The Witch Camps of Ghana

An article of mine on the scandal of witch refugee camps in the African country of Ghana has headed the most read list on BrooWaha for the past few days.  It was published there under the title No Country for Old Women.  I feel sure that it will also be of interest to my blog readers. 

Perhaps you’ve visited Salem in Massachusetts. If not, you may have been to Pendle in the English county of Lancashire, another northern community. Salem is well-known, Pendle less so, but both have a common link: they were the location of notorious seventeenth century witch hunts.

Now, of course, it’s all good fun, an opportunity for witch tourism. In Salem one can enjoy the Haunted Happenings; in Lancashire it’s possible to ride every Witch Way. Both places have recreated the trials of the accused for visitors, interesting, educational and diverting.

It’s all past; it’s all innocent fun. There are places, though, where witchcraft is neither new age nor diversion. There are places where accusations of malevolent magic can rise with shocking suddenness, often with fatal consequences. There are places where our past is their present.

In Ghana in West Africa up to a thousand women, most of them elderly, have been banished to remote camps in the north of the country. They include eighty-year-old Zeniebu Sugru, accused of being a witch after her nephew took ill and died. In fear of her life, she was obliged to take refuge in one of the six northern camps. Some of the women who live in these primitive places, without electricity or running water, have been there for thirty years or more.

BBC Radio recently highlighted the problem in a broadcast entitled No Country for Old Women. A number of people were interviewed, Zeniebu among them. Of the accusation against her she said “I knew it wasn’t true. I have never used witchcraft. But when I heard that they were planning to bury me alive in the boy’s grave, I knew I had to escape.” She did, eight years ago, leaving behind her grandchildren and all her possessions. There is little hope that she will ever be able to return to her former home in safety.

Samata Adulai is also in her eighties. She used to live in the village of Bulli in the south of the country, where she cared for her twin grandchildren while her daughter worked in the fields. One day her brother came to visit, telling her that her life was in danger: she had been accused of bewitching her niece after the girl died.

There was no possibility of facing down the charge: no, it was flight or death. “I was confused and filled with fear because I knew I was innocent. But I know that once people call you a witch your life is in danger and so without waiting to pick up any of my belongings, I just fled the village.”

Conditions in the witch camps are deplorable. Those who live in the settlement at Kukuo have to walk three miles each day to the River Oti for water, elderly people carrying heavy pots up and down hills. They survive by collecting firewood, selling bags of peanuts or working in local farms. “What is happening is an abuse of human rights”, said Adowa Kwateng-Kluvitse, the country director of ActionAidGhana. “The camps are effectively women’s prisons where the inmates are given a life sentence.”

These witch camps seem to be unique to Ghana but the accusations of witchcraft are not. And it isn’t just a problem for women; children are targeted too, across large parts of Africa: in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and the Central African Republic. Lynchings are commonplace. The problem has even made it to England. Two years ago in Newham in east London fifteen-year-old Kristy Bamu was tortured and drowned in a bath by his sister and her partner attempting to exorcise ‘demons.’

There are some comparisons with past persecutions in Europe and America. In Ghana most of the women in Kukuo are widows, accused and banished after their husbands had died. The suggestion is that an accusation of witchcraft is an easy way for other members of the family to take control of the property. “The camps are a dramatic manifestation of the status of women in Ghana”, said Professor Dzodi Tsikata of the University of Ghana, “Older women become a target because they are no longer useful to society.”

The government, which sees these places as a blot on the country’s reputation, is anxious to disband the camps. There is one thing preventing this: the safety of the women returning home cannot be guaranteed. One form of insurance is to undergo a ‘cleansing’ ritual. At Kukuo, Samata Adulai obtained the services of one of the local fetish priests, to determine her innocence or guilt. In a special ritual a chicken has its throat cut. As it flutters around people wait to see how it will fall. It lands on its back, beak in the air. Smiles all round: the woman is innocent.

So much depends on the chicken. If it had fallen in any other way the ritual then proceeds to a potentially fatal level. If Samata had been declared guilty she would had to have undergone a cleansing ceremony, drinking a concoction of chicken blood, monkey skulls and soil. The exorcism is only considered effective if the woman does not fall ill within seven days. If she does, and survives, she has to do the whole thing again.

But even after this there is no guarantee that they will be accepted. So great is the fear of witchcraft, or the love of property, that not all communities are prepared to accept the return of the exiles. Once a witch, always a witch, so the view sadly goes.

Dreaming on a Midsummer Night

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it; it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a central feature of which was ritual baths and bonfires. The bonfires themselves were closely linked with water, lit as they were on the shores of streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Midsummer marks the convergence of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, now at its height, has entered Cancer, the great water sign, the only sign ruled by the Moon, the only sign ruled by Artemis, Diana and Hecate, the lunar goddesses. All those who share the sign of Cancer with me are collectively the Children of the Moon, hunters, witches, flyers and lovers.

This was a time when witch-hunters of the past claimed that witches rode out to meet Satan, whereas the real witches, not the monsters of imagination, simply gathered to renew their sacred bond with the earth, to celebrate its bounty and fertility. It was a time also for gathering magical plants, a time when they were at their most potent. Russian witches use to harvest those which grew on the top of Bald Mountain, considering them to be the most powerful on Earth.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by far my favourite Shakespearean comedy, light of touch and light of heart, rich in all sorts of magic, a world of fairy visions.  And it just so happens that one of favourite paintings touches on the very same themes.  It’s The Fairy Raid: Carrying off a Changeling on Midsummer’s Eve by Joseph Noel Paton, a nineteenth century Scottish artist who painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style.  He is better known for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but for me The Fairy Raid is just sublime.  The technical proficiency is astounding but there is far more here.  This is a vision that could only have come of a true love of the Realm of Faerie. 

Magic, love and fruitfulness, these are the things Midsummer Eve and the Solstice are about; this is what they will always be about. All hail to thee, Children of the Moon.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

The Hammer of Prejudice

I’ve cobbled together some thoughts on the Malleus Maleficarum – literally the Hammerer of the Witches - , one of the most infamous texts ever written on the subject of witchcraft. What follows is entirely impressionistic rather than a detailed exposition or a review as such; so please do bear that in mind. Besides, I’m not quite sure that a review of a primary text like this is in any way meaningful.

I’m assuming, though, that most of the people who glance at this article have never actually read this notorious book. So, if there is anything that is not clear, or if you would like to know any more, I will do my best to tackle any questions that you might have.

The book, of course, was originally published in Latin, translated twice into English; first by Montague Summers in 1928, and more recently - and accurately - by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. The text I am referring to here is the latter, published in paperback by Manchester University Press in 2007.

Anyway, the Malleus first appeared in 1487 under the name of two Dominican inquisitors: Heinrich Kramer, usually known by his Latin name of Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger, though it is generally thought that Kramer was the sole author.

Those of you who know little of the nature of the great European Witch Hunt may be surprised to learn that the Catholic Church was originally highly sceptical about the whole phenomenon of witchcraft, a position reflected in canon law. The Malleus was composed specifically because Kramer had been frustrated by the failure of the prosecution of a group of alleged witches in Innsbruck, a process in which he had been personally involved. The task of his manual - that is how it is best conceived - was both to provide a scholarly defence of the heresy of witchcraft - it is important to understand that is how Kramer conceived the practice - and to provide guidance for inquisitors and legal professionals in the pursuit and prosecution of witches.

I would like to say that the book stands in relation to the Witch Holocaust as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does to that of the Jews.  Yes, I would like to say it but I know, contrary to a more general prejudice, that this is a gross exaggeration; for it was only one of a number of similar texts, and by no means the most popular. It did, however, have a percolating effect, steadily influencing a large section of scholarly opinion on the matter, both before and after the Reformation.

So far as Kramer was concerned witchcraft was a huge diabolic conspiracy against Christendom, a terrorist threat, if you will, with Satan in the role of Osama Bin Laden and the witches as his agents. Witches were not ignorant of the faith, like Muslims. Rather they had chosen the deliberate path of apostasy and heresy, all the more dangerous for this. The diffuse nature of the practice - also like contemporary terrorism - made it a particular and pervasive threat.

The Malleus itself is by no means an original work, rather bringing together in one place a whole series of past opinions and judgements on the nature of malificiendum or harmful magic. Kramer’s unique contribution was to identify this principally with women, for the simple reason that witchcraft for him was a crime founded on carnal lust, and women, in his view, were more susceptible to this than men. For Kramer the most powerful class of witches, whose crimes included the killing and eating of their own children, all practiced “copulation with devils.”

It would be wrong to assume, as often is, that the work is specifically misogynist; it does little more than reflect many of the prejudices of the day. Rather it was the carnal susceptibilities of women, their weakness in the face of temptation, which made them the Achilles Heel of the Faith. Kramer even argues, on the basis of a bogus etymology, that ‘femina’ comes from the root ‘fe’ and ‘minus’, meaning less of faith. It was this that made many females, those who chose the perverse path, to be liable to demonic seduction. In short it was the infidelity of women that could and did, in his mind, lead to perfidia, a betrayal of the Faith. This was not inevitable, but women needed all the help they could get to keep the dangers posed by their carnality under control.

The ideas presented in the Malleus gradually seeped downwards, linking witchcraft with diabolism in the popular mind, thus divorcing the practice from an older and less malign root. In this in made an important contribution to the forms of hysteria that formed such an important part of the psychology of the Burning Times.

So, this is what I would like you to hold in mind: that for Kramer and many of his contemporaries, witchcraft, linked with the Devil, was a malevolent form of supernatural terrorism. This was the essential fuel of the witch-hunt, then and in all subsequent times.

Any rating here, like a rating of a work like Mein Kampf, also seems gratuitously unnecessary, serving almost like a papal imprimatur!  I can assure you that I do not approve of the contents of this book.  But I will rate it at four stars simply because it’s a work that really should be consulted by those who have any interest at all in witchcraft, past prejudice and a darkly important phase in European history.  My rating, however, is more a reflection of the package offered by Maxwell-Stuart.  Not only is it a vast improvement on past translations but it comes with a superb introductory essay. I think it only fair to add that if you are looking for something, lurid, dark and racy the Malleus is bound to disappoint.  It is crushingly dull!  Or is that just witchy prejudice?  :-)

Now she rests!  

Sperm Bandits

Now picture the scene. By the side of the road a group of male hitchhiker are trying to catch a ride. A nineteen-year-old girl stops to pick them up. The guys refuse to get in. They don’t trust her, they say; they fear they are going to be raped!

You think this is a spoof, well, I can assure you, it's not. The country in question is Zimbabwe, where three women currently stand accused of picking up male hitchhikers with the intent of harvesting their sperm. The victims apparently were drugged or subdued at knife or gun point before the women forced themselves upon them. In one case a live snake was alleged to have been used. Afterwards the ‘donors’ were dumped naked by the roadside.

Reports of male rape first appeared some three years ago, but the story only achieved widespread prominence after the police arrested sisters Sophie and Netsai Nhokwara and Rosemary Chakwizira, three prostitutes, last October, when they were found in possession of a bag of – ugh – used condoms. They were subsequently charged with the violation of seventeen men.

The story is just so bizarre, even more bizarre than the sort of thing that normally comes out of Zimbabwe. For one thing why the sperm was taken in such circumstances has still to be established, though it is thought that it is used in ‘juju’, traditional witchcraft practices designed to bring good fortune. For another it’s unclear why force is used, in that men are not usually noted for their reluctance to donate sperm freely, though possibly compulsion adds, ahem, to the potency.

According to Watch Ruparanganda, a sociologist at the University of Zimbabwe, the practice, which he describes as ‘mind boggling’, is a lucrative business. Apparently he first came across it seven years ago while doing research for his doctoral thesis among the street youth of Harare, the capital. He was told that businessmen would take them to hotels where they were entertained by prostitutes, the only charge being that they hand over the used condoms afterwards.

Though the women have been in custody for several months, appearing in several preliminary hearings, no trial date has been set. Because there is no law in Zimbabwe criminalising rape by women they have been charged with aggravated indecent assault. The anger is such that, according to their lawyer, they have received death threats.

It also seems impossible that the trail process, if it ever comes, will be in any way fair. They have already been paraded on national television as ‘female rapists’, though the evidence against them seems to be tenuous at best. Dunisani Mthombeni, counsel for two of the accused, says that the authorities are reluctant to go to trial because they have arrested the wrong people.

The case has provoked mixed reactions. Zimbabwean women’s rights groups have criticised the reaction as disproportionate, shifting attention away from female rape victims. Men are reported to be afraid, refusing to get into cars driven by women, “Even if she is old”, said one hitchhiker outside Harare. But this has not stopped the local press printing a cartoon showing a naked man trying to attract the attention of women drivers.

I refuse to prejudge the issues here, though I find my credulity stretched to the limits. There is, according to some reports, an international market in stolen sperm, a commodity so plentiful, so readily given - some even paying for the pleasure - it beggars belief that it has any value at all. It’s as well to remember also that Zimbabwe is a country run by Robert Mugabe, where scapegoats and diversions from the misery of everyday life are always welcome. Meanwhile the country’s tourist board could mount a new campaign; not come to Zimbabwe but come in Zimbabwe.

Mother of Darkness, Mother of Light

Another year has past, another season gone. The witches gathered on the funeral hill, waiting at the feast, for the first winter’s day, the first winter’s sun arising in the east; for death has come for the summer time and to take the leaves of spring; Hecate, Nemesis, Dark Mother take us in.

The light has gone, the dark begins, but we still fire the darkness; I did fire the darkness. Once again we had a marvellous festival of the dead, we the living, all my sisters and all my brothers, together for another sabbat, Samhain-Halloween, the most important of them all, a celebration of the past, of the past united in the present and flowing on to the future.

I did something different this year, away from London, deep in the Surrey country. Sisters and friends joined me for a ritual, a celebration and a party, made all the more complete with a traditional bonfire. We give renewed power to the sun, to ourselves, through the winter days ahead.

I paid particular reverence to Hecate, the goddess of witches and of magic; of crossroads and new beginnings, new beginnings in new life; goddess of moonlight, of thresholds and of gates, looking in three directions at once. Although her main festival follows later in November, All Hallows is also of great significance to her, the night of the dark moon, the night of the wild hunt.

A wild journey, a wild hunt, a supper by the crossroads, a dedication by the Trivia, that’s what makes it all so exciting, these sacred nights, that sacred night past, rich in meaning, rich in significance. Bliss was it in that darkness to be alive but to be young, and a witch, was very heaven. Let’s fly! :-)

Belladonna and aconite
Give to me the gift of flight
Take me up, airborne in the night
In a dream, across the sky
A hundred-million miles high
Take me ever onwards in the night
Dark sisters join my night flight
See how far you can climb
Holt’s with us on this bright night
Ride with him ‘cross the sky
As a screaming horde
We cut the scape
The Devil’s Apple exacerbates
To the sabbat on a demon steed I ride
Across the astral plane we race
The universe my fingers trace
And I am lost forever in my mind

The Witch Child

In one of my very early blogs here I wrote about the case of Brigitta Hörner, a seven-year-old girl who once lived in Rothenburg ob der Tauber in seventeenth century Germany (Remembering the Little Witch Girl). In 1639, for reasons unknown, Brigitta claimed to be a witch. I wrote;

In much the same fashion that was appear later that century during the Salem witch trials Brigitta began to identify the members of her 'coven', adults from both Rothenburg and Spielbach. This added to the social tensions in the area, with people asking her to identify those whom they suspected of witchcraft. It was concerns over public order that caused the city council of Rothenburg to have Brigitta arrested on 8 July. She was now widely known in the area as the 'Little Witch Girl.'

This was a dangerous time. The Great European Witch Craze had not yet come to an end. Hysteria, fuelled by no more than accusation, could have taken hold of the community in much the same way it was do elsewhere. But the authorities, who treated Brigitta with kindness, decided that her stories were simply not plausible, allowing the matter to settle down.

I called this back to mind on watching The Pendle Witch Child, a BBC documentary about another accusation of witchcraft, this time in the county of Lancashire in north-west England. It’s a case that also involved the testimony of a little girl, one with a wholly different outcome. In concerned nine-year-old Jennet Device, whose evidence was enough to send her whole family, her mother, her brother and her sister to the gallows, along with a number of others.

It’s England in 1612. The country is on the cusp of huge changes, poised between the Age of Superstition and the Age of Enlightenment. It’s a time of great religious and political uncertainty, a time of fear and suspicion; against perceived outsiders, against Catholics in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, against all those who are believed to be a threat to good order.

On the throne sits James I, the intended victim of one plot after another, not just the political terrorists of 1605 but those who allegedly tried to ensnare him by witchcraft when he was still king of Scotland. James, the wisest fool in Christendom, according to his fellow monarch Henri IV of France, was a bit of an expert when it came to the nefarious arts, bringing all sorts of Presbyterian prejudices from the north, all outlined and codified in Daemonologie, his witch-hunter’s manual.

To Lancashire now, a county in England’s wild north-west frontier, a place still considered to be beyond the pale by those living in the tamer regions of the south. This was an area where old religions and old beliefs did not die readily. Here a great many remained loyal to England’s Catholic heritage. Others remained loyal to an even more ancient set of beliefs, giving particular prominence to the wise women, the local healers in the absence of any other, the only healers the poor could afford.

It’s a dry and explosive mixture that really only required a spark, that and an ambitious guardian of public order, ready to fan the ensuing flames. The spark came in March, 1612, when one Alizon Device laid a curse on a peddler by the name of John Law. Alizon, the older sister of Jennet and part of a local family of beggars, was at once convinced that she had the power of a witch. Full of contrition for the doom that had befallen Law, who on the evidence seems to have suffered a stroke, she held to her story, bringing it so far as the guardian, Roger Nowell, a local magistrate.

Now a witch hunt was truly underway, a hunt that drew in not just suspected wise women but Catholic dissidents, as the circle moved wider and wider still. Enter Jennet, full of accusations against her own family and their neighbours.

There was something deeply tragic about this little girl, as tragic in her own way as Brigitta Hörner. The greater tragedy is that her accusations, unlike Brigitta’s, were taken seriously. She had a story to tell and she told it in open court, a key witness for the prosecution. Was it right to trust the word of a child when there was no other corroborating evidence? Yes, of course it was; had not the king said as much in Daemonologie?

Why did Jennet act as she did? We can’t be sure but according to Simon Armitage, who presented The Pendle Witch Child, she seems to have harboured a particular animus against her family, perhaps for neglect, perhaps for other perceived slights. After her mother, making hysterical appeals from the dock, was removed from the court at the little girl’s request, she proceeded to give her evidence with calm authority, even evading a trap laid out for her by the judge.

As the story unfolded it was brought vividly to life by some haunting hand-drawn images of Elizabeth, the mother, of Alizon, the sister, and of little Jennet, who looked particularly forlorn. Tragic and malicious, a pawn and a player, she was to have an impact far beyond Pendle, beyond Lancashire, even beyond England itself. It was her actions and this precedent that allowed child testimony to play such an important part in Salem in 1692.

Ironically Jennet herself became a victim and by the very process that she initiated. In 1634 she was accused of witchcraft along with a number of others on the fantastic evidence of a ten-year-old by the name of Edmund Robinson. But times had changed; a new mood of sceptical inquiry was coming into prominence. The political, social and religious tensions that sustained events earlier in Pendle - and later in Salem - were in abeyance. Robinson’s accusations were eventually dismissed as fantasy, though not until after he had initiated a mini reign of terror. It did not do Jennet much good. Though acquitted, the evidence suggests that she died in jail.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort off thing, part of the age of superstition, not the age of reason. But reason, as Armitage pointed out in his presentation, is always superficial. Fear, superstition, if you will, remains with us in some fashion or another, though the targets may have altered. Demonization, after all, is not limited to Daemonologie, and witches come in many guises.

Castles, Ghosts and Witches

I flew up to Edinburgh early on Friday morning for a long weekend with some dear friends who moved earlier this year to a village called Dirleton to the east of the city. It was a trip I was so looking forward to, planned some time in advance. At the beginning of the week things were not looking so good because Vulcan’s hissy fit in Iceland was sending up so much dust and ash! In the end, I’m happy to say, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing.

It’s almost two years since I was last in Edinburgh, there for the International Festival. The city is as beautiful, and as dirty, as ever. The tram works on Princes Street are still not finished, but the thoroughfare is now far less of a mess than it was in August, 2009. This whole project seems to have been something of a local farce. Not only is the route shorter than planned but the scheme is also millions over budget, another massive waste of time and money that looks to be of minimal benefit to local people. I’ve yet to find a soul who has a good word to say about it, although I suppose I should have spoken to the foreign companies who were awarded the contract.

It’s not Edinburgh I want talk about; no, it’s East Lothian, a county in a part of Scotland I had never been to before. Dirleton itself is absolutely delightful. It’s not like any Scottish village I’ve ever seen, more English in appearance and general atmosphere, with a lovely central green. Close by is the most marvellous castle, parts of which date back to the thirteenth century. I adore romantic ruins and this is one is particularly charming, set in such beautiful gardens.

The other romantic delight is the nearby Archerfield House, originally founded in the late 1600s with substantial remodelling the following century. Once the home of Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the First World War, the place went in to sad decline after the Second, a fate reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead. Happy to say it has been beautifully restored as a hotel adjacent to two splendid golf links. As guests of my friends we had a round on the Fidra on Saturday afternoon. My game, I regret to say, does not improve. Dash it all: I blame it on the wind!

On Sunday, my appetite whetted by the Dirleton fortress, we did a spot of castle bagging. I was told there was one particular monument that was bound to appeal to me, situated on top of a rocky headland. This is Tantallon Castle, once the property of the Douglas earls of Angus. Actually it’s not at all a castle as traditionally conceived, a keep surrounded by four walls. No, Tantallon itself is in the shape of a huge single wall built to make use of the defensive possibilities of the sea cliffs. In a state of ruin it’s still a formidable and majestic place. Once besieged by the king of Scotland in person, it last saw action during the seventeenth century Civil Wars. Occupied by troops loyal to the crown, it was bombarded in 1651 by Parliamentary forces under the command of General Monck, Cromwell’s artillery chief. After the surrender it was left in a state of ruin, never again reoccupied.

No, that’s not quite true. There is one inhabitant, a courtly gentleman dressed in a ruff, a style favoured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. This is the Tantallon Ghost, last seen in a photograph taken in 2008, peering through one of the upper windows into the courtyard. Sadly he declined to show himself when I was there, no matter how much I willed it!

There are marvellous views from the grounds of Tantallon over the Firth of Forth and on to the nearby Bass Rock, the same kind of volcanic plug upon which Edinburgh Castle was built. Though this is the first time I’ve seen the Rock it’s not the first time I’ve visited it. No, I came through the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped. It was here that David Balfour, the priggish and self-important hero of the story, was kidnapped and confined for a second time. I remember it principally for the Tale of Tod Laprick, a story within a story, another eerie encounter, this time with a warlock and a shape shifter, one who takes the form of a gannet, in which the island abounds.

East Lothian is rich in the traditions and tales of witchcraft, no place more so than the seaside town of North Berwick, a Scottish version of Salem. It was a place I simply had to visit. It is here in the late sixteenth century, in the green by Saint Andrew’s Church, that local witches gathered, supposedly under the guidance of Satan himself, to cast spells against James VI, returning by sea from a trip to Denmark. The magic was ineffective, for despite the conjured storms the king made it safely to port.

What is certain is that a hysterical witch-hunt followed, in which hundreds of women were arrested, many confessing under torture to meeting Satan at the nocturnal sabbat. Among the accused was Agnes Sampson, also known as the Wise Woman of Keith, a local midwife and healer, who was even interrogated by the king in person. After gruesome tortures she was finally garrotted and burned as a witch on 28 January, 1591.

I’ve written about this before in a piece I called To Kill a King: the Story of the North Berwick Witches. Superstitious James may have been, the author of a work on demonology, but the persecution of these women, healers and innocent victims, had a clear political purpose, proving that the king, as a ‘man of God’, could defy the powers of Satan and the schemes of Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell, his principal enemy and the real devil behind various conspiracies. I said a silent prayer in memory of Agnes and all the other victims of this tragedy.

From the crimes of the past to the pleasures of the present the weekend was rounded off with a super dinner at Archerfield House. I’m grateful to all concerned for a magical time amongst castles, ghosts and witches.

Bogus Journey

There is one glorious snippet of information I discovered about Season of the Witch: Dominic Sena, the director, was apparently inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returning from the Crusades meets Death in the midst of his plague-stricken land. If I tell you that Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey does it so much better you might get a flavour of this movie!

Starring Nicholas Cage as Behmen and Ron Perlman as Felson, two crusading-weary crusaders, Season of the Witch is a sword and sorcery romp, the sort of thing I normally love. I say crusaders but I could not honestly say which crusade these guys are on – it’s set in the fourteenth century-, who they are fighting or for what end. I can’t even say which crusading order they belong to, though I would have to guess the Teutonic Knights, judging by the black crosses on their surcoats. Actually it’s much more of a Western, or the kind of medieval scenario that might have been found by a Connecticut Yankee visiting the Court of King Arthur!

This is not a bad movie; it’s an awful one. The script is shallow, the editing incompetent, the dialogue laughable and the acting dreadful. It might actually have been quite effective as parody – it certainly carries slight Monty Python overtures – but unfortunately it takes itself too seriously. I have to say that there were points I almost laughed out loud at some of the one-liners. There is Behmen comment on the number of times he has saved Felson’s ass, or his aside in one battle that whoever slays the most men buys drinks.

The one- slightly- bright spot is Perlman, who can do medieval quite well. He was superb as the grotesque monk Salvatore in the film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I had the feeling here that he was the only one to recognise the absurdity of the script, hamming it up accordingly. He only needed a cigar to complete the effect of medieval Europe by way of the Mid-West, playing a kick-ass Sir Rambo. But in the end he was a victim of a director who could not make up his mind about which direction he wished to travel.

Anyway, these two cowpokes, sorry make that knightly buddies, decide enough is enough after about a dozen years of murder and mayhem on behalf of the church. Deserting the cause, they find themselves in a plague-stricken land. It’s the fourteenth century so we are in Black Death country…or are we? As the pals mosey along into town they are recognised as apostates and brought before the local big-wig, a cardinal by the name of D’Ambroise, his face so disfigured by plague pustules, buboes and boils that it’s quite impossible to recognise our own Christopher Lee!

Now the terrible truth is revealed to Behmen and Felson: the plague, it turns out, is not caused by microbes – they didn’t exist in the middle ages -, bad air or Jews poisoning wells; no it has been caused, so the Cardinal believes, by witchcraft, or rather by one witch in particular, only ever identified as ‘The Girl’, played by Claire Foy.

In return for absolution the chums are asked to escort her across country to a distant monastery, where the monks possess knowledge, drawn from a secret book, that will determine whether ‘The Girl’ is a witch or not and lift the curse. They eventually agree, but only on Behmen’s insistence that she gets a ‘fair trial.’ A fair trial, on an accusation of witchcraft in the Middle Ages! Here we are firmly back in Wild West country – we’ll give her a fair trail and then we’ll burn her at the stake!

It get’s funnier. The party is made up of a priest called Debelzaq, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, almost invariably pronounced, at least to my ear, as Da Ball Sac, and a guide by the name of Hagmar, played by Stephen Graham, an English actor who affects here a bizarre American accent in a time centuries before America was discovered. With ‘The Girl’ safely enclosed in a caged witch-mobile off we go.

I say it gets funnier but the humour soon dries up. We are not in the heart of darkness, just the heart of dullness, stock images and unimaginative clichés. At one point the path is intercepted by a precipice that can only be crossed by – guess what – a rickety old rope and plank bridge, possibly left over from an Indiana Jones movie set.

In the end it turns out that the witch is not a witch at all. No, she is simply possessed by a gargoyle – at least that’s what the computer-generated image looked like – which manifests after the chaps try a spot of do-it-yourself exorcism, the monks all being dead from the plague. The appearance of the beast is the occasion for the movie’s most memorable line, Da Ball Sac’s immortal “We are going to need more holy water.” The thing is, you see, the said demonic gargoyle, replete with a wonderful set of wings, fooled everyone into taking him to the monastery so he could lay his claws on the monks' secret book and thus plunge the world into darkness. If he had only flown there he would have saved himself, and us, a wholly wearisome journey.

Even the finale, an extravaganza of demon-bashing and chopping up of ninja-monks, brought to life by possession, is just too silly to engage on any emotional level at all, even one of simple visceral excitement.

Season of the Witch is clearly just another milestone on the seemingly downward spiral in Nichols Cage’s career, so sad when compared with how brilliant he once was in movies like Leaving Las Vegas. Here he is hopelessly out of place, hopelessly miscast, reciting banal lines with a dream-like lack of engagement. I was tempted to write that this movie is so bad it’s actually good, right up there with the Ed Wood masterpieces; but it’s not – it’s just bad, dull and predictable.

Incidentally, ‘The Girl’, the witch who is not a witch, is given a voice-over at the end, telling us her name at last. She is Anna. :-)

Shadow Dance

Now we have just past Halloween – and, yes, I did have a marvellous time – I thought you might like to know that the police force here in London has been issued with thoughtful and sensitive advice on dealing with the great sisterhood of witches. Indeed, they have. Officers of the Metropolitan Police have a 300-hundred page guide (not all about witches!) with all sorts of helpful tips on dos, don’ts and correct procedures. The details outlined in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday helped raise a smile amidst the residues of party Armageddon!

To begin with officers are advised against touching a witch’s Book of Shadows. Yes, we all have one, a personal, hand-written account of each singular and unique journey in the mysteries of the Craft. There is magic here, the magic beginning with pen put to paper and continuing to weave a spell. It’s a mystery and like all mysteries has to be kept secret, so I’m not prepared to say anymore, or to allow the police to have access on a whim!

The other thing Mr Plod should avoid is touching my ceremonial dagger, my athame, without permission, or interrupting a pagan ceremony. If by chance they happen to do so, and if by further chance they discover that a blindfolded, bound and naked person happens to be the focus of the said ceremony, they are not immediately to jump to conclusions. It’s just as well they stayed away from my party then, or various erroneous conclusions might have been leapt at!

Actually, I shouldn’t really make fun of this, though the earnestness really invites humour. It’s a measure of the growing importance of witchcraft that officers are being introduced to terms like “merry meet” and “wickening”; to festivals such as Imbolic, Lughnasadh and Samahin. It’s delightfully educational; I’m just not sure what it has to do with policing. “Pagans”, we are told, “have no religious dietary laws. However, many, though not all, witches are vegetarians”. Yes, but so what? It seems, well, a tad on the banal side

Meanwhile, you can burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from an old fruit jar. Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh, honey, lay off of my Book of Shadows. :-)

...Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels!
Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!
I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset;
I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky...

Season of the witch

There are times when it seems to me that the English know more about the customs and traditions of, say, the French or the Americans than they do about the nations with whom we have long shared this island.

Take Halloween, for instance. So many people are under the deluded impression that this is an American import of fairly recent provenance. Yes, it’s true that there are pronounced American features to the contemporary festival, notably jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treat, but Halloween has been celebrated here for ages past in Scotland and Ireland, where it emerged from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.

It has long been part of Scottish tradition for children to go out ‘guising’ on Halloween, visiting houses, dressed for the occasion their way lighted by a lantern carved not from a pumpkin but from a large hollowed-out neep, a turnip. In the homes they visit they perform a set-piece, a poem or a song in return for small gifts of sweets or nuts or whatever the household could spare. It was such customs that were carried by Scottish and Irish migrants to the Americas.

There are also English customs which, at root, belong to a pagan past, though here the tradition is much more heavily sublimated. Dominic Sandbrook in a polemical piece in the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine argues that the ‘foreign custom’ of Halloween should be scrapped in favour of the ‘traditional’ English festival of Bonfire Night (If I ran the country, I’d throw Halloween on the bonfire).

Celebrated on November 5, Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, marks the foiling of the Gunpowder plot in 1605, in which Fawkes and a number of Catholic co-conspirators planned to blow up the opening session of Parliament with the king in attendance. But this is just a political gloss on another pagan practice, the lighting of huge bonfires to give renewed power to the sun, which ancient communities, governed by the law of the seasons, believed was in danger of dying at this time of year, with the nights growing longer and the days shorter. The Samhain bonfires, moved to a more acceptable occasion, also included the burning of an ‘old guy’, clearly the vestiges of a human sacrifice, long before anyone had ever heard of Guy Fawkes!

Samhain, the long dark night, the night when the dead are nearest to the living, is also the night of the witches, warlocks and imps! My coven will assemble, flying in to celebrate the turning of the seasons and to honour the Goddess. The fires shall burn and the wheel of life shall turn, and the dead come back home on Samhain. Yes, they shall, and join with the living, witches and straights, in a big Halloween party at my London home!

Rabbit Witch

In popular imagination the animal most associated with witches is the cat. But in tradition it wasn’t the cat at all who served witches as familiars and messengers: it was the rabbit. Witches were also on occasions said to have transformed themselves into rabbits.

There are clear associations here with far older fertility and witch cults, concepts going beyond the malevolent perversion of witchcraft in the Christian Middle Ages. Rabbits are clever, fast, coming and going as if by magic. Their defences are limited to quickness of wits and of movement. They thrive by fecundity, and are everywhere associated with sex, fertility and the moon. They are the classic tricksters, representing the triumph and joy in life, representing success, the primal stimulus for magic and witchcraft.

In Central America the moon is invariably associated with rabbits. The Maya depicted the moon goddess as a beautiful young woman holding a rabbit in her arms. The goddess Ixchel herself has a consort who is a man-sized rabbit.

The Chinese associated rabbits with witchcraft, sorcery and alchemy. One classical myth echoes the iconography of the Maya, depicting a rabbit as the companion of the Moon Lady, one who prepares the elixir of immortality.

In Africa the rabbit is the great trickster spirit, one whose story was carried by the slaves to America, where he eventually took the shape in the folklore as the wonderful Brer Rabbit and more recently as Bugs Bunny. Both in their different ways represent the intelligence, the curiosity and the magical quality of their kind: no matter how much trouble they get into they always manage miraculously to slip away. I can think of my better symbol for a witch!

Talking of which and witch, here is a lovely Song for a Witch by Adam. :-)

So far as the eye can tell,
There is no heaven--is no hell,
The bird that sings, sings not for me,
And nothing lies beyond what we might see.

Cloak your dreams in winter's fur,
Even if your heart demures,
What blame is given when soldiers die,
The fool shall gaze on you and cry.

But what is the poppy that you plant?
Is your sympathy for me to grant?
You are not chained and yet are grand,
Small minds so low to understand.

What spell is written on chamber doors,
If only my heart could but implore,
Oh witch of wisdom make me wise,
Make me a drink of truth that's drunk of lies.

Make me thin and make me fat,
Make me bird then dog then cat,
Touch my flesh and burn my soul,
Take my penance--reject my toll.

Your beauty is no mortal constraint,
Be my devil--be my saint,
Be my conscience--be my guilt,
Lead me to placid waters where blood is spilt.

Oh witch that knows all that is seen,
Is my life a rich man's dream,
Does the poor man want to scream,
Whose eyes are these the gods did glean?

Ana evil--Ana wise,
Woman lives and man shall die,
Ana humble--Ana strong,
The night is warm and days grow long.

God is dead for I am here,
Angels draw their daggers near,
If a witch could make my weak heart sing,
My beauty like Bow Bells would ring.

An ocean parts as you bid it so,
Your garden in my tears does grow,
Awaken now--Jerusalem is planted,
And England shall reign for e'er enchanted.

Cast your spell above my head,
I will go where I am led,
The Thames is an ocean in a ditch,
Oh what is life without a witch?

Call out my name

She was no ordinary succubus.
Late into the night
Through cold, electric clouds
She flew with broken wings
On currents kindled by his dreams.
And finally, descending upon
His yearning body, she whispered:
“I’m late, my love, but tender is the morning.”

I have before me my copy of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches), the infamous fifteenth century witch-hunting manual of Heinrich Institoris, a Dominican inquisitor. Dear Heinrich knew so much about witches and women; he knew so much about succubae, my demonic sisters, and we are legion; even Japanese emperors want to sleep with us!

What is a succubus, you ask? The legend is simple and quickly told: a succubus is female, a demon – though I personally prefer to be called an imp – who takes the form of a living woman in order to have intercourse with mortal men. The Malleus is quite clear on the reasons for this;

The reason the evil spirits turn themselves into incubi or succubae is not for the sake of gaining or conferring pleasure, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones. The most potent reason is this – to harm a person twice over, that is, in body and soul, through the vices of lasciviousness, so that there comes into being people who are more inclined to all the vices.

So there! Succubae, you see, exist for one purpose and one purpose only – to steal sperm from sleeping men and then pass it to the incubi, male demons, who take the same sperm and use it to impregnate sleeping women, a sort of early form of in vitro fertilisation! According to some sources this is how witches are conceived. Oh, I should add that in case men might just be attracted to a spot of free extra-marital sex with a lascivious imp the church spread the story that the vagina of the succubus was like a chamber of ice. Clerics, I assume, most have had some empirical experience here!

There is a whole sub-text, an inner message to the Malleus that Institoris could never have anticipated, a possible reading, post-Freud, that he could never have imagined. The book is full of apprehension about women in general, fears over female sexuality. The succubae are, in a sense, an expression of that fear, rampant sexual beings, which, like vampires, come in the night to steal the life force from mortal men, blood or semen, it really makes no difference. The succubus really is a phantom of desire. To be taken by one is the Medieval version of an alien abduction!

I am not the greatest of the clan, no; that singular honour belongs to Mother Lilith, in Jewish legend the first wife of Adam. I wrote once before that if Lucifer was the first male rebel in creation then Lilith has to be the first female. And what a rebel she was: the first feminist; the first witch; the first sexually assertive woman; the first divorcee! As a figure she is an inspiration, a mentor and a guide; a woman who deliberately exiled herself from paradise in search of nothing more substantive than freedom, nothing more important than freedom. And there is nothing more important than freedom, for me as a woman and for me as a succubus.

So, late one night if you hear a rapping, rapping on your chamber door, don’t worry; it’s only me…and nothing more.

You're laying on your bed on a hot summer night
Underneath the lunar light
I am a dream I am a phantom of desire
Call out my, call out my name

Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain
Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain

I've come a calling from, a thousand ages past
I was the first I'll be the last
I am a scratching on the windows of your soul
Call out my, call out my name

Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain
Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain

A witch is what I am

I’m beginning to lose count of the number of times I’ve been asked why I take such an interest in witchcraft. The answer is really quite simple: I love the traditions and the magic, the custom and the practice. I love the old stories of witches; I love the sense in which one bonds with a tradition that pre-dates all of the major religions of today, one that shows a unique reverence for the past, for one’s ancestors. There is also a particular bond with others who think like me, who practice with me, who worship with me. It really is something quite wonderful, beautiful and special. Next month comes another Samhain, another Halloween, the great shift in the cycle of the seasons and the highlight of my witchy year, to which I am already looking forward and preparing. All hail to the Great Mother.

Why do you call yourself a Witch?
Why do you dress yourself in black?
Why don’t you use some other word
And get the devil off your back?”
I call myself a Witch because
A Witch is what I am
And like a Jew in Nazi Germany
I don’t define my name
To suit the Master Plan
The Propaganda Man
Never again! Never again!

“Why do you call yourself a Witch?
You know we just don’t understand
People will think you’re sinister
You know they’ll say your soul is damned!”
I call myself a Witch because
I don’t believe the lie
That the Creator is a macho man
Who wants to tell me what to do
Until I die
For pie in the sky
That’s such a lie! That’s such a lie!

I don’t believe in Satan
He’s a poor excuse for Pan
I’m a child of Holy Mother Earth
And I’m gonna stand up to
The Propaganda Man
In every way I can

“Why do you call yourself a Witch?
Such a pretentious fantasy!
Magic is just a childhood dream
Come on and face reality!”
I call myself a Witch because
I’m not afraid to tell
That the magic is in Life itself
Not just in some ancient book
Or secret spell
And I know damn well
That there’s no Hell
Except the Goddess of that name

No, the devil doesn’t turn me on,
He’s too much of a chauvinist pig
No self-respecting feminist
Would be caught dead around
A masculine ego that big

“Why do you call yourself a Witch
And talk of Witchcraft openly?
Wicca’s a nice disguise to use
When you’re in mixed company”
I call myself a Witch because
There’s power in the word
There’s power in the truth about
What we really feel
And who we really are
Live by the Star
And you’ll go far
Yes, you’ll go far

“Why do you call yourself a Witch?”
Because a Witch is what I am!
“Why do you call yourself a Witch?”
Because a Witch is what I am!

The Witch Priest

I first came across the story of the Loudun possessions in the course of my researches on seventeenth century English history. To be specific, it was in reading about the life of John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale, one of the figures in Charles II’s infamous Cabal ministry, who as a young man had visited the Ursuline convent at Loudun in western France, where a number of the nuns were said to have undergone demonic possession.

Lauderdale, a man of formidable and rational intellect, quickly concluded that the whole thing was a fraud. Fraud it may have been but it had particularly serious consequences for Father Urbain Grandier, the local priest, who was burned in the town in August 1634 after being convicted on a charge of witchcraft.

The Loudun possession is an altogether fascinating tale, involving sublimated sexual frustrations and grand politics. Grandier had a bit of a reputation, distributing his masculine favours among some of the nuns. Loudun was a hothouse of frustration, jealousy and potential hysteria, something I suspect true of most nunneries of the day, refuges often for genteel women who had little or nothing in the way of a vocation.

Grandier was unlucky enough to have attracted the obsessive attention of the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, who accused him of using black magic to seduce her. Now the latent hysteria of the place came to the surface, with other nuns coming forward with similar accusations. While this is impossible to prove, I suspect that these charges were mostly levied by those who had not attracted Grandier sexually. He was duly arrested, interrogated and acquitted by an ecclesiastical tribunal, clearly not convinced of the value of the ‘evidence’ against him.

But Grandier was unlucky enough to have attracted the enmity of a far greater person than Sister Jeanne. It took a brave or a foolish man to attack Cardinal Richelieu, the leading figure in both church and state, and Grandier had been both brave and foolish, criticising the Grey Eminence in word and writing. The Loudun accusations were all that Richelieu needed to rid himself of a turbulent priest.

Grandier was rearrested and although the previous accusations were not renewed he found himself arraigned on an altogether more abstract and sweeping charge of witchcraft, one which involved consorting not with nuns but with demons. A document was produced ‘proving’ that he had entered into a diabolical pact. He was clearly a person of some importance to the satanic community, given the names of those who witnessed the pact;

We, the influential Lucifer, the young Satan, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Elimi, and Astaroth, together with others, have today accepted the covenant pact of Urbain Grandier, who is ours. And him do we promise the love of women, the flower of virgins, the respect of monarchs, honors, lusts and powers. He will go whoring three days long; the carousal will be dear to him. He offers us once in the year a seal of blood, under the feet he will trample the holy things of the church and he will ask us many questions; with this pact he will live twenty years happy on the earth of men, and will later join us to sin against God.

Bound in hell, in the council of demons. Lucifer Beelzebub Satan Astaroth Leviathan Elimi The seals placed the Devil, the master, and the demons, princes of the lord.
Baalberith, writer.

Thinking of this in present-day terms it would be like some minor spy being signed up by the Prime Minister or the President, along with leading members of the cabinet! But Grandier, despite the most extreme torture, never confessed to witchcraft.

Children of the Moon

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it, it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a central feature of which was ritual baths and bonfires. The bonfires themselves were closely linked with water, lit as they were on the shores of streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Midsummer marks the convergence of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, now at its height, has entered Cancer, the great water sign, the only sign ruled by the Moon, the only sign ruled by Artemis, Diana and Hecate, the lunar goddesses. All those who share the sign of Cancer with me are collectively the Children of the Moon, hunters, witches, flyers and lovers. :-)

This was a time when witch-hunters of the past claimed that witches rode out to meet Satan, whereas the real witches, not the monsters of imagination, simply gathered to renew their sacred bond with the earth, to celebrate its bounty and fertility. It was a time also for gathering magical plants, a time when they were at their most potent. Russian witches use to harvest those which grew on the top of Bald Mountain, considering them to be the most powerful on Earth.

Magic, love and fruitfulness, these are the things Midsummer Eve and the Solstice are about; this is what they will always be about. All hail to thee, Children of the Moon.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Killing Cats

The setting is Paris in the 1730s, the Rue Saint-Severin to be exact, a printer's shop run by one Jacques Vincent to be even more exact. And as every story requires a hero so, too, does this one. There are, in fact, two heroes, heroes to be found amongst the lowest class of all - the shop's apprentices, a much abused class of humanity at the time. Their names are Jerome and Leveille. The lives they have are not to be envied. They sleep in a filthy and freezing room. They have to rise before dawn to be sent on all sorts of tasks. They are abused by all with the least power over them, from the journeymen to the master. Worst of all the food they are given to eat is not fit for human consumption, not fit even for...cats.

This is really a story about revenge, a story that points back to the superstitions of the middle ages and forward to the excesses of the French Revolution. Jerome and Leveille served an uncaring master, or bourgeois, as he was known to the workers in the printer’s shop, one who, along with his equally callous wife, cared more about cats than people. This passion for cats seems to have been a feature of the printing trade at the time. One bourgeois kept as many as twenty-five, having their individual portraits painted and feeding them on fowl. Jerome and Leveille, in contrast, had to live on whatever slops they were offered, scraps from the master's table. To make matters worse the cook often sold the leftovers, leaving them with old rotten bits of meat that even the cats refused to eat.

How these cats played on the minds of our heroes. Insulted and degraded by the presence of the household cat, including one known simply as La Grise (the grey), the mistress's favourite, they were kept awake at night by the howling of the alley cats on the roof above their bedroom. Unable to get a full night's sleep, they had to rise as early as four o'clock in the morning, exhausted at the beginning of the day and even more exhausted at the end of it.

One night they had had enough; they decided to take action in the most effective way they knew. Leveille was particularly talented as a mimic. He crawled over the roof to that part of the house where the bourgeois and his wife slept, presumably isolated from the usual cat chorus. Once there he howled and meowed so horribly that neither could get any sleep. After several nights of this they decided that they must have been bewitched. Orders were given to Jacques and Leveille, dogs rather than dogsbodies, to get rid of the cats.

They did, with all of the passion and exuberance they could muster, making sure that La Grise was drawn into the holocaust. But this wasn't simply an orgy of killing. Oh, no; for with the aid of the shop's journeymen the neighbourhood cats were rounded up to appear before the tribunes of the people. The cats were tried in accordance with the forms of process favoured by revolutionary tribunals, given the last rights and duly hanged on an improvised gallows. It was a cause of huge amusement, a diversion from the usual drudgery of the working day. In this workshop in this small quarter of Paris a prelude was acted out for a drama that was to come later the same century. The mistress came. She saw La Grise hanging from the gallows, retiring in horror. The workers had the day.

This bizarre episode, true in every detail, can be found in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's taken from one Nicolas Contat, the Jerome of the story, who later set down an account of his life as an apprentice. There is so much richness here, so much which tells us about the politics and, more particularly, the attitudes of the day. A lot of the subliminal messages would have been better understood by a contemporary audience than a modern one. There is the obvious resentment of the workers against the bourgeois, the resentment of the abused apprentices against the pampered cats. But in sweeping up La Grise there were clear references to old witchcraft superstitions, clear references to the cat as a familiar and the mistress as a witch.

No matter that this was the Age of Enlightenment, cats still carried a long legacy of fear and superstition. In the carnivals held before Lent they were often subject to the same kind of treatment and torture that those accused in the Great Witch Hunt once were. The abuse and torture of cats was also a feature in the festival of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June. Then cats were burned at the stake by people hoping avoid ill-fortune for the rest of the year, a variation of the Scottish Taigherm of which I wrote recently. The scream of the cat, the Katzenmusik, was a background to much anarchy and jollity. Anarchy and jollity in death, a reference to the persecution of witches, a leitmotiv for the coming French Revolution.

For those who are interested on the folklore of cats, France and witchcraft I would highly recommend Ancient Sorceries, a wonderful story by Algernon Blackwood, along with M. R. James my favourite writer in the ghost and horror story genre.

Baphomet and the Templars

During the Great Purge in Russia in the 1930s NKVD, the Russian secret police, recreated Leon Trotsky as a great Satan at the head of fascist-rightist conspiracy to kill Stalin and his party comrades and thus bring down the Soviet Union. Having conjured up this unlikely demon they then forced those destined to be processed in the public show trails to admit that it was all true. No evidence was required, just beatings and all the subtle tortures, psychological and otherwise, in which they specialised.

There are historical precedents that they might have drawn on for their modern demonology. In the early fourteenth century, on the urging of King Philip IV of France, the Knights Templar, a Crusading order, was suppressed on an accusation of heresy. Philip wanted to get his hands on the order's wealth but simple dissolution was not enough, no, the knights had to stand accused of the most elaborate of crimes. And one of the crimes they stood accused of was worshiping an idol by the name of Baphomet.

There are no independent accounts of the existence of this devil-like creature beyond the records of the Templar interrogations and an earlier twelfth century poem. Twelve of over two hundred knights examined admitted to his existence. It's as well to remember that the confessions, like those obtained in Russia by the NKVD, were the result of systematic torture. Baphomet, in other words, may very well just have been the invention of a particularly imaginative Inquisitor, whose existence was confirmed by those anxious to avoid any further pain. The thing is we just can't be sure. After all, the elaborate schemes woven around the head of Trotsky in Russia did not take away from the fact that he was indeed an enemy of Stalin, constantly critical of contemporary Soviet policy.

But who, or what, is Baphomet, and why was Satan not sufficient, a figure who appeared repeatedly in the trials of alleged witches? The records are confused and contradictory. He was worshipped in the form of a head, either as a skull, a head with a beard, or a head with two or three faces. He was a black cat, an obvious witchcraft familiar. He had a goat's head and horns and a body combining the features of a dog, a donkey and a bull.

It would seem to be an amalgam of Pagan deities and Christian monsters. The name itself would seem to suggest Mahomet, an archaic and corrupt spelling of the name of the Prophet Muhammad. After all the Templars had close dealings through history -and not always hostile - with the Muslim communities of the Middle East. But if it is it is based on the deepest ignorance; for Muslims abhorred idolatry, and there is nothing in Islamic tradition that resembled anything like the forms of worship of which the Templars were accused. Those who take the view that Baphomet represents an attempt to syncretise Islam and Christianity simply ignore the fact that the Templars were never accused of dabbling in Islam in any form. No, they were, like witches, Christian heretics.

So, while it seems unlikely, the possibility remains that the Templars were engaged in the worship of some form of the horned god, either in the form of the Christian devil or in an older pre-Christian guise, and here Pan comes to mind. Personally I see this as a crude device by long-dead interrogators, but even so Baphomet has had a long afterlife.

In 1854 Eliphas Levi, a French occultist, published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic) in which an image of Baphomet appeared, drawn by himself. It was clearly an imaginative effort, because it bears little resemblance to the Templar testimony. It's an odd kind of amalgam, one whose sex is even indeterminate. Although he makes no such admission himself, Levi may have drawn on the grotesques depicted in the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and Saint Merri in Paris, which show a bearded man with bat wings, female breasts, horns and goat-like hindquarters. Levi explained the significance of the figure, which appears on the front cover of his book, thus;

The goat on the frontispiece carries the sign of the pentagram on the forehead, with one point at the top, a symbol of light, his two hands forming the sign of hermetism, the one pointing up to the white moon of Chesed, the other pointing down to the black one of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. His one arm is female, the other male like the ones of the androgyn of Khunrath, the attributes of which we had to unite with those of our goat because he is one and the same symbol. The flame of intelligence shining between his horns is the magic light of the universal balance, the image of the soul elevated above matter, as the flame, whilst being tied to matter, shines above it. The beast's head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes. The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life, the body covered with scales the water, the semi-circle above it the atmosphere, the feathers following above the volatile. Humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyn arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences.

He was to call his creation the Goat of Mendes, another derivative, drawing on Herodotus’ description of the ram-deity worshipped in the Egyptian town of Dejedet. And by this route Baphomet made it into modern occult practices, a central figure in the cosmology of Thelema, devised by Aleister Crowley, a great magus or a great fraud, I leave it to you to choose which. Nosce te Ipsum :-)