witchcraft | Scriptus Recensera

August 20, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Afterlives of Endor – Laura Levine

Categories: witchcraft, Tags: Cornell University Press,

Laura Levine is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts and so brings an intriguing perspective to witchcraft literature from the early modern period. Subtitled, Witchcraft, Theatricality, and Uncertainty from the “Malleus Maleficarum” to Shakespeare, Levine considers how that period’s anxiety about witchcraft and theatricality impacted on the understanding of witchcraft, and further, how this was conveyed in the works of three pivotal writers, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlow.

Was witchcraft a real and imminent threat, or was it delusion and deception? This dichotomy is embodied in the biblical witch of Endor referenced in the book’s title, and the ways in which she was perceived on the one hand by the rationalist Reginald Scot (author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584), and on ‘tother by the contradistinctively zealous King James VI/I (who penned the tract Daemonologie in 1597). For Scot, most accusations of witchcraft were a scapegoating campaign against poor menopausal women, and the imagery of malfeasance and malefica were entirely in the minds of the accusers. King James, however, believed explicitly in the reality of witches and witchcraft, making both practice and practitioner worthy of extermination. Both men understood that the Endor witch visited by King Saul in the biblical book of 1 Samuel could not have raised the shade of the prophet Samuel to physical appearance, but each offered a different explanation. Scot took the most obviously rational approach and argued that the witch was simply a charlatan, using stage tricks to effect the appearance of Samuel. King James also perceived a deception, but rather than coming from the hand of the witch, it was the devil himself who was given his due, with Satan employing a demonic theatricality to assume the shape of the dead prophet.

Levine divides her book into two parts, with the first five chapters devoted to the witchcraft treatises of Heinrich Kramer, Reginald Scot, Jean Bodin and King James, and the rest on the literature of Spenser, Marlow, and Shakespeare with a chapter given to each writer; and an epilogue in the case of the bard.

There’s a common though largely unspoken sense of duplicity that weaves its way through the texts of Kramer, Bodin, Scot and King James, with Levine highlighting moments that make the writers seem conflicted and possessed of double standards. In the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger provide elaborate instructions for trials of witches, creating scripts and judicial procedures that seem to instil order but are then undone with a theatrical flourish at the end of the trial in which a witch’s accuser are revealed to her, thereby confirming her guilt. This is just one example in the Malleus Maleficarum where examiners are advised to use deception to reveal deception, the judicial theatricality acting as a counter-performance to the innate performative nature of witchcraft itself. Jean Bodin in his meisterwerk De la démonomanie des sorciers makes an impassioned case against theatricality in witchcraft trials, distaining any spectacles, especially instances that replicate the witchcraft he is examining (something which he singles out German judges as being guilty of, take that Kramer and Sprenger). Yet there is much in Bodin’s judicial approach that suggests the magic of performance, and despite believing that words ‘describe’ rather than ‘create,’ the act of verbally giving evidence has a constitutive power, one that as a prosecutor he is reliant upon. In this and other examples, cognitive dissonance abounds and as Levine notes, this is something that extends to both a rationalist like Scot and to the believers like James, with the worldviews of both sceptic and witch-monger often coming close.

The grounding in history that Levine provides in the first part of the book is so successfully done that when it comes to consider the fictional heirs of Kramer, Bodin, Scot and James, the parallels betwixt fact and fiction are immediately obvious, even before she makes each case. Of these, the most interesting examples are drawn from the works of Edward Spenser and William Shakespeare. In the eighth canto of the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Una strips the witch Duessa of her clothes to reveal to Red Cross Knight who he has been consorting with and demonstrate what she actually is. This obviously recalls the procedures found in both Malleus Maleficarum and Newes from Scotland in which suspected witches were stripped and their bodies searched in order to find the devil’s mark and elevate that suspicion to categorical fact. What is a particular delight in this section is how Levine highlights the way in which Spenser undoes the inquisitor’s gaze, never allowing Duessa to be truly laid bare. He couches his description with ostensive modesty, employing acts of narrative preterition that he credits to his chaste muse who prevents him from describing Duessa’s innermost muliebral monstrosity. Despite tantalising the reader with description of her broader theriomorphic and colubrine attributes, the private site that would confirm her designation as female and witch remains invisible, her secret filth “good manners biddeth not be told.” Levine draws a comparison to the unveiling of Duessa (“loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old”) to the trial of Agnes Sampson (“eldest witch of them al”) in Newes from Scotland. The account details how Sampson seemed to resist corporeal definition by her interrogators and had to be stripped and fully shaved before the devil’s mark could be finally found on her ‘privities.’

When turning to the works of Shakespeare, Levine considers first The Winter’s Tale. This sharpens the focus once again on the differing interpretations of Saul and the witch of Endor by Scot and Shakespeare’s patron, King James. Here the divergent interpretations are credited to the characters Paulina and King Leontes, with the latter calling the former a ‘mankind witch’ and threatening to have her burnt. In turn, Paulina, channelling the pragmatic Scot, replies that “It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in’t,” effectively arguing that the crime is in the tyrannous mind of the beholder who makes the accusation and kindles the flame, not the immolatee. The Tempest with its play within a play provides an even clearer exploration of the themes of magic and artifice, given the clear analogy that it makes between Prospero’s sorceress arts and the contrived magic of the theatre, with Prospero giving up the practice of the artes magical like an actor retiring from treading the boards.

Afterlives of Endor runs to a brisk 129 pages of body copy, followed by a substantial section of extensive endnotes (many running to over a page in length), as well as references and an index, making for 178 pages in total. Levine has an engaging but dense writing style that rewards close attention, but does assume some familiarity with its subject matter, both in terms of witchcraft trials and the works of fiction, both of which she refers to exhaustively.

Published by Cornell University Press

March 22, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

The Spiritual Power of Masks – Nigel Pennick

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Categories: folk, witchcraft, Tags: Destiny Books,

Bearing the rather poetic subtitle of Doorways to Realms Unseen, Nigel Pennick’s The Spiritual Power of Masks promises to provide a thorough exploration of the use of masks in folklore and magic, with a particular focus, as one would expect, on the British Isles. Given Pennick’s vast experience in writing on matters of folklore and magic, one would think that he has explored masks in some depth before, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. He has certainly touched on them previously as part of his broader considerations of Norse magic and folk traditions, such as chapters on masks and mumming in his 2015 Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition: Customs, Rites, and Ceremonies, but as this book’s own Pennick-rich bibliography shows, this is the first standalone donning of such a ceremonial guise.

As the reader begins to make their way through this, a book ostensibly about the spiritual power of masks, they may notice that while there’s a lot of spiritual power here, it’s not necessarily just about masks. Instead, masks are but one accoutrement amongst many others in what can be seen as a broader consideration of all manner of guising and ritual regalia and their use across Europe in various festivities and rituals. With this broadness also comes the opportunity to investigate the folklore that lies behind or resembles such ritualised events. Thus, there are chapters about the Furious Host and Wild Hunt, as well as other types of spectral animals, all of which tend to focus just on folklore accounts, thereby effectively providing a cultural context, rather than how they might specifically relate to guising.

The area that receives the largest focus in The Spiritual Power of Masks are English folk customs, with Pennick offering individual but connected chapters on Straw Bears and Straw Men, Masquerades, Rural Ceremonies, Carnival Characters and Mumming; with a further chapter on the specific characters, disguises and costumes of Mummers’ Plays. Some of these entries do mention similarities with Scandinavian or Continental traditions (such as Germany in the connection to straw bears due to their greater popularity there), but by and large, the focus is on England and the wider British Isles.

Animal guises take up significant space in this book, with several chapters devoted to their various forms. Horses have such a prominent role in guising that they warrant their own chapter, as do dragons, with Pennick listing possibly every instance of a processional horse or dragon, including a personal anecdote about performing as the white horse at a folk festival in Cambridgeshire. The miscellaneous assortment of other animal guises, those not deserving the sixteen pages given to horses or the thirteen for dragons, receive a combined chapter, so let’s hear it for the rams, bulls, goats, camels, and a few sundry others. In addition to animal kind, Pennick devotes separate chapters to their more humanoid cousins such as straw bears/men, and the civic giants that were processed through towns and cities.

The remaining chapters, constituting about half of the book, largely turn from the players to the plays, considering the various events at which guising might occur, including Christmas revels, masquerades, puppet shows, mummer’s plays, and rural festivals. Pennick tracks the history and evolution of such events, showing the influence that Commedia dell’arte in particular had throughout Europe, immortalising such figures as Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pantalone and Pierrot. By far the largest topic covered in this grouping is mumming and mummers’ plays, as well as similar rural ceremonies. Pennick is thorough here, documenting various examples from across the British Isles, all copiously illustrated.

Leaving no stone unturned, Pennick concludes with a sequence of chapters that feel slightly odds and ends, but which consider other less discussed roles of masks and guising. Of particular interest are two chapters that deal with guising as a tool for misrule, rioting and other rebellious acts, with a focus on fiery Guy Fawkes celebrations and the somewhat related creation of brigades that allowed the disguised population to fight various injustices or attempts at political or religious control. The most delightful of these were the Skeleton Army, factions of which were established across southern England, created as a reaction and opposing force to the Salvation Army’s proselytising and calls for temperance. When the Salvation Army arrived in a town, bothering the locals with excessive hymnody and objections to alcohol, the Skeletons would mobilise, meeting them with violence and vulgarity, throwing flour, rotten eggs, and dead rats. Fun times.

The strangest of these latter chapters begins with a brief description of the English festival tradition of Pantomime before veering widely across the English Channel for an only slightly longer discussion of guises and masks in modern Avant-Garde European art movements. Bauhaus, Dada, Futurism and Surrealism get brief mentions, though these receive considerably more attention than the artists mentioned in the chapter’s final paragraph where Pennick concludes by listing the names of some mask-rearing contemporary musicians you’d never expect to see receive a mention in one of his books: the Knife, Slipknot, Pussy Riot, and the veritable kings of these unexpected and aberrant appearances, the Insane Clown Posse. Just the thought of Pennick sitting there typing ICP’s name into his manuscript creates, in one, a bubble of concentrated joy.

At 267 pages of body copy alone, this is a thorough book, one that is perhaps ill-served by the limiting title, as what Pennick presents here is a valuable resource concerning guising and related folk traditions. There is so much material here, with Pennick comprehensively drawing from a variety of sources, bringing a wealth of information together in an easily accessible reference. The abundance of information can make the reader feel overwhelmed by encyclopaedic info-dumps (a previously-aired complaint in some of Pennick’s other titles), in which the facts and information are presented abruptly, with little literary or analytical cartilage to string them together. Given how frequently this critique continues to come up in these reviews, one can assume it’s not going to change any time soon. This is a shame, especially given that Pennick is a skilled writer, and just adding a bit more analysis and continuity would raise the value of these books. With that said, and while we wait in vain for anything to change. Pennick’s exhaustive data collection is for the most part fastidiously referenced, with citations appearing in-body and pointing to a lengthy reference list at the back.

The Spiritual Power of Masks features text design and layout by Priscilla Haris Baker, using Garamond for body copy, with Belwe and Gill Sans as interior display faces, and with the decorative Amber Taste giving a vintage vibe for the cover. Like many of Pennick’s books, this one is profusely illustrated with a wide selection of photographs and other illustrations; so much so that, in some places, two-page spreads of just text can be hard to come by. This surfeit of pictures is not limited to the text body, as there is an additional 16-page section of full colour plates, doing justice to the costumes and festivities with a wonderful and welcomed burst of colour.

Published by Destiny Books

January 11, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization – Edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers

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Categories: magick, shamanism, thelema, witchcraft, Tags: Penn State University Press

Magic in the Modern World is another entry in Penn State Press’ ever reliable Magic in History series and brings together eight essays with contributions from Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng, as well as editors Edward Bever and Randall Styers. Beyers and Styers divide the contents into two sections, beginning with Magic and the Making of Modernity, which could be broadly said to reflect a foundational theoretical approach with broad strokes outlying the interactions between magic and modernity. This leaves the second half, Magic in Modernity, to explore some fun case studies with more of a focus on the idea of legitimisation in magical practice.

One of the two core themes of this collection is how modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, but with a counterargument that sometimes the role of disenchantment in the modern world has been greatly overstated, and as a result, much like the perennial punk battle cry, magic’s not dead. Styers set the stage to this in the opening Bad Habits, or, How Superstition Disappeared in the Modern World, documenting how superstition was increasingly framed in psychological terms through the various stages of modernity until it attained the status of a delusion that was an inherent threat to the order of society.

As in another reviewed title from Penn State Press, Frank Klaassen’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England, Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung and its assumed totality is swiftly undone. In Descartes’ Dreams, the Neuropsychology of Disbelief, and the Making of the Modern Self, Bever discusses the three pivotal dreams that René Descartes experienced on a November night in 1619, and thereafter believed that a divine spirit had revealed to him a new philosophy. That Cartesian thought, that most rational of philosophies, emerged from an irrational, spiritual event, underscores how the rational cannot be so easily separated from the mystical.

For his contribution Benedek Láng explains, in the words of the title, Why Magic Cannot Be Falsified by Experiments, beginning with a question as to why scribes and collectors of grimoire did not see that some of the more ridiculous spells and operations couldn’t possibly work, whether it’s becoming invisible with certain herbs, or expelling all scorpions from Baghdad. Ultimately, Láng’s essay is a questioning of the whole idea of crucial experiments, be they in matters magical or the science laboratory.

The final essay categorised as Magic and the Making of Modernity is Adam Jortner’s Witches as Liars, which looks at the relationship between witchcraft and civilization in the Early American Republic. He argues that the rationalist response to concepts of magic and witchcraft was fundamental in the development of the political and social structures of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian United States, with the irrationality of magic being seen not only as antithetical but as a direct threat to the nascent order of social democracy.

The four entries gathered under the heading of Magic in Modernity are a diverse bunch, covering off Enochian magic, Jack Parsons and rocketry, Seidr in contemporary Norse paganism, and Simon’s Necronomicon. That’s truly something for everyone, and Egil Asprem starts things off with Loagaeth, Q Consibra A Caosg, which navigates what he defines as the contested arena of modern Enochian angel magic. He provides a potted history of Dee and Kelley’s Enochian revelations, showing how the magical system broadly fits within Dee’s version of natural philosophy, before breaking down how these foundations have been built upon and interpreted by subsequent practitioners, ultimately taking the material far from its roots. This is familiar territory for Asprem, having written the previously reviewed Arguing With Angels, which pursued similar concerns, but with a considerably higher page count. For this outing, Enochian magic makes a suitable area for considerations of legitimisation, not just because of the inherently suspect origin of the system (transmitted by angels to a known forger in Edward Kelley) but because of the way in which subsequent adoption of its elements (or a veneer thereof) have required mental gymnastics to justify their diversions from the source.

In Babalon Launching: Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the ‘Method of Science,’ Erik Davis considers the intersection between Parsons’s magical work and his career in rocketry, two worlds he largely kept separate. This an enjoyable read, with Davis effectively giving a brief overview of Parson’s life, focussing on particular moments and showing how the scientific model interacted with the magical one. Parsons becomes an example of how romance and rationalism are not compartmentalised or balanced in occultism, with Davis arguing that modern occultism, specifically its Thelemic strands, does not simply seek to re-enchant the world but is instead an aggressive performance of pluralism with a structural ambiguity founded on deconstructed notions of belief.

Megan Goodwin enters the world of contemporary Norse paganism with Manning the High Seat, exploring how the magical technique of Seidr is used and how its implicit associations with gender and sexuality are navigated by male practitioners. Goodwin presents a brief historical overview of Seidr before exploring the perspectives of two people, Jenny Blain and Raven Kaldera. Blain’s significant role in the promotion of Seidr in Norse Neopaganism ensures her presence here, with Goodwin crediting her with making an important contribution to the scholarship or gender and magic, and providing a thorough review of her understanding of Seidr, particularly its relation to sexuality. As Goodwin notes, though, Blain’s perspective never moves beyond the binary, employing rather basic dichotomies of straight and gay, male and female, and with none of the queer ambiguity and multiplicity that is implicit in the definition of Seidr as ergi. The ergi is plentiful in Kaldera’s definition of Seidr, though, and Goodwin appears to have a lot of sympathy for him in the presentation of his approach.

In the final essay, Dan Harms is well ensconced in his Lovecraftian wheelhouse with a consideration of the strategies of legitimisation used in the presentation of the trade paperback version of the Necronomicon by the mononymic Simon. There’s probably no other work in occult publishing that has a greater need for legitimisation than Simon’s Necronomicon, not just because it purports to be the non-fiction version of a fictional book, but because it always had an air of inauthenticity about it, right down to the cliché origin story with the mysterious monk revealing the manuscript before disappearing into unverifiable oblivion. It also seemed to be such a product of the occult scene of the 1970s New York, especially with how Herman Slater’s Warlock Shoppe was so central to its mythos, along with all those familiar scene names. Despite the transparency of the deception, Harms doesn’t descend into invective or scorn (as he is sometimes wont to do when discussing such matter on his more informal blog), but rather presents a considered analysis of each of the strategies used by Simon within the book and in marketing. There are a couple of classic strats here, as one would expect, with the most obvious being appeals to authority through comparisons to a bricolage of religious and mystical traditions, employing reduction to simplify these and enable pattern recognition to an uninformed audience.

In all, Magic in the Modern World is an interesting read, particularly in the second half where the four entries all offer something different. Body copy is devoid of any illustrations with the text set in Minion Pro by Coghill Composition Company, and presented in the consistent Magic in History style.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

February 21, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

Demons in the Middle Ages – Juanita Feros Ruys

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Categories: grimoire, luciferian, middle ages, satanism, witchcraft, Tags: Arc Humanities Press

Demons in the Middle Ages is part of the Arc Humanities Press series Past Imperfect, which they describe as seeking to present concise critical overviews of the latest research by the world’s leading scholars. Concise is certainly what you get here from Dr Juanita Feros Ruys, with the page count, sans references and further reading, only running to a little over a svelte 100 pages.

Ruys is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia, but this is a work that doesn’t feel particularly academic, and instead fulfils the brief of being a concise overview, something of a lay primer. As a result, while there is a lot of detail contained herein, there is not much in the way of academic analysis, no theoretical models applied to the information, with largely a just-the-facts approach being pursued. That isn’t to say that Ruys is devoid of insight, and she notes particular through-lines that occur across the centuries in regards to the theological function of demons, drawing attention in particular to how their interaction with saints and monastics served different purposes depending on the period. She also employs a style that, while not overly detailed, provides context and background information that may be essential for the lay reader, but without any sense of talking down, over-simplifying or being patronising.

Ruys divides Demons in the Middle Ages into a mere four chapters, largely based on locations, respectively situating demons in the desert, the cloisters, the schoolroom, and finally, the wider world. The desert, as a site of profound alterity, provided a paradoxically fertile ground for the growth of ideas about demons. Deserts already had an association with the demonic, due to the environment’s harsh and remote nature, and it was these same austere qualities that attracted the monks who travelled there to use this isolation as an aid to their spiritual growth. Here, though, the existing associations with the demonic were affirmed by the monks themselves, who were subjected to attacks from the indigenous metaphysical inhabitants. Demons impinging on the spiritual pursuits of monks became an almost de rigueur factor in the biographies of such future saints, and Ruys shows how this related to the idea of acedia, the emotional state of spiritual listlessness that monks in their isolation were often susceptible to. The spirit of acedia was ‘the noonday demon,’ and was described by the late fourth century Evagrius of Pontus, as the most troublesome of all of the eight genera of evil thoughts.

In chapter two, Ruys documents how demons, along with monasticism itself, moved from a harsh eremophilous environment to the more temperate climes of Western Europe, where eremitic privations were replaced by the slightly more hospitable cloister. Without the harsh conditions that had made spiritual combat in the desert so tangible, the demons found a new home within the very walls of European monasteries, the conflict becoming less physical and more metaphysical. Demonic attack was a constant concern, and because it was believed that the Devil would target site in which Christian truth and purity was at its strongest, the ardour and righteousness of an order or monastery could be inferred from the amount and ferocity of assaults that they suffered. In this section, Ruys therefore draws on material from two monks in particular, the Benedictine Peter the Venerable and the Cistercian Herbert of Clairvaux, both of whom collected a variety of accounts of demonic activity, representing an exponential growth in the conception of demons and their interaction with humanity. Ruys expertly notes this evolution of ideas, documenting how new concepts were introduced by various scholars, such as the twelfth century French monk Guibert of Nogent and the thirteenth century Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach. Guibert’s accounts place terrifying tales alongside farcical ones, such as the story of the pious priest accosted one night by a crowd of demons who appeared as Scotsmen, and, living up to the very worst of Hibernian stereotypes, demanded money from him. In addition to slanderous allegations against Scottish demons, Guibert asserted that demons could love women and seek to have intercourse with them, a reversal of the idea popular in desert eremitism, where demons appeared as lustful female spirits in order to distract monks with lustful thoughts, but did not seek to directly copulate with them. Caesarius underscores how demons were still associated with acedia, despite the relocation from the desert to the monastery, with the pious always being susceptible to the Devil inflaming their hearts with doubt, leading to melancholy, ennui and sickness.

Ruys moves from the cloister to the classroom in the third chapter, using the quaestiones compiled by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae as examples of the discussions common amongst medieval thinkers as to the nature of creatures like demons and angels. The focus here is largely on the value of demons and angels to the speculation, theories and thought experiments of scholars, with the ambiguous natures of both spirits making them worthy subjects for epistemological ruminations. Aquinas, naturally looms large in this chapter, casting an inevitable shadow down through the years, but Ruys also draws on works from the likes of Anselm of Canterbury, Bartholomeus Anglicus, and most notably, William of Auvergne, whose focus of the sexual interaction betwixt human and demon, segue into the next chapter.

In this, the final chapter, Ruys enters the world beyond the ecumenical and educational, considering how demons were treated amongst lay people, and in particular in so-called learned magic and the narratives of witchcraft. This is a whirlwind conclusion to the book at a mere seventeen pages, with the end coming far sooner than expected, just as things are getting interesting. It is largely a broad discussion of how the idea of magic as exclusively demonic cemented over time, beginning when the Early Church Fathers established a Christian orthodoxy amongst the milieu of competing traditions of Jewish belief and various pagan schools of philosophy. This had an antecedent in the apocryphal Jewish Book of Enoch, in which the fallen angel Azazel taught the secrets of witchcraft and magic to humans, as well as the arts of metalwork and makeup. Ruys documents how this intersection of magic and science also occurred in the medieval period, where the proto-science of alchemy, informed by ideas of forbidden knowledge introduced anew by a twelfth and thirteenth century influx of Jewish, Arabic and Greek learning, eventually lead to the grimoire tradition. Unfortunately, this is just a preamble that doesn’t go into much depth about learned magic following this. This is, something that then also occurs with the slightest of references to witchcraft’s relationship to demons, with the Malleus Maleficarum being introduced a mere three and a half pages before everything wraps up.

In all, Demons in the Middle Ages is a nice little potted history that does what it was intended to do at a brisk pace. Ruys has an enjoyable author’s voice that moves this pace along, but does make one pine for more of it.

Published by Arc Humanities Press

September 2, 2022 by ScriptusScribe

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

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Categories: egyptian, hellenic, hermeticism, magick, music, shamanism, witchcraft, Tags: Aeon Sophia Press,

Published by Aeon Sophia Press, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult concerns itself with exactly what it says on the tin, but it approaches this theme from a practical and experiential perspective, with a variety of musician writing about the ways in which music and the occult interact within their work. But first, a little caveat, as this anthology includes an essay from this reviewer, discussing her creation of devotional music for Hela under the name Gydja. Suffice to say, we will be neither critiquing nor lauding that particular contribution, but even without that, there’s plenty more to explore.

We usually leave matters of aesthetics to the conclusion of reviews, but the appearance of Music in Witchcraft and the Occult impacts on reading to such an extent that it informs what follows. There is unfortunately a haphazard quality to the layout, with no consistent style and with each entry apparently retaining its contributor’s source formatting. As a result, the inherited styling of subtitles, footnotes, footnote numbering, indents, captions, page beaks, line spacing and paragraph returns are all inconsistent; though mercifully, the same serif face is used throughout for the main body. This inevitably makes the book feel rushed, lacking in cohesion and genuinely hard to read in some places; such as the first entry in which the text is interrupted by strange, abrupt digits as the footnote numbering has been formatted at full scale instead of superscript. Most jarring of all are the main titles which have been left however the author minimally formatted them in their submission, resulting in barely any typographic hierarchy. Similarly, if an author didn’t include their name at the start of their original submission document, then it hasn’t been added here for publication, meaning that without recourse to the contents page you can dive into some entries with little context, hoping that the author’s name is mentioned latter on.

There are some interesting contributions in Music in Witchcraft and the Occult which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t look better, especially when only a little tightening of the layout and the addition of hierarchy and consistency would have done wonders. After something of a broad introduction with a few personal specifics from Aaron Piccirillo of Synesect, the first entry comes from Kakophonix of self-described Black Ritual Chamber Musick project Hvile I Kaos. This is a comprehensive consideration of the music of Hvile I Kaos, with a guide to their performances as live rituals, an analysis of the theory behind some indicative pieces and albums, accompanied by notation of particular motifs, including a setting of the Agios O Baphomet sinister chant. It’s all rather interesting, though the lack of formatting makes it feel rather desultory, with huge half-page spaces left between sections and little in the way of typographic hierarchy.

Zemaemidjehuty, author of The Book of Flesh and Feather, published by Theion Publishing, lays his Kemetic cards on the table with his contribution, which focuses not on any music they themselves make, but on a ritual that takes the form of a conversation between Djehuty and Barbelo/Sophia. The dialogue is spread across an exhausting sixteen pages at a fairly large point size and with a lot of leading between the lines, with the words spoken by Sophia being differentiated with some hideous underlining as if we’re still living in a world of manual typewriters instead of one in which any variation of formatting could have been chosen.

Moving swiftly along, another author, Jack Grayle, whose book on Hekate, The Hekatæon, was published by Ixaxaar, provides a dose of erudition with Gravesong. Once again, though, this piece feels a little divorced from the overall theme of this anthology, though it is tangential, with Grayle focusing on funeral songs, particularly in the intersection of Aeschylus’ trilogy of plays The Oresteia and the Greek Magical Papyri. Again, and through no fault of Grayle, the formatting here leaves a lot to be desired, with subtitles capitalised but otherwise unformatted (and in one instance, widowed at the bottom of a page), and with the endnotes kept in Microsoft Word’s deplorable default Calibri styling.

Ilya Affectvs mirrors the entry from Hvile I Kaos with a thorough, fifteen page, multi-section overview of his ritual ambient project Corona Barathri. It begins with a general biography and statement of intent, followed by Oratio Sacra, a part-manifesto sermon that is exemplary of Corona Barathri’s diabolist themes and lyrics, finally ending with the lyrics of two songs, Hymn of Nahemoth from the album Womb Ov Sheol and the title track from Speculum Diaboli.

In Baron Samhedi, Edgar Kerval gives a broad outline of his project Emme Ya before turning to the baron of the title. Ostensibly this is done to illustrate how Kerval has worked profoundly with Baron Samhedi since 2009 and how the attendant methods of invocation include sonically-induced trance states. In practice, though, this is more of a six page general biography of Samhedi with a concluding ritual, and one that could have benefited from proofing and editing to corral Kerval’s otherwise enthusiastic prose.

A different style of writing is provided by Keeley Swete and Jessica Rose of Portland’s She Scotia with their Music as Ritual, which invites the reader to reject the commodification of music in favour of something with a more sacralised intent. This is a considered and eloquent piece with a voice that blends a New Age style of metaphysical speculation with a witchy underpinning, a little self-help, a little inspi- and aspi- rational. Jon Vermillion’s The Souls (sic) Expression Through the Universal Vibration of Sound follows and feels somewhat cut from the same cloth, with a focus on frequencies and sound waves, and visualising a violet sphere of light. There’s an obvious debt to Robert Monroe’s idea of altered conscious using audio techniques to achieve hemispherical synchronization, and quite a bit of the New Age with talk of Kryst Consciousness, meditation and etheric bodies. Sitting within the same pages as Emme Ya’s Baron Samhedi and Corona Barathri’s diabolism, this makes for some incongruent company.

Iceland’s enigmatic NYIÞ offer one of the most interesting contributions here, situating their work within the folklore and magick of their homeland, beginning with a broad overview of such. They then pull back the curtain, explaining the symbolism behind various choices of instruments (the organ being linked to death, skin drums with shamanism, etc) and then showing how these elements can be combined with more conventional instruments and intent to create their intersection between music and magick.

Finally, zenKOAL of the ritual noise duo Brujentropy wields the longest-titled entry here, offering Strange Spells Spontaneously Evolving into Art: Avant Punk, Spoken Wyrd, Ritual Noise and Deathdream Electronics Unveiled no less. It’s also a pretty long piece in general, with zenKOAL writing dense paragraphs in a lyrical and effusive manner that, given the abrupt and indecisive formatting elsewhere in this volume, is quite welcome and even comforting. Like a lot of the entries here, this feels like a manifesto, with zenKOAL describing her practice, both magical and musical, as one in which creative works are birthed as sentient entities that gradually form over time, and eventually perpetuating themselves independent of their creator.

In all, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult has promise but is let down by the presentation and lack of attention to detail. It is presented in an edition of 200 hand-numbered exemplars, bound in cloth with a metallic foiling of the title and a stylised flame on both the cover and the spine. There are multiple images used throughout, both graphic and photographic, with some at full page or as spreads, while others are awkwardly marooned on their own and not integrated into the text, as if they’ve retained the practical formatting of their original submission document. Accompanying the book is a CD that compiles music pieces from the various contributors: Gydja, Khtunae, She Scotia, NYIÞ, Hvile I Kaos, Brujentropy, Corona Barathri, Emme Ya and Synesect.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

June 5, 2022 by ScriptusScribe

The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia – W. F. Ryan

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Categories: folk, grimoire, witchcraft, Tags: Penn State University Press

Yet another entry in Pennsylvania State University Press’s expansive Magic in History series, the peculiarly-titled The Bathhouse at Midnight is a rather weighty and encyclopaedic tome, running to over 500 pages, albeit with a significant slice of this page count being inflated by the large selection of endnotes with which each chapter concludes. William Francis Ryan explains in an introduction that the work builds upon material that they began collecting for their 1969 doctoral dissertation on Old Russian astrological and astronomical terminology, as well as a series of articles on the history of science and magic text in Russia. Suffice to say, it seems that Ryan collected quite a bit of material during this career-spanning hunt, now distilled into fifteen chapters covering off almost every field of magic conceivable.

These chapters broadly divide Russian magic and divination into various subcategories, beginning with popular magic, and followed by considerations of different wizards and witches, systems of divinations, omens, predictions from dreams and physiological phenomena, spells, talismans, materia magica, bibliomancy, numerology, geomancy, alchemy, and astrology. Ryan concludes with a chapter on the relationship between magic and the church, the law and the state, and includes a roster of witchcraft cases that the Synodal court dealt with in the eighteenth century.

Ryan begins this trip to the bathhouse at midnight with an historical outline, a large part of which is effectively a literature review, albeit not of comparable scholarly dissertations, but of the source texts upon which much of Russian occultism was based. Ryan shows how a considerable body of material imported into Russia was influential on later occultism, with streams coming from an older Byzantine textual tradition, a corpus of translation from Hebrew that were originally made in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as more obvious Western influences. In so doing, the Russian tradition is situated within a broad occult context, wherein the confluence of similarities between indigenous and exotic practices and influence makes it hard to determine what exactly constitutes something that may have originated in native practice.

The next two chapters focus on practices and the practitioners of magic respectively, beginning with a comprehensive discussion of various types of popular magic, categorised into sections on the evil eye, malefic magic, entities such as ancient gods and evil spirits, prophylactic magic, festivals and other propitious times or dates, magical places and directions, and finally religious parody and inversions. This amounts to a covering off of all the usual areas that one might find in a contemporary practical magical text, but in this instances, there’s a lot more detail and provenance, with Ryan meticulously referencing all his sources. With the following chapter’s focus on the practitioners of this magic, Ryan provides a catalogue of these various types, dedicating usually at least two pages to discuss the Volkhv, the Koldun, the Ved’ma, the Znakhar’, and the Vorozhei. These are only the main designations, and Ryan follows with an additional section exhaustively documenting all the words used for both types of magic and their practitioners. As elsewhere, this is no perfunctory list, and Ryan lists sources, derivation and context.

This is a formula that Ryan uses throughout, everything is so detailed and draws from a wide range of sources, all tied together with an expert voice and clear familiarity with his subject. Evidence of this is the consideration of materia magica, in which Ryan provides a lengthy and useful roster of plants, both real and fantastic, used for magic rites and in Russian folk medicine, where herbs dominated. There are nine pages here, with 49 plants described with varying levels of details, some with botanical names identified, and others with merely the places they are mentioned and their purpose.

With his background as a president of the Folklore Society and an emeritus professor and honorary fellow at the Warburg Institute and the University of London, Ryan is well equipped to not only deal with the subject of this volume but to authoritatively draw comparisons with Western magic, as well as its classical roots. This makes for a comprehensive work, one that is thorough in its specificity but is aware of a broader context within the occult milieu. Because of Ryan’s readable manner, The Bathhouse at Midnight can be read sequentially from cover to cover, but is also clearly organised in such a way that allows for simply dipping in as a reference.

The Bathhouse at Midnight is formatted in the academic style one would expect of a publisher like Penn State Press with a small but readable typeface throughout and an even smaller point size for the references and index, suggesting that with less frugal formatting it could have been a work significantly longer that its 504 pages. At first glance there is one exception to the quality of the layout with a distractingly small safety area on the top margins on each page, meaning that the page title and page numbering in the header sit a mere 3mm from the edge of the page. The digital preview version on Amazon features a more comfortable margin and a closer inspection shows that printing is provided by print-on-demand service Lightning Source, whose lackadaisical quality control has resulted in a tiny top and a big bottom. Therefore it is worth bearing in mind that this book may be printed on demand and so the results may vary, for the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the layout but in the printing.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

December 14, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

The Strix-Witch – Daniel Ogden

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Categories: classical, witchcraft, Tags: Cambridge University Press,

Another entry in Cambridge University Press’ compact Elements in Magic series, Daniel Ogden’s The Strix-Witch seeks to provide the tricky answer to what is acknowledged as an ostensibly simple question: what was a strix? The simple answer is a winged and often predatory female figure of Greek and Latin folklore, travelling at night in either a birdlike physical form or as a projected soul. But as Ogden shows, the strix is a being of shifting classifications whose liminal status as a creature of simultaneous substance and ephemerality makes her difficult to grasp and define.

Ogden begins with a brief consideration of the Latin term itself before providing a survey of the three most substantial accounts of the strix, as found in the works of the poet Ovid, the satirist Gaius Petronius, and from a Christian perspective, the seventh century Byzantine theologian John Damascene. Ogden then provides an analysis of the imbricated motifs within the three texts, isolating fourteen in all: the strix as an old witch, the strix at night, flying and avian transformation, flying and soul projection, screeching, snatching of whole bodies, snatching of individual body parts, the extraction of moisture, the imposition on a time-limit on the life of victims, fighting back against the strix, cannibalism and covens of striges, and the strix’s imperceptibility in relation to battles over both houses and bodies. This is a thorough section, the lion’s share of the book, and Ogden does not simply list the recurring and constituent motifs, highlighting whether they appear in all or only some of the texts. Instead, he provides parallel instances of such information, drawn from passing allusions in a substantial collection of additional sources, whether they concern themselves with striges in particular or with broader folk conceptions. In the consideration of the flying strix as an avian soul projection, for example, he incorporates various precedents from the Classical world, ranging from Homer and Virgil’s underworld ghosts that flock like birds, to a group of marvellous figures from Pythagorean tradition credited with the ability to fly, including Aristeas of Proconnesus (mentioned by Herodotus, Maximus of Tyre and Strabo), Hermotimus of Clazomenae (mentioned by Apollonius), and Abaris the Hyperborean (mentioned by Porphyry in his Life of Pythagoras). Similarly, Ogden draws polymathically from both Classical and medieval sources when discussing the snatching of bodies and body parts, referencing Gervase of Tilbury in the former and Plautus’ comedy Pseudolus in the latter. In so doing, Ogden provides a far broader picture of the strix than an assessment of just three texts would lead one to believe, drawing on information from both forwards and backwards in time to build up a comprehensive, culturally and temporally diverse image.

From this comparison of motifs, Ogden reconstructs the ideal narrative of a strix attack, what he defines as ‘the strix paradigm,’ and uses this to offer a more complete and final answer to the fundamental question of what a strix was. This paradigm defines the strix as a terrible woman that attacks babies, flying by night by transforming into a bird or bird-like creature and focussing her onslaught first on the exterior of the house in order to gain ingress via invisibility or permeability. Once successful in its intrusion, the strix may steal the entire body of the child, or rend its liver and other internal organs, or drain the victim of moisture.

In the third section, Ogden shows how the strix paradigm influenced the general representation of witches in the Latin literary tradition, something that becomes evident early on with the intersection of so many motifs, particularly in the prior discussion of striges gathering to feast on the bodies they had stolen, so reminiscent of the witches’ sabbat. Ogden suggests that the strix provides an explanation for the vastly different ways in which witches are represented in Greek and Latin literature, with the latter having greater emphasis on the morbid, predatory and gruesome. To this end, he analyses various Latin accounts of witches: Candida in Horace’s Epodes, Dipsas in Ovid’s Amores, Erictho in Lucan’s Pharsalia, the Thessalian witches in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and the unnamed witch who is described killing the slave Iucundus on his epitaph from early 20s CE Rome. In addition, there are the later accounts of the witchy innkeepers from St. Augustine’s City of God and the belief in the night-working witches mentioned by Burchard of Worms in his 1012–20 CE Corrector sive Medicus. Ogden introduces each excerpt and then highlights the strix-like motifs in what are rather striking reiterations of core themes, in particular the ability to gain ingress via small gaps, and the interest in matters corporeal.

In his fourth and final section, Ogden considers the strix via the analogous figure of Gello whose existence constitutes a longue durée that stretches from the child-killing demons of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece, right down to survivals in modern Greek folklore. He begins with the child-stealing Lamashtu demon found in Akkadian texts of the first and second millennia BCE, tracing her descent into the Classical lamia, but he also considers another predatory Mesopotamian demon, Gallû. Although they are male in their initial appearance, Ogden documents the Gallû demon’s evolution into the female bay-stealing figure of Gello, mentioned in a grimly ironic fragment by Sappho in which she describes an unidentified subject as “loving children more than Gello.” Ogden also uses this section to consider briefly a few minor threads, like related terms such as the men-transformed into birds called styx in Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, the striglos/ strigla defined in Hesychius of Alexandria’s lexicon as either the inside of a horn/wing or as a little owl or a long-eared owl, and ultimately the more recent folkloric night spirit known as stringlos.

Like other entries in the Elements in Magic series, Ogden’s The Strix-Witch is a satisfying deep dive into a specialised topic with much to satisfy for those seeking information both on the predatory female figures such as the strix specifically, but also for those interested in the roots of the image of the malevolent witch.

Published by Cambridge University Press

October 16, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

The War on Witchcraft – Jan Machielsen

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Categories: witchcraft, Tags: Cambridge University Press,

Jan Machielsen’s The War on Witchcraft is part of Cambridge University Press’ compact Elements in Magic series, which aims to restore the study of magic to a central place within culture. A brief work, it has an ambiguous title with a far more informative subtitle of Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr, and the Origins of Witchcraft Historiography. The two American historians of the title, Machielsen argues, have had a little acknowledged but lasting influence on the field of modern witch hunt studies, one that is comparable, if in opposition, to the more familiar, and slightly later, Margaret Murray and Montague Summers. Machielsen’s work has its origins in 2010 when, as a graduate student, he received a scholarship to Cornell University, giving him the opportunity to study its large witchcraft collection (begun by one of Cornell’s founders, the aforementioned Andrew Dickson White), thereby sparking an interest in the library’s origins. The text itself began life in 2016 as a lengthy article, before enduring, as Machielsen wryly reflects, three years of rejections from a trio of academic journals, until he was encouraged by Alex Wright and Elements in Magic series editor Marion Gibson to expand it into its final form during a research stay in Germany, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Machielsen begins with a brief but comprehensive review of eighteenth century scholarship’s rational approach to witchcraft which sought to dismiss allegations against witches as an embarrassing and superstitious delusion, now safely and mercifully consigned, in the clear light of modernity’s day, to the past. It is this academic, historiographical onslaught, continued by White and Burr, which is the war of the book’s title and a play on White’s voluminous A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. As Machielsen notes, such eighteenth century scholarly attitudes were fundamentally paternalistic and condescending, comparable to that of the very demonologists and church authorities that scholars now sought to denigrate, men whose appeals to a greater sapient authority, framed within the certainty provided by an absolute dichotomy of true and false, was later mirrored by scholarship’s belief in an axiomatic rationality set against equally self-evident irrationality. Just as demonologists used the language of superstition, dressed up in religious nomenclature, so academia defined both belief in witchcraft and the witch hunts that followed as thoroughly superstitious, as inherently irrational and therefore belonging to the past. In the early 1900s, Murray and Summers, who could both be, and were, dismissed as enthusiastic amateurs, took a different approach, with Murray positing that early modern Europe’s witches had been members of a secret pagan fertility cult, while the Catholic convert Summers argued for a literal and perennial worship of demons with the witch as a “minister to vice and inconceivable corruption” and “a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State.”

The work of Andrew Dickson White and his student George Lincoln Burr is positioned here in opposition to the literalism later embraced by Murray and Summers, being a continuation of the veneration of the rational that sought to consign witchcraft to history. In some ways, this was merely an adjunct of White core and overstated thesis, as explored in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, in which dogmatic theology and science were, and had forever been, inimical to each other, locked in perpetual and fundamental conflict. White drew attention, for example, to the way in which his rational heroes, be they scientists, witchcraft sceptics, or even printers, were pilloried with allegations of sorcery by an irrational world, such as the thirteenth-century physician Arnold de Villanova (charged with sorcery and dealings with the devil) or England’s first printer, William Caxton (who did not escape the charge of sorcery). The war on witchcraft and the warfare of science were, thus, effectively extensions of each other, with the witch-hunt being emblematic of the consequences of dangerous theological and sectarian ideas. That isn’t to say that White’s embracing of unassailable rationality extending to dismissing Christian belief itself and it was his opposition to inhibitive theology, rather than Christianity itself, that allowed him to see himself as, in the words of Machielsen, “the latest (if not the last) in a long line of virtuous Christian men fighting for scientific and religious Truth.”

It was White’s student, Burr, who ran specifically with these themes of witchcraft, sharing a philosophy with his mentor that any form of false belief existed only to be refuted as the absence or corruption of something good. Burr’s language spoke to this with earnest zeal, seeing witchcraft as a ‘nightmare of Christian thought,’ a pale and perverse shadow of the real thing that was to be exposed in the light of rational day by heroic and devout men. While ideas of witchcraft as female, irrational and hysterical underlie their work, the paternalistic misogyny and hyper masculinity of White and Burr meant that the female role in the witch craze was simultaneously promoted and minimised, with, as Machielsen notes, both men seeing the witch-hunt as a battle between two types of male elites. Its cast of rival masculinities featured those who believed in the phenomenon, while their critics were perceived, by them, to be motivated solely by a desire to undermine their position of power; the female victims and their condition being completely superfluous to this patristic battle for supremacy. Such an essentialist viewpoint simultaneously made the prospect of a male witch a problematic anomaly, given that such a person lacked agency of the heroic male variety. Thus, in Burr’s work, Johannes Junius (mayor of Bamberg executed for witchcraft in 1628) and Dietrich Flade (university rector and electoral judge executed for sorcery in the Trier witch trials) are positioned solely as heroic witchcraft sceptics and righteous opponents of the hunt, with any prospect that the accusations could have had some foundation being completely ignored.

Machielsen suggests that such a view point had a lasting legacy on witchcraft historiography and contributed to the minimising, by both sceptical scholars and feminist revivalists, of the role of male witches within the historical record. In his conclusion, Machielsen also notes how witch-hunt studies in the vein of White and Burr shore up the perennial appeal of the warfare thesis in which it is comforting to glibly see history as a heroic and inexorable march of progress that defines itself in opposition to the theological missteps that it hopes to have relegated to the past, but which still threatens to burst through the blurred temporal boundaries.

The War on Witchcraft is basic in its formatting, the body set in a standard serif, exhaustive footnotes tidily footnoted, with the occasional image sprinkled throughout. Everything is purely functional, right down to the lack of new chapter pages, with each chapter flowing through on the page, separated only by a title in an aberrant blue typeface. As a concise history of the thoughts of two men, The War on Witchcraft is a joy to read, providing an insight little available elsewhere.

Published by Cambridge University Press

September 3, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

Slavic Witchcraft – Natasha Helvin

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Categories: folk, witchcraft, Tags: Destiny Books,

With its title and subtitle, Natasha Helvin’s Slavic Witchcraft: Old World Conjuring Spells & Folklore promises much in this 2019 release from Destiny Books. It’s debatable as to whether this promise is met by Helvin, a Soviet Union-born “professional rootworker and spiritual coach” who now lives in the Pacific Northwest and claims to be a fifth generation hereditary witch. That’s a lorra generations.

With her brief opening chapter, Helvin offers a general history of Russian pre-Christian belief, and its evolution with the coming of Christianity, pushing the idea of dual observance that incorporated the two. In a strange little section she also draws a somewhat unnecessary comparison with Voodoo, which she awkwardly describes as having, like Slavic paganism, aspects of the older African religions; that’s quite some cultural diffusionism.

In her second chapter, Slavic Magic, Power and Sorcery, Helvin begins with very little focus on said Slavic magic, instead presenting a primer on the mechanics of magic in general sans the book’s cultural context. This covers off many of the core principles that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time within 20th and 21st century magic, including expressing intent through actions and words, and the use of objects and amulets as repositories of this intent and power. It is only in the second half of the chapter that Helvin turns to specific Russian examples, abruptly moving away from the high magic theory to spend several pages discussing the folklore associated with Russian sorceresses. This abruptness, perhaps unintentionally, highlights a contrast in writing style that is found throughout Slavic Witchcraft but most noticeably in this chapter. For the most part, this book features the awkward, lumpen tone that one might expect from someone with English as their second language: sentences can be too short, the flow is halting and the phrasing can often be a little tortuous or naïve. The section of magical theory, however, has a more confident flow, and a contemporary nomenclature quite distinct from the rest of the book.

The spells in Slavic Witchcraft are presented with nary a trace of source or reference and in her introduction, Helvin explains that they come predominantly from her family, with others collected whilst travelling abroad and on expeditions to rural Russia. This does rob the content of context, as there’s nothing denoting a spell’s origin, nothing to give value or credibility based on provenance or even popularity, nothing to suggest that they haven’t all just been made up by Helvin on the spot. This highlights a problem found throughout Slavic Witchcraft, in which there is no referencing, no primary sources, and also, most frustrating, very little in the way of specifics. W. F. Ryan’s 500 paged The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia this is not. Instead, this vision of Russia is an ungrounded, almost mythic, one, in which its 17.13 million kilometres contain very few named towns, cities or regions, ultimately implying a widespread homogeneity, given how so many of things are inconceivably attributed, like a comedy bit, to just “in Russia.” Apparently whether you’re in Kaliningrad or Vladivostock, it’s all the same. The same is true on matters of ethnicity and even worse, time, with the spells and the anecdotes existing in some ambiguous temporal space, unmoored from any particular time period. Context is everything and in this instance, context is completely absent. A spell may have been composed centuries ago, or it may have been made up yesterday, it’s impossible to tell.

This lack of context contributes to another problem with the spells in Slavic Witchcraft: there’s too many of them. A vast swathe of the book, fifty pages in all, is dedicated to love and relationship spells of the most psychologically suspect kind, all sharing similar goals and similar techniques to the point of redundancy. If Helvin documented where these spells came from, then there could at least be some validity to including all of them out of historical or anthropological interest. Instead, it’s just spell after spell of ways to get your husband back, how to hurt their mistress or new partner, how to forget your attachment to a married man that you’re having an affair with, how to get a reluctant partner to marry you, how to get your partner to forgive you after you’ve cheated on him and he doesn’t wanna, and how to make men who are indifferent to you instead fall for you, emotionally healthy catch that you are.

Now, books of this stripe often attract reviews on Amazon from people who, being a little susceptible to superstition, find a particular title too heavy with the bad vibes, a cursed tome that brought bad luck until they wisely disposed of it. Slavic Witchcraft itself has one of these reviews and in some ways, they’re right. Not because the book is anything more than ink on paper, or because the content is grim and dark and will open the very gates of hell (if only), but because, well, some of said content is just gross and comes from a decidedly emotionally unhealthy place. Witness spell after spell that presupposes conflict and infidelity, and provides, as its solution, coercion and deceit. And some of the spells are ridiculous in their specificity, prefacing with misogynistic scenarios that says a lot about their authors: you trusted your beloved before you got married and had complete harmony and understanding between you, but the situation changed after the wedding. You began to control him, answer his calls and demand a full report on what he was doing. The solution? Basically say a charm reminding yourself of your proper place, as the led not the lead, as the neck not the head, which, after a week’s repetition, will change your “inner state,” your anxiety will go away, your irritability will be replaced by gratitude, and best of all, your husband will once again adore you. Score!

Suffice to say, it’s all very icky and all very tiring, and all a bit strange coming from a publisher like Destiny Books/Inner Traditions whose self-help titles on relationships probably don’t contain anything resembling these psychologically damaged inanities. It’s telling that this chapter begins with a bizarre little paragraph stating baldly that God created the first humans as androgynous, happy creatures that were later divided into male and female halves, and now those unhappy heteronormative halves look to reunite with each other and that, dear reader, is what love is. Naturally, this is presented simply as fact, and it is not explained whether this is Helvin’s personal belief, some scrap of folk belief “from Russia,” or just something cut and pasted from an inspirational meme on Facebook. Helvin goes on from here, effectively justifying the spells that follow, by saying that sometimes these relationships between the two halves are not always perfect, since, she seems to say with some inevitability, “either a rival turns out to be more grasping or beautiful and takes your love away or takes a loving husband and father from his family” or you know, the fire goes out and there’s no passion. Options, we’ve got options.

The other spells collected here are grouped into sections on money and wealth, protection, and house and home. These cover many of the familiar concerns of folk medicine, with some methods that will be familiar from elsewhere. Indeed, reiterating that point, there’s often very little that distinguishes what is here from things that would be found elsewhere, with nothing obviously or uniquely Slavic about the spells. Perhaps the one selling point are the spoken charms which employ a darkly glamorous lexicon and which, par for the course, there doesn’t seem to be any prior trace of, be it in print or online, so you have no idea of their provenance, save for assuming it’s merely Helvin’s hand; or in a few cases, onemagic.ru

The final section of spells focuses on cemetery traditions and unlike the previous groupings, these have a substantial preamble, outlining various Slavic funeral folk traditions. Again, this has the barest of details, nothing is geographically more specific than ‘Northern Russia’ and there’s little indication of the time we’re talking about, be it ancient, recent or contemporary.

If Slavic Witchcraft documented its sources and presented itself with considerably more rigour, it would have much to recommend it, as there is a staggering amount of material here that cannot be found anywhere else. But, because of this failing, the reader, save if they be of a most trusting disposition, must surely assume that almost everything here has been crafted from whole cloth and these attested old world conjuring spells are considerably more new world.

Published by Destiny Books

August 8, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

Hedge-Rider – Eric De Vries

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Categories: witchcraft

The size of the ‘witchcraft’ tag in the column to the right is testament to the popularity of the genre and to the amount of so-themed titles that, through little conscious effort, have ended up crossing the Scriptus Recensera submissions desk and being reviewed. With so many witchcraft books read and reviewed, it is often hard to find a unique selling point, with even areas that were once fairly limited specialities, like Traditional and Luciferian witchcraft, now being represented by a veritable surfeit of titles. Needless to say, if this title from 2008 didn’t have something to offer, it wouldn’t have made its way with such ease to the crowded top of the library pile, and this said ‘something’ is effectively a more Germanic take on witchcraft.

Eric De Vries’ key premise can be summarised in one thought, the roots of witchcraft, and in particular the figure of the Witch Goddess, are in a shamanic take on Germanic myth and folklore, and that the oft-touted idea of Celtic origins or influence is overstated. Indeed, throughout this work, De Vries uses the details found in Norse mythology to flesh out the more vague descriptions of witch trials and faery lore. With this, and revealing this reviewer’s biases, comes a pleasant focus on things Helish and chthonic, with De Vries following in the vein of some incarnations of Traditional Witchcraft, particularly those inclined towards the approach of Robert Cochrane, that centre on the idea of a Pale Goddess of Death and the Underworld who combines elements of both Hela and Holda.

De Vries writes in a largely informal and conversational style that is fairly loose, his editorial voice jumping around with equal parts enthusiasm and earnestness, and with both characteristics contributing to the occasional jibe at Wiccans and other people he disagrees with. Throughout Hedge-Rider, De Vries gives often somewhat contemporary interpretations and musing on metaphysical themes, rather than just presenting the symbolism as self-evident. This aligns with his informal tone, having, like Jan Fries, the tendency to try and demystify what he’s presenting, rather than layering on the obfuscation.

After an introduction to the concept of the hedgewitch, the first chapter proves to be indicative of De Vries’ approach here, detailing first the conception of the underworld and Hela found in Norse myth, and then relating both of these to continental tales of Holda and Holle, As the final step in this puzzle, De Vries then focuses on Holle’s association with witches and in particular the wild hunt, showing that she was both a goddess of life and death, of night and day.

From the witch goddess, De Vries turns to a male counterpart, the black god, whom he primarily identifies with Óðinn/Woden, before proceeding at a brisk pace into chapters on various practical tools and applications. This begins with a consideration of steads and stangs as vehicles for transvection and then evolves into various methods of invoking trance, including the use of wine and entheogens. De Vries seems to be an enthusiastic advocate of the latter, though he only vouches for mugwort, wormwood, sweet flag and passionflower (all with the necessary caveats about careful use), and balks at the use of any mushroom whatsoever, since, as he definitively states, “you’ll only end up hurt or in hospital.”

The rest of Hedge-Rider continues downwards as it were, providing further tools and methods of travelling to the underworld, drawing on the idea of the fetch and fylgia, as well as ideas of werewolf transformation, each time returning to the themes of witchcraft and then informing them with details drawn from Norse mythology. This is a mixture of the practical and the historical, with De Vries providing techniques along the way but always including them broadly within the body of the text, never as a set of rigid instructions or recipes. The reader is thus introduced to a variety of themes and tools, but nothing that feels dogmatic; though this may not be too appealing for those who prefer instruction and structure.

In the penultimate chapter, the journey reaches its end in the underworld but this isn’t necessarily one in which Hela or any other queen of the underworld is directly encountered. Instead, De Vries turns to the model of the hieros gamos, using Svipdagr and Menglöð, and Freyr and Gerðr as examples of the hero who journeys into the underworld for the love of an otherworldly maiden. This he then brings back to witchcraft via the idea of the demon lover, such as the incubus or succubus, but it’s a brief chapter that feels like the ideas are not fully explored.

Finally, De Vries presents a few pages in summary, followed by musings on lessons learnt and how these can be applied in the everyday. And with that, Hedge-Rider concludes rather quickly, with its large point size meaning you can breeze through the 139 pages that make up its content proper. This is then padded out to 194 pages with an index, a collection of reproduction of many of the classic woodcuts of witchcraft, a book hoard, a reproduction of Grógaldr, and an extensive but not entirely necessary glossary of terms in which even witch apparently needed to be defined.

Despite his heart being in the right places, there are many problems with the presentation of the material in Hedge-Rider. Too often, De Vries inexplicably begins sentences and even paragraphs with filler words, particularly minor crimes like ‘however’ and ‘also.’ But the strangest opener is ‘actually’ with which, apropos of nothing, he often begins whole paragraphs, seemingly responding to a prior clause that was never argued. This erratic authorial voice can make the copy feel like a first pass, an ebullient but unedited mind dump, and this impression is compounded by the sloppy editing, with a peppering of spelling mistakes, switched homonyms and the occasional malapropism; something that is on show in the book’s very first sentence when De Vries says “Often you here so called ‘Wiccans’ and ‘Pagans’ claim that they are witches.” Poor Baldr fares even worse though, and a lack of proofing renders him as Bladr several times, creating quite the visual image when his death during the gods’ deadly game is mentioned. One could make some allowances for all of this if, as one assumes, De Vries is not a native English speaker, in which case the fault lies more with the publishers, Pendraig, whose best practice should have included a cursory proof and a spell check of at least the first paragraph, if not more.

Along with the sloppy and inconsistent spelling, there are the occasional equally sloppy moments of fact checking. Nothing is ever directly cited, leading you down your own avenues of fact checking, and while there appears to be no malice, there are things that seem to have got muddled. An account from Herodotus is merged, uncredited, with one from Pliny to create a single composite that draws details from two sides of the continent. Similarly, as so often seems to happen, the cast in the events leading up to the death of Baldr are conflated, and while usually the casual retelling in error mistakes Freyja for Frigg, here they’ve gone one step further and it’s her brother Freyr who asks all creatures in the world not to harm Baldr.

With all that said, Hedge-Rider is a worthy read that has much to recommend it, with caveats. Its overall argument and themes are solid, but it is by no means authoritative, with the lack of references and the brisk pace meaning that the reader may need to do their own work tracking down the sources and seeing how it all stacks up.

Published by Pendraig

Scriptus Recensera

Reviewing books magickal

Categotry Archives: witchcraft

Afterlives of Endor – Laura Levine

The Spiritual Power of Masks – Nigel Pennick

Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization – Edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers

Demons in the Middle Ages – Juanita Feros Ruys

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia – W. F. Ryan

The Strix-Witch – Daniel Ogden

The War on Witchcraft – Jan Machielsen

Slavic Witchcraft – Natasha Helvin

Hedge-Rider – Eric De Vries