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!!