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Embracing the Darkness A Cultural History of Witchcraft
John Callow
London: I.B. Tauris, 2017 Hardcover. 272 pages. ISBN 978-1845114695. £19.50
Reviewed by Georges-Claude Guilbert Université Le Havre Normandie.
John Callow is a Lancaster University historian who I believe also teaches at Goldsmiths and heads the Marx Memorial Library in London. He is the author of The Making of King James II (2000), of King in Exile : James II as Warrior, King and Saint (2004), and the coauthor of Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (2001). On the flap cover of Embracing the Darkness he looks like a handsome long-haired vampire straight out of some twenty-first century Hollywood movie, or like a leather-clad warlock—which is completely appropriate. The front cover bears a reproduction of The Witch, by David Rickaert III, the seventeenth-century Flemish painter—another inspired choice.
In ten well-organised chapters, from “The Figure at the Window” to “The Way Through the Woods”, Callow delivers a thorough vision of witchcraft through the ages. Or, rather, more accurately, since this book is pure cultural history, he examines the presence of witches in writings and art from ancient times to today. As he has already shown in his previous books, Callow can be vastly entertaining as well as scrupulous in his research, on the same pages. This is one particularly pleasant aspect of cultural studies, that made some of us choose a cultural studies career. Callow shares that quality with historian Ronald Hutton, who published many books through the years about Pagan religions, folklore, shamans, witches, and druids. His 2017 book, The Witch : A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, should not be seen as competition. On the contrary, the two books complement each other very agreeably.Embracing the Darkness quickly mentions Charles Perrault, Bram Stoker, Walt Disney and the Mother Redcap figure. Callow warns that it deals mostly with seeing “witches where none really exist”, [6] and that because it is a book of cultural studies, it is “constructed from an entirely personal viewpoint” [6]. In his Merseyside village in the 1970s, there was an “old gipsy woman who lived at the end of the lane” [7]. This, of course, is as good a point of entry as any. Callow soon dismisses a few unprofitable misconceptions, and offers unexpected wisdom, notably when it comes to the propensity of the rich and learned in past centuries to take witches seriously, perhaps more than popular classes did. He knows “the public appetite for wonders”, though [61]. He also shows that there was not one specific period, such as the Enlightenment, when overnight, as it were, people declared, “that’s it, we’re not naïve any longer, we know witches don’t really exist”. As well as reading (about) “the theologians, rulers and judiciaries” [11], he proposes scholarly readings of every form of literature from the Greeks to the twenty-first century. Those of us versed in gender studies as much as cultural studies wait behind the hardcover with a metaphorical nailed club, but even if he does not go so far as some might like, he does establish the link between liberated feminists and the twentieth-century revival of Paganism (“the independent and sexually liberated woman of the 1970s” [11]). He states clearly that “witchcraft was an overwhelmingly female phenomenon” [27], and discusses the matter. He does not shy away from stating that the fourth-century mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Hypatia has been seen as a witch and feminist icon in recent years [50]. “Three decades of intense scholarly work have shown that almost every previous assumption about the activities of the witch must be reevaluated or discarded”, he writes [12], before proceeding to do just that.The book is particularly effective in its treatment of central European paintings, such as those by Albrecht Dürer, and their rapport with religion. But its passages on Italian art (Salvator Rosa), French art or British cinema are equally interesting. Every Ken Russell fan remembers The Devils (1971). Based on several sources, it is famously about Father Grandier, in seventeenth-century France, who attempts to protect the city of Loudun from the corrupt Cardinal Richelieu. Hysteria spreads across the city when he is accused of witchcraft by a horribly repressed nun. The movie was viciously attacked by what then constituted the religious right of the UK, in particular by the raging homophobe Mary Whitehouse (the UK’s version of Anita Bryant). Callow makes a valid point that many of us missed: why did the would-be censors attack The Devils, and not so much blockbusters like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)? The answer is that The Exorcist does not question the existence of God, nor that of the Devil and his demons.
Embracing the Darkness addresses every single aspect of witchcraft, every nuance: healers, white witches, sorcerers, visionaries, warlocks, users of hallucinogenic drugs, etc. There are the witches who obey demons’ wishes and those who make demons grant theirs. There are the ritually naked witches and those who wear witches’ costumes. There are the fertile witches and the witches who attack fertility. There are the beautiful witches and the old crones, the Inquisition witches and the others, the witches with goats and those with dildos; the grave-robbers, the cannibals, the child-slayers [86], those who annoy the Catholics and those who annoy the Protestants; there are the confessions and the hysteria, regularly creeping up in distinct places.
Although I am sorry to say that novels such as John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1984) get no more than two lines [61], my personal favourite is perhaps the passage about Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (late second-century AD), the only Latin novel to have survived in its entirety. “Apuleius, like most educated Roman citizens, saw Christianity as a socially divisive and dangerous movement”, we are reminded [44]. “Once transformed into the ass, he has become the lowest of the low. However, while he had played around with the ‘wrong sort’ of magic, [he] had not thought to use it for evil purposes, and this enables him to win back the sympathies of the gods” [45]. I also derived much satisfaction from the chapter on Sister Jeanne of the Angels and the possessions at her Ursuline convent. Callow has read Jules Michelet and knows when to use him and when not. My only qualm is that I myself would have also looked in some detail at the witches of comic books, notably superhero comic books.
This book provides adequate illustrations and will no doubt find its place in many cultural studies, history and womens' studies libraires.
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