Confounded Again!

NOTE: This essay was inspired by the first 30 minutes of Leo Zagami’s discussion on 1/5/20 with John Barnwell, Lowell Joseph Gallin, and Rev. David William Parry, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL1_gZd1cu0

 

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I found a curious review by a certain P.D. Maior of Montague Summers’ The History of Witchcraft and Demonology.[1] Here is an extract from that review:

So this book is just the tip of an iceberg rising out of the sea; yet the old rest of the iceberg is still quite buried in the waves of modernity; so I suppose there is some value to this work even presently. For as connection to the noumenal was lost over time, superstitious attachment to the mere mundane, the peripheral and chthonic dense phenomenal (modern increasing materialists identified with their senses) became the way of the day until now. A stilted, stagnant, stasis came over man slowly toward his own super-mundane and the super-mundane in all this “corpse of a world” (- Thomas the Contender). Man became “deannoyia” (Greek), paranoid and fragmented in mind instead of light seeing inner light. Super-stitious eytmologically originally meant stilted, irrational, static, fear of the unknown/the noumenal/the supra. This is what moderns have, not the ancients.

Moderns think the further back one looks the more superstitious and savage man was; primordial gnostic archaicists say the opposite: man began as light in touch with light experiencing the shamanic super-mundane noumenal in all: in themselves and in life. Then slowly man became dead to all this as they became more modern, which gave rise to their superstitious paranoic fears of any of those claiming to experience the invisible. Now the medieval witch hunt inquisitions (not ending till Napoleon officially shut their foul branch down) could rise up again easily in our age and become doubly worse if the new modern skeptics one step further dead than the inquisitors get fully in charge and wish to start plaguing the noumenalists even worse as “woo woo dangerous people.”

In the review P.D. Maior describes himself as “an esoteric historian by profession,” though I find no books authored by him, at least not under this name. He is of the opinion that Summers’ book over-emphasizes the medieval period with the examples of the history of witchcraft given therein.

Whatever Maior thinks, he won me over at the very beginning of his review when he recollected the following about how he first discovered Montague Summers’ book:

I still remember when I was 11 years old and this book accidentally fell from the school library shelf starting my life long journey into the occult. It was just a very limited and “elementary” library after all. So what the hell was this doing in it? Maybe there were only 200 books in it total. I was just looking for books on magic tricks on the shelf below when it oddly fell out from above on it’s own. They were sturdy shelves.

Odd, meaningful, personal anecdotes such as these have a convincing aspect to them. This is so, perhaps because (sentimental fool that I am) they come across as authenticating via a simpatico identification with an author’s intimate experience. Of course it is also techniques such as these that are in the trick-bag of many a professional intel salesman-propagandist.   

In the end, Maior gives the book “four stars” and concludes with the following:

So I recommend this book but more to those looking into just the medieval period and starting in a very elementary way in their search for magic. There are hundreds of books on the history of magic far better and more in depth than this half misguided and overly superstitious but intriguing work.

P.D. Maior appears to be a voracious reader and to know a lot about the occult. He makes an impression. Goodreads credits him with 1442 ratings (4.8 avg) and 142 reviews. The books he has read and reviewed comprise quite a grab-bag of esoteric and archaic literature with sprinklings of modernist critique; his latest rave is on Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1991,1996) by David Day.

Maior’s tastes are eclectic and his prose is disarmingly intelligent and interesting. When I come across a seeming savant such as this, I imagine how some accomplished guitar player might feel upon discovering Django Reinhardt or Jimi Hendrix.

There is just so much to explore, to know, to uncover. It’s unnerving. Whenever I get the sense that there’s so much more than “my little world” allows for, it is humbling. Then again, how do we know that folks such as P.D. Maior are not simply good showmen, chock full of neologisms, colorful phrases and abstruse vocabulary meant only to dazzle—and yet intoning an obvious intelligence?

All this to say, I am the first to admit (as I did to Leo Zagami) that, when it comes to the occult, I know about as much as a cabbage (“Non capisco un cavolo.”)—in other words I don’t know nuthin’; I don’t understand a flippin’ thing! Just when I think I have a grasp on the twilight zone that stage-manages reality, the world, truth, God, love, etc., some smart aleck comes along and ruins everything. When I watch and listen to Sig. Zagami interviewing, e.g., John Barnwell, I know I am listening to two people who know something—in fact who know a whole helluva lot.

So if you’re out there, "Mayor Petey," (and so many others like you) please understand that while you are mostly an enigma to me you make me want to know and understand more than what is swirling around in the water of my cabbage head.   

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[1]

Summers, M., The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (first published 1926; 1999, Castle Books, USA) Retrieved on 1/7/2020 at 
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2155366.The_History_of_Witchcraft_and_Demonology