Book Review: Cursed Britain

Posted by Phil Hine in Book reviews, History, Occult, Reviews  |  February 27th 2020  |  About poster:

Interest in witchcraft seems to be at an all-time high at the moment, and over the last few years, there has been a steady stream of books examining the history of witchcraft in its various manifestations. The latest work I’ve had the opportunity to read is Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times (Yale University Press, 2019, Hdbk).

Cursed Britain sets out to examine, as Waters puts it “black witchcraft, curses, hexes, jinxes, damaging esoteric influences and harmful spells.” The focus of the book is the examination of the belief in the possibility of magical harm, particularly in respect to witchcraft and other kinds of magic – including evangelical Christian Deliverance ministries and their relationship to phenomena such as “child witches.” It is an accessible, engaging work, which attempts to cover a vast field of those practices and beliefs which cluster around what Waters refers to as “mystic interpersonal harm”. Beginning in the 1800s and moving gradually to the present day, Waters explores accounts of witches, cunning folk, wizards and other magical practitioners and their activities. Also, he examines those who argued against their practices and indeed, sought to counter their presence in a more forceful manner – suspected witches were occasionally mobbed or subjected to ducking or scratching across the nineteenth century. His main argument is that the popular belief in Witchcraft did not – as previous scholars have argued – die out in the nineteenth century, but did not fade away until the early decades of the twentieth century.

Drawing extensively on Victorian newspaper archival sources, Waters spends the first few chapters examining cases of belief in witchcraft – including “unwitching” and anti-witchcraft vigilantes – throughout the nineteenth century. He also examines how the belief in witchcraft was treated by Victorian folklorists, the growth in popularity in fortune-telling, and the influence of the rise of Spiritualism.

Chapter Six moves the discussion onwards by focusing on the Victorian occult revival, examining more esoteric movements such as the Theosophical Society, the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn, Christian Science and Satanism. I thought the discussion of Theosophy’s relationship to harmful magic was a bit weak – there is certainly more work to be done on how Theosophical views of occultism related to popular beliefs in “Black Magic” during the period. Theosophical ideas about thought-forms and mental contagion for example, could be viewed in relation to popular ideas of malefic magic (see this post for some related discussion). Also, the discussion of the Golden Dawn focuses almost entirely on the activities of Anna Kingsford and the work of A.E. Waite, but omits to mention the time Mathers cursed his enemies using a packet of dried peas – surely the most infamous bit of “malefic magic” associated with the Golden Dawn?

Chapter Seven takes a look at witchcraft in “the British Empire”. Opening with an argument that demolishes the idea that the more educated a person is, the less likely they are to place any credence in the supernatural, Waters examines the experiences of British citizens encountering indigenous witchcraft beliefs in the colonies – and in particular, individuals who came to accept, to varying degrees, a belief in the reality of harmful witchcraft. Again, this is an interesting chapter, and hopefully, it will inspire other scholars to step forwards and research the intersection between colonialism and magic. Having said that though, I do think there is a slight problem with Waters’ analysis, which relates in part, to his periodization. His discussion of witchcraft and witch-hunting in India focuses, for the most part, on a few rare instances where the East India Company had, in the Nineteenth Century, sought to curb the killing of people (mostly women) accused of being witches. This, he asserts, was part of the EIC’s project to “remodel Indian society and culture, purging it of superstitions and barbarisms, refashioning Asia in the image of modern Europe.” ¹ This statement is somewhat surprising, given the EIC’s general “hands-off” non-interference policy when it came to native affairs. The Company had, until 1813, refused to allow missionary activity in Company-controlled territories, and had forbidden any attempts to foster religious education. This policy had ceased with the Parliamentary Charter Act of 1813, and the Company’s independence from the British Government by the Government of India Act of 1833. Hence the EIC’s activities which Waters is discussing here is a somewhat different entity to the original corporation. British beliefs in native superstition – in India at least, is further complicated as it could be argued that – rather than the English adopting native superstitions (which seems to be the general thrust of this chapter) they brought their own beliefs about witchcraft with them. For example, the East India Company’s settlement of Bombay (founded in 1665) possessed a scaffold where witches could recant before their execution, and there is documentary evidence of at least two witch trials of Europeans taking place at Bombay. ²

Chapter 8 deals with one of Waters’ central arguments – that the decline of witchcraft and belief in the black arts occurred much later than is generally thought – specifically, he argues, between the 1900s and the 1960s. He begins with an example of how the occultist Dion Fortune, in her book Psychic Self-defence (first published in 1930) put a new, psychological spin on the old idea of black magic. Again, this example fits well with Waters’ thesis regarding the idea that occult practitioners effectively instill a belief in the efficacy of their practices by educating the reader – providing them with a framework in which their problems – and of course an offered solution – could be understood. Fortune’s Psychic Self-defence has, of course, spawned an entire subgenre of texts devoted to “Psychic Self-Defence” and again, this suggests a rich field for further investigation.

Moving onwards, Waters examines cases of surviving witches and cunning-folk and the persistence of a general belief in ‘black magic’ in the early decades of the twentieth-century beliefs which received a general boost during the First World War (see my review of Owen Davies’ A Supernatural War for related discussion). Waters attributes the decline of witchcraft to a number of factors such as changes in standards of living, the decline of oral storytelling and the decline of crafts such as fishing and the horse trade which had magical lore entwined around them. The key deciding factor he argues though, was state power – in the form of the regulation of the health care market, which made life very difficult for the cunning-folk and other ‘alternative’ health practitioners to ply their trade. He mentions, for example, the Midwives Act of 1902 and the Pharmacy and Medicines Act of 1941 as instances of the state’s regulatory measures designed to shut out unlicensed practitioners.

This period also saw the growth in popularity of the understanding of witchcraft as a survival of a pre-Christian, pagan religion – and Waters examines the influence of Margaret Murray in scholarly circles, and how her theories entered popular discourse due to her intervention in the murder of a farm labourer in 1945. He briefly reviews the rise of Wicca in the mid-1950s and how it differed from traditional witchcraft.

Chapter Nine, titled “Multicultural Magic” examines the period 1970-2015 and argues in part, that Britain experienced a revival of interest in magic due to immigration, and also the growth of New Age beliefs and alternative therapies – which, he says, impelled some Christians to embrace “fundamentalist worldviews that saw the hand of God and the handiwork of the devil in everyday events.” ³ Waters spends several pages discussing the Victoria Climbé case in relation to both Deliverance Ministries and African beliefs concerning child witches. It was the Victoria Climbé case, the subsequent Laming Enquiry, and other cases that led to the new investigatory category of “Faith-based Child Abuse”. ⁴

Opening the concluding chapter, Waters writes:

“This book’s broadest conclusion is that witchcraft, understood as black magic, is an enduring, erratic belief system. It can be therapeutic, but it’s also apt to be fraudulent and dangerous. If it’s not properly controlled, witchcraft will certainly do damage. Social activism and intellectual criticism are unlikely to help. Instead, the best way to control the weird world of black magic is by targeted government legislation.” ⁵

For someone like me, who remembers all too well the Satanic Panic of the 1980s: the calls by MPs for legislation against occultists, the children forcibly removed from their families in dawn raids by social workers, and intense campaign of articles in the popular press – this is a rather ominous opening. Fortunately, perhaps, Waters does not offer any real solutions as to what form this “targeted government legislation” might take apart from suggesting that a “campaign could be mounted today, against the most unscrupulous spiritual healers operating in Britain”. ⁶ Nor does he really address the wider issue here – whether or not existing laws are sufficient to deal with cases of “mystic interpersonal harm”? In June 2018, Josephine Iyamu was jailed for 14 years under the UK’s Modern Slavery Act for trafficking Nigerian women into Germany to work as prostitutes. Dubbed the “voodoo nurse”, much was made of her use of “voodoo rituals” to subjugate and humiliate the women and coerce them into obeying her. Would focusing on the “voodoo” aspects of the case rather than the slavery aspect have helped the prosecution? Somehow, I doubt it.

Attempting to “control” the belief in Witchcraft through the law is hugely complex. In 2013 for example, in response to international outrage over a series of brutal murders of women accused of being witches, Papua New Guinea repealed its 1971 Sorcery Act, which had criminalized the practice of sorcery and recognized the accusation of being a sorcerer as a defense in murder cases. It was argued that the codification of black magic as a legal issue legitimized violence against those accused of being sorcerers. That same year, the President of Cameroon, Paul Biya, used the army to forcibly shut down Pentecostal churches following the death of a nine-year-old girl during a witchcraft deliverance ceremony.

Distinguishing between harmful and beneficial forms of witchcraft would be, I think, enormously difficult – as difficult as distinguishing between helpful and harmful religion. After all, much of what Waters says about the harmful vs the beneficial aspects of witchcraft could easily be applied to more mainstream religions.

Waters ends with the equally ominous declaration that: “Indulged and ignored in the West, witchcraft – both black and white – is already undergoing a revival. How far that revival progresses, and what shape it assumes, depends in large part upon the way we elect to be governed.” ⁷

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