This is the introduction I wrote to my transcription and edit of Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus; it will not be appearing in the printed edition, so I reproduce it here.
The book itself will be published by Holythorn Press at the end of March. Introduction This actually happened: a friend from the southern reaches of the Appalachia was telling me about her experiences with Hoodoo and the tent revival scene, and how she's seen people with her own eyes regurgitate nails and pins during an exorcism.
This captured what I want to say about Joseph Glanvill's work and the persistence of the seventeenth-century so well; if you at all doubt what Glanvill and , and their various gentleman correspondents recount in Saducismus Triumphatus, you have only to join the Pentecostalist circuit in North Carolina. What happened then, happens now; context and interpretation vary, of course, but the heart of the thing, the phenomenon, is what it is.
Glanvill never saw Saducismus Triumphatus through the press; he died in 168o, leaving his manuscript with his friend Henry More, who published it in 1681, expanding it for its subsequent edition. Glanvill's work is the heart of the work, to be sure, but More deserves more credit than he generally receives; his commentary and additional material is illuminating, and all the memorable turns of phrase are his. I will forever call my own critics 'the Sir Foplings of this present age'. I also now aspire to tend my garden, and 'hunt the humble-bee'.
Which touches on perhaps the principle reason anyone would present a new edition of Saducismus Triumphatus; it is just a very good read. As a collection of ghost stories and tales of witchcraft, it is cracking, and at times honestly scary; I don't doubt the influence this book had on the imagination of M.R. James, who certainly knew it. There are things in these relations that stay with you.
For example:
The next night, they strewed ashes over the chamber to see what impressions it would leave; in the morning, they found in one place the resemblance of a great claw, in another of a lesser, some letters in another which they could make nothing of besides many circles and scratches in the ashes.
Or my personal favourite:
After it had scratched about half an hour or more, it went into the midst of the bed under the children, and there seemed to pant like a dog out of breath very loudly. I put my hand upon the place, and felt the bed bearing up against it, as if something within had thrust it up. I grasped the feathers to feel if any living thing were in it; I looked under and everywhere about to see if there were any dog or cat, or any such creature in the room; and so we did all, but found nothing. The motion it caused by this panting was so strong that it shook the room and windows very sensibly; it continued thus more than half an hour, while my friend and I stayed in the room, and as long after as we were told.
During the panting, I chanced to see as it had been something which I thought was a rat or mouse moving in a linen bag that hung up against another bed that was in the room; I stepped and caught it by the upper end with one hand, with which I held it, and drew it through the other, but found nothing at all in it. There was nobody near to shake the bag, or if there had, no one could have made such a motion which seemed to be from within, as if a living creature had moved in it.
Both these incidents occur in the context of the famous Mompesson haunting, the story of the Demon Drummer of Tedworth, which I first encountered in Gould & Cornell's magisterial 'Poltergeists'. It comprises part of their historical survey of the phenomenon, but has a chapter to itself because Glanvill relates Mompesson's adventure so lucidly; his objectives in examining these cases might have been at variance with the late-twentieth century Society for Psychical Research's corporate policy, but he proceeds methodically, considering the possibilities and counters, testing his intuitions, his suspicions. It's dangerous to claim this or that is the point of departure for modern psychical research, but Saducismus Triumphatus certainly has a plausible claim, and this story in particular.
Glanvill's examination of the case has to be appreciated in terms of his philosophical preoccupations, and the controversies of his day. This is the epoch of Descartes and Spinoza, Leibnitz and Newton; it is also the afterglow of the Thirty Years War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a time of great trauma on so many levels. Glanvill and More are examining their case studies along two axes: on the one hand, they are countering what they perceive as a materialist, atheist critique developing on the continent, particularly by the application of Descartes method of doubt; in fact, they were originally advocates for the new philosophy, only adapting a stance against it when they felt it was being misapplied to subvert. The other axis, however, is theological; Calvinists in particular objected to the concept of the dead appearing to and interacting with the living, much as others affirmed the 'age of miracles' had ceased with the passing of the apostles; the dead sleep in the grave until doomsday, and wonders are delusional, natural or the guile of the demon.
In all simplicity, Glanvill and More set out to say something a luminary of the Society for Psychical Research once said: I didn't claim it was possible, only that it happened. They stress the credibility of their sources, the instances of multiple attestation; this is particularly the case in their treatment of the Wincanton witch trials, where the depositions from the magistrate's papers accumulate to provide a fascinating glimpse of witchery as organised crime. Wherever possible, they rely on first-hand testimony, or their own observations; the point is, they might not be able to tell you why the thing happens - though Henry More will try his best, at length - but what they can affirm is it really happened.
And subsequent psychical research bears them out. It is no exaggeration to say every paranormal event they describe - like the appalling nail thing we opened with - is attested many times in the modern literature.
For example:
At the same time, a bedstaff was thrown at the minister, which hit him on the leg, but so favourably that a lock of wool could not fall more softly, and it was observed that it stopped just where it lighted, without rolling or moving from the place.
That sense of an object not being so much projected as conveyed with great precision and irony is noted frequently in the literature of the modern poltergeist phenomenon; I could rephrase that extract, and probably persuade you it was taken from Playfair's 'This House is Haunted'.
About the latter end of December 1661, the drumming was left frequent; and then they heard a noise like the jingling of money occasioned, as it was thought, by something Mr. Mompesson's mother had spoken the day before to a neighbour who talked offairies leaving money, viz., that she should like it well if it would leave them some to make amends for their trouble. The night after the speaking of which, there was a great chinking of money over all the house.
Again, poltergeist mimicry and interaction is a matter of consistent record. In fact, your devoted servant has experienced himself in a basement flat on Whitstable seafront.
And that intersection of folklore and the paranormal has a comfortably contemporary feel, especially in the light of the `psychoanthropological' movement's willingness to entertain the possibility that stories are not always stories, and that there may be a commonality to accounts across cultures and time which suggests a core of experiential truth. Not everything is metaphor, and sometimes Occam's Razor cuts for the Fair Folk.
Which brings us to witchcraft. This book includes the classic accounts of the Wincanton, Youghal and Swedish witch trials, which stand on their own merits as literature and historical documents; but do they support Glanvill and Moore's thesis that people really did associate to practice malefic magic?
One of the stories More appends is about a fellow attempting to leave a Quaker congregation, but experiencing paranormal activity akin to that described in, say, the Wincanton case. And really, there is so much to unpack there, regarding the intersection of religious nonconformity, political radicalism, folklore and crime; there might be a case for saying sectaries, brigands and witches have in common their outlawry, and they all act according to the archetypes, constituting a continuum, a spectrum of folkloric villainy and resistance.
The Wincanton witches, according to their confessions, met in various locations in walking distance of their homes along the way, on common land and hilltops; fires were lit, music played, poppets baptised in the names of their victims, and business conducted. The members of this group were recruited like members of a cell, a sorcerous Baader-Meinhof gang; marginalised people talked into attendance, paid a little money to tide them over, promised the means of restitution and retribution.
That the Devil about ten years since appeared to her in the shape of a handsome man, and after of a black dog.
That he promised her money, and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the world for twelve years, if she would with her blood sign his paper, which was to give her soul to him and observe his laws, and that he might suck her blood. This after four sollicitations the examinant promised to do; upon which, he pricked the fourth finger of her right hand, between the middle and upper joint (where the sign at the examination remained), and with a drop or two of her blood she signed the paper with an '0'. Upon this, the Devil gave her sixpence, and vanished with the paper.
Wouldst thou?
Here's the thing, though. This is all described so vividly, so plausibly, that were it regarding, say, Ranters or Baptists, I doubt anyone would much worry about its essential truth. In our own time, people gather to do all the things Glanvill and his sources describe, and much more besides; they, in fact, draw upon the same store of folkloric archetypes and tropes as people did in Glanvill's own day. Nobody doubts they exist; visit Treadwell's and see for yourself. And nobody questions the existence of Quakers. So why the reluctance to acknowledge that if people believed in the efficacy of magic - which they did - and if they believed other people gathered to practice it as part of a criminal conspiracy - which they also did- it is completely plausible that they enacted all this in real time, just as people do today?
I believe Glanvill confronts us with that.
En passant, the Wincanton case exerted a fascination for Margaret Murray, who drew upon its vivacious details in her works. I believe it is reasonable to say aspects of Wincanton witchcraft consequently live and breathe; some of you reading this greet one another as they greeted themselves on a dark Somerset evening.
Saducismus Triumphatus also affords us a glimpse of the 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' world of the provincial gentleman magician:
He had been a soldier under Cromwell, and used to talk much of gallant books he had of an old fellow who was counted a wizard. Upon this occasion, I shall here add a passage which I had not from Mr. Mompesson, but yet relates to the main purpose.
The gentleman who was with me at the house, Mr. Hill, being in company with one Compton of Somersetshire, who practised physick and pretends to strange matters, related to him this story of Mr. Mompesson's disturbance. The physician told him he was sure it was nothing but a rendezvous of witches, and that for a hundred pounds he would undertake to rid the house of all disturbance. In pursuit of this discourse, he talked of many high things, and having drawn my friend into another room apart from the rest of the company, said he would make him sensible he could do something more than ordinary, and asked him who he desired to see. Mr. Hill had no great confidence in his talk, but yet being earnestly pressed to name someone, he said, he desired to see no one so much as his wife, who was then many miles distant from them at her home.
Upon this, Compton took up a looking-glass that was in the room, and setting it down again, bid my friend look into it, which he did; and there, as he most solemnly and seriously professeth, he saw the exact image of his wife in that habit which she then wore, and working at her needle in such a part of the room (there represented also) in which and about which time she really was, as he found upon enquiry when he came home.
The gentleman himself averred this to me, and he is a very sober, intelligent and credible person. Compton had no knowledge of him before, and was an utter stranger to the person of his wife. The same man we shall meet again in the story of the witchcrafts of Elizabeth Style, whom he discovered to be a witch by foretelling her coming into a house and going out again without speaking, as is set down in the Third Relation. He was by all accounted a very odd person.
Mr. Compton is played by Julian Barratt here, in the theatre of my imagination.
In a nutshell, Glanvill and More are saying this: whatever your ideological reservations, the fact is people you might plausibly know experience extraordinary things strongly suggestive of the reality of an invisible world inhabited by the ghosts of the dead, on the one hand, and spirits of another order of existence, with whom we can interact. We inhabit a haunted landscape, the dead walk among us, witches cast spells and people pull thorns out of their children as a result, and things are revealed to gentlemen of sound repute in mirrors. Live with it.
The grounds for belief they present are rational, and that is what is so exciting about this book philosophically; they are building the case for a reasonable acceptance of the paranormal, based upon observation and experiment. This also serves to underline something important about seventeenth-century people in general: they were not fools.
It's been suggested that Glanvill and More developed their particular interest in the paranormal when attending the salon of Lady Anne Conway, who deserves so much more attention than she has ever received; published philosopher, occult experimenter, and in the end a convert to the Quakerism More had such a problem with. So many currants of seventeenth-century English counter-cultural thought run through her life that she is our uncrowned queen, to my mind at least.
This extraordinary time, when there is a blossoming of esoteric writing and publishing, the time of Culpeper's radicalism, Lilly's weaponised astrology, and the Englishing of Agrippa and the Heptameron. It's been said it witnessed a post-Hermetic occult revival, grounded more in Classical and Jewish sources, and the charismatic practices of the Protestant underworld, than in the Neo-Platonism of fifteenth-century Italy. The occult revival of the nineteenth-century has occluded it, to a great extent; for me, however, it is far more vital, more grounded in the palpable, in what happens in churchyards and sitting rooms. It beguiles, while the other disappoints and bores.
Because who, really, wouldn't want to accompany Mompesson taking a turn about his house at night, pistol in hand, or be present at the assize when a murderer confessed, compelled by the testimony of the woman he slew, as it was revealed to someone working one night alone, by candlelight, in a clothmill whose ruins are still extant? Or enjoy the wrecking crew at Woodstock being hunted from room to room of a now-lost palace?
Saducismus Triumphatus is many things, more or less. What it is, absolutely, is a delight.
When we were working on this edition, I accompanied the publishers, who were then living in seventeenth/eighteenth-century farmhouse in Glastonbury not very unlike Mompesson's manor house, on a tour of the various places around Wincanton associated with the witches. We paid a visit to a hilltop, which may or may not be one of the places they met. In the woods, we came across an old, neatly divided stone bowl, like a font. Very much like a deconsecrated font, where witches once met to baptise themselves and their homuncular creations.
Another time, along a sunken lane, we came to a stop because a very large brown rat and a crow were standing in the road, as if in conversation. They turned to look at the three of us, and walked off together into the hedge.
I merely mention this.
My thanks to Sally and James at Holythorn Press for sharing my enthusiasm, and to Dawn for sparkling.
The edition I have used is the one published in 1726, and digitised by the Wellcome Institute. This conforms to the text in its complete revised form of 1682 (as More discusses in his introductory remarks), with only one exception; a lengthy extract from one of Moore's own works which he inserted to corroborate Glanvill's thesis has been removed, simply because it was so redundant, and liable to test the reader's patience. It certainly tested mine. As this was an insertion, I felt it could be removed without doing the text any violence.
Other than that, the entire text has been transcribed afresh, and its spelling and punctuation brought more or less into line with modern usage. In that respect, this is a new, Modern English edition. If nothing else, the introduction of modern paragraphing will be reason for rejoicing.
Visit the Holythorn Press website more about the things we discovered along the way, and our terrifying paranormal adventures.
Paul Summers Young
Comments
Post a Comment