“The concept that certain objects contain and emanate magical power, sometimes given the name Fetishism, is ancient and has assumed myriad forms. The image-making powers of sorcery, and its attendant set of rites, are also encompassed by this secular term. Veneration of such objects as divine, termed 'idolatry' in the Abrahamic religions, has variously been viewed as a sin, error, crime, abomination or heresy. In contrast, from the perspective ofthe practitioner of image-magic, the concepts regarded by outsiders as fetishism and idolatry are part of a greater complex of magical knowledge and practices which permits varied levels of engagement with spirituous power. Whether such wyrd-infused images emanate bane or blessing, it is their sacrality of origin and use, transcendent of external definition, which, in part, elevates their power.
Witchcraft, because of its syncretic nature, partakes of multiple infusions of traditional image-making lore, including not only sorcery and religious iconography, but also the sciences, astrology, medicine, craftsmanship, the fine arts and magical ontologies closely resembling totemism. However, because much of its magical images are used privately, and indeed are created for a limited set of viewers, they participate in a concentrated alembic of exposure wherein all who experience them do so principally in the context of magical practice and devotion. This intensity of private magical interaction provides a locus which enables the image to transcend its medium - and indeed that fetish known as 'icon' - and generates living numen. This is one essential distinction between images made by practicing sorcerers, and images made about them, from those outside their arena of magical operation.
In using the term witchcraft, I refer here not merely to the deeds ofwitches as imagined by the Christian Inquisitor or classic anthropologist literature , where such were defined purely as magical malefactors. Rather, in addition to the ideas accreted to the historical form of the maledictus, I speak of the art of the sorcerer, usually rural or marginal to society, who holds traffic with spirits and makes use of both healing and harming spells. This zone of definition penetrates many eras, and milieus, including juridical, heresiological, literary and artistic. Of greater import than all of these to our study are the actual practices exacted by these historical practitioners, which are preserved as archaeological remains - and in the teachings and practices of the modern inheritors of these magical traditions.
The modern occult embodiment of traditional witchcraft, itself a reclusive and tightly knit body of practitioners whose practices relate to those of the historical cunning-folk, is also an inheritor of a number of traditions of image-magic. Consisting of small groups preserving teachings of archaic rural magic, these traditions are taught orally, passed from master or mistress to apprentice, in a direct person-to-person means of initiatic transmission. Though rooted in the past, this corpus of magic adapts to the present, and is self conscious of an envisioned magical future. As an initiate of these traditions, this body of knowledge, in part, informs my understanding of these subjects as expressed in the present treatise.
Scholarly investigations of image-magic in witchcraft have focused largely upon figures used for malediction. This is often because of the tendency of many researchers to define witchcraft principally as malevolent sorcery. In addition many such images, as a consequence of their purpose, were fated to become part of the archaeological record, sealed in walls, thrown into wells and springs, and in humed under earth. The waxen image, seal inscribed parchment, and curse-mommet have all been the subject of scrutiny, and recur in varied permutations in historical manuals of witchcraft and grimoires. Many such images are deemed crude in their craftsmanship, at least by the standards of art history, contributing to their lay perception as objects of ignorance and superstition, or, at best, 'folk art'. The exemplar of the sheep's heart, pierced with hawthorn spines and nailed to a door as a spell to stop gossip, is a case in point.
Aesthetically, some lesser-known witchcraft images would seem to display precisely the opposite characteristics. One ofthe most striking objects of this kind on record, referenced in Ewen’s Witchcraft and Demonianism, comes from an illustrated parchment found in 1606 in the chest of a Hertfordshire witch. It bore a central image of a human heart, from which radiated "very curiously divided braunches, on which hung dangling things like ashen keys'', as well as delicately elaborated arterial termini detailing very specific portions of human anatomy. The owner of the parchment admit ted to its use for sending magic to cause bodily harm, much in the same manner as a thorn-pierced effigy. This example reveals a high degree of imaginal complexity in the origina tion ofwitch-imagery, and an almost scientific, or empirical, approach to cursing.
Enchanted Images of witchcraft praxis often serve a strictly sorcerous function, being vehicula of spell-craft and manifestation, as opposed to the veneration of a spirit or god, a dynamic more often present in religion. The large number of Mandrake charms extant in folk magic, where the natural or carved root is used as a fetish, bear witness to this. Mandrake sorcery may be considered a specialization of both image-magic and herbalism, historically found in witchcraft and cunning-folk practice, but also in alchemy and ceremonial magic. The pattern common to all is the Art of image magic, the Fetish serving as the embodiment of sorcerous desire, or as the manifest form of a familiar or Magistellus.
Cunning-folk traditions, and surviving cor pora of charming practice, have within their communities an advanced set of images and regalia which exemplify a confluence ofspirit veneration and magical utility. Many of these objects can be found conserved in such places as the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle Corn wall, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The Cornish charmer Cecil Williamson, whose training intersected some patterns of cunning folk practice, was an adept maker of magical images, and several of his talismanic seals, composed for the concentration of specific energies, still reside at the Museum. There is also a series of photographs taken of Williamson demonstrating the grave art of making a curse poppet.
Similarly, some modern traditional witch craft groups, drawing on the roots of their tra ditional cunning-folk practices, reckon the holed stone or 'hagstone' as a repository of feminine power, its central hollow having been formed by the forces ofnature and serving as a simulacrum of the lumen ofthe Goddess ofthe Sabbat. Likewise the witch regards the 'Stone God', an oblong stone naturally shaped like the membrum virile, as the telluric embodiment of phallic virtue, and used as a surrogate for the God during rites of sexual magic. Their respective magical uses encompass the power of the Holy Icon, but importantly also serve as the sexual surrogate during ecstatic rites where the witch 'mounts the gods'. In this transcendental state of carnal reverie, Object and Spirit are co-identified and the boundaries between their states ofidentity are effectively eradicated. The state of physical alienation thus generated by transposing the sexual act from the realm of the human-relational into the realm of 'Other' assists in incepting a magical consciousness ofpraeter-sexuality.
The Richel-Eldermanns Collection, an assemblage of ritual objects and drawings residing in the previously-mentioned Museum of Witchcraft, presents one ofthe most potent examples of image-magic in the modern European magical traditions. While clearly linked to the arcana ofthe sex-magic practices of the modern magical orders 0.T.O. and A:.A:., there is also a strong and persistent component of rural cunning-craft and witch-iconography which is grafted, in varying degrees, to complex ceremonial formulæ. Part of this collection is a series of skillfully-carved wooden hands and genitalia, some united with sigillic forms such as pentagrams to form enigmatic magical regalia. Given the uniquity of the images, as well as the detail with which they were produced, it is reasonable to surmise they were ritually-hallowed anatomical simulacra of initiates of the sexual magic order Ars Amatoria (of which Eldermanns was Magister) or, perhaps the more obscure M:.M:. The collection, when considered as a whole, is a sound exemplar of a unified iconography within a magical order, but one arising from diverse pathways of magical aesthesis via the hands of many different artists and practitioners.
Ritual veneration of images - or eidolatria - is challenging to document in historical witchcraft practice; many such images or figures are presumably concealed within cultic shrines, or as heirlooms in private collections. The so-called Hendy Head of Anglesey, a face carved of red sandstone in the manner of other ancient Celtic heads of the region, is in present times by cultic rites similar to some forms of image-veneration in traditional witchcraft. We may also consider the wandering head of Atho, a horned countenance carved of oak originally in the custodianship of English witchcraft practitioner Raymond Howard, since stolen. This large effigy, bearing some resemblance to the Dorset Ooser of Dorchester, is carved [in] a rustic and eldritch fashion evocative of the Janicot, the horned witches' god. Though it was later revealed the Atho head did not possess the antiquity. Howard initially claimed, the rites of its veneration, its curious symbolism, the magnetic folklore surrounding it, and its sudden disappearance present a fascinating example of twentieth-century image-magic in the Craft. More recently, witch-iconography present in Andrew Chumbley's grimoire Azoëtia utilizes several ancient magical visual grammars, notably the stele of the Near Eastern and Mayan religions of antiquity; images of the Witch-guardians or 'Passionate Retinue' in Chumbley's Dragon-Book of Essex most closely approximate polytheistic iconography.
While the ritual veneration of images is often associated with religion, its practice in witchcraft is often compounded with other magical techniques that classify it as sorcery, or, at the least as part of a cult of spirit-congress. In the witchcraft Traditions ofthe Cultus Sabbati, the figure of Cain is one example of such image veneration which may be publicly documented. However, if one puts aside the images and artifacts of modern witchcraft orders - even those capable demonstrating some degree of historical linkage with the cunning folk magic and popular sorcery prior to the twentieth century - the preponderance of evidence for magical images in association with magical images in association with witchcraft lies in their magical use, rather than in their veneration. This does not, however, negate their status as images of power.
Some years ago, whilst sojourning in the West Country, I was shown an imagic object of alleged cultic worship and witchcraft practice which, according to its present steward, had been used in this manner by fellow adepts of that tradition for ten generations. Indeed, the particulars of the item would place its manufacture in England, somewhere between the late sixteenth century and the early nineteenth century, a span of 150 years, and precisely the period from which some modern traditional witchcraft lineages in Britain claim descent. Upon examination, it was clear the object had been both ritually venerated and well cared for, but this no more proves its history as an image-artifact of witchcraft than any magical anecdote which cannot be independently confirmed. However, it was also evident that, whatever the facts of the idol's history truly were, there was no doubt of its owner's conviction in these matters, nor of its present power of imagic fascination.”
Witchcraft and the Imaging of Power
Chapter 1: ‘Imago and Spiritus’
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