Witches Read online

  When man became an agriculturalist, the magic of the priests was now directed at ensuring a good harvest.

  Inevitably, then, it was sometimes used for the opposite purpose—to blast the harvest of enemies. Because toads were believed to be poisonous, they were sometimes used in these ceremonies. (Charles Walton, the victim of the ‘witchcraft murder’ at Lower Quinton (Warwickshire) in 1945 is reported to have harnessed toads to a toy plough and made them run across the fields.)

  The notion of black magic, the left hand path, seems to emerge fairly late in history. Persia is the traditional home of magic; but the Magi were priests, the wise men of the Bible. The Greeks regarded Egypt as the land of magic; yet there were no specifically ‘black’ witches or magicians in ancient Egypt. The legendary Circe, daughter of the sun god and sea nymph, could change men into swine; yet Homer does not seem to regard her as wicked; she was an enchantress, not a witch.

  What seems to have happened is that with the coming of civilisation, the shamans and witches no longer had a specific job to do—except those that became priests or priestesses. The rest had to retire into private life. And the official priests no doubt regarded them as a nuisance. The Biblical King Saul—around 1000 BC—issued an edict against witchcraft; but according to the First Book of Samuel, he had to call upon the services of the Witch of Endor in order to consult the deceased King Samuel to find out why the Lord had ceased to regard him with favour.

  In the Odyssey, Odysseus summons the spirits of the dead through a ceremony involving sacrifice—he wants to consult the shade of the seer Tiresias. Homer was writing about two centuries after King Saul, in the beginning of the eighth century BC. Towards the end of the same century, another Greek poet, Hesiod, makes the first reference to Hecate, the goddess of the underworld and of the moon—that is, of magic. This combination of functions also explains why the magical art later became known as necromancy—the art of communication with the dead.

  Charles Walton bewitching crops withs toads harnessed to a toy plough.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Earliest Witches

  Circe was not a witch in the modern sense of the word; she was an enchantress. But the modern notion of a witch—an evil old hag with supernatural powers—enters world mythology long before the coming of Christianity. The Greek orator Demosthenes, writing around 350 BC, mentions that a woman named Theoris of Lemnos had been tried as a witch in Athens and burned. It seems typical that she should be condemned by the city that had sentenced Socrates to death.

  What happened, of course, is that city-dwellers created their own exaggerated image of witchcraft. Country people, living in contact with the local ‘wise man’ or woman, know that a witch is a useful member of the community. Town-dwellers, no longer in contact with nature, invent preposterous stories of magic and malevolence. And this is not just because they are credulous, but also because they are incredulous; half the time they believe that magic is nonsense; the other half, they believe it is frightening and dangerous. Both attitudes spring out of a lack of acquaintance with the real thing.

  Around 300 BC, the Greek poet Theocritus writes of a girl named Samaetha, who prays to Hecate and performs a magical ceremony on the seashore to bring back her faithless lover. Basically, she is only performing a religious ceremony. But over the next two or three centuries, the image of the witch changes. And when the Roman poet Horace writes about two witches named Canidia and Sagana, they are horrible crones, ‘pale of face, barefooted, their hair dishevelled’, who gather poisonous herbs in the graveyard and tear a black lamb to pieces with their bare hands. They make a wax image of their victim, then invoke the goddess of Hell—Hecate—and the Furies. ‘Snakes and hounds of Hell appear. Ghosts utter shrill, forlorn cries, and the waxen image, thrown into the fire, flares up brightly.’

  In fact, the witch as she appears in Ovid, Horace, Lucan, Petronius, Lucius Apuleius, is as unreal and as absurd as a genie out of the Arabian Nights.

  The greatest of all novels about witchcraft, The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, resembles the Arabian Nights in more ways than one. It begins with a story told by a traveller about how a friend of his had offended a witch. In the middle of the night, witches burst into their bedroom, and cut the man’s throat, then they tear out his heart, and replace it with a sponge. As they walk out the door locks itself behind them. Yet the next morning, the victim seems in perfectly good health—until he tries drinking from a stream, at which the wound in his throat opens up and he falls down dead ...

  Lucius goes on to describe how he goes to stay in the house of a moneylender named Milo, whose wife is a witch. One night he peers through a crack in the door and watches the witch smearing herself with an ointment that transforms her into an owl. Anxious to try it out, Lucius persuades the serving maid who was also his mistress to smear him with ointment—and finds himself changed into an ass. The remainder of the novel is about his comic adventures as he tries to find a bunch of roses, the taste of which will restore him to his proper form. He endures various mishaps and adventures until finally the moon goddess—Isis—intervenes to save him (the cult of Isis had been brought to Rome from Egypt—she was identified with Diana and the Greek Selene). Lucius is transformed back into a man, and becomes a votary of the goddess, devoting his life to her service—as Apuleius himself did.

  In these last chapters of the book, it is clear that Apuleius is making a serious point. He addresses the moon goddess as ‘blessed Queen of Heaven, whether you are pleased to be known as Ceres (the earth goddess)., or whether as celestial Venus.. or whether as Artemis, the physician sister of Phoebus (the sun god)..’ Artemis is the Greek version of the Roman Diana, the ‘queen and huntress, chaste and fair’. Lucius’s ‘sin’ is his romantic interest in witchcraft—the ‘left hand path’, and the lesson is that, if he is interested in magic, he hould follow the right hand path of devotion to the moon goddess and her mystery religion. The point is as valid today is it was in the second century AD.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Devil

  The witch persecutions would have been impossible without the idea of the Devil, and the Devil was basically the invention of Christian theologians.

  Readers who recall Satan in the Book of Job, or the fall of Lucifer, son of the morning, in Isaiah, may feel this is an exaggeration. But Isaiah was not referring to a rebel angel, but to the King of Babylon; and the Accuser in the Book of Job is not Satan but a satan, the Hebrew word meaning an adversary or obstructor. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, ‘satan’ became ‘diabolos’—again, meaning adversary—and this eventually became the Christian Devil.

  In this sense, the Devil can be traced back to St Paul. It was St Paul who invented the Vicarious Atonement, the notion that man had fallen from divine grace through the sin of Adam, tempted by the Devil, (although there is no suggestion in the Old Testament that the serpent was anything but an ordinary snake); and the death of Jesus on the cross had offered man a chance of redemption. (Jesus himself never made any such suggestion.) If there is a Christ, there must also be an Antichrist.

  Even so, the Devil who tempts Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew is a development of the ‘satan’ in Job rather than the later Christian Devil; the satan in Job had been ‘walking up and down the earth’, and Jesus’s Devil is the ‘lord of this world. ’

  It is difficult for an unbiased historian to feel anything but irritation when writing about the early history of the Christian Church. It is true that while they were being persecuted by the Romans, Christians showed themselves at their greatest; but as soon as Christianity began to gain the upper hand, after Constantine, they behaved like barbarians, destroying books and works of art, persecuting their pagan enemies, and burning one another for heresy. The council summoned by Constantine at Nicaea in 325 AD promptly began to quarrel about the Trinity, and rejected the commonsense view of Arius that Jesus had been created like any other man in favour of the view of Athanasius that he was God. In 381, a council summoned
by Theodosius I forbade heretics to assemble and took away their right to inherit prophecy. Fifty years later, Theodosius II instituted the sentence of death on heretics. Monasticism flourished, and the monks and hermits vied with one another in castigating the flesh. Sexual temptation was regarded as the great sin. The emphasis upon sin—every possible form of sin—meant emphasis on the Devil. Theophilus of Alexandria even denounced the saintly (if intolerant) John Chrsostom as ‘Satan disguised as an angel of light’. So Christianity became a dark and morbid religion, obsessed with sin and evil, grimly literal-minded about the road to salvation. R. W. Southern remarks in the second volume of The Pelican History of Christianity: ‘There was a further ultimate impotence that prevented the mediaeval church state from becoming a police-state. It had no police.’ It is a sad comment on what had become of Jesus’s religion of love and forgiveness.

  The lives of saints are full of stories of demons and of the Devil. The Devil tempts St Anthony by appearing to him as a beautiful woman. (They became known as succubi.) In other accounts he is a fly, a toad, an imp, a black man, a gargoyle, a rat, a horrible stench, a tree, a giant cat, and an incubus whose penis was like an icicle and whose semen made a woman cold inside. And Christians took these stories quite literally; they believed the Devil walked among them, and that they were surrounded by legions of unseen demons. Even as late as 1801, Francis Barrett’s book The Magus contains two chapters devoted to demons, who are classified into nine orders or degrees, beginning with false gods and ennding with tempters; they have names like Asmodeus, Ashtoreth, Belphegor, Amduscias, Abaddon, Agares, Narbas, Glasybolos, Choronzon, Haussibut, and literally thousands of others. (A later demonologist, John Wier, says there are over seven million.)

  This crude, literal-minded obsession with evil was increased by the various practical problems of the Church in the Dark Ages. The Arabs invaded Spain; hordes of pagan barbarians swept across Europe; and the Greek Orthodox Church formed a powerful rival to Rome. Then, after about 1100, things began to improve. The Arabs were now on the defensive. European trade was expanding; so was the power of the Church. The only cloud on the horizon was the growth of various dangerous heresies, like Catharism. The Cathars—like Martin Luther a few centuries later—felt the Church was growing too fat and self-indulgent. They wanted to re-spiritualise Christianity. The Church reacted by declaring a Crusade against them in 1208, and announcing that the slaughter of Cathars would not be any hindrance to salvation. When the Crusaders burst into Beziers in July 1209, someone asked the Papal Legate how heretics should be distinguished from true believers; he replied: ‘Kill them all; God will look after his own.’ So twenty thousand people were slaughtered.

  CHAPTER 6

  Erichto The Witch

  The most famous witch of classical times is Erichtho, the Thessalian witch. (Thessaly, in Greece, was the legendary home of witches.) She is described in a famous episode of the Pharsalia, an epic by the Roman poet Lucan (1st century AD) about the war between Caesar and Pompey. Whether Erichtho really existed is uncertain; but Lucan’s portrait is typical of the Roman idea of the witch as an evil hag, ‘foul with filthiness ... her dreadful visage laden with uncombed locks. She destroys crops, digs up graves, and performs gruesome ceremonies’—in fact, she is a female bogey, an ‘archetype’ like Dracula.

  In the Pharsalia, Pompey’s ‘degenerate’ son Sextus goes to ask her to show him the future. She explains that she needs a corpse whose speech organs are still intact and flexible. They visit a battlefield and she selects a corpse, which she drags off with a hook through the jaw. Then, with horrible ceremonies, involving the froth of a mad dog, entrails of a lynx, marrow of a stag that has been fed on serpents (Lucan seemed unaware that stags are vegetarians); and incantations to Hecate, the corpse comes to life, and prophesies that Pompey will soon join other heroes in the ‘shades’. Then Erichtho performs spells to enable the corpse to die again, and burns the body. The story is crude and preposterous, but may be regarded as a typical example of the popular conception of a witch in late classical times.

  CHAPTER 7

  Merlin and Morgan le Fay

  The real King Arthur was an Anglo-Roman general who defended England against the invading Saxons in the 6th century AD; at his last great battle against them, he inflicted such tremendous losses that they halted to lick their wounds for half a century. General Artorius (his Romanised name) then found that he had given his own people—the Celts—time to quarrel amongst themselves, and he finally died, about 537 AD, after a battle against his own nephew Mordred. Legend has it that his body was taken to Glastonbury, where his half-sister, the enchantress Morgan le Fay (Morgan the Fairy) tried—unsuccessfully—to cure his wounds. The legend of Arthur’s burial at Glastonbury persisted down the centuries, strengthened by a belief that he would one day return and drive all foreigners out of England. In 1190, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey dug down between two marble crosses in the Abbey grounds, and found, at a depth of sixteen feet, an enormous coffin containing the skeletons of a man and a woman. A leaden cross above the coffin declared that this was the burial place of King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon. The smaller skeleton, that of a woman, may have been his queen Guinevere.

  Within a century of his death, there were many legends about King Arthur, mostly originating in Wales (where many of the Celts had been driven by the Saxons after Arthur’s death). They are equally widespread in Cornwall; and a standing stone near Fowey carries an inscription: ‘Here lies Tristan, son of Cunomorus’, Cunomorus being the Celtic name for King Mark. This is one of the few genuine historical links with Arthurian legend.

  The earliest of the Arthurian tales is the Welsh Culhwch Olwen, dating from the 10th century; it describes how Arthur and his knights helped his cousin Culhwch to perform various tasks set by a giant, and so win the hand of Olwen. There is no mention of Merlin or Morgan le Fay here. Both owe their existence as figures of legend to a Welsh bishop named Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the middle of the 13th century. In his History of the Kings of Britain, Arthur is turned into a kind of British Alexander the Great, according to Geoffrey, King Uther Pendragon—a real person whose life overlapped that of Arthur—fell in love with Igrain, wife of Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall, who lived in Tintagel Castle. (In fact, Tintagel Castle was not carted until a century before Geoffrey; in Arthur’s day there was only a hermitage on the site.) Through the magic of the wizard Merlin, Uther was made to resemble Gorlois, and spent a night with Igrain while her husband was away; as a result, Arthur was conceived. Gorlois was later killed in battle, and Uther married Igrain.

  Who was Merlin? It seems that he really existed at about the same time as Arthur. His name was actually Myrddin (Geoffrey changed it to Merlin to avoid it sounding like the French merde), and he was a northern British bard and prophet, who served a chief called Gwenddolau; when Gwenddolau was killed in battle in Cumbria, Myrddin went mad and fled to the woods, where he lived as a wild man for several years and gained the power of foretelling the future. Arthur himself moved around the British Isles a great deal—his last battle, Camlan, was fought near Hadrian’s Wall—so it is conceivable that there was some association between Arthur and the prophet Myrddin.

  According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing seven hundred years after the real Myrddin, Merlin was born to a Welsh nun who had been visited in her sleep by an incubus. His birthplace, Carmarthen, was named after him. (Caer Myrddin—Merlin’s Fort.) The demon who fathered him intended him to be an Antichrist; this intention was frustrated by the teaching of the good nuns, and Merlin only inherited his father’s magical power. As a boy, Merlin is discovered by King Vortigern—the predecessor of Uther Pendragon, who invited the Saxons into England—and helps him to build a tower on Snowdon, prophesying the coming of Arthur, who would defeat the Saxons. Geoffrey also describes how Merlin moved the great stones of Stonehenge from Ireland—where they were known as the Giant’s Dance—to Salisbury Plain, by magic. In his later Life of Merlin, a poem, Geoffrey of Mon
mouth borrows more details from the real Myrddin, including the episode of living as a wild man of the woods in the forests of Caledonia. It is Merlin who suggests to Uther Pendragon that he should have a round table constructed, with a special place for the future hero who will win the Holy Grail. He also predicts the coming of a hero who will drive back the Saxons.

  Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s wicked half-sister, first appears in a twelfth century poem by Robert de Boron, of which only a fragment survives; she is the ruler of a Fortunate Isle called Avalon, the Isle of Apples—later identified with Glastonbury. This is the form in which she appears in the Life Merlin poem by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In later Arthurian legends, she steadily becomes more evil—Arthur’s relentless enemy. In its finalised version, Morgan le Fay is the youngest daughter of Gorlois and Igrain, and therefore Arthur’s half-sister. She also has an elder sister, Morgause, with whom Arthur unknowingly commits incest when she omes to his court. In King Arthur and the Grail, Richard . Cavendish speculates that some missing fragment of the legend tells of Morgan falling in love with Arthur. And in fact such an episode seems to be necessary to make sense of the rest of the story—her hatred of Arthur and of Queen Guinevere and her plots against them.

  The legend tells how Morgan was schooled in a convent, then came to Arthur’s court. Merlin fell in love with her, and taught her the arts of magic when she promised to give herself to him—she failed to keep her promise. But she took many other lovers, finally marrying a King Urien. At one point she stole the sword Excalibur, substituting a skilful imitation, then lured Arthur into a fight with her lover Accolon of Gaul, who had the real Excalibur. The intervention of another enchantress, the Lady of the Lake, caused Accolon to drop his sword, and Arthur seized it and won the battle. Supporting the notion that Morgan’s hostility to Arthur was based on incestuous passion is the legend that she tried to save his life by tending his wounds at Glastonbury, after his final battle, and took away his body in a boat.