Witchcraft & Occult

The sinister figure of the Witchfinder General casts a long shadow over horror fiction, folklore and history. Historian Malcolm Gaskill re-examines the myths and legends of Matthew Hopkins’s vicious campaign against witches, and exposes some alarming truths about ordinary people during the English Civil War.Imagine a bloody civil war is raging, and many men from your community have left to fight, perhaps never to return. Horses have been requisitioned, food prices are high, and taxation is crushing. Rumours abound.Apocalyptic visions have been seen in the sky, and speculation is rife about which enemy will arrive first: the Royalist army or theplague.

Your parish is blighted by sickness and misfortune, not helped by local conflicts over religion, politics and poor relief. Suspicions are festering that some of your neighbours have made pacts with the Devil, and are to blame for the village’s ills. Magical counter-measures have failed, but it is risky to go to law; no one can remember when a witch was last successfully prosecuted. But just then news arrives that a gentleman is approaching, interrogating suspected witches and forcing the guilty to confess. Your hopes are raised that, however powerless you are to resist the enemy without, at least you can fight the enemy within. Above: Title page to A True Relation ofthe Araignment of eighteen Witches... at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolke, 1645Image: British LibraryThis was a scenario common throughout the eastern counties of England in the years 1645–7. To many people, the fighting between Crown and Parliament was part of a greater cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist as foretold in the Book of Revelation, and the agency of Satan had never seemed more real. No one believed this more than the gentleman interrogator, Matthew Hopkins (above), the scourge of witches who has passed down in legend as the ‘Witchfinder General’. But who was this enigmatic young man, and what exactly motivated him to ride the lanes and highways of East Anglia in a time of war? The true story is surprising, but lies beneath a thicket of myth andmisunderstanding.......

The first and most obvious of such secret societies is the freemasons, and the 1717 date in the title of this talk refers to the announcement made that year that four London lodges had met at the Goose and Gridiron pub, near St Paul’s, to form a Grand Lodge of English Freemasonry.There has been a lot of research and pseudo-research about the Masons, but there are a few points I wish to make about them that may be under-emphasised.The first is that whatever else can be known about it before 1717, Speculative Freemasonry, which is a system of morality taught by the performance of rituals incorporatingterms and objects taken from the craft of Freestone Masonry which are given symbolic significance, came to England from Scotland.

Most histories agree that the first known non-operative Mason was a Scottish Nobleman in 1600, whereas the first Englishman known to have been made a Speculative Mason was Elias Ashmole in 1648. It should be noted that while Ashmole was a native of Oxford, he was initiated in Cheshire, a whole lot closer to Scotland than Oxford, suggesting a gradual southward movement of Masonry.But I believe that the most important southward movement that explains to appearance of Masonry in London in 1717 is that of Scottish financiers. The Act of Union of 1707 had effectively united the Scottish economy with the rest of Britain. What is often forgotten, especially by Scots nationalists of the most anti-English variety, is that the immediateeffect was that the Scots began to take over England’s financial institutions. Quite simply, the Scots had a better grasp of what is now called Economics than anyone in England, and from 1707 onwards they rose to power in the City and its institutions. The one exception was Lloyds, which was developed by the Welsh.Britain was turning from a predominantly agricultural nation into one powered by trade, and this led to two important changes. One was that the use of metal coins as the sole means of exchange was becoming increasingly too clumsy to meet modern needs. New theories of credit were devised, and what was meant by these theorists was what we now call paper money. Both in England and France the pioneers of paper money were Scottish, though in both cases the initial attempts were catastrophic. In France the attempt to create money from decreeing a monopoly in trade with theMi......

The Unity Church of Dallas sits on a wooded street not far from downtown, nestled beneath the shade of several large trees. In its 32 years, the brown brick building has been a refuge for those dissatisfied with mainstream religion. Put simply, it is a place where people go for answers they can't find elsewhere, which is why Jaired Conrad went there on a rainy night in January.Conrad had come because his son, an elfin 8-year-old with pale skin, had been having problems. The boy, named Dusk, had been doing things that made Conrad worry, things the single father couldn't explain.In school, for example, Dusk had a hard time concentrating. His grades were dropping, and he wasdisruptive in class, refusing to do his homework.

When Conrad asked Dusk what was troubling him the boy gave him a hair-raising answer. He couldn't concentrate, he said, because he was hearing the thoughts of his classmates. It was a supernatural power the boy could not control. When Conrad relayed this to an administrator at his son's University Park elementary school, he was told he should have the boy tested and possibly put on medication. As it was, Conrad felt overwhelmed raising his two boys on his own, and the thought of putting his oldest on Ritalin upset him greatly. He hoped the event at Unity that night, a film screening, would give him some answers. When they arrived the sanctuary was mostly full, so Conrad sat on the front row with his two boys, Dusk and Day, sitting beside him. The room went dark and thefilm began. "Do you know what an indigo child is?" a man onscreen asked a group of firefighters. None of them had a clue. On came the doctors in white lab coats, the Chinese scientists, the clairvoyants, the wild-haired psychics and the bearded New Age gurus. These people were experts on the subject. "We're watching humans evolve," explained one. "Just like we've evolved to now we have an opposable thumb, we're witnessing the human species evolve into a telepathic creature." All over the world, these experts explained, a new breed of children is emerging who can read minds, predict the future and bend silverware through sheer brainpower. These kids, called indigo children, are surrounded by a blue aura, hence the name, and believed by some to be reincarnated beings. Disruptive, impatient and easilybored, indigos are commo......

The most enigmatic figure to emerge from the 'occult revival' of the early 20th century was also the most successful: the Austrian 'spiritual scientist' Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).Although many of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries were outwardly more eccentric – think of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, or of the inimitable GI Gurdjieff, or the scandalous 'magician' Aleister Crowley – it's precisely Steiner's sobriety that is so striking, even making him seem out of place in the often flamboyant world of the esoteric.We generally associate ideas of the occult, higher consciousness and spiritual worlds with exotic, extraordinary characters with something of thetrickster about them; Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Crowley would certainly fall into this category.

Steiner, though, was precisely the opposite. Standing at the lectern with his pince-nez in hand, he projected an image of irreproachable rectitude. Steiner was earnestness incarnate, his one gesture of bohemian extravagance the flowing bow ties he was fond of wearing, a remnant of his early student days. Where Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Crowley each took pains to present a formidable self-image, there was something simple and peasant-like about Steiner. Combined with this wholesomeness was an encyclopædic erudition; if we were to use an 'archetype' to describe Steiner, it would have to be that of 'the professor' – or, more precisely, the Doctor, as he was known by those around him. Commenting on her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky once remarked thatshe "wrote, wrote, wrote," like the Wandering Jew "walks, walks, walks". Steiner, too, wrote a great deal, but his main mode of disseminating his ideas was lecturing, and in the years between 1900 and 1925 he lectured, lectured, lectured, delivering more than 6,000 talks across Europe. In a dry and at times pedantic style, Steiner informed his audience of the results of his spiritual research, his "super-sensible" readings of the occult history of the world made available to him through what is called "the Akashic Record". In matter-of-fact terms, he introduced them to his teaching – 'anthroposophy', as he called it – telling them along the way about ancient Atlantis, life after death, astral and ætheric bodies, the true meaning of Christianity and much, much more. Yet this humble, self-effacing character became one ofthe m......