Ghostwriting by John Herdman

Author:John Herdman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leamington Books
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps that very year, 1981, would see that prophecy fulfilled! Torquil’s panic was no more than held at bay by a fragile restraining dyke. He knew only too well that almost without warning its waters might sweep down upon him again at any time, like the sea over the isle of Erin, and that like blue-green Islay he could then be utterly overwhelmed. Where within himself could he find that steadfast island of the Dove of the Church, which would swim safely above such a psychic flood!

His sea-wall, his one support, was still Abigail. (She was Abigail once more, not Annie, it was hard to say why — her essential nature seemed to change with her surroundings.) What her purpose might be in bringing them to this Christian place, he was uncertain. Sometimes he felt that it could only be to undermine and subvert it. That meant nothing to him personally, since he was not a Christian; but the thought disturbed him, all the same. It suggested an animus that should have been at odds with her conscious philosophy of live-and-let-live healthy-minded pagan tolerance. And ‘pagan’ here had a specific meaning. For that Abigail was a ‘witch’ Tod could scarcely any longer doubt, in the sense that she was involved in the practice of ritual magic; indeed, she had let it be known without saying so directly.

That did not in itself particularly upset him. He had understood from the start that Abigail was imbued with New Age ideas and ideals, which to him represented a farrago of inconsistent ingredients, interesting enough and perhaps offering here and there a grimy window or two on the truth, but possessing no inner logic or coherence. It was supremely ironical, for instance, that those who today practised ritual magic boasted the name of ‘witch’, which referred historically to a stereotype created by the popular imagination and probably never existing in reality — the Devil-worshipping Satanic fiends whose supposed atrocities unleashed the late medieval witch hunts. This stereotype, if he had correctly understood Norman Cohn, was indirectly derived from a misunderstanding of the activities of ceremonial magicians and practitioners of maleficium or black magic. But such practices did not imply Devil-worship. On the contrary: the invocation of demons to do one’s will — whether that will were directed to good, evil or indifferent ends — was dependent upon an intense, though paradoxical belief in God: the essence of the activity lying in the invocation of the Holy Name which the demons had no choice but to obey. Invoked in God’s name to work at the magician’s bidding, the demons summoned had no power to refuse.

Human beings have never been slow, however, to act on the promptings of their imagination. Once Satanists were believed to exist, it was inevitable that they should come into existence in reality. One was always being told nowadays that it was only ‘white magic’ which witches practised, that they were only following the old wisdom of the Earth Mother, that all their ends were good and benign and life-enhancing and spiritually pure.

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