Supernatural: Your Guide Through the Unexplained, the Unearthly and the Unknown by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780286952
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Watkins Publishing
Published: 2013-05-07T05:00:00+00:00

10

The Power of the Witch

THE MOST UNEXPECTED bestseller of 1926 was a book called The History of Witchcraft and Demonology by the Rev. Montague Summers. Issued by Routledge and Kegan Paul as part of their History of Civilisation, it was an obviously serious work, full of Latin quotations, lengthy footnotes, and a comprehensive bibliography. What startled the reviewers was that the author clearly believed every word he wrote about the ‘enormous wickedness’ of witches, warlocks and devil worshippers. H. G. Wells was so incensed by the book that he launched a vituperative attack on it in the Sunday Express. The Times, equally disapproving, contented itself with the comment that ‘the more Mr Summers gives proof of general ability, of scholarship and of wide reading, the more the suspicion deepens that a mystification is in progress and that he is amusing himself at our expense’.

Was it a legpull? Or a cynical attempt to achieve a succès de scandale? Apparently neither. The Reverend Montague Summers was a respectable Catholic scholar, editor of several Restoration dramatists, and founder of a theatrical society called the Phoenix, which revived Restoration plays on the London stage. It is true that his name was not to be found in the clergy lists of either the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England; but this was not—as rumour had it—because he was an unfrocked priest; in fact he had been ordained a Deacon of the Church of England in 1908, a year before he became a Roman Catholic convert. It is also true that he allowed people to suppose that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and used to say Mass in his own private oratory, in spite of the fact that he had been rejected as a Candidate for the priesthood by his superiors. The gusto with which he recounts sexual details of the satanic rites—even though most of them are decently clothed in Latin—may suggest why his superiors had found him unsuitable. In spite of these foibles, Summers was a genuine scholar. And the views he expressed were the views held by the Roman Catholic Church in his own day—as they still are.

What is the truth about witchcraft?

Between 1275 and 1692, thousands of men and women were tortured and burnt to death in Europe, accused of worshipping the Devil, and having intercourse with spirits and demons.

The first known victim was a 60-year-old woman called Angéle de la Barthe, who was accused of having had sexual intercourse with a demon, and given birth to a monster. This creature had to be fed on the flesh of dead babies, so—according to the accusation—Angéle either murdered children, or dug up their corpses from graveyards. Tried before the Inquisitor Hugues de Baniols at Toulouse, she was sentenced to be burned to death.

It is natural for us to feel outrage at such appalling inhumanity, and to conclude that the evidence against Angéle amounted to the grossest superstition. Yet the last chapter suggests another possibility. If the umbanda magicians of Brazil

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