Violent defenders of old ignorance

Robin Briggs

HarperCollins, #25

THERE is a spellbinding sequence in Roman Polanski's film Rosemary's Baby. The pregnant heroine pores over a book called All of Them Witches and comes to the terrifying conclusion that her excruciatingly nice neighbours are carrying on the Satanic work of one Adrian Marcato who supposedly set up a coven in New York.

Now Rosemary, by the ambiguous logic of the film, may be right in accusing her neighbours of witchcraft or she may be suffering from her paranoid perception of everything around her. Never mind. No matter. One thing she knows for sure is where Adrian Marcato came from. He came from Scotland.

Perhaps in associating a Satanist with Scotland, Ira Levin - who wrote the fiction on which Polanski's film is based - was thinking of Scottish Satanist Aleister Crowley who styled himself the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation and alarmed some of his neighbours in New York where he lived during the First World War.

Crowley was never good news. A kilted occultist, he was a charlatan who should have been ashamed of himself but never was as he rejoiced in his role as a nasty neighbour. Recent bad news has told tales of Satanic abuse and neighbours from hell in Scotland but this tells us nothing new about a country where the occult is a popular cult.

No wonder Shakespeare set his most nightmarish play in Scotland. Macbeth (1606) was first performed before the first King James of England who, before that, was the sixth King James of Scotland where he was known as the only son of Mary and author of Daemonologie (1597), a tediously obsessive treatise explaining how the devil imposed his will on warlocks and witches.

No wonder Scotland's most popular poem is Tam o' Shanter, featuring a flight from a hellishly bewitching woman in a short skirt. As a boy, remember, Burns listened to ``tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks'' so as a man he could easily imagine ``Warlocks and witches in a dance''. It came supernaturally to him.

Robin Briggs agrees with Sir Walter Scott in condemning the Presbyterian Kirk for creating so many demons in Scotland: ``Without the intellectual underpinning the Kirk provided there might well have been no witch-hunt of any significance in Scotland for the lairds and lawyers were deeply influenced by its teachings.''

General Assemblies regularly called for the punishment of witches, poor folk were at the mercy of pompous ministers, self-righteous citizens turned on neighbours who failed to conform to the moral code of the Kirk. The definition of a witch was one who upset the established order which was hell for anyone accused of being betwitched. Witchcraft is a crime involving social control.

Or, as Briggs puts it: ``Witchcraft beliefs might at least partly be explained as accidental yet powerful by-products of the systems by which human beings orient themselves in the social world. ``When false notes are struck, our bodies react in ways beyond our conscious control, which can extend to hostile gestures or outright aggression.''

Witchcraft satisfies a social hunger for a criminal culture, subjecting eccentrics as well as authentically evil beings to scapegoating.

Margaret Atkin, who flourished in Fife in the sixteenth century, was condemned as a witch and tried to exonerate herself by identifying others as witches. She was taken to Glasgow where she put her evil eyes on many innocent women who were, courtesy of a local minister, put to death.

Flash forward to the twentieth century and you will come across similar cases. of folk found guilty of innocence. Some anti-social social workers make sure something wicked their way comes. Which, one wonders, is the witch: the accuser or the accused?

Turning from Scotland to New England, Briggs criticises Arthur Miller for, in The Crucible (1953), comparing Senator Joseph McCarthy's campaign against Communists to the Salem witch-trials of 1692. An obnoxious man of low cunning, McCarthy knew exactly what he was doing in pursuing his political ambitions by insisting on the persecution of left-leaning intellectuals whereas the Salem witch-hunters, in their ``search for hidden inner enemies'', were motivated by the arrogance of ignorance. Ignorance is obviously evil in Scotland or in Salem where 19 folk were hanged and another pressed to death for refusing to plead guilty when innocent. Both the practice and the persecution of witchcraft are exercises in ignorance.

Briggs's specialist area of expertise is Lorraine and he cites trial documents from the sixteenth century to clarify his view of witches as victims of societies unable to address problems intelligently. If something went horribly wrong in Lorraine - crops failing, for instance - the self-righteous moralistic majority found it most convenient to scapegoat the minority for crimes most found beyond belief. Tortured by moralistic monsters, so-called witches would say anything to escape from torment so admitted to whatever accusations were inflicted on them. It was a vicious circle from which, in fact, there was no escape.

This exceptionally erudite study of ignorance will make you think. It made me think of an encounter with a local woman who sold me a ``good luck'' charm which seemingly brought me nothing but bad luck. It was a brass charm, a tiny figure of a cat sitting on its haunches. There was a ring at the top, so the brass cat could be attached to a chain. I slid the charm into my key ring and felt comfortable with it. Yet the day after acquired this possession my domestic cat died, ditto an old neighbour. I cursed that brass cat for all the wrong reasons.

After my neighbour's funeral, I heard his dogs had been put down. When I got home I took the brass cat from my key ring and buried it beside the roots of a rowan, remembering the bewitching woman who had sold me the trinket. Impulsively, I cursed that woman for a witch though I am not, and never will be, a superstitious man.

It is easy to blame others because we have been conditioned to attribute to outsiders failures we fear in ourselves. As Briggs says in his last words on witchcraft: ``The subject compels us to probe the inner depths of consciousness. The witch may be the other, but witchcraft beliefs are in ourselves.''

So they are. They are insights into the unknown. Read this thoughtful book and beware of hating your neighbour because he or she might be yourself by another name.