witchcraft | The Blog of Baphomet

“Witches and Wicked Bodies: This exhibition explores the relationship between witches, sorcery and the artistic imagination. Prints and drawings are used to convey how the female gender has been key to the depiction of witches, sirens and harpies in western art. These enduring images reveal how witches have been seen as harbingers of misfortune and horror, objects of misogyny and sexual fantasy, as well as figures of ridicule and caricature.”

I was going to be in London for a meeting last month, so on my way there I stopped off at this little show high up on Level 4 at the rear of the British Museum in London. It is on for a few more days, until the 11^th January 2015. Go if you can!

Starting at the end of my experience, I left with my head in a whirl, understanding the way that the raw female body served/serves as the projection for all sorts of unacceptable desires on the behalf of society. Feelings of lust, animal sensuality, rejection of the status quo (whether political, cultural or other), become anchored in the fevered imaginings of repressed men, who seek out salacious graphic pictures depicting those acts they declare sinful:

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” HG Wells

Witches have long been portrayed as temptresses, similar iconography accompanies them as the portrayals of sirens, spells cast by wicked women are used to excuse the viewers’ obsessions; with the agency taken away from the bewitched viewers, they cannot be blamed for their fascination with these pendulous breasts, muscular arms and bare behinds.

Witches’ Sabbath, 1510 (Hans Baldung)

One label, on Hans Baldung’s 1510 woodcut Witches’ Sabbath, stated; “This print… shows an obsession with the malevolence of female sexuality… It is likely [it] found a ready market… in the affluent city of Strasbourg… The violent Witches’ Hammer, … was first published in this city in 1487; by 1520 it had been reprinted fourteen times.”

Similarly to the prurient outrage of readers of the News of the World poring over pictures of wrong-doers, ‘abnormal’ sexuality is displayed in great detail in many of these 15^th/16^th century engravings, presumably in part to titillate the purchasers. Obviously it is more nuanced than JUST this, but the prominence of nakedness, same-sex interactions, and generally non-reproductive sex acts depicted does seem to point towards voyeuristic motivations of the sexually curious/repressed. Nakedness itself was used in art of the time to show the people concerned were outside the realm of contemporary cultural mores, and those who practise magick (amongst other marginalised groups) have often had accusations of unacceptable behaviours projected upon them. It is generally agreed that tales of secret meetings where all kinds of bizarre activities take place, are often more revealing of the phantasies of the person ‘revealing’ them, rather than the actuality of what went on.

In my experience most meetings of any group, whether anarchists, community gardeners, magicians, musicians, writers, scientists, or academics, tend to centre around the quality of the coffee and biscuits, with the administrative structure of the group, and when/where to hold the next meeting, as the top three items on the agenda.

Conspiracy theorists existed then as now, as people of limited power and knowledge construct elaborate hidden rationales to explain that forces are arrayed against their own missions, thus thwarting the easy path that Others have to privileged positions in our societies. What other reason could there be for virtuous persons’ lives being imperfect?! Surely, some kind of judgement from an ineffable source.

In reality of course there are many problems with this vision of Those Other people messing up our nice world, and who are adversarial towards us (thus legitimising our defending ourselves against Them). Whilst this dualistic perspective provides emotional comfort, and a strong way of identifying as a group which exists in contrast to Them, it does not help with a constructive approach to mutual understanding of the multiplicity of ways of life, and finding possible common ground to moving forwards together in partnership into the future.

The mindset of the inquisitors of the witchhunts still exists today too, luckily not so often directed in so many places towards those of a non-mainstream religious lifestyle, but couched in terms of race, sexuality, or dress style. Tribal affiliations are often based upon the observable differences rather than the more important basic behavioural and ethical values we tend towards such as being nice to one’s fellow humans, trying to take care of the land we inhabit and lifeforms we interact with, and generally living in a way that maximises good feelings for oneself and others.

I know this is a rather rose tinted view of the state of affairs and that economic/social constraints affect and limit the reification of these ideals into daily practices, but if you take a broad view of all human societies as they actually function, these kinds of values remain core to what would be considered a good life.

Although homosexuality was not featured in the exhibition (well, not that between two males… the bestial lusts of women for women are portrayed as existing within the general depravity of these harlots, out of control and with insatiable physical bodies…) we know that many of those persecuted in the heresy/purification frenzy of the 15^th and 16^th centuries were executed for the crime of sodomy. Fear of the temptations of female flesh were bad enough (let alone anything worse!) and injunctions in the various holy books of all the Abrahamic religions against all that sinful ‘lying with another man’ business meant that a person’s basic desires were one avenue used to justify murder and torture. [NB ‘Sodomy’ grouped together homosexual and heterosexual anal sex as equivalent to bestiality, amongst other unspecified unnatural acts, but a large proportion of those prosecuted were men who had sex with men consensually. The term and concept of a ‘homosexual’, and also the notion of a ‘heterosexual’, does not appear until relatively recently in our culture.]

This is relevant to our witches because their desire, to have power over their own spheres of influence, were similarly seen as aberrant to the simplistic top down power hierarchy of the time. In the monolithic One Priest above all else pyramid structure, anyone opting out, especially one who opted out in open defiance of the ruling elite, had to be labelled as dangerous, as Other [to the status quo], and destroyed as publically as possible. A mandate from God (whichever one gets named on the contract) cannot withstand the threat from a person who claims to have direct access to supernal connections. Heaven forfend, where would we be with such a world?! Anarchy!!!

Chaos magicians, I suspect, would have little truck with this as a sensible attitude; warfare and throwing insults based upon mere paradigmatical clothing has little to offer in the way of results, apart from a waste of time and energy; and leads at best to an impasse (or, very occasionally to some witty observational comedy), instead of constructive dialogue. There are of course exceptions that prove any rule, and some situations it could be argued do need people to receive a swift blow to the head (e.g. someone materially attacking me, or invading my home).

These thoughts and other musings upon the way those holding political views Other to one’s own tend to be portrayed in mass media cartoons as witches or similar despicable (visually accessible) stereotypes, showed me as in a mirror darkly how this example of a culture’s treatment of magick makers holds deep clues to the ecosystem of paradigms which jostle for position upon the stage of our awareness, and in particular in the media led portrayals of what we the people are allegedly thinking.

Mass confusion over the argument of how to answer that age old question, ‘How does one properly worship God?’, must have unsettled the church authorities mightily once Christianity had won as the dominant religion with power over Europeans. A new collection of Others who could be banded against had to arise, in order to close ranks and enforce conformism amongst what was a ramifying and diversifying series of cults.

In the times of the witch persecutions, some of these Others included rumours of Jews and lepers poisoning wells, rumours which undoubtedly led to thousands of people from these easily identifiable (and already disliked) groups dying horribly by being burned alive. This primal need of humans to know which tribe they are in, so they can feel fine about violence towards Others, is the same cultural fear that the witch pictures, and the depictions of women in particular as malefic, tapped into. They exacerbated social prejudices, by encouraging stereotypical views of those Others upon whom the ‘normal’ populace could vent their anger at whatever the complaints of the day were. Today in western culture we still suffer the presence of the descendants of these cultural depictions of the evil female, which deny female’s any power except via a route of sexually manipulative agency, showing us as physical objectified entities, compared with the proactive self-determined agency of the ‘successful’ male (see representations in advertising and mass media drama etc.). Women were without souls, the carriers of Original Sin, and a scapegoat group par excellence for use by a divisive ruling elite.

That goes beyond what I wanted to write here though; what this exhibition revealed to me, which I knew, but was brought home in a most moving way, is the impact words and pictures can have upon the collective psyche.

The pit of Acheron, or the birth of the plagues of England, 1784 (Thomas Rowlandson)
A satirical comment on the failure of the Fox-North Coalition and the India Bill, reusing the witches from that tour de force of ‘blaming of Other’ propaganda piece which James VI of Scotland commisioned, Macbeth.

As I finish this blogpost, it is the day after the shooting in Paris of some people who used words and pictures to laugh at religious stereotypes. We would do well to try to understand better how prejudices can flourish in cultural atmospheres of fear and anger, which can in turn then lead to flimsy excuses for nasty acts of violence by individuals who I suspect would probably be best understood as unhappily deranged and dysfunctional. Very angry people with issues do not tend to think things through, whether attacking cartoonists or mosques.

Grouping together Those Other people on grounds of whatever arbitrary attribute happens to be the flavour of the decade does not often prove useful in building a nicer world. As a strategy it offers merely a simplistic and easy to point at a group of scapegoats, upon which to load all sorts of emotional baggage. Thinking about the folly and wisdom of this strategy will be the basis of my next blogpost, which examines mechanisms of simplistic vs complex decision making strategies.

Magicians, especially chaos magicians, consciously choose tools of belief in various situations; in order to do this effectively we could do worse than consider how those choices play out, albeit unconsciously, in wider society, even for those of us primarily interested in the internal clamour of our own psyche’s internal society of voices and opinions.

We should listen to the various discussions prompted by this attack, and learn from our approval (or not) of what they say to learn of our own prejudices, through which we cannot help but lens all we hear. Perhaps, like addictions, prejudices can also be chosen wisely…

A good friend of my once observed that we should pay more attention to what we find ourselves doing rather than what we think we should be doing. What my friend (who is both a therapist and magician) was pointing towards was that we often cause ourselves suffering through the endless cycle of searching, aspiration and acquisition. “If I just gain mastery of x, acquire this book or undertake this training then I will know who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing here!” Sadly this doesn’t really work does it? We might gain a temporary sugar-high from rebranding ourselves or spending far too much on fine books (or wines), but if your anything like me we end up caught in a solipsistic loop where we end up exhausted (and frankly bored) by our endless self-narrative.

My friend’s theory was that if we pause for a moment and reflect on the things that we actually do and enjoy doing (hence why we keep doing them), then we are probably getting close to understanding something about what we really desire. Desire often gets a bad press, but personally I feel that our problems with distraction and consumerism are often our attempts to flee from the cost that our real heart-longings might ask of us. The quick-fix is really no fix at all and contrasts radically with the type of awakening and attentive self-listening that will allow us to look down to the soil in which are personal roots are really bedded.

Such self-reflection is rarely easy and in making the effort to “tune-in” to these realities, we may have to turn-down or reject the versions of ourselves that others may want us to buy into. This willed antinomianism allows the creation of a space in which we might experience a greater sense of cognitive liberty in experimenting with our dreams. This is the demarcation of the magical circle – a lab in which we create the optimal conditions for self-examination. In waking up to “what we find ourselves doing” I have often opted for a period of elective self-limitation. In a world where endless choice and speed are valued, a period of monastic retreat often allows the cultivation of clarity.

Getting up to stuff in the magic laboratory

As we push our hands down into the dark soil of our unconscious, we risk the possibility of contacting some of the core aspects of what drives us and those things that cause us to feel most alive. The discovery of this “dark matter” is rarely linear and the value of art, dreams and synchronicities should not be underestimated. Often the untidy syncretism of our altar spaces, reveal more to us than our ordered book shelves.

One of my personal routes to accessing such gnosis has been through the use of dance and shaking states. In seeking to loosen the tensions and defences that often get located in what Wilhelm Reich described as “body armour”; I often have a sense of a deeper instinctive knowing emerging in and through the body. When I move in response to the music my self-consciousness slowly melts away. This type of “shape –shifting” may well relate to the way in which the body allows us to process aspects of the self that the conscious mind struggles to make sense of. Interesting research is beginning to explore this territory, and it may be the “darker” more instinctive drivers of the early or “reptilian” brain get processed more effectively when we actively engage the body. As I dance I often feel that in my messy embodiment, I am making sense of my early and deepest drives (for more on this see “The Compassionate Mind” by Paul Gilbert and Peter Levine’s work on trauma).

In reconnecting to the “what is” of the moment, rather than becoming stuck we create the possibility of emergence coming from a place of depth. Stirred by the memory of some conversations with a Setian Priest, I keep returning to the concept of how important “need-fire” is in the pursuit of my own initiatory work. Whether one self-defines as a magician or not, one of the primary indicators of whether a goal will reach fruition relates to the degree to which we are motivated by burning need. To follow a path of the basis of whim or fashion may provide a temporary distraction, but it is unlikely to adequately fuel significant transformation.

fuelling transformation

In many ways these observations connect to the “Chaos Craft” project (and forthcoming book) mentioned on this blog. In contrast to the often hyper-accelerated go-getting that one might associate with Chaos Magic, this project has sought to integrate the inescapability of the moment made manifest in time and the spirit of place. We make no claims to lineage or secrets shared on Grandma’s knee, rather this is a Witchcraft born of a connection to a raw coastline, the beating of drums and a desire to awaken. This is the Witchcraft we found ourselves doing.

To look into the mirror and truly see ourselves requires real bravery. To let go of the script of how it should be and to ask “What is it that I find myself doing…?” is truly revelatory. It may reveal the nature and extent of our current desires and also our need to escape from the current constraints that block our unfolding. There are no simple answers but it is a beginning.