In Western Europe, certainly, wizards are few and far between. I have been able to turn up a dozen or so, who with the 20/20 hindsight of history look like either con men or conjurors. Druids almost fit the bill, but Druids were a few lines by Julius Caesar until they were reinvented a couple of hundred years ago. All this business with the white robes and the sickles and the oneness with nature is wishful thinking. It’s significant, though. Caesar portrayed them as vicious priests of a religion based on human sacrifice, and gory to the elbows. But the PR of history has nevertheless turned them into mystical shamans, unless I mean shamen; men of peace, brewers of magic potions.
Despite the claim that nine million people were executed for witchcraft in Europe in the three centuries from 1400—this turns up a lot in books of popular occultism and I can only say it is probably as reliable as everything else they contain—it is hard to find genuine evidence of a widespread witchcraft cult. I know a number of people who call themselves witches. No, they are witches—why should I disbelieve them? Their religion strikes me as woolly but well-meaning and at the very least harmless. Modern witchcraft is the Friends of the Earth at prayer. If it has any roots at all, they lie in the works of a former colonial civil servant and pioneer naturist called Gerald Gardner, but I suggest that it is really based in a mishmash of herbalism, sixties undirected occultism, and The Lord of the Rings.
But I must accept that people called witches have existed. In a sense they have been created by folklore, by what I call the Flying Saucer process—you know, someone sees something they can’t or won’t explain in the sky, is aware that there is a popular history of sightings of flying saucers, so decides that what he has seen is a flying saucer, and pretty soon that “sighting” adds another few flakes to the great snowball of saucerology. In the same way, the peasant knows that witches are ugly old women who live by themselves because the folklore says so, so the local crone must be a witch. Soon everyone locally KNOWS that there is a witch in the next valley, various tricks of fate are laid at her door, and so the great myth chugs on.
One may look in vain for similar widespread evidence of wizards. In addition to the double handful of doubtful practitioners mentioned above, half of whom are more readily identifiable as alchemists or windbags, all I could come up with was some vaguely masonic cults, like the Horseman’s Word in East Anglia. Not much for Gandalf in there.
Now you can take the view that of course this is the case, because if there is a dirty end of the stick, then women will get it. Anything done by women is automatically downgraded. This is the view widely held—well, widely held by my wife ever since she started going to consciousness-raising group meetings—who tells me it’s ridiculous to speculate on the topic because the answer is so obvious. Magic, according to this theory, is something that only men can be really good at, and therefore any attempt by women to trespass on the sacred turf must be rigorously stamped out. Women are regarded by men as the second sex, and their magic is therefore automatically inferior. There’s also a lot of stuff about man’s natural fear of a woman with power; witches were poor women seeking one of the few routes to power open to them, and men fought back with torture, fire, and ridicule.
I’d like to know that this is all it really is. But the fact is that the consensus fantasy universe has picked up the idea and maintains it. I incline to a different view, if only to keep the argument going, that the whole thing is a lot more metaphorical than that. The sex of the magic practitioner doesn’t really enter into it. The classical wizard, I suggest, represents the ideal of magic—everything that we hope we would be, if we had the power. The classical witch, on the other hand, with her often malevolent interest in the small beer of human affairs, is everything we fear only too well that we would in fact become.
Oh well, it won’t win me a PhD. I suspect that via the insidious medium of picture books for children the wizards will continue to practise their high magic and the witches will perform their evil, bad-tempered spells. It’s going to be a long time before there’s room for equal rites.
*1 Of course, if you’ve read the later Earthsea novels you can. But in 1985 that was still to come.
ROOTS OF FANTASY
“The Roots of Fantasy: Myth, Folklore & Archetype,” The Book of the World Fantasy Convention, ed. Shelley Dutton Berry, 1989
I’ve adjusted this slightly and filled in some detail. The stuff about the nuclear pixie is stone-cold true.
There’s another story about that power station that’s just waiting to happen.
You see, power stations take a long time to build. Large items of construction plant spend their entire working life on the site, until they break down beyond hope of repair. What can you do with a clapped-out bulldozer? Well, you’ve got lots of spoil and junk anyway, and you need to landscape the place, so you bury it in a huge mound, maybe along with a couple of mechanical diggers to serve it in the Next World.
People visiting the site now see this and think it’s the Pixie Mound. It isn’t. That is on the other side of the road, and quite unimpressive by comparison.
But, you know, I’d like to think that on some dark and stormy night lightning will strike both mounds at the same time. It will be that slow, blue, crackling lightning that you only get in movies, of course.
And then there will be a moment of deep silence that is broken by the muffled yet distinctive cough of a big diesel engine starting up.…
Now, there’s a press release you wouldn’t want to miss.…
Last year an American writer told me, “I’m afraid your books won’t sell well over here, because in your books you can’t hear the elves sing.”
Well, it looks as though time is proving him wrong, but not hearing the elves sing is fine by me. I think they probably do far more interesting things. Besides, if the job of elves is to sing, then the elf I’m interested in is the one who’s tone-deaf. Half of the fun of writing funny fantasy is the search for clichés to bend. But enough of this …
The roots of fantasy go far deeper than mere dragons and elves, and it’s a shame that writers now spend so much time in the consensus high fantasy universe … you know the one.