A new picture of British witchcraft and witch trials

The trend in modern witchcraft studies has been to picture the "confessions" of accused witches as mostly obtained under duress, including torture, with the details supplied by inquisitors eager to confirm their own notions of witchcraft taken from "learned" treatises on demonology.

Recently, some historians have urged that we take the narratives of the accused more seriously. They suggest that the stories contain genuine folkloric traditions of the British rural poor--not about selling one's soul to the Devil, but about certain men and women, known as "cunning folk" , who gain powers of healing and divination by their relations with ancestral spirits of the British countryside, usually desribed as fairies or spirits of the dead.

In "Cunning Folk And Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions In Early Modern British Witchcraft And Magic," historian Emma Wilby studies the witchcraft confessions carefully and locates a consistent thread of folk belief and practice beneath the diabolical veneer applied by the interrogators. She then takes these beliefs and, using a comparative anthropological approach, compares them with shamanic tradition and practices from Siberia and North American Indians, and finds many points of apparent similarity.

In the end she suggests that a popular tradition of native shamanism persisted among the British peasantry since pre-historic times (she asserts that many parts of rural Britain were only thinly Christianized up until the dawn of the modern era). She sugggests that this tradition was the mysticism of the illiterate, comparable to the contemplative visions of the more elite, learned and celebrated narratives of recognized, orthodox Christian mystics and saints.

A fascinating, frequently mind-blowing book, whose ultimate message is that people will always tend to find their own source of mystical experience, even when they are barred from the orthodox channels of the elite milieu they canot hope to enter.

Coming Soon

Coming soon: The movies, myths, categories of experience that history has no name for, the 24th South Wales Borderers, and Scottish witches.

Time for a Poem

Trismegistus

by Richard Wilbur

from The New Yorker, January 5, 2009

O Egypt, Egypt—so the great lament

Of thrice-great Hermes went—

Nothing of thy religion shall remain

Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.

His grieving eye foresaw

The world’s bright fabric overthrown

Which married star to stone

And charged all things with awe.

And what, in that dismantled world, could be

More fabulous than he?

Had he existed? Was he but a name

Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim

Of every ancient quack—

That one could from a smoky cell

By talisman or spell

Coerce the Zodiac?

Still, still we summon him at midnight hour

To Milton’s pensive tower,

And hear him tell again how, then and now,

Creation is a house of mirrors, how

Each herb that sips the dew

Dazzles the eye with many small

Reflections of the All—

Which, after all, is true.

Another European Socialist Spouts Off

"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

I correspond with Camille Paglia

We talked about The Golden Bough.

MC5 for the Rock Hall! Tell Jann Wenner

Rock critic Dave Marsh once said that, if the MC5 and the Rolling Stones (at the height of their powers) were playing across the street from each other, he would choose to go see the 5. So would I, and we're far from alone in this. There seems to be near unanimity among people who saw the 5 live that it was one of the greatest rock and roll shows they'd ever experienced. There's now something of a concensus that the 5 belong on a short list of contenders for the title of The Great American Rock and Roll Band. All the "alternative" movements in hard rock that have come since them--glam, punk, grunge, indie-- are unthinkable without them. But you will not find them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The concensus would be stronger if not for legal hassles holding up the release of The MC5: A True Testimonial, a thrilling, inspiring, long-overdue documentary telling of the band's career. It now looks like the legal obstacles are clearing up, and if A True Testimonial sees the light of day, run, do not walk, to get a copy of one of the key rock and roll documents of recent years. Those wanting to know more of the story of the MC5 in the meantime are referred to Don McLeese's excellent Kick Out the Jams.

Do this experiment for me. Go watch the You Tube video of the 5 performing Kick Out the Jams. Then come back and try to explain to me why Bobby Darrin, the Bee Gees, Ricky Nelson and the Four Seasons belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the 5 don't. Do not forget the name of the institution: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Then e-mail Jann Wenner, founder and editor of Rolling Stone ( jann.wenner@rollingstone.com) and the 800 pound gorilla of the Rock Hall induction process.

If you need to hear more of the 5, buy their three albums here.

The Rock Hall may have compromised its mission in the years since its founding, but maybe an appeal to conscience may still work. In theory it exists to recognize and promulgate awareness of great rock and roll, and if the MC5 aren't great rock and roll, then my definition of the term is completely invalid. Go watch the video. Then buy Kick Out the Jams. It'll change your life.

Get the MC5 in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Watch this space...