Witchcraft Still Flourishes

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31921, 24 February 1969, Page 3

Witchcraft Still Flourishes

(By

RICHARD BOETH)

Witchcraft is a titillating subject, the kind that is forever being summoned up in snickering exposes of middleaged English women dancing bare-chested round an incense-laden altar. In Switzerland in recent ! weeks, however, witchcraft ! has been the source of a genuine horror stofy with no , laughs to it at all. A Zurich ■ jury found five men and a ; woman guilty of beating a 17-year-old girl to death in a remote alpine village in an j effort to “exorcise the devil” j from her adolescent body.

! The murderers were all members of a pseudo-Catholic

religious sect called “Noah’s Ark,” which combined an intense taste for personal confessions with free-form predictions that non-contribu tors to the cult would not survive the end of the world (originality scheduled to take place in 1957). In spile of the inaccuracy of such forecasts, “Noah’s Ark” exjerted considerable influence in the mountain fastnesses above Zurich; one dentist, f or example, contributed $12,500 to the mystical cause. In recent years, "Noah’s Ark” 1 acquired a secular name (“International Community for the Peace, Inc.”) as well as a fund-raising president, Mr Josef Hasler. When his teen-age daughter Bernadette, turned into a, disciplinary problem—unCMly at school, moody, obstinWRMBBBBiMBBB

ate, admittedly sensual—the cultists fell upon her one night “in justified holy wrath” and beat the life out of her with walking canes, plastic pipes and riding whips. Her father did not take part in the beating, but after recovering her body he told police she had died of “heart trouble.” From the outraged reaction of the Zurich burghers, one might have supposed that witchcraft was a strange and isolated phenomenon. Actually it exists—and sometimes flourishes—in all the civilised countries of the world, which is an interesting comment both on modern witchcraft and modern civilisation. Probably the most renowned witch of all is England's Mrs Sybil Leek, who has busily cashed in on her fame by conducting lecture tours and by writing a book on her family’s supernatural experiences with a pet jackdaw.

“Witchcraft is the largest secret society on earth,” Mrs Leek maintains. “It is greater in secrecy than the Mafia and it goes all round the world.” Indeed, full-fledged Witches have turned up in recent years in large and organised numbers in West Germany, France, Portugal, England and naturally United States. A good West German wife won a divorce in 1963 when she testified that a sorcerer —one of 10,000 in that highly industrialised country—had convinced her husband that she was responsible for the death of four of his calves and a drop in milk production. Merry Time British witches have been having a merry time of it ever since the repeal of theWitchcraft Act in 1951. Witches’ covens have sprung up all over the country like dragon’s teeth, and the women are doing a brisk business in sanctioned nudism, incense-burning and the sale of spells and aphrodisiacs.

Almost all modern witches claim to practice “white magic,” which is the use of magical powers for strictly beneficent purposes. Curses, hexes, haunting, and all those practices that once gave witchcraft a bad name are rigorously eschewed most of the time.

White or black, all Western witchcraft is closely tied into primitive or mystical Christianity, which causes considerable problems when the I authorities try to explain why a bishop’s blessing is permissible but a witch's incantantation is not. There is sound Biblical authority not only for the existence of Satan (Luke, 22:31) but the exorcism of devils (Luke, 8:36; John, 10:21), among many. Even the vicious “Noah’s Ark” group in Switzerland had ties with formal Roman Catholicism. Mr Josef Stocker, one of the leaders, was an unfrocked priest, and the whole sect drew its direct inspiration from the dubious Mariolatrous revelations of one Sister Stella. Sister Stella has been locked away and silenced by the church, but her apocalyptic writings, approved by Pope Pius XII, have been allowed to stand.

Witches are, if nothing else, ready to move with the times. Just two months ago, Lisbon’s most popular bruxa (or sorceress) was brought to trial as part of a nation-wide Portuguese crack-down on witchcraft.

The bruxa, an illiterate old crone named Silvina Rodrigues, was accused of “illegally practising medicine”— an up-to-date way of saying that she charged money for her prayers and incantations for the sick and crippled.

After a dozen or so witnesses testified to the efficacy of Silvina’s spells, the court accepted her lawyer’s argument that she was only practicing “rustic psychotherapy” —and acquitted her of all wrongdoing. (Newsweek Feature Service).