Witchcraft’s Decline

This chapter explores witchcraft's major decline. It occurred much later than many people realise: during the first half of the twentieth century. Britons were living healthier, more comfortable lives. Their ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality was hardly consistent with making themselves believe in the reality of terrible magic. They no longer entertained themselves with tales of local witches: radio, cinema, and television were more interesting. But the main reason Britons stopped blaming their misfortunes on evil spells lay elsewhere. The state was growing, its tentacles reaching into previously ignored areas. Health care was becoming more regulated and professional magicians began to suffer. Cunning-folk, fortune-tellers, and itinerant Roma women had skirted around hostile laws designed to stop them from making money with magic. But this was no longer the case.

Occultists Study Dark Arts

This chapter shows that witchcraft did not beguile only rustic simpletons during the Victorian era. In cities and suburbs, behind expensive curtains and in bay-windowed houses, avant-garde types experimented with new forms of occultism. Spiritualism, theosophy, Christian Science, and extremely complex ritual magic — these types of mysticism are often seen as positive, therapeutic, and emancipating. In many ways they were, but the late Victorian occult revival had dark sides too. Many occultists were intrigued by evil powers and some were absolutely obsessed with them. These characters, with their strange theories and esoteric investigations, helped to refresh the idea of witchcraft, rendering it in terms that befitted the modern age.

Tough Superstition

This chapter reveals the difficulties of convincing the people to discard their ‘superstitions’. However, this change was slow to come and was not brought about by reason or enlightenment. Between about the 1830s and 1860s, campaigners against superstition strove to convince their compatriots that witchcraft was risible nonsense. These campaigners failed because ridding people of their occult beliefs is far harder than many non-believers imagine. It was not social activism but the growth of professional policing that stopped mobs from attacking eccentric, vulnerable, and usually innocent people. Alleged witches were somewhat safer, but knowledge of the occult's finer details remained rife.

Blood the Witch, Swim the Wizard

This chapter shows that in early 1800s Britain, witchcraft was widely believed in. Magical traditions, traceable to the period of the witch trials and before, were strong. Villagers and townsfolk ducked, mobbed, attacked, and bullied witches. Privately, many sophisticated and wealthy people sympathised. Not with victims of superstitious violence, but with the perpetrators. Indeed, witchcraft troubled many well-to-do folk during the early 1800s. This chapter explores a remarkable area of common ground between the masses, the upper classes, and those in the middle. More often than one might expect, they agreed with each other: sorcery was real, and witches deserved to be punished.

Black Magic in Modern Times

This chapter shows that the history of black magic in modern times is a cosmopolitan drama. Human movement rapidly accelerated from the nineteenth century. People, goods, technologies, and ideas began crossing the earth at a dizzying rate. Travellers took their magical beliefs abroad and encountered new mysticisms when they got there. Empires regulated their colonial subjects in all sorts of ways, including how they dealt with witches. Witchcraft became more international, though at the same time it remained fundamentally rooted in local circumstances. This means that, to understand modern witchcraft, one must combine a global orientation with a local focus. And an excellent place for that local focus is a large island, lying on the eastern edge of the North Atlantic Ocean: Britain.