Magic rides out
Leo Abse
Exorcism Martin Ebon (Cassell £3.50)
The Powers of Evil Richard Cavendish (Routledge and Kegan Paul 15.95)
It would be extravagant of me to claim that some of my best friends are Christians; but I could claim some of my best friends are Churchmen. The idealisations of really zealous Christians lack the realism and compromise which are the experiential assumption of survivors like Jews and Welshmen. So I have found working with some of our trendy and ineffective Bishops, for ever peddling their doubts and exhibiting their anguish with unseemly immodesty, a tiresome experience. Butworking with real Churchmen, uncluttered by theology, I do so enjoy. Wrily and, as a Labour MP, ambivalently, I have to concede Disraeli's thrust against Jewish reformers. "If you scratch a Jew deeply enough you will always find a Tory." I have to acknowledge old institutions do attract me and, if they are ramshackle, my instinct is not to assault them as an iconoclast but to help refurbish them. That no doubt is why I became fortunate enough to have gained the friendship of Robert Mortimer, the recently retired Lord Bishop of Exeter, for so long the authoritative spokesman of the Church of England on social affairs; indeed my friendship with him became so secure that he was able to tell me that there was once no man in Britain whom he hated more than myself. In recent years, whenever the strains between contemporary . societal needs and orthodox dogma had become too threatening, the Church has turned to this conservative Bishop. His appointed Commissions, even on delicate issues like divorce, subtly devised compromises, as becomes a State Church, that, without affront to the traditionalists, would be capable of containing the impatience of the liberal and the secular. His appointment therefore, of a Commission in 1963 to consider the theology, techniques and place of exorcism in the life of the Church was seemingly prompted by the customary activists. It was made in response to the protests of those who, like the sixty five theologians who last week made representations to the Archbishop of Canterbury, were appalled at the spread of exorcist practices within the Church, and recoiled from a twentieth century established church regressing into mediaeval superstition. But there was another dimension to the appointment of this Commission; the Church had become aware that widespread apostasy from the Christian faith was now being accompanied by increased recourse to occult Practices.
The Church was being called to gird its loins for yet another battle in a ewar it had imagined had long since been • won. The conquest in England by Religion over Magic, it had mistakenly believed, was over. Knowing that the faith of a Christian was a guiding principle to every aspect of life and afterlife, and that magic merely attempted to overcome isolated and particular difficulties, the Church had become over-confident; and its conceit had been buttressed not only by the historians but even by the anthropologists. Malinowski had stressed "Religion refers to the fundamental issues of human existence while magic always turns around specific, concrete and detailed problems." The comfortable established Church had been lulled into a false security; and although the story of the Gadarene swine Proves, for some, that Jesus was a superb exorcist, the dear old C of E found it had become rather rusty on the subject. So Exeter, in a bout of ecumenical zeal, called in some Roman Catholic priests to join the little Commission. 14 one could dispute that, when it came to black magic, they had a rare expertise to fall back upon; for who indeed could have claimed to have burned more witches, Jews and other possessed heretics?
Yet, even although thus augmented, when, in 1972, the Commission reported, it can hardly be said to have been one of Exeter's great successes. Its stern watnings, seeking to limit the boundaries of exorcism, caused it to make the most refined differential diagnoses of the possessed places and persons over whom exorcism could properly.be exercised; nor, it thundered, is it to be deployed as a major cure against ghosts, places inhabited by poltergeists or infected by asportations, levitations and other phenomena, or interfered with by • magicians or non-human sprites, but only over places suffering from demonic interference • such as ancient celtic sites, tumuli, circles and snake path shrines enveloped by destructive "buzz" or strain. Inevitably the contemporary pedlars of the occult fell upon the report not to underline its admonitions and caveats, but to taunt the scientific century that the established Church had, after more than nine years inquiry, corroborated the existence of demons, devils, sprites, haunted houses formerly used for sexual orgies, and country sites, once used by practitioners of fertility rite cults, now consequently dispersal centres for magicians.
In both these books, part of the torrent of debauching occult literature now pouring down upon the credulous, the Commission's report is elliptically deployed to lend validity and respectability to belief in the spirits that haunted mediaeval man. Ebon's book, as opportunist as its title, masquerading as a collection of clinical case histories of the devil-ridden, is presented as a serious work of a "parapsychologist." Cavendish affects to be a historian offering a study of beliefs of evil supernatural agencies through the ages. Each author operates with the skill of professional salesmen; they present their garrulous anecdotal tales with just that hint of scepticism and detachment which enables the gullibleto believe even more passionately in their auth enticity. The repugnance these books arouse is not against their intellectual dishonesty. Both these authors are well aware that the -demons" are our own unacceptable and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that we have repudiated and repressed; modern man has gained the insight denied to mediaeval man who projected these mental entities into the external world. We know their abode lies within ourselves. The corruption of books such as these comes from their Incitement to avoid personal responsibility, and their wish to discourage the genuine insight which leads us to know that the incubus of our nightmares is not an evil spirit but a self-created defence against acknowledgment of our own deviant sexuality.
It is chastening to realise that these books are
likely to be undeservedly popular. But these are seasons when all-night exorcisms by vicars are interrupted only for a consequent cannibalistic wife murder, when queues for miles and years wait outside our city cinemas to revel in The Exorcist, when no glossy is without its horoscope, no Harrods without its Tarot cards, the tea leaves of the upper middle classes, and when Everyman mocks causality and worships chance in the crowded booming betting shops.
We now know from Keith Thomas's compelling contribution to our cultural history Religion and the Decline of Magic some of the identifiable forces that, for a while, drove so much magic out of our society. Science took over from chiromancy, sorcery, astrology and alchemy, and the new technology gave man the control of his environment which magic formerly had spuriously offered. New devices lessened the incidence of human misfortune; man turned away from incantations against disaster and created secure Banks, Insurance Companies and fire-fighting brigades. Today, alas, the politicians and the scientist, between them, have left man disenchanted and suspicious of the boons of technology. Banks fail, Insurance Companies collapse, inflation soars, and no fire brigade can quench the flames of an atom bomb. And with the growth of anxiety, magic returns. Reason is in retreat; and wretched books such as these unhappily flourish.
Leo Abse is Labour MP for Pontypool.
Previous page
