks with a hoarse voice ‘like someone speaking through a bung hole’, who makes the witches kiss his nauseating behind, and whose embraces are icy cold? It must be more than mere imagination, or some of the stories would vary, making the Devil hot, or sweet-smelling, or pleasant-voiced. Montague Summers takes this to be evidence for the reality of the Devil; Dr. Murray does not go as far as that; she only suggests that the sabbaths were a reality, and that the Devil was probably impersonated by an enormous man wearing a mask and a cloak, and who used an artificial phallus that squirted cold milk. She certainly has no doubts that such sabbaths took place, and neither have even the most sceptical historians. What happened then, it seems, is that the witch craze produced a hysteria that created precisely what it was trying to destroy. This is a peculiarity of the human imagination that is only now being recognised by psychology: that when it is denied active, creative expression, it seeks out any powerful stimulus, no matter how terrifying or negative. The human mind craves movement, any movement. Sartre describes, in one of his early books, the case of a young girl who had been educated in a convent, and then married to a professional man. Left alone all day in the apartment, she began to experience an absurd compulsion to go to the window and summon men like a prostitute. Goethe has a classic story called The Honest Attorney in which a virtuous young wife, left to herself, finally becomes insanely obsessed with the idea of comitting adultery – precisely because the idea would normally horrify her. What is at work here is the same principle as in hypnotism. Boredom or emptiness allows the mind to fill up with unused energy, producing a painful sensation like an overfull bladder. An excessive degree of self-consciousness is created. This produces the usual effect of preventing the instincts from doing their quiet, unobtrusive work; the feelings are frozen. The desire for strong feelings – the most basic of human psychological needs – becomes a kind of panic; guilt and misery are preferable to boredom. What the mind really craves is the sense of vastness and wide-openness, of other times and other places, of meaning. What the inquisitors were doing was to create a body of myths and symbols that were supercharged with meaning and that consequently exercised an overwhelming gravitational pull on imaginative and bored women. The Devil literally finds work for idle hands and idle minds.
I would regard this as the most important element in the witch craze, more important than ecclesiastical politics, or even the persecution of harmless ‘natural mediums’ and clairvoyants. And if this is so, then it must also be recognised that the inquisitors and judges were not as blameworthy as we now believe. They knew little or nothing about the symptoms of sexual hysteria. And the symptoms of demonic possession were often very convincing indeed, as we have seen in the case of the Loudun nuns. Let a modern liberal rationalist try to put himself in the position of some ordinary parish priest of the seventeenth century, reading a pamphlet describing the possession of a girl called Elizabeth Allier. When the nun, who is twenty-seven, goes into fits that any modern psychologist would recognise as sexual hysteria, and speaks in a hoarse, masculine voice, the Dominican friar François Farconnet repeats exorcisms and questions the demons; they give their names as Orgeuil and Boniface and explain that they entered the girl on a crust of bread when she was seven, and intend to stay there until she dies. The incantations continue over Saturday and Sunday, and finally, when the friar exposes the sacrament and orders, ‘Go, then, miserable creatures,’ the girl twists into extreme convuisions, her tongue sticks several inches out of her mouth, and the devils declare hoarsely, ‘I go, Jesus.’ From then on (we assume), the girl is cured. No one is hurt, no one is tortured or burnt; it is just a case of a holy friar freeing a poor girl from two evil spirits. Would even the most sceptical parish priest be justified in doubting that demons really do exist and that he should warn his congregation solemnly about the importance of saying grace before meals, and making the sign of the cross over anything you happen to eat between meals? Moreover, although it is true that many witch confessions are produced by torture, many of them are voluntary, by women who know that their only chance of saving their souls from eternal punishment is to allow their bodies to be committed to the flames.
It is true that there are sceptics – like Johann Weyer (the pupil of Cornelius Agrippa), Reginald Scot, Friedrich von Spee, himself a witch-judge who changed his mind about witches – but how can one take such people seriously? They assert that witches do not exist, that accounts of spells and second sight are old wives’ tales, when everyone in the parish knows that the grocer’s wife dreamt of her father’s death the very night it happened and that horses shy up at the spot where two witches were buried in unhallowed ground. This kind of scepticism is really an incapacity for religious feeling; it would be capable of dismissing the virgin birth itself as superstition.
And, of course, such reasoning is fundamentally correct. But the evidence for demons and witches’ sabbaths was of a kind that no reasonable, unbiased mind could reject. Some witches undoubtedly could blast crops with their curses. Thousands of old women could foretell the future and charm warts. What the inquisitors – the sincere and religious ones – failed to see was that all this is no reason for torture and burning; that, in fact, the torture and burning have the effect of increasing the grip of the Devil on the human imagination.
We must also take into account the stimulus of torture and burning on the human imagination. Man has not been civilised for long – a few thousand years. Christianity does not come naturally to the strong and enterprising. Prosperous merchants and stolid farmers long for peace and a quiet routine, but the born soldier dreams of winning glory in battle, and the born criminal dreams of burning cities and raping the women. It is significant that the really violent manifestations of the witch craze date from the end of the Hundred Years’ War (1453), almost as if it were a substitute for war. And they come to an end in the latter part of the eighteenth century, just before the new era of wars and revolutions plunge Europe into mass bloodshed again.
The witch craze rolled over Europe in a series of waves, each one followed by a period of calm. There were times when the persecutions became so bloody that there was a spontaneous revolt against them. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the craze was reaching a climax, particularly in Germany, where its most sadistic manifestations seem to occur. If the appointed inquisitors showed themselves too tolerant, they were likely to be burned as witches. This happened to Dietrich Flade, who was Vice-Governor of Treves and Rector of the University; he exerted his influence to restrain witch hunters, and did his best to get condemned witches banished instead of burned. His leniency opened him to the suspicion of being on the Devil’s payroll, and a witch hunter named Zandt literally ‘framed’ him by bribing condemned witches to shout that Flade was a witch himself. (In exchange for this, they were strangled before being burned.) In spite of his eminent position, Flade was arrested, and finally strangled and burned. In Bamberg in 1628, Vice-Chancellor George Haan was similarly accused of being too lenient with witches, and he and his wife and daughter were all burned, in spite of an order from the Emperor himself for their release. In the case of Haan, this might be considered poetic justice, for he had been one of the accusers of the burgomaster Johannes Junius, whose last letter to his daughter before his execution is one of the most moving documents in the history of witchcraft:
And then came also – God in highest heaven have mercy – the executioner, and put the thumbscrews on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood spurted from the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from my writing.
Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew up on the ladder. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end. Eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. I said to Dr. Braun: ‘God forgive you for thus misusing an innocent.’ He replied: ‘You are a knave’ …
Now, my dearest child, you have all my acts and confessions, for which I must die. And it is all sheer lies and inventions, so help me God … If God send no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned …
Other eminent citizens were tried and executed; their property, valued at 220,000 florins, went to the Bishop-Prince, Gottfried Johann von Dornheim. (His cousin, bishop of Würzburg, burned nine hundred witches between 1623 and 1631). Tortures included crushing by heavy weights, the ladder (a form of strappado, dislocating the arms from their sockets), baths in boiling water (which killed six people in 1630), forcible feeding on herring cooked in salt, and then refusal of water, needles driven into the quick of the nails up to their heads and – perhaps most effective for procuring confessions – prevention of sleep for days or weeks. Punishments included the cutting off of hands, and the tearing off of female breasts with red-hot pincers. Eventually the Emperor Ferdinand himself was forced to intervene and order that the trials be made public and confiscation of property stopped. The Bishop died in 1632; his cousin had died the previous year. Many of these epidemics of sadism ceased only when the instigator died a natural death.
The prince-bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg were brutal sadists. Other notable witch hunters have been callous rogues. England’s most infamous figure, Matthew Hopkins, ‘the witch-finder general’, claimed to have ‘the Devil’s list of all the witches in seventeenth-century England’ when, in fact, he had only read two books on demonology. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he set up a committee, and was soon travelling from end to end of England to examine witches, charging large sums of money for his services. He was an unsuccessful lawyer who became a highly successful prosecutor for fourteen months. He declared that the sign of a witch is that she has a familiar – a demon in the form of an animal – and the deposition against his first victim, Elizabeth Clarke, of Manningtree, Essex, included his sworn statement that he had seen four imps in the form of a dog, a polecat, a greyhound and a black demon with her. (His assistants also swore to having seen them.) His methods of extorting confessions were less horrible than those of the German witch-finders, but equally effective: he threw trussed-up women into duckponds to see if they sank, forced victims to sit cross-legged on a low stool until they confessed. He also made them walk continuously until their feet blistered. This form of torture demanded relays of ‘walkers’. A seventy-year-old parson, John Lowes, of Bury St. Edmunds, was kept awake for several nights, and run backwards and forwards across the room at top speed, until he confessed to all the accusations. He retracted the confession later, but was hanged all the same.
The Civil War was still raging, and the tension found outlet in these witch trials. When a dozen people had been condemned and hanged everyone had an illusory feeling that everything would be better from now on. There were mass trials, and in 1645 nineteen people were condemned and hanged at Chelmsford. Four of the thirty-two accused had already died in prison, and several others went back there for a long time. At Bury St. Edmunds, eighteen were hanged. Hopkins was responsible for sixty-eight executions in Suffolk alone during 1645. But by the following year, moderation had begun to assert itself. A Huntingdon clergyman, John Gaule, preached against him when he heard that Hopkins intended to begin a witch hunt there; Hopkins blustered and threatened, but his authority collapsed as quickly as it had been established; he retired to his home in Manningtree and died of tuberculosis later in the same year. He had been responsible for some hundreds of deaths in fourteen months. The repeal of the witchcraft act in 1736 – so that the punishment ceased to be death – put an end to the witchcraft craze in England, although witches continued to be ‘swum’ for fifty years or more after it was repealed.
To read straight through a large number of accounts of witch trials, as I did before writing this chapter, is to begin to feel slightly insane. The accounts of tortures lead one to wonder whether human beings are ultimately redeemable; for every saint, the human race has apparently produced a hundred murderers capable of the last degree of viciousness. And the sheer absurdities to which so many of the accused confessed add a discordant note of farce to the tragedy. Yet oddly enough, the final impression is one of pity – a pity that embraces the accusers and accused. The human mind was never intended for narrowness, and when it is trapped, it becomes trivial and vicious. The real tragedy of Suffolk in 1645 is not that Matthew Hopkins hanged a hundred or so innocent people, but that human beings in general were so demoralised and devitalised that they could accept it. Village communities had become stagnant pools that bred pestilence.
This is difficult for us to understand in the age of big cities and mass communication; we cannot imagine that kind of stagnation, in which the human mind had no escape from itself except through malicious gossip about the neighbours. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, all this began to change. The dividing line between that world of the past and our own world was an event that occurred in the year 1740: the publication of a novel called Pamela. The statement sounds absurd; but consider it more closely. Before Richardson wrote Pamela, the chief form of ‘escapist’ entertainment that issued from the printers was the pamphlet, usually with a title like A True Narration of the Horrible Crime Committed at York by So and So. The novels of Defoe, issued a quarter of a century before Richardson began to write, are enlarged pamphlets containing ‘true narrations’; Pamela is a novel told in letters, a description of a virtuous girl’s resistance to her would-be seducer, and it is very long. Its reader could enter the world of another person’s life, and stay there for days on end.
If we imagine Jane Austen, or the Brontë sisters, being brought up in a country vicarage in the year 1700, we can immediately grasp the import of what has happened. No doubt Jane Austen would still have read Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, and become a literate and articulate young lady; but it would not have been the same; the classics are bound to be a little remote. But Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Rousseau’s Julie (or The New Héloise), Goethe’s Werther, were entirely different; this was rich food for the emotions as well as the intellect. The human mind was like a bird when the cage has been left open. Novels poured from the presses; Byron’s Corsair, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, were Romantic novels in verse. The plays of Shakespeare and Dryden and Sheridan could only be seen in the big cities; but these small pocket-sized volumes could penetrate to the remotest corner of the remotest county. It is true, of course, that most people could not read; but that is a minor point. Anyone with enough intelligence to want to read could learn to do so – the children of farm labourers as well as vicars.
The creating of ‘other worlds’ became a major industry in the nineteenth century; novelists like Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Trollope, set out to create an actual world as rich and complex as the real world. We take this for granted; we are used to having a choice of ‘alternative worlds’, from Tolstoy and Flaubert to the latest soap opera on television. And we know that there were literary masterpieces long before Richardson: Chaucer, Malory, Montaigne, Cervantes, Rabelais, Boccaccio. We forget that there were so few of them, and that they were known only to scholars. Life in the fifteenth century was dull and repetitive for everybody, from the lord of the manor and the local priest to the ploughman and the shepherd. There were probably as many imaginative and sensitive people as there are today – at least in proportion to the population – but they had no alternative to letting themselves grow as dull as their surroundings. The only touch of the bizarre or unusual that entered their lives was when a pedlar offered a pamphlet containing the confessions of witches, or when the vicar warned them to avoid an old crone who could turn herself into a hare.
For five centuries or more, the human spirit was starved of an essential vitamin, a vitamin that the Church of the Middle Ages had been able to supply, although in smaller quantities. Man not only possesses a capacity for ‘otherness’, for turning away from his own narrowness to the greater world that surrounds him; he possesses a raging appetite for it. I see the witchcraft craze as a direct consequence of this vitamin starvation. When the broad current of Romantic culture began to satisfy the appetite, witchcraft suddenly became a thing of the remote past.
This conclusion is reinforced by one of the most remarkable novels ever written on the subject of magic and witchcraft, Valery Briussov’s Fiery Angel, which Prokoviev turned into his most powerful opera. Briussov was of the Russian symbolist school in the early years of this century; and although he remained in favour after the Revolution, his early work was frowned upon. Prokoviev’s opera The Fiery Angel is still unknown in Russia.
The novel tells the story of a soldier, Rupprecht, who returns from South America in the 1530s, at the time when Agrippa and Paracelsus were famous throughout Germany. In a small tavern where he stays overnight, he hears a woman moaning and crying. In the next room he finds a young girl named Renata, who calls him by his name before she collapses in convulsions on the floor, screaming that she is possessed by devils. Rupprecht finally calms her and makes her lie down. She then insists on telling him her story: how, at the age of eight, a golden-haired angel, flaming as if with sunshine, came to her nursery and played with her. His name was Madiël. For years they played together, and he told her that she was destined to be a saint, and encouraged her to undertake harsh ascetic exercises. Renata was willing enough to be a saint, but she also wanted to be the bride of Madiël. And one night, after she had made a determined effort to seduce him, he left her. Some time later, he appeared to her in a dream and told her to expect to see him again, in human form, in two months. And in exactly two months a young nobleman called Count Heinrich visited her family. She seduced him, and they eloped to Heinrich’s castle on the Danube. But after two years’ happiness, he left without explanation, and had not been back since. Renata had been searching for him ever since, tormented by demons.
Rupprecht spends the night lying beside her on the bed, in perfect chastity, and the next morning takes her away with him. By this time, of course, he is in love with her. But when he tries to get her into bed, she has hysterics and tells him that she must save herself for Count Heinrich. And Rupprecht is by now so enslaved that he agrees to help in the search. The novel turns into a powerful clinical picture of Rupprecht’s masochistic relation with Renata.
She persuades him to rub himself with a witches’ ointment and visit a sabbath. Briussov’s description of the sabbath is authentic, and should be read by anyone who wants to understand what witches were supposed to do on these occasions. The ointment makes him dizzy, and he lies down. Then he finds himself flying through the air on a goat. Half an hour later, they land in a valley between two hills. He is immediately surrounded by frenzied naked women. They carry him to the foot of a wooden throne, on which the Devil is seated:
The Seated One was enormous in stature, and made like a human being down to the waist, like a hairy he-goat below; his legs ended in hoofs, but his hands were like human hands, so was his face human, red, sunburnt like an Apache, with large round eyes and a medium beard. He had the appearance of being not more than forty years old, and there was in his expression something sad and rousing compassion; but this feeling disappeared as soon as one’s glance rose above his high forehead to see, emerging distinctly from his curly black hair, three horns; the two smaller ones behind and the larger one in front; and round the horns was placed a crown, apparently of silver, that emitted a soft glow like the light of the moon.
The naked witches placed me before the throne and exclaimed: ‘Master Leonard, he is new!’
Then sounded a voice, hoarse and devoid of inflection as though he who spoke was not accustomed to pronouncing words, but strong and masterful, which addressed me saying: ‘Welcome my son …’
Rupprecht has to denounce God, Jesus and the Virgin, then kiss the Devil’s hand and his rump. The hand, he notices, has all its digits of equal length, including the thumb, and crooked like a vulture.
There follows a dance among huge toads, snakes and wolves, and then a meal, with coarse food and poor wine, at the end of which Rupprecht is drawn into the wood by a young witch and seduced. He wakes up and finds himself on the floor of his room with a sensation like a hangover. But he has not learned the whereabouts of Count Heinrich.
The detail of the coarse food and poor wine seems curious; why should the Devil give his servants cheap food, when he is, after all, ‘the prince of this world’? On the other hand, if the sabbaths really took place as described, the witches themselves would have to provide the food, which would be of poor quality. The Devil remains seated, and sounds human enough, apart from his enormous stature; could he be a human being, wearing trousers made of goat-skin and hoofs on his feet? Parts of Briussov’s novel are taken from the actual trial of Sister Maria Renata von Mossau, who was tortured, beheaded and burned in 1749 near Würzburg. Her confession contains the usual lurid sexual details – more than usual, if anything – so Briussov was justified in placing so much emphasis on the sexual aspects of the case.
The fine seventh chapter of the novel contains an account of Rupprecht’s visit to Bonn to see Cornelius Agrippa. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of the material here, and it is interesting to note that Agrippa dismisses magic as childish nonsense, and insists that philosophy and mystical contemplation are of greater importance. By the time he published his Occult Philosophy, he regarded it as a juvenile work.
Back in Cologne, Renata finally allows Rupprecht to possess her; but it is a highly unpleasant night in which she is feverish and insatiable, and obviously thinking about someone else all the time. Briussov wallows in his hero’s masochism.
After this, Renata persuades Rupprecht to challenge Count Heinrich to a duel – he has finally appeared in Cologne. Rupprecht agrees, much against his will, and begins to realise that Renata is not the innocent maiden she makes out. She had seduced Count Heinrich, who was a Rosicrucian, and dedicated to chastity, and then persuaded him to practise black magic. He now hates her. No sooner has Rupprecht forced Heinrich to agree to a duel than Renata changes her mind, and makes Rupprecht promise not to harm him. The consequence, inevitably, is that Rupprecht is badly wounded, and Renata has to nurse him back to health. After this, she seems cured of her obsession with Heinrich, and gives herself to Rupprecht. Then she decides she has to be a saint, leaves him again, and goes to a nunnery.
Several chapters of the novel are devoted to an encounter between Rupprecht and Dr. Faustus (with Mephistopheles, of course). And at last, Rupprecht finds the convent where Renata has taken refuge. The demons have entered her again, and all the nuns are having convulsions. She is arrested by the Archbishop of Trier, and subjected to torture. Eventually she dies in Rupprecht’s arms before she can be brought to the stake. Prokoviev makes the scene of the possessed nuns the most hair-raising in the opera.
What makes this novel so remarkable is that Briussov has set out to try to understand what really took place during the ‘witch craze’. Renata is a hysteric, driven by sexual craving; but she also knew Rupprecht’s name as soon as she saw him. She possesses certain occult powers. But Count Heinrich is certainly not Madiël, the fiery angel, and the whole search is futile. The book is about people who are sucked into the whirlpool of their own fantasies, and whose fantasies take on a strange reality because of the subconscious forces that have been set in motion. For a writer of the pre-Freudian era (the book was published in 1907), it is a remarkably convincing tour de force of abnormal psychology. Being a poet, Briussov had an inkling of the strange truth about witches: that the powers of the human mind are far greater than we understand, and that they can be released by symbols. Is it an accident that ‘Master Leonard’ wears a crown that emits a moony glow – the moon, the White Goddess, symbol of the powers that lie below the everyday personality?
There is a story by the Japanese writer Akutagawa that states clearly the point I have been making throughout this book; it is called The Dragon. A priest wants to take revenge on a certain monastery; the monks are always making fun of his red nose. So by a pond near the monas-tery he sets up a board with the sign: ‘On March the third, a dragon shall ascend from this pond.’ It has the expected effect. The news spreads, and on the third of March, there are vast crowds waiting at the side of the pond. The monks are deeply embarrassed; they are aware that when the dragon fails to materialise, they will somehow get the blame. As the day drags on, the crowds stretch for miles around, and the priest begins to regret his joke. Gradually he becomes affected by the atmosphere of intense expectancy, and finds himself staring eagerly at the calm surface of the pond. Then, quite suddenly, clouds appear in the sky; there is a tremendous storm; and in the midst of the thunder and lightning, the smoky shape of a dragon flashes out of the pond, and ascends to the sky. Everyone sees it.
Later, when the priest confesses that it was he who set up the notice board, no one believes him.
The most important statement in this story concerns the eager, tense expectancy of the crowd, which affects even the priest who painted the notice board. He knows there is no dragon; yet the telepathic pressure of thousands of believers finally compels his own instincts into tune with it. There is no self-division. And the psychic pressure is like the rhythmic tramp of feet that cracked the walls of Jericho. First, the clouds form out of the clear sky. Then the storm, the visible symbol of the release of tension; something is about to happen. To call the dragon a mass hallucination would be to miss the whole point. It is a mass projection, a spontaneous manifestation of the forces of the subconscious. Like all magic.
The power of mass telepathy to ‘make things happen’ is known to most primitive people. The late Negley Farson told me on several occasions how he had seen a Liberian witch doctor conjure rain out of a clear sky.
My neighbour Martin Delany, whose own curious powers of divination I have described in the appendix to my Rasputin, described an equally strange occurrence. The local Nigerian witch doctor assured his company that torrential rain, which had lasted for weeks, would stop for two hours during a party given for the staff. The rain stopped immediately before the party was due to start, and started again immediately after the party ended.
In the same appendix I have recounted at length the curious story of the band-saw that belonged to the same company. A hen had flown into the band-saw, and the Negro workers declared that this was because the god of iron had to be propitiated. Mr. Delany refused to have this ceremony performed because it involved decapitating a puppy dog. Two days later, another hen flew into the band-saw. Not long after, it was necessary to make some slight adjustment to the saw; although the electricity was switched off at the mains, the saw began revolving and cut the manager’s hand badly. Engineers spent hours checking the saw and the mains, and agreed that it was completely impossible that it could have ‘switched itself on’. Finally, the saw blade ‘peeled’ one day as it was cutting a log, and a twisted ball of metal struck the operator, killing him. Mr Delany finally agreed to the sacrifice of the puppy, after which the accidents ceased.
If we dismiss the idea of coincidence, there seem to be two possible explanations. Either the witch doctor himself was able to cause the accidents by some form of psychokinesis, ‘the evil eye’, or the fear exerted by the mass of workers caused them. Mr. Delany ruled out the witch doctor, who was apparently a kindly old gentleman. The second hypothesis certainly fits in better with what we have been saying. Most people have experienced some thing of the sort on a smaller scale: a tense, nervous feeling that something is going to go wrong, followed by a minor catastrophe.
Probably the best way to come to an understanding of the witches of Europe is to study eye-witness accounts of modern African witchcraft. Harry B. Wright’s Witness to Witchcraft offers some curious examples. He describes the ‘thunder dance’ in Abomey, West Africa, as an example of ‘the strange rapport that seemed to exist between the primitive practices of these people and the forces of Nature itself A tall native danced with intricate contortions, swishing a long dancing stick in the air. ‘The day had been bright and clear when the dance started, but suddenly I looked up and the heavens were overcast.’ The prince, however, told Wright: ‘It will not rain, because we will not permit the rain without the rain dance.’ And it didn’t. Again, it is notable that Wright felt himself participating in the frenzy caused by the dance. When the dance came to an end, the sky cleared again.
Wright also describes a ‘leopard dance’ that is perhaps less difficult to explain. A tall, beautiful native girl danced by the light of fires, and Wright’s African companion asserted that he could see leopards. Wright could only see shadows around her. The natives appeared to be following the invisible leopards with their eyes. And then, at the height of the ceremony, three full-grown leopards stalked out of the jungle, across the clearing, and went into the jungle on the other side; one of them had a chicken in its mouth. ‘If I had been put under a trance through some process of mass hypnosis, it was a good one, because I felt otherwise quite sane and normal.’ But there is no need to think in terms of hypnosis. Animals are telepathic; under the circumstances, nothing is more likely than that a family of real leopards should look in to see whether the ‘mental leopards’ were really invading their territory, or whether it was just the natives playing games again. (The chief explained to Wright that they summoned the thunder ‘for their own amusement’.)
This suggests at least a partial explanation for two myths that have persisted since the earliest times: the vampire and the werewolf. Montague Summers unearthed so many of them that he was able to devote two large volumes to the vampire alone.
In the post-Freudian period the sexual basis of vampirism and lycanthropy has been recognised. Male sexual desire is generally far stronger than the woman’s desire. Nymphomaniacs are rare among women; but almost every healthy male is – in imagination at least – a satyr. The mini-skirt is a tacit recognition of this; that a quite impersonal appetite is aroused in the male by glimpses of a woman’s sexual regions. It is difficult to imagine a society in which the men wear short tunics and try to give girls glimpses of their sexual members; not many women would want to see them; it would be a sexual depressant rather than a stimulant. Woman, on the other hand, realises that a man may be caught more easily by a glimpse up her dress than by a more subtle parade of her charms. (I was amused by an account of a journalist friend of how he became interested in his wife; they were both in amateur theatricals, and she was climbing a ladder when her tights split, revealing transparent panties; ‘I decided there was more to her than met the eye,’ said my friend. They have now been happily married for many years.)
This violent, impersonal sexual appetite of the male becomes dangerous if subjected to frustration, and may develop an element of cruelty. Robert Musil’s portrait of the sex murderer Moosbrugger in The Man Without Qualities emphasises the frustration of the journeyman carpenter who ‘sleeps rough’ and wanders from village to village, never having the opportunity to satisfy the appetite: ‘Something that one craves for, just as naturally as one craves for bread or water, is only there to be looked at. After a time one’s desire for it becomes unnatural. It walks past, the skirts swaying round its ankles. It climbs over a stile, becoming visible right up to the knees …’ I have pointed out in my Casebook of Murder (1969) how often vagrants like Moosbrugger become sexual killers. The fierceness of the desire may turn to resentment against women. The Birmingham Y.W.C.A. murderer, Patrick Byrne, said that he killed to ‘get my own back on women for causing tension through sex’. The German murderer Pommerenke committed his first sex murder in a park after seeing a film called The Ten Commandments and convincing himself that women were all evil. (In that case, why rape them as well as killing them?) At the time of writing (1970), John Collins is on trial in Ann Arbor, accused of the murder of Karen Beineman; she was not only raped and strangled, but tortured with some pointed object and with acid.
Psychologists argue that all men have a ‘social personality’, an obligation to behave in a balanced and friendly manner, and that this may cover a depth of murderous frustration. This applies particularly in young men. (Most sex crimes are committed by men under twenty-five, often under twenty.) Walking down a street crowded with girls on their way to the office, they feel like starving men surrounded by food that does not belong to them. In a woman like Isobel Gowdie, this kind of ‘split personality’ leads to witchcraft; in a man, it may lead to a form of lycanthropy, in which his ‘beast’ personality takes over and commits rape. This is the view put forward by the Jungian psychologist Robert Eisler in his classic study Man into Wolf (1949). He advances the interesting view that man was once a peaceful, herbivorous ape, living on roots and berries. But man is also an imitative creature, and in his battle against wild animals, a life-and-death struggle, he began to deliberately acquire the ferocity and bloodlust of the wild animal. A modern manifestation of this is the sneaking, fear-tinged admiration that many people have for criminals, particularly violent ones. They feel that violent people need ‘taking account of’, and that the most effective way of taking account is to generate a certain sympathy.
This view would certainly explain the leopard dance witnessed by Harry Wright, and the cults of leopards and other wild animals in Africa. William Seabrook tells the story of a quiet little native clerk who donned a panther skin with iron claws and killed a girl. The clerk was totally convinced that he became a panther periodically, and he told Seabrook that he much preferred a panther’s life to his own. The natives of Africa naturally fear the panther and the leopard – far more than the lion or tiger, which rarely become man-killers – and from the most distant times, the response to this fear, on the part of the bolder spirits, was an attempt to achieve some kind of empathy with the killers. The response of primitive man to the cave bear no doubt illustrates the same thing.
In medieval Europe, wolves were the commonest and most dangerous beasts of prey, and the sexual obsessions that drove Isobel Gowdie caused sexually frustrated peasants to identify with wolves. But the most curious question is how far their obsession caused actual physical changes. William Seabrook has a remarkable description of how a Russian emigrée woman meditated on hexagram 49 from the I Ching whose meaning is associated with an animal’s fur, and with moulting. She imagined herself to be a wolf in the snow, then began to make baying noises, and slaver at the mouth. When one of the witnesses attempted to wake her up, she leapt at his throat and tried to bite it. In the case of Gilles Garnier, executed as a werewolf in 1574, he seems to have carried out the attacks on children either in the shape of a man or a wolf. The charge, drawn up at Dole, alleged that he had seized a twelve-year-old girl and killed her in a vineyard with his hands and teeth, then dragged her along the ground – with his teeth – into the wood at La Serre, where he ate most of her. He so enjoyed it that he took some home for his wife. (This does not indicate that she was also a loup-garou; three hundred years later, in the same area, a peasant named Martin Dumollard made a habit of murdering girls that he lured into lonely places, and taking their clothes to his wife. He would say, ‘I’ve murdered another girl,’ and then go off with a spade. She seems to have regarded these activities as a sign of mild eccentricity.) He killed a twelve-year-old boy in a wood, and was about to eat the flesh (‘although it was a Friday’) when he was interrupted by some men. They testified that he was in human form, and Garnier agreed. But he insisted that he was in the shape of a wolf when he strangled a ten-year-old boy and tore off the leg with his fangs; he does not explain how a wolf could strangle anybody. He also attacked another ten-year-old girl – again wearing his wolf-shape – but was forced to flee when interrupted; she died of her wounds. On this occasion, the peasants who interrupted Garnier saw him as a wolf, but nevertheless thought they recognised Garnier’s face. He was sentenced to be burned alive.
It is by no means unusual for sex killers to eat part of the body of the victim. Albert Fish cooked and ate parts of a ten-year-old girl, Grace Budd, at Greenburgh, New York, in 1928. Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer, ate parts of the women he killed, and also made waistcoats from their skin. (This also brings to mind the fertility rites of the Aztecs, described by Ornella Volta in her book on vampirism, in which the priest first sacrificed a virgin, then skinned her and dressed in her skin to perform the ritual dance.) So Garnier’s strange appetite for human flesh need not be taken as evidence that he really became a wolf. But it is impossible to doubt that he entered a trancelike state in which he felt himself to be a wolf, like Seabrook’s Russian emigrée. And is it not conceivable that some physical transformation did take place, a physical expression of the instinctive forces that erupted from his subconscious? In the Lon Chaney film The Wolf Man, Chaney becomes a kind of upright beast, closer to an ape than a wolf. The descriptions of the peasants in the case of Garnier make it seem that this is what they also saw.
The most celebrated European werewolf trial occurred near Cologne fifteen years after Garnier’s execution, and is altogether more closely connected with orthodox cases of witchcraft. Peter Stube, or Stumpf, confessed that he had been sexually intimate with a succubus, a demon in female form, for twenty-eight years, and that the demon had given him a magic belt, whereby he could transform himself into a wolf, an enormous, powerful creature. Over the twenty-eight years, Stube committed many murders – the details closely resemble those in the Garnier case – and also made an attempt on the lives of two of his daughters-in-law (which sounds remarkably like sexual jealousy). The sentence passed on Stube was particularly cruel: to have his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, and his bones broken with blows of a hatchet, before being decapitated. The fact that Stube was tortured in order to force the confession raises the possibility that the whole thing may have been imagination. The ‘magic belt’, which he claimed to have hidden in a valley, was not found. The case caused excitement all over Europe.
Montague Summers tells a great many tales of werewolves, in his credulous way, but few of them add anything to what we have already said. On the contrary, it becomes quite clear that most of them must be dismissed as inventions and old wives’ tales. There is one element common to most of them: someone attacked by a werewolf manages to cut off its paw (or put out its eye, or wound it in the throat); later, a man or woman is found without a hand and confesses to being the werewolf. Olaus Magnus, a medieval chronicler, tells the story of a slave who wanted to convince his mistress that werewolves existed, and came out of the cellar in the form of a wolf; attacked by her dogs, he lost an eye. The next day, the slave was found to have lost his eye. Both Montague Summers and Sir James Frazer (in The Golden Bough) tell the story of a huntsman of Auvergne who cut off the paw of a wolf that attacked him; recounting the story to a friend, he discovered that the paw had changed into a woman’s hand, with a ring on the finger, which the friend recognised as belonging to his wife. The wife, nursing a wrist from which the hand had been amputated, confessed to being a werewolf, and was executed. Frazer then goes on to tell stories of Chinese were-tigers, were-cats and even were-crocodiles, making it clear that each part of the world has its own variation on the theme. Common to many of these stories is the notion that transformation occurs only at the time of the full moon (the White Goddess again), and that if the hands or feet of the were-creature are amputated, its power is permanently lost. In some accounts, there seems to be a certain confusion as to whether the were-creature (wolf, cat, hare) is a demon or simply a witch.
Werewolves have failed to survive the age of witchcraft, and it is interesting to speculate why this should be so. The answer may be that urban civilisation has no room for this kind of abnormality. The victims of werewolves were generally children, and men like Garnier and Stube may well have felt the need to escape the torments of conscience by convincing themselves that they were victims of a terrible destiny. The modern child rapist is usually so feeble-minded and demoralised that the need does not arise. This may also explain why tales of vampires have retained their hold on the human imagination. It is a rationalisation of a more general and powerful emotion. In every large modern city the police are familiar with the activities of a sexual pervert called the piqueur; this is a man who takes a sharp pointed instrument, an ice-pick or awl, and stabs women in crowds. The woman feels a sudden sharp pain in the thigh or buttock; by the time she has looked around, the man has gone. In most cases the wound is painful but not dangerous; occasionally, when the piqueur has an obsession with breasts, the instrument may penetrate the heart and cause death. To speak of ‘sadistic aggression’, as the medical textbooks do, is to leave the phenomenon unexplained. All that has happened is that a man or youth with a strong romantic fixation on women lacks the necessary courage or indifference to approach them, until the desire becomes a torment. His daydreams of making love to women lack conviction, because he feels he would be rejected. But daydreams of sadistic attacks can be altogether more satisfying because he can imagine himself raping a girl. When he drives his ice-pick into the buttocks of a pretty girl in a crowd, he feels that he is taking revenge on her for rejecting him.
This clearly explains the psychology of vampirism. It is a frustrated sexuality turned to aggression. Add to this the fear of the dead and of supernatural entities, and the story takes on a power that fascinates the human imagination. But this is not to assert that vampirism is merely a superstition or a delusion. Examples of it are so well authenticated that it would be absurd to try to maintain a strictly rationalist position. We are again in the realm of the borderland of the mind where strange forces can erupt from the subconscious and take on apparently material shape. Montague Summers cites a case from The Proceedings of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, 1927, in which a young Rumanian peasant girl, Eleonore Zugun, showed ‘devil’s bites’ on her hands and arms. The investigator describes how she was about to take a sip from a cup of tea when she cried out. Marks of teeth appeared on the back of her hand and developed into bruises. A few minutes later she was bitten on the forearm, under her sleeve, and again the teeth marks were deep. Was it a ‘ghost’, or Eleonore’s own subconscious mind, somehow out of control? The question is futile, since we have no idea of what forces could exist. No one has ever descended into the subconscious and traced all its corridors. Why should we assert that it was Eleonore Zugun’s subconscious mind? If Jung is right and there is a collective subconscious. then it might have been somebody else’s mind. Readers of Thigpen and Cleckley’s Three Faces of Eve will understand this point without difficulty. The book describes how a quiet, well-behaved married woman is completely taken over by ‘another self’, a noisy, sexy, empty-headed female who loves a good time. This sounds less baffiing than it actually is; we all know cases of people who seem to become completely different when drunk. But as one reads the book, it becomes more and more obvious that the ‘two faces of Eve’ were really two completely different people; it is literally a case of possession, and in the fifteenth century would have been treated with exorcism and perhaps torture. Since Eve finally managed to achieve an integrated personality that united her ‘two faces’, we can just about accept that ‘Eve White’ and ‘Eve Black’ were only two aspects of her personality. But the mind cannot grasp it; we can only accept it intellectually. One suddenly becomes clearly aware of the limitations of consciousness, and correspondingly less ready to advance pat explanations for what happened to Eleonore Zugun.
Less celebrated than the Eve case, but in many ways even more baffling, is the story of ‘Sally Beauchamp’ that disturbed the world of American psychology in the late 1890s. In 1898 a girl named Christine L. Beauchamp approached Dr. Morton Prince of Tufts Medical School; she was suffering from nervous exhaustion. When normal treatment failed, Dr. Prince tried hypnosis. And one day, quite unexpectedly, a new personality emerged under the treatment – a cheerful, brash, noisy girl, who explained she was Sally Beauchamp. Sally was insistent that she was not Christine, although she admitted they had the same body. As in the Eve case, this second personality knew all about the first, while the first – Christine – was ignorant of Sally’s existence. Sally was bouncingly healthy, and was contemptuous of Christine for being such a weakling. One day, Christine decided to go to Europe for a holiday, but was so exhausted that she went into hospital to regather her strength. Dr. Prince called to find how she was, and was told she was full of energy. He went to see her, and discovered that Sally had taken over. Sally didn’t want to lose a holiday in Europe, and was determined to sit in Christine’s body until they got on the boat! Dr. Prince managed to persuade Sally that this was immoral, and eventually Christine became strong enough to take the holiday.
In the beginning, Sally always had her eyes closed (because Christine was under hypnosis). Finally, she succeeded in getting them open; and then Christine’s life became altogether more complicated. Sally would take over for hours, and Christine would wake up, wondering what she had done during her ‘amnesia’.
At this point, a third personality appeared – as distinct as Sally and Christine – rather schoolmistressy and sharp. (Sally called her the idiot.) This new personality, who apparently had no name, knew about Sally, and the two loathed one another. Sally learned to read her mind. The three women strove for possession of the body – although it is not entirely accurate to say that Christine strove; she simply got pushed around. Her confusion must have been enormous. One day she decided to get a job in New York. Sally took over and got off the train at New Haven. Sally got a job as a waitress in a dining room. Christine found the job exhausting. The schoolmistress hated it because it was menial. One day, the schoolmistress quit the job and took her wages. She pawned Christine’s watch, and went to Boston. Then Sally took over and rented a room rather than return to Christine’s flat. When Christine came back, she was baffled to find herself in a strange room in Boston instead of in a hotel dining room in New Haven.
Dr. Prince discovered that Sally and the schoolmistress seemed to have memories of different parts of Christine’s life, and the schoolmistress apparently came into existence for the first time as the result of a shock when a man-friend climbed in through her window and tried to kiss Christine. It was all very confusing. Eventually, by hypnotising the schoolmistress, Prince managed to get her integrated with Christine. But Sally had to be bullied and persuaded to go away; she yelled: ‘No, I won’t be dead! I have as much right to live as she has …’ But she was persuaded eventually. The psychologist William McDougal decided that Sally was not a part of Christine’s hidden self, but a completely separate spirit or psychic entity. One is inclined to agree with him.
The closest thing I have seen to a rational phenomenological explanation of this problem occurs, strangely enough, in a work of science fiction called Forbidden Planet, by W. J. Stuart, in which a scientific expedition to a distant planet tries to determine why all previous expeditions have been destroyed. The only man who seems to be able to live safely on the planet is an old scientist named Morbius, and he is able to tell them that the other expeditions have been destroyed by a kind of invisible, and apparently indestructible, monster.
Morbius is studying the remains of an earlier civilisation on the planet – beings who had apparently achieved the power to amplify their thoughts, their power of ‘intentionality’, so that mental images could be projected as an external reality. And at the end of the novel, Morbius realises what has destroyed the previous expeditions. Without even suspecting it, he has also been amplifying the intentional forces of his subconscious mind, his subconscious desire to be left alone on the planet; and this is the ‘invisible monster’ that has been destroying the previous expeditions.
The book should be read by every student of phenomenological psychology; it may have been intended as fiction, but it probably comes closer to the truth about the human psyche than Freud or Jung.
Now, if this hypothesis is correct, it may explain not only the mystery of vampires, werewolves and poltergeists – which we shall consider in the next chapter – but all so-called ‘occult phenomena’. The subconscious mind is not simply a kind of deep-seat repository of sunken memories and atavistic desires, but of forces that can, under certain circumstances, manifest themselves in the physical world with a force that goes beyond anything the conscious mind could command. We are all familiar with certain moments when our conscious personality seems to become more real, more solid and authoritative, and we experience a peculiar sensation of power. Imagine this kind of strength and authority carried through to the far greater forces of the subconscious, and we begin to get a shadowy outline of a theory of the occult that avoids both extremes of scepticism and credulity.
It is because of the lack of such a general theory that most books on vampirism have been so unsatisfactory. Summers mixes stories of the wildest improbability with accounts that have a ring of authenticity. Ornella Volta, one of the most recent historians of the vampire, adopts a medical and anthropological approach, but she fails to establish the connection between sexual criminals like Jack the Ripper and Sergeant Bertrand and the Dracula myths.* She appears to be arguing that strange epidemics of vampirism, such as the one that occurred in Central Europe between 1730 and 1735, are outbreaks of sex crime or necrophilia, when in fact this explanation fails to apply to 99 per cent of the cases cited by Summers, in which the vampires are dead bodies, animated either by demons or by the spirits of their former tenants.
A typical vampire story, recounted in Augustian Calmet’s History of Apparitions (1746) and repeated in every book on vampires since, is as follows.
In the 1720s, the Austrian empire was enjoying a period of peace, after years of sporadic war against the Turks, and there was a deliberate build-up of troops in the southwest. A young soldier (whose name is given by one authority as Joachim Hubner) was billeted in the village of Haidam, on the Austro-Hungarian frontier.
One evening at supper, as he sat drinking wine with his host and the fifteen-year-old son of the house, the door opened, and an old man came in. He sat down at the table, and everyone looked terrified. The old man leaned forward, touched the farmer on the shoulder, then went out.
The next morning the farmer was found dead in his bed. The boy told Hubner that the old man was his grandfather – who had been dead ten years.
Hubner naturally told the story to other soldiers in the regiment; eventually, it came to the ears of the colonel, who decided to have it investigated, since it was spreading alarm among the men. The Count de Cadreras, commander of the Alexandetti Infantry, was instructed to take sworn depositions in the village. Cadreras set up his headquarters in the church, and took sworn depositions from every member of the dead farmer’s household. The evidence was so convincing that Cadreras ordered the grave of the old man to be dug up. The body was found to be completely fresh, as if it had only just been buried. On the orders of Cadreras, the head was severed from the trunk.
The commission had been told of other similar cases of one man who had returned three times during the past thirty years, and who had tried to suck the blood of members of his own family. The graves of all these other ‘vampires’ were opened; all were found to be as fresh as the first one. The villagers asserted that one vampire was so dangerous that they were not contented until the count had the body burned.
The Emperor Charles VI heard about these events, and sent a second commission to investigate. They verified the story of the original commission. In 1730 Cadreras dictated the story to an official at the University of Friborg, and Calmet must have seen this deposition during the next five years, since he states that the events took place ‘about fifteen years ago’. Montague Summers claims that the manuscript is still extant.
The story sounds circumstantial enough, although this is, of course, no guarantee of its truth. I cannot find a village called Haidam on the map or in encyclopedias, but this proves nothing, since villages change their names if the frontier moves. Whether true or not – and Summers cites it as one of the best-documented of all vampire cases – it has all the typical features of the vampire story: the walking dead, who can only be destroyed by burning or decapitation (or sometimes by a stake driven through the heart), the attacks on living people that are said to result in the victim also becoming a vampire after his death.
Ornella Volta points out that the body of St. Teresa of Avila remained undecayed in the tomb for a considerable time after her death. Miss Volta mentions 178 years, but J. M. Cohen, in his introduction to her autobiography, contents himself with the remark: ‘These mysterious levitations [she floated in the air during prayers] were matched after her death by the mysterious incorruptibility of her body.’ Mr. Cohen suggests that this phenomenon of incorruptibility, which seems to occur after the death of so many saints, ‘can only be accounted for by some actual change in the physical structure that takes place at the same time as spiritual transformation.’ The same may be true of vampires.
The vampire epidemic of 1730–1735 seems to have started at the village of Meduegna, near Belgrade, through a young soldier named Arnold Paole, who returned from active service in Greece in 1727. He told the girl to whom he was betrothed that he had been attacked at night by a vampire in Greece (another country famous for vampire legends), but had located its grave and destroyed it – which should have removed the curse. However, he died, and then was seen around the village after dark. Ten weeks later, after several people claimed to have Seen him, or dreamed about him and felt strangely weak the morning after, his body was disinterred by two army surgeons and the sexton and his assistants. The body still had blood on its mouth. It was covered with garlic, which is supposed to be a protection against vampires, and a stake had been driven through the heart.
Five years later, says Summers, there was an epidemic of vampirism at Meduegna, and this time several distinguished doctors investigated; the medical report was signed on January 7, 1732, by Johannes Flickinger, Isaac Seidel, Johann Baumgartner and the lieutenant colonel and sub-lieutenant from Belgrade. They testified to examining fourteen corpses, all listed and described, including a girl of ten. Only two of the fourteen – mother and baby – were found in a normal state of decomposition, all the others being ‘unmistakably in the vampire condition’. It is not recorded what was done, but presumably the corpses were burned or impaled.
Henry Moore, in the seventeenth-century Antidote Against Atheism, tells a story of a man with the delightful name of Johannes Cuntius, of Pentach in Silesia, whose corpse was scratched by a black cat as it lay in the deathbed; subsequently, he began to reappear and drink blood. When the body was disinterred, it was found to be ‘in a vampire condition’, and apparently resisted furiously when it was cut up.
Augustus Hare, the diarist, recounts a vampire story in The Story of My Life; it was told to him by a Captain Fisher, and may be taken as typical of the vampire tales of the nineteenth century.
The house called Croglin Grange in Cumberland was let to two brothers and their sister. It stood alone on a hillside. The house was only one storey high, which is perhaps why the Fisher family decided to let it, and find a larger place.
The winter passed peacefully for the tenants, whose name is given in one account as Cranswell. One night in June the moon was so bright that the sister decided to open the outer shutters, although she kept the window itself closed. Sitting in bed looking across the lawn, she was puzzled to see two yellow lights moving among the trees. Soon she realised that they belonged to a man, who proceeded across the lawn towards her window. She rushed for the door, which was close to the window, and saw ‘a hideous brown face with flaming eyes’ looking at her; at the same moment, she saw that the creature was unpicking the lead of the window frame. She was so terrified that she stood there as it reached in through the window, opened the catch and climbed over the sill. The creature seized her by the hair and bit at her throat; at this moment she found her voice and screamed and her brothers rushed into the room, having broken open the locked door. One brother saw the intruder fleeing over the lawn, but it seemed to disappear in the region of the nearby churchyard.
They took her to Switzerland, and eventually all three returned to Croglin Grange, apparently convinced that the creature had been an escaped lunatic. The winter passed quietly with no more alarms. And then, in the following March, she was awakened one night by the sound of scratching on the window, and saw the brown face looking in. This time she screamed immediately. Her brothers, instead of rushing into her room, went out of the front door, and fired at the figure as it made away across the lawn. It stumbled, then ran on. They both pursued it to the churchyard and saw it enter a tomb. The following day the brothers went to the tomb, accompanied by the servants from Croglin Grange. The coffins were scattered wildly and the bones were lying all over the floor; the only undisturbed coffin was the one that contained the vampire, who had the pistol wound on his leg. They burnt the body.
The story sounds unlikely enough; even Hare does not state that he believes it. But it could well have been based on fact. The same scattering of the coffins occurred in a case that is much better authenticated, the ‘unquiet tomb’ of the Elliott family on the island of Barbados. The vault, which stands above Oistin’s Bay above the cemetery of Christ Church, is hewn partly out of solid rock. In 1807 the body of a Mrs. Thomasina Goddard was interred there. A year later, a child, Mary Chase, was interred, and in 1812 two more members of the Chase family. It was on the occasion of this fourth interment that the child’s coffin was found standing on end and the one containing Mrs. Goddard had been thrown across the vault. The third coffin – of Dorcas Chase – was undisturbed. On the next opening of the tomb, in 1816, it was Mrs. Goddard’s coffin that was undisturbed; the others were scattered around. After the same thing had happened a third time, Lord Combermere, the governor of the island, conducted an investigation and found the coffins scattered; this was on July 17, 1819. The floor was covered with fine sand, and the marble slab that served as a door cemented into place. On April 18 of the following year, the governor, accompanied by his military secretary, Major the Hon. J. Finch, the local rector, the Rev. Thomas Orderson, the Hon. Nathan Lucas and two more whites, opened the tomb (with the aid of a party of Negroes). With immense difficulty, the slab was moved. This time there could be no doubt that a human intruder was not responsible for the chaos inside. Only Mrs. Goddard’s disintegrating coffin was undisturbed. Three witnesses – Combermere, Orderson and Lucas – wrote accounts testifying to what had been discovered, and these can be found quoted in many books: Schomburg’s History of Barbados, Combermere’s memoirs, Sir J. E. Alexander’s Transatlantic Sketches and half a dozen other books; an account by Andrew Lang appeared in the Folk Lore Journal in 1907. The mystery is still unsolved; neither does it clarify it to know that three of the six coffins in the vault were those of people who met violent deaths – two were suicides, and a third was murdered by his slaves.
The unquiet spirit that disturbed the Elliott tomb was not a vampire, but its activities could have given rise to legends of a vampire; so it is conceivable that an apparently preposterous story like that of the Croglin Grange vampire could be based upon fact. Summers points out that ghosts have been known to make their presence felt physically. The old Darlington and Stockton station was as famous for ghosts in its day as Borley rectory later became. One night the night watchman, James Durham, was struck by a man who had walked into the porter’s cellar; when he struck back, his hand passed through the stranger. But the stranger’s black retriever dog seemed real enough when it sank its teeth into Durham’s calf. The man called off the dog with a lick of his tongue, and they vanished into the coal cellar, from which there was no exit. Naturally, they were not there when Durham looked a moment later. The ghost seems to have been a man who committed suicide on the premises; W. T. Stead printed Durham’s attested account in his Real Ghost Stories.
It must be admitted that Summers offers no convincing evidence, of the kind that would satisfy the Society for Psychical Research, throughout his two large volumes. And this is undoubtedly because his curiosity about such things was avid but superficial; he had no insight into what lay behind them.
The case is quite different with Dion Fortune, one of the greatest of modern occultists, whose book Psychic Self Defense (1930) is a classic of its kind. She connects vampirism directly with negative psychic forces, the ‘evil eye’. In this connection, I have already mentioned her account of the school principal who launched a ‘psychic attack’ on her.* As reported in the first chapter of her book, the attack hardly sounds ‘psychic’; Dion Fortune went to announce that she was leaving the school – ignoring the warning of a colleague who told her that if she confronted the principal, she would never leave. The woman’s method of attack was to assert that Miss Firth (Dion Fortune’s real name) was incompetent and had no self-confidence. She repeated this assertion over and over again for four hours. ‘I entered [the room] a strong and healthy girl. I left it a mental and physical wreck, and was ill for three years.’ She remained drained of vitality for a long time. Whether or not the principal really employed ‘psychic’ methods – I am inclined to doubt it* – her attack had the result of turning Miss Firth’s interests to the field of psychology, then of occultism.
Dion Fortune’s short chapter on vampirism is probably the most sensible account that exists of the subject. She begins by remarking on cases that she encountered as a psychiatrist, when one marital partner seemed to drain the other of energy, or when a parent seems to feed on the energy of a child. (She claims that most Oedipus complexes are of this nature.) ‘Knowing what we do of telepathy and the magnetic aura, it appears to me not unreasonable to suppose that, in some way we do not as yet fully understand, the negative partner of such a rapport is “shorting” on to the positive partner. There is a leakage of vitality going on, and the dominant partner is more or less consciously lapping it up, if not actually sucking it out.’ She goes on to quote Commander Baring-Gould, the author of Oddities, who claims that certain of the Berberlangs of the Philippines practise vampirism by liberating the ‘astral body’ from the physical body, and performing their vampirism – a draining of vitality, not of blood – as ghosts, so to speak. She then describes a case of which she had personal knowledge. The French windows of a certain house would blow open in the course of the evening, and locking them seemed to have no effect. A young homosexual who lived in the house was under psychiatric treatment, but seemed continually drained of vitality. One evening an adept in occultism was present when the local dogs began to bark and the windows opened. He told them that something had come in. ‘When they turned off the lights they were able to see a dull glow in a corner of the room; … when they put their hands into the glow, [they] felt a tingling sensation such as is experienced when the hands are put into electrically charged water.’ The occultist despatched the spirit by ‘absorbing’ it through sympathy – of which more will be said in a moment. The young homosexual then admitted that he thought he knew the source of the trouble. It was a cousin, also homosexual, who had been caught on the battlefields of France practising necrophilia on dead soldiers, and sent back to England for psychiatric treatment. The young boy had often been sent to sit with his cousin, and sexual relations developed. (On one occasion he bit the boy on the neck, drawing blood.) It was after the two separated that the phenomena began, and the boy had nightmares of being attacked by a ghost, which left him drained of energy.
The occultist, says Dion Fortune, was of the opinion that the necrophile cousin was not the primary vampire in the case. Her theory is that some of the soldiers on the Western front were of Eastern European origin – especially Hungarians – and that some of these knew certain traditional ‘tricks’ of occultism, the most important being how to avoid the ‘second death’, the disintegration of the astral body after the death of the physical body. They ‘maintained themselves in the etheric double by vampirising the wounded. Now, vampirism is contagious; the person who is vampirised, being depleted of vitality, is a psychic vacuum, himself absorbing from anyone he comes across in order to refill his depleted sources of vitality. He soon learns by experience the tricks of a vampire without realising their significance, and before he knows where he is, he is a full-blown vampire himself.’
However, the occultist did not believe that the vampire was the necrophile cousin. He was of the opinion that the astral body of some deceased Magyar soldier had attached itself to the necrophile, and had then transferred to his young cousin after the neck-biting episode.
To the sceptic, all this is bound to sound absurd; but it has a ring of its own kind of logic about it, and certainly explains vampirism in a way that Summers fails to do.
Dion Fortune’s explanation of werewolves also involves the astral body, or etheric double. She explains that powerful minds can create thought forms that actually possess a life of their own, and become ‘elementals’; she goes on to describe how she once did the same thing, involuntarily, herself. She was lying on a bed thinking highly unpleasant and negative thoughts about a friend who had done her an injury. In a semi-dozing state, ‘there came to my mind the thought of casting off all restraint and going berserk. The ancient Nordic myths rose before me, and I thought of Fenris, the Wolf-horror of the North. Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus, and there materialised beside me on the bed a large wolf … I could distinctly feel its back pressing against me as it lay beside me … I knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method – the brooding highly charged with emotion, the invocation of the appropriate natural force, and the condition between sleeping and waking in which the etheric double readily extrudes.’
Although scared stiff, she managed not to panic, and ordered the creature off the bed. It seemed to change into a dog, and went out through the corner of the room. That night, someone else in the house reported dreams of wolves, and of seeing the eyes of a wild animal shining in the darkness. She decided to seek the advice of her teacher – almost certainly Crowley – who told her that she had to ‘absorb’ the creature she had made. But since it had been created out of the desire to settle accounts with a particular person, she had to begin by forgetting her longing for revenge. And, as if by coincidence, the ideal opportunity for revenge presented itself at that exact time. ‘I had enough sense to see that I was at the dividing of the ways, and if I were not careful would take the first step on the Left-hand path.’ She decided to forgive the offender, and to re-absorb the wolf, which she describes:
It came in through the northern corner of the room again (subsequently I learnt that the north was considered among the ancients as the evil quarter), and presented itself on the hearthrug in quite a mild and domesticated mood. I obtained an excellent materialisation in the half-light, and could have sworn that a big Alsatian was standing there looking at me. It was tangible, even to the dog-like odour.
From it to me stretched a shadowy line of ectoplasm; one end was attached to my solar plexus, and the other disappeared in the shaggy fur of its belly … I began by an effort of will and imagination to draw the life out of it along this silver cord, as if sucking lemonade up a straw. The wolf-form began to fade, the cord thickened and grew more substantial. A violent emotional upheaval started in myself; I felt the most furious impulses to go berserk and rend and tear anything and anybody that came to hand, like the Malay running amok … The wolf-form now faded into a shapeless grey mist. This too absorbed along the silver cord. The tension relaxed and I found myself bathed in perspiration.
It is a curious point that, during the brief twenty-four hours of the thing’s life, the opportunity for an effectual vengeance presented itself.
Unlike her master, Crowley, Dion Fortune never gives the impression of being an exhibitionist, avid to create effects. The extraordinary material in her books, and the sober, factual manner in which it is presented, make her almost unique among writers on occultism. Even a sceptic has to admit that she writes as if she knows what she is talking about, and without the overblown, romantic language of most occultists. And what she says here about the temptation of the ‘Left-hand path’ explains a great deal about the lives of the magicians. In the Kabbalah, the world of magic – Yesod, the moon – is on a lower level than the world of intellect and imagination, Hod, or the vital, creative forces of nature, Netshah. Certain people posses natural ‘magical’ faculties, but unless these are subservient to intellect and imagination, they will tend to be used in the service of negative emotion – malice, envy and so on. The result is character degeneration. Most people possess magical faculties. Most people are, fortunately, unaware of it.
It is interesting to observe that the vampire bat seems to have been named after the legendary vampire, rather than vice versa. Until recent years, little was known about the creature. When it was finally studied by zoologists, it was discovered that the bat is not a blood sucker, but that it laps blood as a cat laps milk. Unlike Dracula and his confrères, the vampire bat does not leave two tiny punctures; it slashes an incision in the skin of the victim with its incisors, then its tongue flickers in and out with great rapidity, drinking the blood as it runs. The cut usually continues to bleed after the bat has finished drinking. The only attribute of the vampire bat that sounds at all supernatural is its ability to make the incision without causing pain, or waking a sleeper. Men who have been attacked by vampires – in tropical countries – wake up to find that they have bled on to the bedsheets. Scientific observers have noted that animals stand quite still while the bat makes the incision, apparently quite unalarmed by the attack. No one has tried to explain why this is so.
It will be interesting to observe whether the legends of vampires change their character as the facts about the vampire bat become better known.
A story printed in the Daily Express in August 1970 reveals that the vampire legend is still alive.
Armed with a wooden stake and a crucifix, Allan Farrow prowled among the tombstones of a graveyard. He was hunting the ‘vampire’ of Highgate Cemetery. And 24-year-old Farrow told a court yesterday; ‘My intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart.’ Farrow pleaded guilty at Clerkenwell, London, to entering St. Michael’s churchyard, Highgate Cemetery, for unlawful purposes … He was remanded in custody for reports.
Last night, Mr. Sean Manchester, leader of the British Occult Witchcraft and Lycanthropy Society, said: ‘I am convinced that a vampire exists in Highgate Cemetery. Local residents and passers-by have reported a ghost-like figure of massive proportions near the north gate.
Until the year 1953, it was generally assumed that magic in England came to an end with the dissolution of the Order of the Golden Dawn in the mid-thirties. (A Crowley disciple named Frances Israel Regardie published a full account of the Golden Dawn rites in four huge volumes between 1937 and 1940, and the few remaining members of the society decided it was hardly worth going on.) But in 1953 a book called Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner created an immediate stir. Gardner expounded the well-known Margaret Murray theory that witchcraft is a survival of pagan cults, after which he went on to reveal that witchcraft is as common in England today as it was in the fifteenth century. Modern witches, said Gardner, worship a Horned God and a Moon Goddess. Readers of Witchcraft Today observed a certain gusto in the accounts of torture and flogging, and may have concluded that Gardner’s brand of witchcraft had strong sexual overtones. Francis King, in Ritual Magic in England, says frankly that ‘Gardner was a sado-masochist with both a taste for flagellation and marked voyeuristic tendancies.’
Gardner, who died in 1964 at the age of eighty, seems to have been a distinctly flamboyant character in the Crowley tradition – that is to say, something of an exhibitionist. The son of a highly eccentric timber merchant (who used to remove all his clothes and sit on them whenever it rained), Gardner apparently developed his taste for voyeurism and being spanked during boyhood travels in the Middle East with a buxom Irish nurse. He lived in the East until 1936, when he returned to England and became a student and practitioner of magic. He joined a witch coven in 1946, according to his own account. As a result of his book Witchcraft Today, a number of ‘Gardner covens’ sprang up in England. Their purpose, according to Gardner, was to practise white witchcraft – curing the sick, performing ceremonies to assure good crops, etc. – but there was a heavy sexual emphasis. In Man, Myth and Magic, a journalist and photographer named Serge Kordeiv described his own involvement with a witch coven that sounds distinctly Gardner-esque. On arriving in a large Victorian house, he and his wife found themselves in a cloakroom whose pegs seemed to contain complete sets of clothes, including underwear. The ceremony, in front of an altar with six black candles, had strongly melodramatic touches, with oaths signed in blood and the sacrifice of a black cock. The ‘Master’, a naked man shining with red-coloured oil, placed his hands on their genitals. On another occasion a girl was ravished on the altar by the Master, as a punishment for betraying confidences. Kordeiv claims that his luck changed abruptly for the better while he was a member of the coven, and suddenly for the worse when he broke with it.*
Gerald Gardner’s rites also included ritual scourging and sexual intercourse between the High Priest and Priestess. He insisted that witchcraft (or ‘wicca’) was a healthy cult, and should be regarded as a religion. Whether he is right remains a matter of controversy; some investigators feel that there may be a certain amount of invention in his two books, and Francis King states that he forged a ‘witch’s rulebook’ called Book of the Shadows. In his will, Gardner left a witchcraft museum in Castletown, Isle of Man, to Mrs. Monique Wilson, another well-known contemporary witch, known in witch circles as Lady Olwen; Mrs. Wilson now runs the museum, together with her husband, and weekly coven meetings are held in Gardner’s old cottage. She asserts that a sex rite known as ‘the sacred marriage’ is performed only once every five years, and insists that English ‘wicca’ is basically the worship of the Mother Goddess, the Earth.
Francis King states that there has been a recent revival of interest in the Golden Dawn and its rituals. Regardie’s four-volume work is now almost unobtainable; and when it can be obtained, is likely to cost as much as £80; but a book on the ‘inner teachings’ of the Golden Dawn has recently been issued in England.* The new converts, according to King, are young red-brick-university graduates, and the leaders of the two leading groups both claim to be the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley. An order flourishing in Wolverhampton and the Midlands calls itself the Cubic Stone, and seems to be more closely related to Crowley than to the Golden Dawn. A long quotation from The Monolith (the order’s magazine) given by King seems to indicate that its magical invocations have been remarkably successful; on various days the room was permeated by a blue glow, a rose-coloured glow and a golden glow; voices were heard, presences felt, and blasts of cold air swept through the ‘temple’. In King’s opinion, the members of the Order of the Cubic Stone are to be regarded as serious and painstaking students of the occult, pursuing the ‘Enochian’ method.
It would probably be safe to say that there are now more witches in England and America than at any time since the Reformation. The best known among English practitioners are Patricia Crowther (who runs covens in Sheffield and Manchester), Eleanor Bone (who runs covens in Tooting and Cumberland), Monique Wilson and Alex Sanders. Sanders, born in 1926, claims the title King of the Witches, and has reintroduced into modern witchcraft some of the flamboyance associated with Crowley and Gardner. He was initiated into a coven by his grandmother at the age of seven, and introduced to Crowley three years later. He explained to Frank Smyth, the author of Modern Witchcraft, that he had deliberately used black magic to achieve money and sexual success. ‘It worked all right,’ he explained. But he then made the discovery that it all had to be paid for: several members of his family died of cancer, and his girlfriend committed suicide – after which, he set about purifying himself by magical ceremonies. Since 1967 he has held meetings at a flat in Notting Hill, London, and achieved considerable notoriety via newspapers and television. Like Monique Wilson, he insists that sexual rites are kept to a minimum. But, as with the majority of modern covens, most of the rites are performed naked.
Madeleine Montalban, who also knew Crowley, describes herself as a magician rather than a witch; she runs a correspondence course in magic from London, teaches levitation (‘even my young pupils can levitate one another, but it is a perfectly useless exercise’), and bottles demons, which occasionally explode the bottle. For her, magic is a strictly practical and rather cheerful affair. ‘Magic should make life easier. That’s what it’s all about,’ she told a reporter from Man, Myth and Magic.
To summarise: modern witchcraft seems to be far more varied than its earlier counterpart. Some witch covens are undoubtedly an excuse for sexual orgies, and have a large element of showmanship. Others are distinctly puritanical, and treat witchcraft as a pantheistic religion. Some are conducted in a spirit of research, with the aim of finding out how many of the traditional rites actually produce results, either objectively or subjectively. Perhaps these latter deserve to be taken the most seriously. For reasons we do not understand, certain rites do produce results – at least, when performed by the right person. This must mean that there are certain laws underlying the phenomena. In earlier centuries there was no curiosity about these laws, because the Devil and his cohorts were supposed to be at the back of them. By the time the age of scientific analysis arrived. witchcraft had vanished. And now, when faith in science has been eroded, magic is seeing a revival. The timing, at least, is excellent.
* Her facts are often wildly inaccurate. She states, for example, that Jack the Ripper committed nine murders between 1887 and 1889: in fact, he committed five murders in 1888, then stopped. She asserts that John George Haigh, ‘the acid-bath murderer’, drank the blood of his victims through a straw. Haigh claimed to have drunk blood from a cup, but this was only an attempt to get himself certified insane.
* Although this type of suggestion involves the same basic principle as hypnotism: to take advantage of the self-division of most people by turning one half against the other. In Appendix A of Beyond the Outsider I describe the case of the novelist Margaret Lane, who was plunged into a two-year depression by reading John Hersey’s account of the bombing of Hiroshima when she was recovering from a difficult childbirth. The mind develops a negative reflex, like a nervous dog that flinches every time someone moves.
* Man, Myth and Magic, Issues 30 and 31.
* The Golden Dawn, Its Inner Teachings, by R. G. Torrens (Neville Spearman, 1969).