Books of the Day
The Nightmare of the Spirit
Witchcraft. By Charles Williams. (Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d.)
MR. WILLIAMS' previous work, the publishers claim, shows him to be the ideal author for a book on witchcraft. Whether this is true or not only an ideal reviewer could say, for he alone could know what an ideal book on the subject should be. I can merely express the opinion that, if ever a really great book is written on the phenomena which are conveniently, though by no means scientifically, described as witchcraft, it will probably be written on the lines of this little study ; for Mr. Williams sees that, in and above its historical expression, witchcraft is nothing less than the pathology of a mystery. Christian experience is an un- fathomable mystery which affects the whole life of man, and when it is deliberately perverted, rationally, liturgically, emotion- ally perverted, it can become indescribably horrible. The parody of the pure adds a value to the preference for the unclean. Evil impulses and desires acquire the sanction of an ordered depravity. The Devil " desired to be, to those related to him by a certain dependence, the only source of good. It is, among men, a not very unusual desire." At one end of the scale just the human failing which makes a man snatch at love, or try to shape the course of a friend ; at the other end the ritual of the witches' Sabbath.
It is important, I think, to hold fast to this central idea of Mr. Williams' book, for only by doing so can we get any sense of perspective in this madness, and any clue to the persistent yet elusive problem, whether there is or is not any historical reality in witchcraft, any substance in the charges brought against the men and women who were said to profess it. Mr. Williams very wisely refuses to dogmatise, and his own way of approach implies disbelief in the value of anything like a statistical inquiry ; but he does help us to a clearer view of the problem. Because no marl can be entirely immune from the perversion of the best in him, witchcraft always had a large choice of potential victims ; but because witchcraft was a sophisticated and pathological thing, its victims must always have been few. The number of people willing at any one time, without the provocation of un-
usual circumstance, to sell themselves to the devil—a very different thing from being a criminal or a neurotic pervert-41 fortunately small, but that there are such persons is always true, just because social health has evolved slowly and painfully out of primeval fears and excitements which, however disciplined, have never been destroyed.
Mr. Williams is primarily concerned, not with the age-long background, but with the hideous phenomena which appeared in Europe and New England between the fourteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. In his earlier chapters he tries to trace the affiliations between beliefs and practices in the classical world and those of the later middle ages. He shows that the attitude of the Church, though ambiguous, was sensible. Thee. logical opinion had not been able to hold fast to the words of St. Ignatius on the conversion of the Magians at Bethlehem: " from that time forth every sorcery and every spell was dis. solved." What Dean Inge has described as the nightmare of the spirit was too widespread and too persistent to justify so great a hope ; but it sought to direct the minds of men and women to the good and the sane by insisting that their phantasms were imposed on them by a malignant spirit. It could not altogether deny the reality behind beliefs which it reproved, but it did its best to divert the thoughts of the faithful from them. The tragedy of later theology was that by reversing this attitude and by formulating the evil which it wished to extirpate, it became the accomplice of evil and was fascinated by the thing. it perse- cuted. It was not altogether to blame, for the evil had grown, and I wish that Mr. Williams had deserted his allusive style of writing at this part, and 'made an attempt to analyse, in 33 simple and detailed a way as the scope of his book would allow, both the reasons for the growth of this form of spiritual malice and the systematic treatment of it by the schoolmen. A discussion of this kind would have prepared the reader for his important chapter on the famous book of the inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer,_ the Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1490). By this time witchcraft had been branded as heresy, not heresy as a persistent belief in error, but the heresy which means taking the wrong side, not an illusion but the surrender to an obscene fact.
Some students of witchcraft are more interested in it as a perverted expression of the desire to know. The desire becomes a certainty that one can know, and then that knowledge means power. This, though related to spiritual perversion, is not really the same thing as witchcraft. It is rather the magic which in his vast encyclopaedic work, The History of Magic and Experi- mental Science, Professor Lynn Thorndike has associated with the development of scientific discovery. Mr. Williams has an interesting chapter on " the philosophical and literary move- ment," in which he shows how easily the belief in the capacity of man " to discover a principle of operation in the universe," could lead to a pathology of the spirit, although it might start from the high thinking of men like Thomas Vaughan, the brother of Henry Vaughan the poet. Indeed, this natural belief in a principle of operation, implicit in the maxim "as above, so below," explains the apparent inconsistencies of ecclesiastical and lay authority in the middle ages, so that it so frequently patronised astrologers and geomancers and soothsayers. How far, if at all, modern science is an outcome of this belief is still in doubt; the scientific mind is more likely to have emerged from the mediaeval belief in reason and the mediaeval practice of dialectic; but that the belief, as expressed by such people at Paracelsus and Faustus, has lent a sort_ of respectability to the pathology of the spirit is not in doubt. Whether Hitler has his soothsayers or not I have no idea, but that he should be SUP' posed to have them is natural enough, for this pathetic megalo* maniac is the most accomplished exponent in modern Instal of that sophisticated and pathological perversion of noble things which our forefathers described as the pact with Satan.
F. M. Powiaa-
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