Black Magic
Windle, Bertram C. A.
BLACK MAGIC By BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE THE second volume of the Cambridge Ancient History contains amidst a wealth of interesting matter, an allusion to early magic which brings to mind...
...It appears, however, that the priors were far less generous, for they had the interests of their order to look after...
...To use the language of the account written at the time, the judges "forsook the good instruction which had been given them" but in vain, for this matter having come to the knowledge of Rameses, he promptly cut off the ears and noses of two of the judges and permitted the others to commit suicide in the court over which they had presided...
...One of the most favorite tricks of black magic is to make an image of the person you desire—either of wax, as here, or of clay, as in the Keltic COrp CTaidhe, a well known instance in folk-lore---and then, either maltreat it or allow it to be wasted by fire or otherwise...
...Otherwise, how explain the wonderful drawings of the animals of the day, some of them with darts sticking out from their most vital parts ? Nor is it extinct this day amongst savage races, and it may shrewdly be suspected tnat in those places where blasphemous decadents assemble to carry out the "black mass" there, too, warming before the fire will from time to time be found a wax figure or a corp craidhe designed to injure some enemy...
...The figure might have pins stuck into it, in which case dire sufferings would be produced at the points of puncture, or it might be placed in front of a fire slowly to melt away and then its prototype would in like manner waste away in the fires of consumption...
...They were afterward to proceed to deal with the prior, of course, and also with King Edward II, who was, according to rule, modeled in his crown...
...Things had reached such a state by the year 1323 that some of the discontented prior's men actually took into their councils one Master John de Nottingham, set to work, and by way of trying the experiment, style him, and the doings in the case subsequently were made public in a trial before the court of King's Bench for, oddly enough, trials for witchcraft took place in the civil and not in the ecclesiastical courts...
...The trial is recorded in the Lansdowne manuscript and, it may be remarked, is the first trial for witchcraft held in England...
...Her ride is one of the myths which we must give up, for, at the time it is supposed to have taken place, Coventry cannot have consisted of more than a couple of hundred huts...
...The case was sent from the court of first instance to a jury and all the accused but Nottingham were admitted to bail...
...it had no market place nor tolls...
...When Rameses III ruled over Egypt, some twelve hundred years B. C, there was discovered an attempt to upset the existing state of things through what is known as the harem conspiracy...
...However, the point is that amongst the objects brought into court in connection with the trial were sundry wax images, the purpose of which there can be no doubt...
...In this case the effort on the part of one of the wives was to set her own son on the throne, irrespective of the claims of others...
...The plot was discovered and sent for judgment by the pharaoh to his courts...
...and several other important personages of the realm and the convent...
...She was not the first, for we may feel sure from the paintings in the caves of the late palaeolithic age at least ten thousand years ago that a very similar form of magic was practised then...
...On the Friday before the feast of the Holy Rood, le Marshall, acting under the instructions of Nottingham, poked a leaden bodkin into the forehead of Richard Sowe's image...
...The burghers had the money and the earl got it on condition that he grant a charter allowing them more freedom than had existed before...
...Whatever happens to the figure will happen, if the proper incantations are said, to the person whom it is intended to represent...
...Thus, as the town grew, it came to consist of an "earl's half" and a "prior's half," both under different governance...
...One of the most curious instances is that which is narrated in Miss Dormer Smith's very interesting History of Coventry...
...Thus it came to pass that the prior's half was much more tied up by tolls and other annoyances than its fellow on the other side of the main street...
...and above all, Luriche and Godgifu were not only a devoted, but very devout couple to whom the suggestion of such a thing as the famous ride would have been a horror...
...Naturally, this led to great jealousies and many disputes...
...On the whole, those of the earl's half had much the better of it, for earls at times wanted cash for purposes of their own, such as raising forces for a crusade...
...On the Wednesday before the Ascension, le Marshall, again acting under instructions, took the bodkin out of the head of the figure and plunged it into the place where its heart would have been had it had one, whereupon and at that moment Robert Sowe in the convent departed this life...
...It seems that these disgruntled and dissatisfied persons offered the limb of Satan a large sum of money and subsequent maintenance for life if he would seriously mischief the prior and a selected list of others, and with that offer they brought him seven pounds of wax and two yards of canvas...
...They divided the town of Coventry into two halves, keeping one for themselves and giving the other forever to the Benedictines who there set up a great and famous abbey...
...It is an ancient and a long-lived method...
...That ancient and still flourishing city, prior to the Norman conquest, belonged to a certain Earl Luriche or Leofric who had to wife one Godgifu, commonly and erroneously called Godiva in most of the books...
...Whereupon, the magician and his assistant, Robert le Marshall, who afterward became "approver" or witness against Nottingham, set to work and by way of trying the experiment, they first of all operated on one Richard Sowe, an underling at the convent, a person of no importance, but for some reason obnoxious...
...Before the assizes were held, he had died, and some of the others were not forthcoming, so that when the case actually came before a jury, there was but one person to be tried and he, very distantly connected with the matter, was acquitted by the jurors, apparently quite properly...
...Some of the conspirators were bold enough to get hold of the judges who were to try the case and persuade them to meet them at clandestine festivities...
...Readers of Dumas will remember the construction of the wax figure of the king, with his crown so that he might be unmistakable, an account of which is given in La Reine Margot...
...In the morning le Marshall was sent around to the convent to make kind inquiries, and returned with the news that he had found Sowe "as mad as mad could be...
...With a lot of jealous, unoccupied women shut away from the world, it readily may be understood that intrigues and small turmoils must have been taking place constantly...
...BLACK MAGIC By BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE THE second volume of the Cambridge Ancient History contains amidst a wealth of interesting matter, an allusion to early magic which brings to mind some curious incidents...
...It was less fortunate to be a bribed judge in those days than in later times...
...In this case we have the procedure described in the legal documents of the day and doubtless the Egyptian queen was about to carry things out in the same manner...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 12
