WITCH LORE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26034, 24 December 1945, Page 3

WITCH LORE

By J. I. SPEDDINO

There is on record a remark attributed to Groucho Marx, who, as a member of a “Vic- • tory Caravan ” of film stars engaged on a national bond-selling jaunt, was appraised of the fact that the Andrews sisters were in a neighbouring compartment. “ What? ” said Mr Marx, with some surprise, “On this train? I thought they did all their travelling by broomstick.” The remark seems typical of the spirit of levity in which witches are treated in these supposedly enlightened days. For the attitude towards witchcraft has passed out of the “ ghosties and ghoulies and things that go wump in the night ” attitude of our great-great-grandfathers, when stockbrokers and other irrational persons dismissed it all as a pack of nonsense and an excuse for burning poor old women, while more superstitious folk felt there “ must be something in it ” and sought decrepit herbalists for advice, or declined sentimentally into folklore, attempts to photograph fairies, or open dementia. It seems distressing that a well-established institution such as witchcraft should hlWe been allowed to decline into a butt for humour and an accepted form of symbolism for" Hallowe’en, but it would be unfair to complain at length. Just as unfair as to point out that Christmas itself has. its date fixed by Mithraism, its mistletoe and its yule logs bequeathed by northern mythology, its tree introduced from Germany by Prince Albert, its first Christmas card not before the middle of the last century, and its general acceptance as a first-rate festival contributed by Dickens out of Big Business. FIRST APPEARANCE It is possible that witches first cropped up in the unpleasant customs of the practitioners of the Black Mass. This form of activity flourished at one time in Britain and, to a greater extent, in Germany. The powers of the witches were no doubt considerable. They were often invoked by the political opposition, which may offer iood for thought to contemporary politicians. vames I quite rightly feared them, and Bothwell, their probable Scottish leader, died in Naples accused of necromancy. The witch of the Christmas magazines, however, is more likely to have come from another stream of tradition—the scholars and the dramatists, many of them with a smattering of the Kabbalah and the Rosicrucians—the other dark stream of magic, often perverted but still powerful, which had first been bottled in ancient Egypt and the Middle East and, with the Renaissance, again emerged into history. The romantics created a wonderful witch, calling on the evidence of contemporary trials of witches, the weird sisters of the North, the Greek and Roman furies, and a half-dozen other sources, and producing “a true Sibyl . . .’ ill apparelled, worse nourished,, toothless; blear-eyed, crook-shoulder’d, snotty . . . drooping, faint, and pithless.” They added black cats for. good luck, a broomstick for transport, and a cauldron for potion-brewing bad odour. Strangely enough, there is little talk of witches flying before the seventeenth century, and they seemto have been mixed up with the Valkyries. It is this conventional character, with a hat like a female Welsh nationalist, a defective manicure, and nutcracker jaws, who has intruded into the children’s fairy stories and the contemporary Christmas. * NOT AIR-MINDED In actual fact, witches were originally men as well as women, young as well as old. They did not often claim to fly, and were in the early periods of European history popular rather than the opposite. Later, when the union rules were still further relaxed, there were white as well as black witches. They may not have been supernatural, but they certainly thought they were. And, contrary to popular belief, no witch was ever legally burnt alive in England. The witch goes back to the dread sisters of Scandinavia and the writhing furies of Thrace; to the peris of Persia, from whom the fairies took their name; to the horned dancer of ten thousand years ago, and the first anthropoid thing which rhythmically gyrated to the wonder of the full moon. POSITION USURPED But the illustrators of to-day only have to go back a year. Children who have become familiar with the idea of the flying bomb will not be scared by flying fiends in the shape of toothless old women with a nice line in curses. Our superstitions nowadays are all scientific ones. We may legitimately welcome the romantic witch and her dated curses, and be thankful that the children of 1945 can still groan wideeyed over stories which commence: “ Once upon a time there lived an old witch, who was all alone in her hut in the forest except for her seven bats, named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Albert. . . It had to be Albert, for the Witches’ Union is still sufficiently aware of its Black Magic origins to refuse to recognise Sunday.