Winding Up the Charm: (Part 2)

 books, culture, Stage  No Responses »
Dec 042012
 

Having “Wound Up” their Charm: “Hail Macbeth! Thane of Glamis and Cawdor! That shalt be King hereafter!”

In their book The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson, and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Olympian Press, 2005), Robert Mathiesen and Theitic discuss the “regular-meter” structure of traditional “Lore-Text”: “the metrical stresses fall on only the first, third, fifth, and seventh syllables, not on the second, fourth, and sixth. We write this pattern as ['-'-'-'].” (p. 59) What Mathiesen and Theitic recognize as “regular meter,” a Shakespearean will call “iambic meter”; meaning a line of verse, composed in alternating “STRESSED/ unstressed” syllables: “ONCE more UN-to THE breach, DEAR friends, ONCE more!” being the first line from the “Once more” speech from Henry V (Act I, scene iii), taught in Shakespeare Schools as an example of perfect “iambic pentameter.”

Shakespeare tends to write in “iambic pentameter,” meaning five groups of “iambs” (STRESSED/ unstressed syllables), resulting in a line of ten “beats” altogether. As Mathiesen and Theitic point out (p. 62), “In the English-speaking world, rhyming couplets in regular meter- as we have termed it- are traditional for literary representations of spells, as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” Mathiesen and Theitic go on to examine the “regular meter” structure (the “iambic” structure) of the “Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog” speech, from the Cauldron Scene (Act IV, scene i), as well as various other examples of Witch “Lore” such as Isobel Gowdie’s “Horse and Hattock” Charm, and an 1850s Healing Spell, before going to to consider the “regular meter” structure of some of the more antique of the rhyming couplets found in The Rede.

However much a Shakespearean will recognize “iambic pentameter” (a line of ten beats, of “STRESSED/ unstressed” syllables) as the Bard’s accustomed speech-pattern: Mathiesen and Theitic point out that “Witch Spells” tend to be rendered in sequences of seven; achieved by the tricky and witchy habit of ending each line on a “broken” iamb. Such an example we find in the “Weird Sisters Charm” of Macbeth (Act I, scene iii):

Macbeth’s Witches, “Winding Up” a Charm in their Cavern

“THE weird SIS-ters, HAND in HAND” [the first line of the Charm, consisting of seven syllables, in alternating "STRESSED/ unstressed" pattern, ending with a "broken"or an unfinished iamb]; “POST-ers OF the SEA and LAND” [ditto, as Mathiesen and Theitic say]; “THUS do GO, a-BOUT, a-BOUT” [note the "witchy trickiness" in emphasizing "About, About" at the end, which is a phrase often found in English Witch-Incantation]; “THRICE to THINE, and THRICE to MINE” [again, seven syllables of iambic "regular meter"]; “AND thrice A-gain, TO make UP NINE!!” [The last line requires eight syllables, leading to something interesting-]

The “Weird Sisters Charm” of Macbeth (Act I, scene iii) consists of four lines, of seven syllables each, before concluding in an eight-syllable line, with the Magickal Number of “Nine.” If you do the math: 4×7=28; 28+8=36; 3+6=9.

If you work your way through the text of the Charm: you kind of can’t help making your way through some sort of Magickal Labyrinth, towards some sort of Mystical Conclusion. At this point: “Peace, the Charm’s Wound Up.”

As Mathiesen and Theitic go on to note, the Witches resume this pattern of speech during the famous Cauldron Scene of [Act IV, scene i]; all of which suggests a habit of Witches deliberately speaking “Witchcraft” in a very “BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM” way: which becomes somewhat hypnotic in a sense; a little meditative; a bit reflective; a little suggestive of rhythmic clapping or even the steady beating of a drum.

Following the example of the “Weird Sisters’ Charm,” at a minimum,  you may wish to experiment with writing out “regular metered” Charms, each line of seven syllables, ideally ending with a rhyming couplet [two lines, whose two ending-words rhyme: "A drum! A drum! Macbeth doth come!" is actually a rhyming couplet.] You may wish to experiment with “the Charm” outright (I have some observations for you, if you do, as Part 3). At another minimum: consider the story told in “the Charm.”

The Weird Sisters (who are also “Posters of the Sea and Land,” meaning that they can travel with great velocity- almost like riding Magickal horses- over both sea and land; basically, they can fly) join “hand in hand,” forming a Circle. Now they “thus” go “about, about”: they begin to spin in a Circle. Following the instructions of the text, they go first “one way” three times; then they go “another way” three times; then they conclude “back this way,” three times.

Why do they do this? “Peace. The Charm’s wound up.”

They have “wound up a Charm.”

Now consider what Gerald Gardner says in Witchcraft Today (Magickal Childe Publishing, p. 20): “Witches are taught and believe that the power resides within their bodies which they can release in various ways, the simplest being dancing round in a circle, singing or shouting, to induce a frenzy.”

Witch Lore-Text

 books, culture  1 Response »
Nov 282012
 

Question: How do we remember what a “red sky at night” means to sailors? The same way that we remember what a “red sky at morning” means: through Lore-Text that tells us, “Red Sky at Night; Sailors’ Delight. Red Sky at Morning; Sailers, take Warning.” As Robert Mathiesen and Theitic point out in their book, The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson, and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (p. 58), important information was often preserved and relayed in oral folk-culture through “Lore-Text”: “a brief text that conveys a piece of traditional knowledge or lore in a fixed form. Lore-texts include proverbs, weather rhymes, old sayings whether or not they are in rhyme, and so forth. A lore-text has a relatively fixed form of words in which it is handed down from one generation to the next. Although a lore-text can change with time, the change is from one fixed text to another.” As another example of lore-text, Prof. Kittredge provides (in Witchcraft in Old and New England) many examples of the folk-proverb, that “Vervain and Dill hinder Witches of their Will,” testifying to the purifying, protective aspects of the two herbs.

Antique oral-culture lore-text becomes significant to Mathiesen and Theitic in their examination of The Wiccan Rede, credited to Lady Gwen Thompson. Lady Gwen (of North Haven, Connecticut) is one of those early Witches on the scene, responsible for establishing the Craft in the United States. As she had been initiating people into what she described as a Hereditary-Family-Tradition of Celtic Witchcraft since the late ’60s, and was indeed the first High Priestess to initiate Eddie Buczynski into a Witch-Tradition, Lady Gwen is also covered (rather thoroughly) in Michael Lloyd’s Bull of Heaven: the Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan (according to Michael, Eddie used material from Lady Gwen’s Book of Shadows to create his own Welsh Tradition of Witchcraft).

Be that as it may- it is specifically the collection of rhyming couplets known as “the Wiccan Rede” that interest Mathiesen and Theitic (Michael also covers the Rede in Bull of Heaven, Chapter 18, “Black and White and Rede All Over”). Examining this series preserving bits of folk-wisdom (“Soft of eye an light of touch- speak little, listen much,” is one such example, which interestingly paraphrases Polonius’ advice in Hamlet, Act I, scene iii, line 68: “Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice”), Mathiesen and Theitic conclude that the majority of the couplets contained in the Rede give evidence of indeed being oral-culture Lore-Text (presumably collected from the late 19th century and early 20th, by Lady Gwen’s grandmother Adriana Porter, apparently something of a folklore hobbyist). None of these (alas) give evidence of a Witchcraft sensibility, much less a “Wiccan” one. The few that do- like the famous “Bide the Wiccan laws ye must, in perfect love an perfect trust,” and “Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill- an it harm none, do what you will”- Mathiesen and Theitic conclude must have been constructed by another, later individual (most likely Lady Gwen), inspired by her grandmother’s collection of antique couplets to create her own “Wiccanate” ones.

My point is less to blow apart cherished Wiccan mythologies, than to point out that Robert Mathiesen and Theitic introduce the concept of “Lore-Text” into the proceedings: Lore-Text, an oral-culture means of preserving wisdom and useful advice, often in a rhyming manner, which facilitates easy-memory. Which brings us (as things will) to the most famous depiction of Witches in the Western World: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Performed in 1605 and published in 1623, the Tragedy unquestionably dates to the earliest 17th century. Its Witches are undeniably compelling, as well as notoriously controversial (of course, one can make the argument that this applies to Witches in the early 17th century as a whole, not just to Mr. Shakespeare’s). Virtually every thing that the Witches do onstage during the show, one can go over and over and over, reading meaning and postulating theory: for the now, I want to draw attention to the odd little ceremony that the Witches enact in Act I, scene iii (immediately before Macbeth’s entrance, signaled by the line, “A drum! A drum! Macbeth doth come!”). I call the Witches’ text here, “the Weird Sisters Charm,” and want to propose that it serves as a Lore-Text: a Lore-Text that preserves the memory and information of a Energy-Raising Ceremony.

Coming Next: “Posters of the Sea and Land.”

Magick-Workers in Early America

 books, culture  3 Responses »
Jan 182012
 

In the category of “Pagan Scholars to Watch For,” please add the name of Robert Mathiesen. A medieval philologist teaching at Brown University, with a great interest in the history of Magickal practices, Prof. Mathiesen uncovered (from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) Charles Leland’s remarkable Book of Shadows (recently published); earlier, he collaborated with Theitic (an Initiate into the Tradition founded by Gwen Thompson in the early 1970s, and now an Elder in this Tradition, as well as its archivist) on The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson, and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Olympian Press, 2005), wherein they examined the “Rede of the Wiccae,“ published in the Ostara issue of Green Egg Magazine in 1975. Attributed to her grandmother, Adriana Porter, this was a series of rhyming couplets, intended to preserve a bit of wisdom or folk-knowledge in an easy-to-remember rhyming style. The last couplet- “Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill- an it harm none, do what ye will”- is probably the best known.

Because of Ms. Thompson’s attribution of this “Rede,” or series of rhyming folk-couplets, to her grandmother, the story of early-on-the-American-Witchcraft-Scene High Priestess Gwen Thompson and her grandmother Adriana Porter has come to be recognized as one of those “Grandmother Stories,” whereby someone claimed Extreme Authenticity for their Practice of Ye Olde Crafte by citing some elderly relative (often one’s grandmother) as an Initiating Instructor. (Wicca Spoilers): Mathiesen and Theitic, in reviewing the Rede, find that most of the couplets appear to represent genuine examples of folk-culture “Lore-Text”: or the transmission of useful folk-knowledge through an easily memorized couplet-form. These, however (the majority of the couplets that comprise the Rede), do not really reflect any specific Wiccan or Witchcraft sensibility.

Upon examination of the smaller number that seem specifically Wiccan-oriented (such as the one cited above), Mathiesen and Theitic determine that someone else (probably Gwen Thompson), acting upon the inspiration of her grandmother’s folk-collection, created certain couplets intended to reflect a Wiccan viewpoint.

Lore-Text, and the types of rhyme-meters generally employed in such (as according to Mathiesen and Theitic) is a very interesting subject (to which I wish to return): however, what is intriguing at this point, is the research presented in this book that suggests that the first migrations of European settlers into the New World brought with them the Magickal customs of the Old: exactly as one would imagine they might, considering the degree to which Magick remained ingrained in Europe through at least the 1600s.

Mathiesen and Theitic begin Part 3 (p.33) by quoting John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1865 poem Snowbound, wherein he recalls the Oral Culture tradition of story-telling around a fire on a winter’s night. Things take an oddly Classical tone when Whittier brings up a “gray wizard’s conjuring-book,” seen by his mother as a child, as well as an uncle, “rich in lore of fields and brooks, of Nature’s unhoused lyceum, in moons and tides and weather wise, he read the clouds as prophecies, and foul or fair could well divine, by many an occult hint and sign, holding the cunning-warded keys to all the woodcraft mysteries”; “Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome had all the commonplace of home, and little seemed at best the odds, ‘twixt Yankee peddlers and old gods.”

Trusting that their reader will have seized upon the mention of a “gray wizard’s conjuring-book,” encountered in rural New Hampshire in what must have been the late 1700s, the two authors describe (p.35) how Whittier explained in his foreword to the poem that the book belonged to one “Bantam the sorcerer,” a member of the “strange people who lived on the Pisquataqua and Cocheco,” and the book, a copy of the 1651 English edition of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. In another work, The Supernaturalism of New England (1847), Whittier elaborates upon this individual, describing him as a Quaker who was considered a “conjurer and skillful adept in the art of magic,” who acted as a neighborhood Cunning-Man “without price”; his book (in 1847) was “still in possession of the conjurer’s family.” The 1790 United States census lists this man as Ambrose Bantam, the head of a small family living in Somersworth, New Hampshire. (p. 36) Remarkably, Mathiesen and Theitic find that, in old New England, “such people were not particularly rare.”

Fascinating as it will be in a moment to discover why such people were not particularly rare in old New England: let us stop and dwell upon this “conjurer’s book” (a mid-seventeenth century edition of Agrippa), possessed by a Cunning-Man in the late 1700s, in the northernmost New England states. So far, at the Juggler, we have seen (1) a Colonial Era grimoire, known as the “Joshua Gordon Witchcraft Book,” held at the University of South Carolina, and (2) a German-language “Cure-Book”, carried into Appalachia by a German immigrant in 1790. And here we have a copy of Agrippa being put to operative use by a Cunning-Man or local Wizard, in rural New Hampshire, also in the late 1700s. It does indeed begin to look as if Magick-Use played some part in the early settlement of America (maybe not a huge part, as obviously Magick-Using America has to square with the America of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams: still, the Revolution is “only” eighty years after they literally tried Witches at Salem).

In “Magic and the Occult Sciences in Old New England” in The Rede of the Wiccae (p. 36), we learn of Cunning-Women and Men, Fortune-tellers and Palmists, Scryers or “Glass-Lookers,” Dowsers or “Rods-Men,” “venders of charms and other small magics,” and even the occasional astrologer, alchemist, or perhaps even a conjurer of Spirits. As the authors observe, such folks will not be found among “the urban elite of New England,” preferring instead the privacy and low profile of relatively isolated rural areas- and seaports, as sailors have always been an especially superstitious lot, eager to improve their chances on the hazardous seas with charms and spells. They point to George Lyman Kittredge, who (in 1928, in his fantastic book- and one of my personal favorites- Witchcraft in Old and New England) “recognized a great continuity” between England and early America in such Magickal practices- “as was only to be expected.” Since England is so heavily dominated by Magickal thought during the 1500s and 1600s- both Queen Elizabeth, in the late 1500s, and King James, in the early 1600s, believed in the Powers of Witchcraft and Magicke, as did innumerable of their subjects- “by chance alone,” a proportion of Magickal-Practicing folks will make the migration into the New World.

The reason that this is not more generally known, is that scholars have only recently become aware of these facts. Mathiesen and Theitic observe that it has been only in the last 15 years or so that research has been undertaken into such subjects; they refer to Richard Godbeer (The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England, Cambridge University Press, 1992), who has reviewed much of the evidence of 17th century New England Magick-Use, finding it to resemble 17th century English Magickal practice (as one would expect). They refer also to the work of Peter Benes, who identifies 90 such individuals in New England between 1644 and 1850, suspecting that he has only scratched the surface.

Other fascinating research is alluded to, involving early Mormonism and follow-up on “old hints” that the Smith family (of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr.) had been “deeply involved with a subculture of magic that had flourished in New England and upstate New York during the 1700s and the early 1800s.” A “persistence of occult and hermetic teachings as well as alchemy and ceremonial magic” was found throughout “the same regions during the same centuries,” with specific evidence “far more numerous and varied than anyone had ever suspected”- including general stores that advertised books on the occult sciences for sale, both current and antiquarian, as well as traveling Spirit-Conjurers who maintained sideline interests in alchemy and perhaps even counterfeiting. Mathiesen and Theitic even point out a photograph published by D. Michael Quinn, of a curious, black-handled, double-bladed, hand-forged knife possessed by Joseph Smith, Sr., engraved with sigils (as were several other artifacts owned by the Smiths) copied from Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (both of which were re-printed in England during the mid-1600s).

Add to this the 1950s documentation of one of Edgar Allen Poe’s West Point military instructors, who wrote “extensively” on alchemy and who owned a manuscript copy of the medieval grimoire the Lemegeton, said to date from 1512- and, as the authors of The Rede of the Wiccae conclude (in this kind of digression from their main topic, which is Gwen Thompson’s Rede): “The myth of a Puritan New England, where occultism and magic were rare, and quickly stamped out whenever they appeared, is no more than a myth. The reality was very different indeed.”