In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.
Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.
Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.
People are enrolling, says one British wiccan,
Not because they’re idiots and think it’s going to teach them how to wave a magic wand and do a spell. They’re people who have just a huge curiosity about the world and the way we perceive the seen and the unseen worlds.
But, I mean, if they're not going to teach us how to do it, what's the point? Seriously, I foresee a program not rigorous enough to satisfy grim academics like me and not woo enough to satisfy most of the people who might enroll.
Let's consider, for example, "Western dragons in lore, literature and art," a subject once dear to my young heart. Dragons are not common in the western tradition until the late 19th century, and so far as I can tell they do not mean anything in particular. As I wrote here about the Roman magical tradition, what stands out to me most about the western lore of magic is its complete absence of any kind of theoretical framework beyond a vague notion of spiritual powers and a desire that emotions (hate, envy, desire) have a real impact on things that are. Dragons sometimes represent ill-gotten wealth – in some German witch trials, witnesses said they knew the accused had sold their souls for gain because they were seen riding in the air on dragons – but mainly they are just scary monsters for heroes to slay and be slain by and things for 14th-century manuscript illustrators to doodle in the margins.
The sad truth is that what comes down to us from the western lore of magic is, for the most part, neither particularly deep nor particularly interesting. There are a couple of fine fairy tales – East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Yew Tree – but those were not recorded until the nineteenth century and so far as we can tell the people who told them did not understand the memories of ancient shamanism they encode. Yes, there are few hints that some medieval people had a practice based on ancient religious lore, but three-quarters of them are in one book, Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles. Otherwise the best books about witchcraft focus, not on the magical acts, but on the petty village rivalries and obscure hatreds acted out in the trials.
To extract any kind of religion or philosophy from our magical lore requires a great act of imagination, spinning those hints into something which is not really there but which you can glimpse if you read by moonlight in the Ember Days. I think I understand something about Druidism, but I freely admit that the leap from the meager sources to the thinking behind them is half imaginative. And that is why I loaded what I know about our magical tradition into a novel (The Raven and the Crown) rather than a monograph. To me, the magical sources work best as springboards for the imagination of storytellers, whether that is Irish talesmen or J.R.R Tolkien. And that is why modern Wicca is only very loosely based on any kind of tradition, filled out with modern ecological sensibilities, feminism, and the Romantic cult of feeling.
You could fill a course with facts about our old lore, I guess, but I think I could lay out everything I know about what they might mean in an hour. How one might turn that into an MA program I have no idea.
5 comments:
Didn't Stuart Clark write over 600 pages of stuff in Thinking with Demons? You've read it, I haven't. What was he doing in all those pages if not talking about magic?
"Thinking with Demons" is about Christian demonology and the intellectual underpinnings of the witch persecutions. A fascinating topic, but little to do with any native European magical tradition. Clark pays approximately zero attention to questions like where the notion of witches flying to nightime meetings came from, or what kinds of spells witches might actually have used.
Let me add that my disappointed writing about this theme is born from frustrated love. I really want the hints of shamanism that appear all over European folklore – the witches' sabbath, Arthurian knights crossing a sword bridge to reach the Castle of Death, the importance of south-flowing water, tales like The Twelve Dancing Princesses that look like renderings of shamanistic journeys, church carvings of Green Men – to represent some kind of pagan, shamanistic tradition that endured into the high middle ages, perhaps preserved by semi-secret groups like Ginzburg's binandanti/benedante. I want shamaness-midwives like Eleanor to be real. I want to think that there were, somewhere, at some time, lore masters who knew that all these stories represented the Old Way, a kind of European agrarian shamanism the featured night-time journeys to battles over the harvest, or to the land of the faeries, or to the troll king's halls. I have spent hundreds of hours of my life imagining these things. I have made this lore my chief intellectual hobby for 40 years.
But I find that however much I want to believe in the survival of a coherent pagan, shamanistic tradition outside a few Alpine valleys, I can't. I have looked and looked but haven't found any sign that some wise peasant of fourteenth century England understood what this lore meant in the same way that a Chukchi or Saami shaman did in 1820. I can't find it.
I think it is possible that such people existed, and that they somehow preserved a real tradition like the one I present in "The Raven and the Crown," but I have resigned myself to thinking that we can never know.
@John
Very, very interesting and important. Much for the rest of us to think about.
It's why I married the man, ya know. Plus he seduced me by reciting Beowulf in Old English
~Lisa the Wife
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