I Come, Graymalkin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 10

I Come, Graymalkin

ISS NORA’ COOPER, doubling, toiling and troubling, with her battery of toads, wax imag», devil’s paps, covens, and anthropolo, its, has moved in on 3YA, where her series of talks on Witchcraft Through the Ages

began recently. The series is being heard on Tuesdays at the-not too attractive hour of 2.30 when the listener is not trained to expect anything of wider appeal than A.C.E, talks. Miss Cooper began with a talk subtitled "What it is’ and expounded the origins of magic and sorcery in primitive life. The most interesting fact to an amateur about sorcery in its natural form is that it is morally neutral. Like science in the modern age, it presents a set of techniques for comprehending and controlling natural forces, and leaves it to the practitioner to use them benevolently or malevolently. It would be possible (but for getting away from the point) to depict the primitive discovery of the idea of magic as containing the seeds of all science, engineering, and civilisation, since for the first time men believed that the human mind might, by developing its knowledge and method, obtain " power over nature, and impress its will upon it; a salutary recollection for the 20th Century rationalist, ‘so pleased with himself for not believing in treespirits. But European witchcraft (to return to our murrains and continue to cultivate our paddocks) is generally treated as a survival of the primitive vegetation and seasonal cults of the pre-Roman peasants and hunters of Europe, driven underground and forced into furtive and unnatural ways by the weight of Christian disapproval. Gods depressed to demons, magicians to witch-doctors, and an enforced secrecy producing rumour, fear, and hatred; such was the underside of medieval civilisation.