witching and trials

No recurrence of my toothache,

Though i couldn't get a dental appointment.

So i'll have to cold pedal, and see if i survive. 

The flat is riddled with damp again, 

and i am so fed up with everything.

Anyway, to witches....

Do you remember the M R James story Number 13?

Whatever happened to decent Christmas ghost stories on tv?

Was that founded on the story of Walpurga Housmannin, perhaps,

A witch who had a demonic suitor?

Walpurga was an Austrian woman who confessed to being

a witch, under torture, during the preparations for her  witch trial.

She was a midwife, who had, she said, been visited by a demon in 1566,

(Numerologically 666 you might notice)

who made promises to empower her, if she compacted herself to Satan.

The demon was called Federlin, had sex with her, and took her to Satan, 

who she also had intimate relations with. Story has it that they

 feasted on roast babies, presumably because she was a midwife?

She had an ointment from her demonic lovers, which could kill,

and hurt others, and she confessed to killing 40 children.

sucking their blood before they were baptised.

In collusion with other witches, she performed Satanic rituals, 

in which children were eaten.

She was sentenced to death, of course,

whatever the truth of her story.

She was taken through the streets, mutilated and tortured on the way,

to be burned at the stake.

Clearly her persecutors were little better than she was claimed to be.

more witchery

Mother Shipton 3

It's obviously dangerous to discuss Mother Shipton.

I tried yesterday. Sat down in a cafe about to blog and a toothache started.

It lasted on and off all day until it finally subsided enough,

 for me to get some sleep, after watching Father Ted.

Is that significant, do you think?

Maybe the brandy in a hot fruit drink helped.

"Feck, arse, drink," as Father Jack would say.

Anyway, as my jaw feels uncursed today... so far, I'll try again.

Did Mother Shipton actually exist?

Richard Head (1684) who wrote a book of her prophecies,

Admitted that he invented a lot of her history for the book,

But what lies beneath?

Book of prophecies

Was there an Agatha Southill or Southeil, who married a Toby Shipton?

If  not she's a figure who has come to be believed to have lived.

That'd be  a testimony to human creativeness, if nothing else.

Or maybe testimony to the power of the witch

that she could become real, even if she didn't exist!

Mother Shipton 2

Ma Shipton

Still feeling very rough, my teeth not having settled after extractions,

and a general malaise flu, cold, whatever... had it all December...

But I plucked myself up off my sickbed to blog..

She demonstrated poltergeist like activity as she was growing up, we're told.

 She married Toby Shipton, a carpenter, and thus her name was set...

Fame as well, because of her name? 

One of the earliest chapbooks about her dates to 1641,

Called 'The prophesie of Mother Shipton, in the raigne of King Henry viiith,

Foretelling the death of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Percy and others,

and also what would happen in ensuing times.'

The story goes that Wolsey said he'd raise a funeral pyre for her as a witch,

as soon as he reached York. But he never did.

She prophesied that he would see York, but never reach it...

Purportedly....he arrived in Cawood on the outskirts of York,

where he was arrested for treason, and returned to London. 

However he fell ill and died in Leicester on Nov 29th 1530.

A lot of these prophecies probably never left her lips. There are dozens 

attributed to her, far less cryptic that Nostradamus's.

But she must have had a name for herself as a prophetess

in the first place, in order to have so many books attributing 

Spurious prophecies attributed to her in later years....one would imagine.

It was probably because of some physical malformity 

that she wss assumed to be a "child of the devil".

This was probably enhanced by the poltergeist activity as an adolescent.

Of course the people of the sixteenth century had never heard

of political correctness. 

... continued..

Mother Shipton

Mother Shipton

Over Christmas, i'll leave the magic to Old Mother Shipton.

The term Mother is used for the more powerful witches, 

it seems. I wonder if it doesn't go back further than

the obvious use of an elderly knowledgeable woman 

a sort of local private nurse and midwife with herbal

skills living on the edge of society, to ancient times.

My impression of the old magic is that the term Mother, often 

was a title given to a senior in the coven, when the coven was composed 

of families, mostly interconnected by marriage.

There are devil-worshipping connections.

Let's be precise about this,

I do not believe that the Devil and Satan are the same entity.

(I'll leave aside the question of in what sense either entity exists)

Satan, and the Christian Demon, are later beings historically.

The lore of the Fallen Angel, which became the Demonic entourage

Of Satan, post-date the old horned Devil

Early religions worshipped horned animals.

Pan and the Devil and centaurs are all examples of this.

The old magical ancestry goes back to the horned beast,

Mothers were remnants of that tradition, 

That's my belief.

Now, to Ma Shipton. Ursula Southill  was born in 1488, allegedly,

out of wedlock, her mother dying after she was born. 

This was supposedly at  Knaresborough in Yorkshire.

 Chapbooks about her add prophecies and tales to the popular literature,

An old cover from someone jumping on the Mother Shipton

 

 bandwagon (Baltimore Press 1890.)

which are  wholly apocryphal. She was apparently a girl of hideous ugliness

but this did not stop her being married to Toby Shipton at the age of 25.

........More to come....

(Probably will not add another blog entry until after Christmas Day.)

The St Osyth Witches

Here's another case that's easy to find details of on-line.

In the Chelmsford witch trials of 1852,

Ursula Kempe or Grey was accused of bewitching a baby 

to its death, whilst hired by the Thurlowe family.She had been hired

 to heal ailments of the family, but they refused to allow her

to nurse the baby Joan. When the baby fell out of its crib she was blamed,

maybe to get out of paying what they owed her for healing them.

The quarter sessions judge Brian Darcy was hostile to witches,

He told Ursula to confess to receive clemency, and name other witches, 

which she did. She admitted to having familiars:

Two toads, a cat and a lamb.,,

(I mean really, keep a toad and of course you must be a witch, as

could anyone with any pets at all!)

The four women she implicated named nine more.

Lo and behold, Darcy had a coven to persecute!

They were tried at Chelmsford. Two were not indited, two were discharged

but held on other charges, and four were acquitted.

Four were found guilty but reprieved. The remaining one, 

Elizabeth Bennett, and Ursula were hanged.

In 1912 two skeletons were found, in St Osyth, with rivets 

through their knees and elbows. Like vampires, 

there was a fear that witches would rise again.

On the evidence of the rivets it is assumed that these

 were the mortal remains of the two witches.

witchcraft

Witchcraft

Most of our information about the activity of witches seems 

to be drawn from the witchcraft trials. Obviously confessions extracted

under torture have to be considered far from reliable, 

as also the testimony of ignorant people in the locality trying to 

find a scapegoat for random wanton acts. Always hard to understand why 

fate should pick on you for no reason at all.

You can imagine rigorous damning religion to be no help

whatsoever to explain these things.

Let's look at some witch cases.

Here is that of Elizabeth Francis, 

who was tried at Chelmsford Assizes in 1566 for bewitching

an infant in the household of one William Auger.

She was from Hatfield Peverell, and her notoriety was spread in a chapbook,

the novelette of her day, a bit of a National Enquirer.

She learnt The Craft from her grandmother,  Mother Eve,

when 12 years old, and given a cat, which was called Sathan.

She used it to try and seduce men including a man called Andrew, 

and when he refused to marry her, caused his death.

 Then the cat helped her catch her husband Christopher.

When they had a daughter she ordered Sathan to kill the child

Also to make her husband lame. 

Finally tiring of Sathan she gave him to her neighbour Agnes Waterhouse.

who was also accused of witchcraft.

She denied the charge against her and was sentenced to a year 

in jail. For other bewitching another year and the public humiliation 

of the pillory.  

She then bewitched one Anne Poole, who died in November 1578

and so was put on trial again. This time she was found guilty and hanged.

 

night of the demon

Night of the demon

This is more or less the classical image of a demon.

It's a version of the classical christmas ghost story 

Of M.R. James," Casting the Runes."

I say xmas because he read them to his group

of followers, often at xmas.

This hollywood version, much padded of course,

Works very well, up until the time when you see the demon itself,

but the noise of its coming is very effective, a sort of wheeling noise.

The monster itself is a bit too unbelievable.

 There was  another rendering of note.

The version with Jan Francis as a tv journalist, 

Who ends up with giant spiders in her bed.

As you do!!......

There the monster is much more ambiguous and shadowy.

Much more Jamesian.

Sly, mysterious, and on the verge of being totally ephemeral, 

utterly insidious.

 By the way, that has to be one of the all time greatest movie posters ever.

More classic ghost stories are needed at Christmas!!

balrog

The bug appears to be back, or it's another one.

I had a tooth extracted, and my jaw is bruised,

so it could be a mix of things.

I felt dreadful yesterday, and not a lot better today.

Maybe i shouldn't have questioned the existence of demons?

I simply believe that if there are negative spirits they come from within.

I don't think that the Balrog image of Tolkien

is really what a demon looks like.

Do demons really look like this?

None of the demons described in A Haunting look like this,

nor are they described as using hellfire?

If demons do, then i suspect it's a facility of the kind of demon

from hell itself, a senior, superior one.

Those demons which possess or terrorise us humans are 

probably juveniles, or the offspring of the original fallen angels,

Which are probably the ones more accurately described

as being the demons of hell.

This animated picture is probably one of the most 

effective renderings i've seen, to date, of the fire demon image.

demonic acrivity

Demonic activity

This is one of the main obstacles where demonic activity
begins, or might be supposed to be beginning,
that there is a credibility gap of one sort or another.
It must go with the territory.
Well, how do you believe that a horned beast emerges
from some other dimension to terrorise you?
How do you make others believe what seems
bizarre to yourself? How credible is the image
 seen in "Night of the Demon", or the "Goat of Mendes"
seated on the stump in the "Devil Rides Out."
I found it very hard to believe the description of a demon
in one of my own stories, so made her invisible.

I was reading on line Rev Fanthorpe's analysis of the demon
In England for the new series " True Supernatural."
A series on Really now. The trouble is, of course,
With this series, that they have fie or six "experts",
Fanthorpe, Jeff Meldrum (always on tap for discussing Bigfoot)
Etc, all saying the same thing, and making
 for a quite repetitive show. It's one of the failures of such programs,
where each portion after the adverts recaps,
that after 45 mins, you have gained 5 mins worth of new information.

Anyway, Fanthorpe gives the figures 968 incidents of demonic
activity in the last quarter century, 57 in Devon, 51 in Somerset,
46 in Wiltshire, 37 in Dorset, Norfolk and Lancs 32 each, 74 in Yorkshire,
And Inverness 39. Sussex and Derbyshire 30 each.
I'm glad Sussex got it's fair share!

haunted house portugal

Comeada

However demonic this sounds, the story then begins to fall apart

for me, maybe because of the way that Fammarion continues

to expound the story. He says that the source for the story

 is the Annales des Science Psychiques of March 1910.

That's to the good, I think.

He goes on to elaborate that Christo came to believe

in what was happening, and then collaborated to produce a book

about it. Here the originating events appear to change.

To me the variations make the whole thing suspect, 

because the elaborations are dramatic and yet do not match 

the accounts given above.

First of all there appears to be an issue with a shuttered window

in the guest room, which falls first on his friend, then

on himself, when he does a vigil there. 

This seems to have come out of nowhere, and the hearing 

of noises seems to  be lost. Then  their baby is abducted from his crib, 

and found downstairs. Surely such a happening 

would have been reported to the police, as well

 be in the original report? Worse perhaps

 the scratching of his face seems to have happened 

before the police were called in the "full version "

 I admit that my feeling of discomfort  about these alterations

could have more to do with Flammarion precising the book,

and I haven't read a translation of Christo's story in full.

Like the Amittyville book, the tale appears to have been

elaborated to be made into a saleable commodity,

and that tends to put the original account in a bad light.

haunted house portugal

Comeada

The following night Christo heard noises himself.

He, his wife, and his friend decided to conduct a vigil.

They sent the maids up to bed.

As soon as they put out the light blows were heard on 

the ground floor door to the garden. When

the door was opened, nobody was there.

But the door slammed shut locking Christo out.

The noises began to sound very loudly in the room next 

to his bedroom.He went upstairs, and with a lighted match

stood listening. As soon as the match went out

A burst of laughter sounded close to his face,

And he saw a white cloud forming.

Too scared to continue, Christo gave up that night.

Police were called in the next night.

After a complete search the officers had found nobody,

 nor any hiding places. The bangs started on the door again.

Again, when the door opened they saw nobody.

When they went back indoors, one of the officers 

went up to the room where his friend had slept,

and sat on a bench which was pulled out from beneath him.

In the guest  room there began a terrible noise, 

With the policeman striking out against something unseen

Christo stood on the landing, and was suddenly struck

On his left cheek. It seemed as if fangs hooked into it.

When they looked at his face they saw four finger marks

in his cheek.....

haunted houses

Haunted houses

That is about all the story. As in A Haunting, the tenants all

then move to sleep into one room, and leave what appears

 to be the most haunted room unoccupied.

Flammarion's book is filled with similar tales.

 This one has a demonical element as well.

It takes place in Comeda in Coimbra, a university town in Portugal

in October 1919. A student named Homem Christo who had been 

expelled from college for being a religious dissenter,

rented a house and occupied it with his wife and two maids.

His wife complained, from the very first night of hearing

strange noises.But worse was to come.

A friend, Gomez Paredes,  a second year law student, 

stayed with them for a night, and heard knocks on his window pane.

He opened his window but saw nobody, and went back to bed.

Shortly afterwards he heard doors opening and closing throughout

the house. He made a search, but found nothing or anybody up.

When he lit a candle it stopped, but when he put the candle out

to go to sleep it began again, and continued all night.

His host had not been disturbed.

Because of his religious convictions, Christo did not believe him, 

So he spoke to his father about it, to learn that other tenants before Christo

had found it hard to keep their tenancy of the house....

More  to come....

haunted house 1

The haunted house cont....

When the night came, the occupier decided to have a vigil. 

He heard a candlestick fall from the chimney piece, and 

when he bent to retieve it a piece of shellwork (on the mantle?) 

rolled to the ground. He stooped to pick that up,

 and the other candlestick fell on his back.

A servant sleeping upstairs called for help, and she was found

to be terrified, saying that she had been beaten. She was taken to another 

room, and then heard to cry out again, and the occupier could

hear the sounds of the blows that she was receiving.

The following day more Belgian money fell out of nowhere.

In the afternoon, the woman of the house went out with a friend,

 leaving the house in good order, and locked up. 

On their return they found a figure of 8 traced out with socks 

and stockings on one of the floors.

That evening, with a group of relatives and a lodger, she visited  all the rooms.
It was quiet, but in the morning, she found a figure traced on
the ground with hats. On the lower stairs, her husband
 nephew's, and lodger's overcoats,  surmounted by a hat.
Two knives whizzed past her, when she was cleaning,
 embedding themselves in the floor and ceiling.

 Tableaus, these often anthropomorphic designs are called.
They often feature in poltergeist cases.
This one does seem to have been quite violent,
Almost meeting a qualification for being demonic.

haunted house

Haunted House story

This comes from "Haunted Houses" by Camille Flammarion,
published 1924, at least in English.
Flammarion was a paranormal investigator who was an astronomer,
by profession, and was obviously very open-minded.
This tale is about a house in the Rue du Prieure at Fives, near Lille.
The source is the Independant of 6th and 8th July 1865.

"For the last fortnight there have been unexplained things happening
in the Rue du Prieure at Fives, and have caused a profound sensation
in the whole district. At certain intervals a hail of missiles arrives in the yards
of two dwellings in that street, which breaks the windows and sometimes
hits the inhabitants, without anyone discovering the place whence
they have come or the person who throws them. Things have come
to such a pass that one of the two tenants has had to protect the windows
 with wire netting for fear of being killed."


A policeman was hit in the back, and a glazier, repairing
a damaged window was also hit.The situation was soon to escalate,
when furniture moved by itself, overturned, shoes were seen to dance,
 and a belgian 2-pence piece dropped out of nowhere.

This case is interesting as it seems to pass beyond the realm
of a mere poltergeist to actual violence,
 and i'll look at how it escalated tomorrow

demons 5

I had a couple of very bad days, that bug again. 

It seems to come and go. Very tired by it, 

Little energy to do anything.

I can't find a story outside of the American tv and movie

world that i would call indicative of demon activity.

My criterion is that poltergeist activity would qualify

if it was violent enough, and nasty enough, 

and associated with individuals, as opposed to buildings, for a duration of time.

Obviously poltergeist activity itself is temporary,

and tends not to actually inflict harm.

The problem to my mind is that the stories 

from American programs like A Haunting, 

Is that the participants either have a Christian background,

or a medium is called in who says demon.

I don't entirely trust statements by mediums,

because in my view their claims are not usually verifiable

historically, and so how do i credit them when they say 

"Demon", which is even more subjective?

I'll come back to this. I don't believe such stories 

to be anything but extensions of the religious background

of the indigenous community.

I thought i'd relate some tales instead 

From Camille Flammarion, 

Who wrote Before, during and after death psychical stories,

And Haunted Houses,  c 1924.

I have to leave the demon issue pending.

demons 4

Demons

The original concept of demon appears to be that of a spirit

of some divine nature, other than those, which are classed as angels.

It was not necessarily evil. 

The whole idea of a demon of evil comes out of the idea of fallen angels, 

A race of angels that were thrown out of heaven for

fraternising with humans.

In the book of Enoch, although it's by no means clearly expressed,

this fraternisation resulted in children, who were called "giants".

When i was studying at art college, i came across the use of the term

Daemon to describe the creative impulse, in the artist, 

as a feature of inanimate objects,as well, which is to say 

their personality. The idea is very clearly expressed in surrealist art

where an object taken out of context shows its true nature.

I think that about sums up the demon  as an angel with

other than holy intentions.

Ezekiel's vision?

This is a  different creature from the elemental spirits, or 

gods of other cultures, which  are called "demons" 

probably by comparison with the Western idea of a demon.

Perhaps, when Christianity swept through Europe, 

ancient Celtic gods became demonised, 

to fit them into  the belief system.

It's made harder to trace these changes as the church 

chose to delete from its library ancient works, gospels, 

which it didn't feel fitted with the world view, 

that it was adopting.

demons 3

Demons.

There are plenty of stories about demons posessing a member of a modern

Christian families. A Haunting and Paranormal Witness prove that.

However nearly all of these seem to come out of a certain context

being that the family especially the heads (or one of them) of the family believe

in the principle of demon existence as a corollary of thrir faith.

This is America, where religion has a gospel intensity.

Where demons are mooted in English history, it also has a strong

religious environment surrounding it.

I'm finding it hard to locate a historical demonic incident outside of that 

context. i'm not so much looking for a horror movie depiction of a posession, 

but a contextual one that has a credibility of its own apart

from Christian battles of faith between a husband and wife, 

in the midst of an escalating demonic development...

I'll keep on looking through my books.

I  would wonder if there's a lunar connection here somewhere?

The moon is supposed to operate in the cases of werewolves and vampires,

Is it also associated with demonic lore?

(I may update this blog today, with more info after more perusal)

 

demons 2

Demons

The idea of a demon isn't Christian. It comes from our remote past.

It isn't only the Christian priest, who performs exorcisms,

And shamans from various cultures practiced it.

It's a lot like curing the evil eye, or witchcraft.

The idea here, though, being that a malevolent spirit

is responsible. But how did it get to be a different

designation than an unappeased ancestor, or a returning

spirit, like a vampire? How did it get a higher status?

In the beginning, in creation myths, there was always a deceiver,

A Satan, or Mara in the Buddhist canons, and there were 

gods of places, rivers, forests, etc, some of which could be 

malevolent, and is it possible that the idea was that when

a god went out of fashion, it had its revenge by becoming demonic?

That's not unlike the concept of the Fallen Angel 

from the Book of Enoch.

These are ancient gods, who don't want to be forgotten,

and are prepared to torment and persecute those 

who neglected them.

It's interesting from a psychological point of view that,

in Christian terms, anyway, to learn the name

of the demon gives you the power to expel them.

Why should that be?

I watched the exorcism scene in A Haunting's episode "Possessed"

(Series 3) last night.

That always strikes me as odd. if the demon knows 

that it can be expelled, why does it give its name, 

when that's demanded of it?

I'm hunting for some good possession cases to relate here.

demons 1

Demons

Okay, do you believe that the cause is only sleep paralysis?

All the tales of people waking to feel a weight on top of them,

holding them down, as if a demonic entity, succubus or incubus, was seated

 on their laps or chests, and perhaps is trying to throttle them

- is this nothing but a physical paralysis, as a result of emerging out of sleep?

Or is it a demon attack? 

 

Fuseli's nightmare

 It occurs in a goodly number of tales of demonic possession,

in demonic raids on families, as witness stories from A Haunting, 

Paranormal Witness, etc, that people already suffering

bizarre events in their houses, experience this, and it usually

convinces them that a demon is on the loose.

Sleep could be a portal for things to get across to this side....

 It's easy to get from a weight pressing down on you 

to believing that it forms some sort of subhuman

sexual assault? 

 

I think the jury has to be out on this, as the important element 

in this must be the context, and the psychological state

of those involved has already been enflamed by whatever

appears to be happening to them.

I'd call that a Twilight Zone situation, 

where you wouldn't be sure if the imaginary and real worlds 

had not folded into one another.

demons

Demons

I have always been fascinated by tales of demons,

Well, i like "A Haunting" and they had plenty of stories

where the haunter proved to be demonic.

I once had a copy of a book of magic called The Magus, 

when i was at college, long gone now.

It was a limited edition reprint produced via Thorson's publishing house,

Just down the road from my birthplace, near Northampton.

It is basically, I believe, a writer called Francis Barrett's  version 

published in 1801, of a work by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa,(1486-1535)

 both of which, dare i say, are available for the curious, on the internet.

It was a common feature of occult works to produce lists of demons...

A sort of cartulary of all the different ranks and hierarchies of spirits,

Devils, fallen angels...

The Magus was "fun" because it included drawings of the faces of

Demons. The online version doesn't seem to go as far as to include this

little rogues' galleries of nasties.

A bit like " Pickman " in the Lovecraft story, i suppose,

 someone, some time, sat painting their portraits, 

whilst avoiding getting eaten?

Sadly in a fit of conscience or sudden burst of stable cleaning

I threw these books out, as well as my Eliphas Levi collection.

Ah well, easy come easy go......

Here are a couple of "Pickman's models"

 

principles of haunting

Principles.

So, what is a demon?

Well, after being so raspy last night that my throat was bleeding,

I think that flu bugs are demonic,

So.... are there simply other disease organisms, 

which affect this world? 

That was the basic premise of "I am legend..".

The book, rather than the film.

That vampires were the product of a disease organism.

I always think that there are three ways these things come to be.

Ghost, demon, vampire, whatever...

They can be (1) a recording of a past event in matter...

The most likely way a ghost comes about, perhaps?

The stone tape theory.

(2) the product of the mind, not necessarily a dream or imagination, 

Because it's possible that the mind translates incoming data,

and gives it material form.

If that wasn't possible, you couldn't possibly have poltergeists,

So it has to transmit into action as well as image.

If mediumship is real that would also be how it works.

(3) entities....

My theory being that like diseases, they exist, or thrive 

inside of us, and produce severe symptoms on the surface,

Or beyond the surface.

Demons.... etc, are inside us.

Human beings are capable of being evil, and converting that 

evil into physical action. So why not give it physical form as well?

The old cartoon image of an angel and a demon as two

sides of the personality, in fact, floating around your head,

vieing for superiority.

mibs

Men in Black.

So, are these also the next step in the mythology's development,

Shadow people employing their watching skills 

to intimidate and theaten witnesses of ufo phenomenon.

Or are they government black ops people

whose business presumably is to try and convince witnesses

that what they saw really was extra-terrestrial 

rather than the result of covert military operations 

with advanced technology? Field disinformation officers?

I don't think it matters which as they have informed our myth

about the dark people who watch and terrorise.

People seen out of the corner of the eye.

Or maybe the governments of the world are demonically infected

anyway, and send out their demonic agents to do

their dirty work?

I'd sooner believe that than that all the seniors and principals of the 

world are from the series  V.

And lizards. Although frankly i find politicians reptilian enough

anyway. Or are they all Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith clones?

Hmmmmmm.......