Aroint Thee, Witch!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 392, 27 December 1946, Page 12

Aroint Thee, Witch!

ISS NORMA R: COOPER has just finished her sixth .and final talk in her Monday morning series from 2YA on Witchcraft Through the Ages. Now witchcraft has a horrid fascination, but the strange thing about Miss Cooper’s talks was that they were not particularly horrid. Fascinating, yes, because I am sure Miss Cooper’s listeners would not have had the will-power necessary to turn off the set before 11.15. But at the end of the short quarter-of-an-hour the hungry sheep were still looking up, -unable to believe that the nice clean grass they had been given was their full allowance. For Miss Cooper managed to present her witches as, in general, sane and harmless. Her talk on "Witchcraft in Scotland" struck a particularly sympathetic note. We are perhaps inclined to think of witches as warped and antisocial, but Miss Cooper quotes the case of a chapter of witches and wizards banding together to encompass the death of James VI, a project which to many may have seemed positively altruistic. Moreover, I was impressed with théir businesslike method of procedure, and the recipe for raising a tempest (by throwing a she-cat into the sea) must have appealed to cat-haters as an admirable method of killing two birds with one stone. But levity aside, Miss Cooper’s talks were inclined to be lacking in, philosophic meat. Her easy conclusion that witchcraft no longer exists is not supported by the findings of anthropologists or even social workers,.and she scarcely stops to peer into the dark side of the human soul of which witch and witch-bajter are but two of the facets. _