Witchcraft

by Charles Williams

Perhaps the best introduction to the subject that is niether hysterical nor Wiccan propaganda. Thus it it hard to find. And yes it is the same Charles Williams who wrote "Shadows of Ecstasy".

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Theology, Christian

317 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Charles Williams


Charles Walter Stansby Williams is probably best known, to those who have heard of him, as a leading member (albeit for a short time) of the Oxford literary group, the "Inklings", whose chief figures were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was, however, a figure of enormous interest in his own right: a prolific author of plays, fantasy novels (strikingly different in kind from those of his friends), poetry, theology, biography and criticism. — the Charles Williams Society website

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

Overview of European witch hysteria from a Christian point of view. As ever Williams writes well, with some very effective description, and with keen insight. Also as ever there is this very weird undercurrent whenever he discusses sex in relation to women (the passage on people fantasising they had sex with demons, which includes painful "scaly members" and artificial phalluses, is one that will stick in the memory and indeed the throat).

Notable also is the celebration of how Gilles de Rais, child murderer, was embraced and given spiritual forgiveness by churchmen before being executed, and this was apparently a glorious and worthy thing. Very Christian. Even more Christian might have been to question why this moral kindness wasn't extended to any women, who were horribly killed for doing nothing, and if giving a particularly nasty murderer this love and understanding because he's a man and boys will be murderers is actually Christian at all or just the patriarchy in action. I dare say that's too much to ask.

[Rick Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've seen many books about witchcraft written by Christians that are paranoid, hysterical, and irresponsible in their particular brand of wish-fulfillment and confirmation bias. Witchcraft by Charles Williams is not one of them. With his typical erudition, Williams lays out the history of magic and witchcraft, both real and imagined, and the Church's response to these ideas through the ages. The reader emerges with a sympathetic understanding of the witch-hysteria of the late Middle Ages, while at the same time realizing the horror and evil that were accomplished in the name of Christ.

I particularly found it interesting that at least a few of the cases seemed to have factual bases. Witchcraft in some form was real and its practitioners, whether following some ancient rites or merely enacting the images popularly attributed to the magic arts, committed stomach-turning atrocities that will make even the most hardened reader blanch. The two stories from the book which stand out in my mind as best illustrating these two sides to the issue are the twin cases of Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. Both were condemned and executed around the same time in France. Saint Joan was clearly innocent. de Rais was clearly, and grotesquely, guilty.

Unlike some of Williams's writings, Witchcraft is eminently readable. Like all of Williams's writings, it is highly engaging and thought-provoking. Even for those who are not particularly interested in the subject matter, the book is worth the read for the observations of human nature which go a long way in explaining, not only medieval witch hunts, but also our modern cultural "witch hunts".

[Winnie Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. In a world of Narnia and Middle-earth and Hogwarts, we have a real need to understand the distinction between Magic and what Charles Williams calls "that perverted way of the soul"...the other kind of magic. He doesn't compare any of these literary examples (the book was written years before either Narnia or LOTR were published, and decades before Rowling was born), but he presents a solid biblical and historical study of true witchcraft that should allow us to draw our own conclusions on any magic we encounter anywhere.

[Leandro Dutra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb text on the precedents & history of the witch trials of end of the Dark ages & of the Reformation & Counter Reformation era. Sheds more than a little light on the current scares on parental abuse, minority discrimination & political correctness.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of European witchcraft and the response of the Christian Church to it at different periods, noting the theological changes that led to changing responses.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it!!!
Much needed light shed, and wonderful readable reasonings transmitted!!!

I do strongly recommend Charles Williams book to all searching to understand the real reason behind the witch hunt in Europe and elsewhere...

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a scholarly-yet-readable study of witchcraft, divination, and sorcery in the Christian era, in Europe, from a specifically-Christian point of view. It is most emphatically _not_ about the newage religion calling itself Wicca. Indeed, as it was published in 1941, it must have been well under way before Gerald Gardner's claims to have been initiated by an old school of Wiccans - in 1939 - was common knowledge; it certainly makes no comment on the "Old Religion."

It begins in Roman times, when the rising power known as Christianity found itself of necessity opposed to all magic and divination. The nature of the Christian faith required the denial of all supernatural powers except for God and the angels, and the forces of Evil. It was certainly aware that such things occurred; Balaam and the Witch of Endor in the Old Testament come to mind, as do several other cases. Before the time of Jesus the great Israelite prophets declared all "gods" but God not-gods, a term originally used for idols made by human hands. Witches, necromancers, diviners, and sorcerers would claim that they derived their powers from some combination of effects that bound invisible powers to their will. That was one of the problems right there; to use the supernatural to attain one's will was to put one's will ahead of God's.

The interesting thing is that there does not appear, in early Christianity, to have been a clear conception of "the Devil"; rather, the concept evolved over the course of the first few centuries, and was clearly in place by the rise of the Middle Ages. Thus also grew up the concept of the Pact with the Devil.

After spending a few chapters on the concept of witchcraft, divination, sorcery, etc., as seen by the Church, Williams turns more to the reaction of the Church to this concept. At least one early writer claimed that since Christ, there was no magic, because He had broken all the power of evil - other, of course, than human evil. Alas, he was not much listened to in his time or after.

Several chapters are spent on the various Inquisitions and their ilk. Williams clearly does not approve of the use of torture, or of burning people alive; nor of the idea that an accusation was tantamount to guilt. One of the more horrible details of the Catholic Inquisition was that a confession must be made without torture to prove the crime. Thus, while a suspected witch might be tortured to get her to confess, that confession was not valid in the court; if she recanted in court, the whole terrible process would begin again, starting with "showing the instruments," in the hope that the confession might come from just the sight of them.

(Interestingly, the two parties that first turned away from this approach, and from torture and baseless accusations in general, were King James and ... the Spanish Inquisition.)

His tone is studiedly neutral but it is clear that he regards the "Burning Times" (as Wiccans call them) as, _at best_, a terrible mistake and an awful evil committed by people attempting to do good by their own lights.

Accusations ranged from hysteria to attention-getting (as the children of Salem) to malice. The term "witch hunt" has its proper source here, concept of looking for enemies for every reason _except_ for any credible evidence that such enemies might actually exist. This is what happened at Salem, what happened with the Commie Scare in the 1940s and '50s, and it is what a certain schmuck _claims_ is happening to him right now (despite the careful piling up of credible evidence that has taken so long, without the prosecutor having yet made any accusations against said schmuck).

_Witchcraft_ is not a book for everyone, but for those interested in the topic from a historical perspective, it is just short of essential. Williams clearly did his research carefully and thoroughly, and the book is full of feetnote and in-text citations. He fills the book with example after example to give the flavor of the attitudes towards witches (and "witches") during each of the times he describes. I am no historian, nor a historiographer, but his conclusions seem reasonably sound to me.

[Dave Maddock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This succeeds as a sober but readable history of the phenomenon of witchcraft hysteria. Williams traces the development of the Christian ideas of the phenomenon as a reaction against paganism, folk medicine, and proto-scientific thinking while adopting a conscious agnosticism as to the existence of witches as defined by these ideas. Despite acknowledging the lack of evidence and all the other caveats one might consider, Williams ultimately concludes that where there is smoke there is fire. Two cases he offers as most representative are Gilles de Rais and La Voisin. Insofar as these are not rank hyperbole, they show very little of a real tradition of witchcraft. If anything, they show an attempt by the mentally unstable to live up to an invented mythos--the 80s death metal of the Middle Ages.

What the book shows is a systematic building up of bullshit that feeds on itself in the same way that stories of alien abductions do today. Only someone like Charles "I Want to Believe" Williams could take such a reasoned look at the evidence and conclude that the likelihood of the existence of real witchcraft was ever probable. He concludes:

If ever the image of the Way of Perversion of Images came into common human sight, outside the Rites of the Way, it was before the crowds of serious Christians who watched a child, at the instance of pious and intelligent men, scourged three times round the stake where its mother was burned.

Indeed! And we actually have copious evidence that this actually did happen. There is no doubt about that point.

[Steven Tryon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a painful book to read, as any sane and even-handed history of the times would have to be. As another reader stated, it is neither hysteria nor propaganda, but a carefully written history by a master thinker, researcher and writer.

Highly recommend, but be prepared for a tough slog. Do not expect a Harry Potter prequel. The evils and perversions committed by both those purporting and those prosecuting witchcraft were real and terrible. Yet there were bright lights as well, and Williams gives them due credit, as partial and imperfect as they may have been.

[Seymour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, as it promises to be, an un-sensationalising account of the history of witchcraft from Roman times until the end of the Salem Witch trials in the late 1600s.

I read it in the hope of unwrapping something more of the mystery of Charles Williams, the man himself, but quickly became drawn into the drama as he tells it, particluarly, through historical documentary evidence from trials.

Williams handles the material carefully. It is almost impossible to disentangle fact from fiction in this particular aspect of history, where hysteria and confession under torture were commonplace. He nevertheless outlines atrocities on both sides of the conflict between witchcraft and the church and secular authorities throughout the ages and makes it clear that he senses evil at work in both the prosecutors and the prosecuted. He doesn't enter his opinion into the debate on whether witchcraft is material or illusory, but proponents of both views come under his scrutiny.

Surprisingly and unfashionably, the Spanish Inquisition comes out in a more favourable light when compared to other Inquisitions across Europe at the time, and King James I is commended for his intelligent handling of the issue in England. The medievals and the philosophical movement of the 1600s also seem to embody something closer to Williams own sympathies, while he draws the centuries in between as a full-scale war, a morass of perversion and confusion, touching every level of society and the church and fuelled by an unhealthy obsession with the Devil and sin. Ultimately, in Williams' reckoning, it was the skeptics who saved Europe from insanity.

I did not obtain from this book much illumination to apply to the growing interest in Wiccan practice in our own times: Williams is talking about something quite different when he speaks of witchcraft. However, it speaks pertinently to the handling of our society's spectres - real or imagined - in which a spark of truth ignites a profane fire that quickly gets a life of its own. Proponents of the "war on terror", for instance, would do well to heed its lessons.

As far as the mystery of the author goes, there are precious few hints about Charles Williams' own spirituality, although a brief mention of the Zohar provides recognisable elements that are also found in his novels.

Ultimately, I was surprised not to find more of his penetrating vision of underlying spiritual realities in his description of the conflict. But I'm coming to realise that this is Williams to the core: the historical plane, to which he limits his analysis, incarnates and reflects all others such that there is virtually no need to be initiated into mysteries other than the open secret of Love.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an overview of its subject from ancient times up to the demise of widespread belief in witchcraft in the 18th century. In ancient times witchcraft was embedded in the belief world of the pagan religions then extent. When Christianity prevailed in late Roman times and in the early Middle Ages, a good deal survived in popular culture and was periodically denounced by the Church. However, for various reasons, the systematic drives to eliminate witchcraft really got going in the 15th century. The worst of this happened, in the 16th & 17th centuries in France, Germany & Britain. Thousands of witches were burned on the continent of Europe - in England they were mostly executed by hanging. Interestingly, the Spanish Inquisition became very skeptical of forced confessions and so in 17th century Spain witchcraft trials became quite rare. There is also a chapter on the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of the 1690's. As the 17th century wore on, opinion became more & more skeptical of the value of witch trials because of the nature of the evidence - while the existence of witches wasn't necessarily disbelieved, the judges kept demanding incontrovertible evidence that was almost impossible to produce. England had its last witchcraft trials in the early 18th century.

The foregoing hits some of this book's high points but contains so much more than I am giving here. Highly recommended as an overview of its subject. The author, Charles Williams, was a member of a group of friends in Oxford, England in the early 1940's, that called itself "The Inklings", whose most famous members were C. S. Lewis & J. R. R. Tolkien.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Williams was a member of the Inklings, the informal club of intellectuals that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as well as others. At one time in his life he was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a well-known occult organization at the time whose members have included William Butler Yeats, Dorothy Sayers, and Aliester Crowley (the latter of whom was expelled). T. S. Eliot commissioned him to write a history of witchcraft, a task he despised, but the book that resulted is a a reasonable Christian take on witchcraft and the hysteria surrounding it. Now Williams is not a master stylist, and to me this book was a tough slog, but the later chapters make the book well worth reading. His balanced treatment of the Spanish Inquisition is refreshing, noting that it tried to be fair as opposed to the secular authorities, who were all too quick to condemn alleged witches and burn them. His chapter on the Salem witch trials makes a fascinating read.

Williams traces the history of witchcraft from the Graeco-Roman period to the Salem trials. It provides a needed Christian perspective on this history that is missing the hysteria of Montague Summers' account of witches. Despite its stolid style overall, it is worth a read.

[Suzannah Rowntree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite its brevity and the sensational nature of its topic, this book wasn't an easy read. With his peculiar vocabulary, Williams can be a little difficult to comprehend even in his fiction. Then, too, despite the arm's-length handling of the gory details, there were enough horrors referred to in this book--committed by both sides in the great war--to make the reading anything but pleasant. When I hit the chapter that describes the outline of what was supposed to have happened at the satanic Sabbaths (it's the one titled "The Goetic Life"), I definitely felt I'd learned more than I wished; I don't think such a detailed synopsis was necessary, here or in other parts.

Still, despite the details, this was in many ways a wonderful and edifying book, and I'm glad I read it. My hope for the rest of this review is to provide a brief overview of the history covered, hopefully giving you some of the benefit of reading the book, with fewer of the gory details.

Read the rest of my detailed review at my blog, Vintage Novels.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent.