It’s no secret to readers of this blog that witchery–in the secular form that phenomenon has now taken–remains a scourge of civilization.
What you may not know is that His Majesty’s government took action to protect military secrets from a suspected witch during WWII.
Eventually, Parliament had to step in and say enough was enough. In 1735, it passed the Witchcraft Act that made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practicing witchcraft. Surprisingly, it worked in Britain and people eventually stopped persecuting so-called witches.
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n November of 1941, [Helen] Duncan held a seance in England where she claimed the ghost of a sailor aboard the HMS Barham visited her. The Barham was in the Mediterranean in 1941, fighting Axis ships attempting to cut off the resupply of the island of Malta. She was actually sunk off the coast of Egypt earlier that year. A German U-boat torpedoed the battleship, taking most of the crew down with it.
The problem was Helen Duncan wasn’t supposed to know that. The Royal Navy wouldn’t announce the sinking until 1942. The only people who were told were naval personnel and the families of those killed aboard the Barham. It caught the ears of naval intelligence, who decided to keep a close watch on Duncan the medium.
She was later arrested in January 1944 under the Witchcraft Act, with many believing that military leaders were concerned she might actually be able to talk to spirits. Some of her followers contended that superstitious military officers were afraid that, through her ghosts, she might be able to reveal the secret plans for Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Related: Revisiting the Rosenhan Hoax
That might have been the case, but the nail in the coffin for Helen Duncan did come in 1944. In January of that year, two Royal Navy officers attended one of Duncan’s seances. Duncan attempted to spook one of the men by “manifesting” first his deceased aunt, and then his deceased sister. There was just one little problem: the officer’s aunts and sisters were all still very much alive.
He reported Duncan to the police, who raided one of Duncan’s later seances. They found a hat band from a sailor’s uniform supposedly manifested from the HMS Barham. But the medium’s lack of uniform regulations did her in. The hat bands of British sailors at the time only read “HMS” and not the name of the vessel on which they served.
Duncan was tried and convicted of claiming to perform fraudulent spiritual activity, defrauding people of their money and generally being a public nuisance.
while some may be disappointed that Duncan wasn’t a broom-riding, crop-cursing bride of Satan finall brought to justice by the Witchfinder General, her crimes stemmed from the same sins that drive the modern witchery crisis. An insatiable thirst for attention, combined with sociopathic tendencies, has turned millions into what some call spiteful mutants, and what we term witches.
Don’t believe me? Just spend five minutes on social media.
Anyway, the Brits weren’t breaking new ground with the 1735 Witchraft Act. High authorities within the Catholic Church had issued censures against those making false claims of–and holding overblown belief in–the powers of witchcraft.
What the Witchcraft Act and Burchard’s Decretum go to show is that it takes religious authorities firmly and consistently laying the moral groundwork for an act of government to sway the culture.
We should all keep that dynamic in mind regarding recent efforts to combat the all-too-real diabolical rites of modern witchery, and adjust tactics accordingly.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can root for battling overwhelming odds
