Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas Waters

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas Waters Stanislav Panin Keywords Britain, witchacraft, black magic, dark mysticism, folklore, superstition, curse, unwitchers, Mesmerism, anti-witchcraft laws thomas waters. Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 358 + 20 ills. In Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times, Thomas Waters focuses on the history of belief in witchcraft and black magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain—an intriguing and monumental project encompassing two hundred years of history and a set of complex issues. The book targets a broad audience, for which it can serve as an introduction to the topic, and promises to address several fundamental questions, namely, "What exactly is black magic and how has it changed over time? What role did witchcraft play in our ancestors' lives and what is its status today? What are the harms and are there any benefits? Above all, what should we do about the recent resurgence in dark mysticism?" (2) The book is divided into ten chronologically organized chapters complete with illustrations and useful maps. It is based on meticulously collected sources, of which historical newspapers are especially interesting and play an important role in the narrative. The description of nineteenth-century popular beliefs concerning witchcraft and black magic constitutes the strongest aspect of the book. Waters describes a gamut of cases of alleged black magic and discusses the practice of unwitching, showing the pervasiveness [End Page 161] and resilience of belief in magic, as well as the persistence of mobbing and assaults of suspected witches during the nineteenth century. Waters demonstrates how various factors affected the situation. He points out, for instance, that unwitchers functioned as mental health professionals and compares their practice to faith-adapted cognitive behavioral therapy (130). However, while helping people to cope with psychological issues, magical professionals also ignited fears of black magic and witches, contributing to assaults on people suspected of witchcraft. Neither education nor attempts to publicly debunk magic affected belief in it. Instead, the primary factor in the decline of anti-witch violence, according to Waters, was the growing police presence that stopped mobs from attacking suspects (67). At the same time, suppression of physical violence contributed to the growing popularity of unwitchers. Even though magical services were prohibited by the 1736 Witchcraft Act and the 1824 Vagrancy Act, magical professionals continued their operations (63–64); because people could not solve their problems by killing witches, they had to turn to magical means to counter black magic. Waters touches upon other aspects of the story as well, including the emerging field of folkloristics and the influence of British colonies or, at least their romanticized depictions, as igniting interest in native spirituality. He also tries to show how urban intellectual readings of esotericism interacted with folk beliefs in discussions concerning mesmerism, Levi's image of Baphomet, and Dion Fortune's concept of "psychic self-defense." Compared to the discussion of the nineteenth-century material, the coverage of topics related to the twentieth century is more uneven and superficial. For instance, Waters includes a section about Wicca, discusses Christian exorcists who have enjoyed a revival of popularity among Anglicans since the 1970s, and provides a fairly detailed discussion of Dion Fortune's ideas concerning magical harm. However, the book avoids topics related to modern Satanism and figures who claimed various flavors of dark magic as their identity, from "Typhonian" esotericism of Kenneth Grant to radical groups like the Order of Nine Angles.1 [End Page 162] This avoidance can be partly explained by a fact that, despite promising to answer the question "what exactly is black magic," the book never clearly defines it. Instead, the author relies on vague notions like "superstition" and "evil" (or, occasionally, "dark") "mysticism" in somewhat circular attempts to explain what witchcraft and black magic are. In the index, the word "witchcraft" redirects to "black magic." In the text, witchcraft itself is defined through a concept of black magic and as "the sort of evil mysticism that takes hold when terrible things happen, disasters mount, and...