The Silver Pentangle & the Amber Alembic

The occult has taken many forms in Britain throughout the ages: from medieval witches and their proliferation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to Wicca people of today following nature cults and pagan devices of white witchcraft. But really witchcraft is about how people in the past have developed their minds and their psychic powers. Men and women have wanted to get a deeper understanding of their world and achieve a greater power and control over it. Because of this, witchcraft has arisen and proliferated. But what is magic ? Well a good definition is that it is an attempt to try and exercise power over other people by an effort of the will. The actual physical world is seen not as real but illusory and therefore it can be changed and controlled by changing other people's minds. If we can do this we are getting a psychic power over them and dominating our world. The occult has always involved in any of its various incarnations the mental and psychic power of the imagination. It would seem that the imagination is at the heart of all magic.

Sympathetic magic, contagious magic and attracting magic all to some extent depend on harnessing the power of the mind. In sympathetic magic one might use a corn dolly as a symbol of someone on which we wish to inflict our hate. By burning it and imagining it as our victim we are destroying or cursing that person. In contagious magic we might try to gain power from something such as a lion or other ferocious beast by wearing its pelt when attempting to acquire its strength and ferocity. In attracting magic you might use both these techniques. Say for example you wanted to meet a lover in a certain place, you would get a symbol of your lover, e.g. a doll, place it on a map of where you wanted to meet and then use a visualization technique where you imagine you are meeting that person to try and effect union.

All magic heavily depends on ritual and ceremony. There are certain concomitants that magic cannot do without. These are : rhythm and repetition, incantations and prescribed words and phrases, special dress and use of objects symbolically, e.g. a dagger or a drawn pentangle on the ground. A pentangle is interesting because it is a symbol of the human body and can be used in spellcasting when the witch will assume a certain position. Using the raised cone of power, the head is position one, the two outstretched arms points two and three, and the two outstretched legs points four and five. If the pentangle points upward it is life-affirming (yang) but if the pentangle points downwards it is in a death-giving mode (yin). The position taken up will vary with the spellcaster's wishes. But obviously a curse will be downward-pointing.

Witches throughout time have been involved in many things. Though not many could ride brooms, many would indulge in cursing neighbours, bringing bad luck to some poor unfortunate or sharing power with a familiar like a black cat or a toad. On the positive side some witches would be fortune-tellers using divination techniques such as scrying, reading reflective surfaces like stones for instance, the tarot cards, oneiromancy or the interpretation of dreams, necromancy, crystal balls, palmistry and numerology. Some witches too would be doctors albeit witch doctors, so you may well live or just as easily die. Herbs would heal but many a witch could poison the right subject.

Old Mother Midnight, a witch local to Hart and buried in the old saxon church there was something of a colourful character. She lived in the seventeenth century and would probably be found brewing up the old amber nectar in an alembic, particularly in her role as brothel-keeper. She was an early version of that age old profession of 'madam' - a right witch by all accounts, but probably serving the local seamen that called in at the nearby port. She would lead a bevy of loose women in orgiastic and Dionysian-style merrymaking. This loose living would be heavily frowned upon by locals and they would just love to call her 'witch'. They could hate her all they liked once they took the moral high ground.

More serious magicians who practised witchcraft in times gone by are most notably Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley. Crowley founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was no stranger to sex magick and Tantrism, a sensual form of achieving divine enlightenment. Abra-Melin was a Mage who attempted to give men an idea of their real self. He particularly attracted the poet W.B. Yeats, a man who had trouble finding himself and a figure that can be referred to as a 'Man with Masks'. W.B.Yeats was also interested in the psychic transportation possible in dreams and how our dreams could affect and influence others also in a dream state.

Today it all seems to be about white witchcraft, not surprisingly as that is all that is socially acceptable. The Harry Potter books have popularized witches and wizards and an entire generation has been raised on the wonder and awe of the occult and the arcane. But when you consider famous English witches were probably just old hags that did a bit of prostitution, you can be forgiven for tittering in the back row. All that ducking-stool stuff seems a long time ago, but maybe today they are still lurking behind the nets and vertical blinds in some ordinary suburb, modern day witches you never even considered, at the centre of some silver pentangle, swigging from the old amber alembic.