Search

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

In summer 2011, Private Eye featured in their ‘Funny Old World’ column a letter written by one Radnor the Wise. He had sent this letter to the Surrey Advertiser , in an attempt to address local concern about the Wiccan practice of draping a sacred tree in underwear. Some of your readers may be aware of the recent discovery of a tree in the Hurtwood forest, which was found to be covered in black underwear (both men's and women's panties, briefs, bras and ladies' stockings), and reported in the local Peaslake parish magazine. As a practising Wicca (with the ceremonial title of High Witch), I can confirm that there is nothing sinister in this practice, and users of the Hurtwood forest should have no fear. The decoration of sacred trees is a feature of our religion, and represents our faith in the virility and generosity of mother nature. The tree-dressing ceremony is conducted very early during an icy spring morning, and is followed by a tactile exploration of rebirth, rejuvenation and renewal which is the highlight of the Coven's annual calendar. A similar ceremony is held at Harvest time, followed by our annual barbecue and quiz night. I hope this ceremony shows how religion, fashion, feminism, and ecology can work harmoniously together in the modern day. Radnor is at pains to emphasise the intellectual sophistication and relevance of the tree-dressing practice, enacting as it does the potential intersection of religion, fashion, feminism and ecology in modern culture. He also takes care to frame sacred trees within the recognisably normal: what could be ‘sinister’ about anything followed by a barbecue and quiz night, that staple of Anglican social life and no doubt often advertised in the Peaslake parish magazine? Yet Radnor is fighting a losing battle here. For there is nothing sophisticated about sacred trees in the public imagination. To the contrary, sacred trees almost always find themselves stereotyped as the preserve of the weird and deluded, something very much marginal to the concerns of mainstream society. For most people today, ‘Funny Old World’ is simply the only appropriate kind of space for giving any thought to sacred trees.

Chapter objectives Learn basic relationships among tetrapods – particularly amniotes Understand something about the course of tetrapod evolution Learn who dinosaurs are (and are not) Become familiar with the characters that diagnose Dinosauria Finding the history of life In the preceding chapter, we explored the methods that scientists use to learn the identity and origin of all organisms. Now we will apply those techniques – diagnostic characters hierarchically distributed on cladograms – to properly position dinosaurs within the biota. The history of life will unfold as we systematically encounter each bifurcation in the cladistic road, reconstructing the path of evolution until we reach Dinosauria. We will be looking at increasingly small subgroups, each characterized by a suite of diagnostic characters. The appearance of each of those suites of diagnostic characters represents new features, forged by evolutionary processes. We'll go with Glinda the Good Witch's suggestion that “it's always best to start at the beginning.” In the beginning Modern life is generally understood to be monophyletic. It's united by the possession of RNA, DNA, cell membranes with distinctive chemical structure, a variety of amino acids (proteins), the metabolic pathways (that is, chemical reaction steps) for their processing, and the ability to replicate itself (not simply grow). Notice we said “modern” life – for who knows how many forms of molecular life arose, proliferated, and died out very early in Earth's history – before the thing that we now call “life” finally prevailed?

Throughout the colonial era, the “supernatural” state of Kenya was one of conflicting codes and contested justice. The contentious nature of justice, law, and order in Kenya emerges in high relief in cases of witch-killing. In the course of investigating and adjudicating such cases, state authorities aimed simultaneously to discipline and deny local “witchcraft” practices and beliefs while African actors asserted the efficacy and legitimacy of their communities’ approaches to witchcraft. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes the most high profile witch-killing case in colonial Kenya – that of Mwaiki, a Kamba woman killed in 1931 by a group of men from her community who believed her to have bewitched a neighbor woman. Mwaiki’s case, officially known as Rex v. Kumwaka s/o of Mulumbi and 69 Others , achieved international recognition when it was tried in the Supreme Court of Kenya and sixty of the seventy defendants were sentenced to death. These sentences were upheld by the Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa and ultimately commuted by the Governor of Kenya. Rex v. Kumwaka brought to bear imperial anthro-administrative networks of knowledge about witchcraft and engendered vociferous debates in Kenya and the metropole about what made British justice in the African Empire.

In this chapter I want to stress two matters in particular. One is that there is an omnipresence of abundant, kaleidoscopic theatricality in Goethe's Faust project. The other is that that theatricality is not simply decoration, not simply (as it were) icing on the cake, but is, rather, germane to the central concerns of the drama. Whether we read Faust as a philosophical drama, as a drama of desire or as the historical drama of modernity (and it is to this aspect that I wish to pay particular attention), at every turn we find that the theatrical statement is the correlative of the theme. Let me begin with somewhat personal and anecdotal rather than scholarly concerns. On two occasions I have been involved in directing students of German at University College, London in theatre productions of Goethe's Faust . We performed an acting version of both parts. What resulted was a three-act drama. At its centre was the so-called Gretchentragodie , the love story of Faust and Margarete. This was our Act 2. It was preceded by the material that is often referred to as the Gelehrtentragodie – the tragedy of the despairing scholar – which extends, in Goethe's Part i , from the opening monologue of Faust's lacerating despair, through the wager with Mephisto, to Faust's rejuvenation in the ‘Witch's Kitchen’. This constituted our Act 1.

Since 1986 witchcraft (“Wicca”) has been a constitutionally protected religion; witch/wizard covens are maintained across the country, though they are, perhaps understandably, concentrated in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the very mention of the seaboard city of “Salem,” for all except those who live there, has never shed its association with the infamous “Salem witch trials,” even though the trials arose in the neighboring inland community of Salem Village, now Danvers. Three centuries of notoriety have made the bibliography of the Salem witch trials (hearings, transcripts, polemics, history, historical fiction, drama, scholarship) so voluminous that no one can hope to master its entirety. My emphasis here is on exploring one long-neglected cause of the Salem trials, and studying selected renderings of it. During the sessions of the 1692 Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, confusions of racial color symbolism (red, black, and white) were expressed in the testimony of the afflicted who swore they had seen specters. Before, during, and after these testimonies, Essex County was sending its militia to fight Indians and Frenchmen who had been threatening and overrunning the county's northern borders since King Philip's War. The interconnections between these two developments demand our continuing attention if we are to understand not only the trials of 1692 but also the historiographical tradition that follows them. It is particularly important that the racial and wartime dimensions of the Salem witch trials should have been so long obscured within the progressive New England historical tradition.

1. Introduction: Keith Thomas and the problem of witchcraft: explanations and representations of witchcraft since Religion and the Decline of Magic Jonathan Barry Part I. The Crime and its History: 2. 'Many reasons why': Witchcraft and the problem of multiple explanation Robin Briggs 3. 'Witchcraft Studies' in Austria, Germany and Switzerland Wolfgang Behringer 4. State-building and witch-hunting in early modern Europe Brian Levack Part II. Witchcraft and Religion: 5. The Devil in the Old World and the New Fernando Cervantes 6. 'Saints or sorcerers': Quakerism, demonology and the decline of witchcraft in seventeenth-century England Peter Elmer Part III. The Making of a Witch: 7. The descendants of Circe: witches and Renaissance fictions Gareth Roberts 8. Witchcraft and fantasy in early modern Germany Lyndal Roper 9. The Devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins trials reconsidered Jim Sharpe Part IV. Witchcraft and the Social Environment: 10. Witchcraft in early modern Kent: stereotypes and the background to accusations Malcolm Gaskill 11. Patriarchal reconstuction and witch-hunting Marianne Hester Part V. Decline: 12. Witchcraft repealed Ian Bostridge 13. On the continuation of witchcraft Willem de Blecourt.

One of the most consistent yet least understood aspects of the early modern witch hunts is how accusation and persecution for witchcraft came to be largely directed against women, throughout Europe and the so-called New World. In an attempt to question why the greater proportion of those accused of witchcraft were women, this chapter seeks to move beyond Keith Thomas' analysis in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and also beyond the dichotomy of ‘sex-related versus sex-specific’ set up by Christina Larner's work. Focusing mainly on English material, it argues that in our quest to understand the phenomenon of the witch hunts we have to see male–female conflictual relations as an integral part of the process of accusation and persecution. The accusation of women was not merely a reflection of an age-old stereotype, nor merely the by-product of a patriarchal society; the witch hunts were a part of, and one example of, the ongoing mechanisms for social control of women within a general context of social change and the reconstruction of a patriarchal society. It is generally recognised that Europe in the early modern period experienced a variety of major changes in terms of demography, ideology, economy, religions and political systems. Levack has rightly pointed out that change is not a feature unique to this period, and that ‘change’ alone cannot explain the witch hunts at this time.

To be a poet you have to believe something so hard that it would break your heart if it wasn't true. Baird W. Whitlock, “Conversations with Robert Frost” Some people want you not to understand them, But I want you to understand me wrong. Robert Frost, “A Masque of Mercy” In the spirit of all of Frost's wandering women, I shall divagate back to the issue of gender by way of a brief discussion of the sublime; for Frost the two are not, finally, separable. But first I should admit that Frost's poetry really does begin to kick up its heels when subjected to the critical gaze; like the Witch of Grafton, it eludes respectability, refuses to be stabilized, goes out kiting when it is supposed to be home in bed. Pick up a Frost poem and you have plucked a star, disguised, from a stone wall; it begins to chafe and shuffle in your hands; if you are a critic, writing, it makes your fingers run off in strange tangents, pulling the pen along. If Frost's poetry tends toward the transformative beauties of dryads and hill wives, starting out dry and pithy and ending as fully erotic, it is also exactly like all of those artifacts – stones, axes, chain saws – within it that snap back; use one and it is likely to bite your hand off, or to fly off the handle and split your skull. More than this, his poetry refutes the critic's attempt to separate herself from these energies.

I fear (amongst our many other provocations) that God hath a Controversy with us about what was done in the time of the Witchcraft. I fear that innocent blood hath been shed; & that many have had their hands defiled therwith. I believe our Godly Judges did act Conscientiously, according to what they did apprehend then to be sufficient Proof: But since that, have not the Devils impostures appeared? & that most of the Complainers & Accusers were acted by him in giving their testimonies. Be it then that it … was done ignorantly. Paul, a Pharisee, persecuted the chu[r]ch of God, shed the blood of Gods saints, & yet obtained mercy, because he did it in ignorance; but how doth he bewaill it, and shame him self for it before God and men afterwards. –Michael Wigglesworth, 1704 After September 22 there would be sporadic incidents before a new court in January put an end to the witchcraft episode. On October 1, Mary Brown of Reading charged affliction day and night by the shape or person of Sarah Cole of Lynn. On October 3, Mary Warren performed against Cole at her examination, unaccompanied by the old set of accusers ( SWP I: 227). On November 5, three men complained against Esther Elwell, Abigail Roe, and Rebecca Dike, all from Gloucester, probably after they were identified by accusers brought to Gloucester to repeat what had been achieved in Andover. Later in November new accusations found another kind of response: “[B]y this time the validity of such Accusations being much questioned, they found not that Encouragement they had done elsewhere, and soon withdrew.”

If any man or woman be a Witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exod.22.18. Lev.20.27. Deut.18.10,11. General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts In 1661, William Holmes of Marshfield, Plymouth Colony, brought a legal complaint against his neighbor Dina Silvester for declaring in public that Holmes's wife was a witch. Summoned to court, Silvester swore that Goodwife Holmes had recently appeared to her, “about a stones throw from the higheway,” in the shape of a bear. In Silvester's opinion, this ability to assume animal form was a sure sign that Goodwife Holmes was indeed a witch. But the magistrates wanted proof of the Devil's involvement in Holmes's transformation; as far as they were concerned, witchcraft was an inherently diabolical phenomenon. The magistrates asked Silvester “what manor of tayle the beare had,” presumably hoping for a forked tail. Silvester answered that “shee could not tell, for his head was towards her.” The court, frustrated by Silvester's failure to provide any indication of a demonic presence, refused to take her story seriously and found her guilty of defamation. Silvester was required to sign a statement “freely acknowlidg[ing]” that she had “wronged” her neighbor.