Review : Land of Mist And Magic

I continue exploring the world of mythology with Philip Parker's Land of Mist and Magic. This rather lovely coffee-table book presents a fully illustrated guide to a collection of British mythology, legends, heroic fiction, and folklore. 

As a physical product it's hard to find fault with this one. Good, thick pages, extremely high-quality printed images, and a text that's highly readable. It doesn't offer much in the way of outright analysis but it does include some incisive and intelligent commentary. This is absolutely a book you can read for pleasure as well as display as a sort of trophy-book to impressive visitors. Come in, gentle stranger, and marvel at the wondrous books you see before you !

Anyway, the text consists of a series of retellings combining different sources to merge all the major elements together, usually with a short introduction describing the origin and history of the story. They're all written in a simple, present-tense style which is never going to win any literary awards* but it gets the job done; they're imperfect, but more than adequate. The descriptive passages of both the scenery and the emotional state of the characters usually adds something not found in the original, archaic literature. But it can also lack an edge, sometimes missing important details for the sake of brevity.

* In particular, over-use of bland phrases like "will never be forgotten" does feel a bit chatbot. In one extreme case, Parker uses "forgotten" three times in as many sentences, which is getting lazy.

On the other hand, there's an unexpected benefit of being concise : when giving only an extract from a story, the moral lesson becomes so much clearer than when reading the tale in full. Often in the old myths (Celtic, Greek and Norse alike) it's very hard to understand what, if any, lesson the reader is supposed to take from these vast pseudo-histories. It may be more realistic to have a hero falling into cynicism and pettiness, but it makes it much harder to understand which actions are deemed to be "right" if everything a hero does is always undone; everything becomes subsumed in the ever-changing now. Cutting the story off, or into distinct segments to be told separately, makes it so much easier to say, "look, they did this, and they were rewarded" without being bogged down by what happened next.

One example illustrates both points. Pwyll and Rhiannon involves the nobleman Pwyll marrying the mysterious fairy Rhiannon, along with some job-swapping with the fairy king. At his wedding feast he foolishly grants a request to a stranger, which turns out to be Rhiannon's abusive ex... but with some cunning trickery involving an unfillable magic bag, they trap him and beat him up so everything ends happily*.

* It probably needs to be reiterated quite a lot that ancient fairy stories are not much like the modern versions. On the other hand, some stories, like Lady Godiva, are so boring they could only appeal to puritanical Victorians; if it was a modern version, the very least she could do to make it interesting would be to start an OnlyFans account. Get over yourself, Lady G.

In this version, that's all that happens, and the moral that even rash promises must be upheld comes through clearly. In the full telling, as given in Epic Celtic Tales, the story continues and it all gets weird, involving a horse-stealing monster and Rhiannon being framed for eating her children*. The moral theme of the earlier part of the story is lost, but on the other hand, the version given in LOMAM doesn't include Rhiannon sharply chiding her witless husband. This isn't a minor detail – it gives her much more feminist depth and underscores just how stupid the otherwise astute, and seemingly generous, Pwyll, is being at that particular moment.

* What did I just say ?

But restricting the story to only a single episode in the otherwise near-complete history of the pair changes the interpretation completely. Instead of it being an almost random "bunch of stuff that happens" sequence of events, suddenly it has a clear message. I tend to read stories expecting that the main point will only come through in the entire product, that the ending is what gives it meaning. Here is seems that this is not the case, that the reader is expected to consider each part in isolation : it's up to the audience to decide at what point to search for the lessons being told. This is exactly what Plato did when he quoted poets to debate some moral point, rather than considering the full history of Achilles or Odysseus. Still, to have this pointed out explicitly is, for me, very valuable.

Anyway, since the analysis is light with this one, and having covered mythology quite a bit already by this point, I think I'll limit the rest of this post to a short set of the most interesting tales I came across within the pages. It's very much a mixed bag, but some of these were wholly new to me while others put familiar tales in a new light. 

Origins : the origin myths of Britain are certainly interesting if you're a modern-day fruitcake... sorry, Reform voter. They're all explicit in that Britain was founded by foreigners – in the case of Scotland, a bunch of mixed-race (mainly Egyptian) immigrants arriving on a small boat. They are clearly proud of having a foreign origin, albeit ones they could look to for imperial glory (Egypt, Rome, Troy). They wanted the Stone of Scone to have a foreign origin to give it mystical credence, wanted to associate themselves with Brutus even as early as the 7th century. They actively deride the previous "native" inhabitants as savage giants who don't really do much except get killed by the heroes. Even when they give Britain a more glorious path of its own, such as when Arthur conquers the Roman Empire, they have it done by forging respectful alliances with other people and respecting their treaty obligations.

Fuck off Reform. Just fuck right off and stop spouting bollocks about "native Britons".

Though to be fair... they don't always have the Britons, once established, as being a bunch of Guardian-reading hippies. They're extremely racist against the Irish, in one story having Merlin steal the stones for Stonehenge (which is constructed, pointlessly, as a war memorial) after slaughtering their way through the Irish ranks. Just because they weren't anything like modern bigots doesn't mean the people telling these stories were very nice. Likewise, when St Carantoc subdued a dragon, he doesn't let Arthur kill it. Saying that it surrendered to Christian faith, instead it he lets it loose to, err... go off and eat Saxon children instead.

Well, I guess that should scare away the Guardian readers as well as the Reform voters, thus bringing my audience down to pretty much zero. Oh well.

Bladud : A curious tale that, while told in its fullest form by Geoffrey of Monmouth, took centuries to develop. Bladud was a possibly Welsh princeling with a hunger for learning who went to learn at Plato's Academy. Expelled for pursuing forbidden knowledge, he returned to Britain with leprosy and found employment with a kindly swineherd. Thanks to his keen wit and observational skills, he discovered a cure and was able to assume his rightful position as king, building a bathhouse on the healing waters that cured him. But his all-consuming hunger for knowledge was not sated, eventually ending in his death in an attempt to fly.

I rather like this one. Bladud's thirst for knowledge isn't the problem, it's that he lacks wisdom. He's a complex character, wanting to help the people of the kingdom but also foolhardy : he doesn't know when to stop, when to just be grateful for his first miracle rather than greedily seeking a second. He could have ruled well – no external enemies assailed him – but he threw it away on a vanity project rather than making the most of what he had. He knew a great deal, but lacked the self-awareness needed to control his own worst impulses.

Saint David : As my patron saint I feel I have to mention this one, but it seems he was a right cunt. His clifftop birth in a storm, to a mother who was herself a saint, was dramatic enough I suppose. But then he was apparently "so holy that he silenced the Bishop from the womb" when his mother walked into a sermon, and if that doesn't scream "awkward pregnancy" then I don't know what does*. Fair play to him for reviving the dead and healing the sick, but his lifestyle of extreme asceticism for himself and his followers – even the one with magical bees – doesn't appeal. Only eating bread and drinking water, preaching while neck-deep in freezing rivers... no thanks. Never mind that his most famous sermon, where the ground rose beneath him so his words could be heard by the crowd, was against the Pelagian "heresy" of free will. Sorry, Dave, you sound like a dick.

* It would also make her rather less saintly and a lot more interesting.

Folk heroes : A couple of popular figures need to be mentioned because they show just how much the stories have changed. Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) didn't start out as a figure having anything to do with beanstalks of any kind, but he did go around killing assorted giants : the earlier Jack has a much longer and more interesting series of adventures than the later one, though both are the classic "unexpected hero" who did nothing to earn his abilities. Similarly, the modern narrative of Robin Hood has a very fixed storyline, whereas the original has nothing much to do with robbing from the rich and has Robin of unexceptional abilities who brawls with his own men. A cantankerous, petty Robin who's also a bit of a god-botherer certainly puts a different spin on things. He begins his journey to folk hero as a commoner, not one of the gentry who merely sympathises with their plight.

Arthurian stories : A few micro-comments on these. Vortigern, tyrant of Britain during Merlin's infancy, is portrayed here as weak and ineffectual. I much prefer Rutger Hauer's version in which he's a classical... well, tyrant. It's not at all clear how he stayed in power in Parker's description, especially as he's given all the charisma of a diseased hamster. This vision of a past Britain in a state of decay is, however, interesting in itself, given the myriad concerns as to whether the Anglo-Saxon invasion ever happened (or at least to what extent and in what form). For the Greeks and Romans, history seems to have been a tale largely of continuous decline, but the medieval British, it seems to have been much less of a monotonic fall from grace. Perhaps this willingness to believe in a ruinous past says something about the mindset of the authors and why we shouldn't take their more apocalyptic descriptions too literally.

The stories of the Holy Grail also varies considerably from some of the modern Arthurian legends. As mentioned in Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic, this appears in the Mabinogion story of Peredur, but once again, setting this part aside as its own complete tale changes the whole interpretation. Peredur encounters the grail – a plate carrying a severed, bleeding head, and nothing at all to do with Jesus or a cup* – in the castle of the Fisher King (so called because he's injured so he fishes rather than hunts), where his failure to ask about it means he can't recover it... but he wasn't even looking for it, nor could he possibly have known what he was supposed to ask. The message is so utterly unclear that it actually becomes oddly satisfying. One day I might even attempt to articulate why.

* Wikipedia says that the Peredur story doesn't contain a grail, but this doesn't ring true. The plate carrying the severed head may not be described as a grail but it carries exactly the same narrative function as in the carbon-copy version Percival, which does supposedly contain a grail. Methinks someone is nit-picking here in the extreme.

There are other points where things verge on the confusing rather than the merely complicated. In the story of St Carantoc Arthur is a mere sub-king rather than the all-conquering perfect Emperor of later elaborations. In some stories there are multiple ladies of the lake, one of whom is decapitated, and multiple Excaliburs that may or may not relate to the one in the stone. Just as in Mark Williams' Celtic Myths That Shaped The Way We Think, Gwain's quest to seek the Green Knight is described as a failure, but what exactly makes it so isn't really stated*. Arthur's death, in some versions, is an almost complete catastrophe, a descent into anarchy and an ending which is simply tragic. In some versions, Arthur's army flee Mordred's host to the land of Lyonesse, which is destroyed in an Atlantis-like flood, a dramatic and absolutely final end to the whole Arthurian saga. At least it provides a clean break for history to resume.

* I find ChatGPT's answer to this very satisfying, however. I might have to re-read the tale in full.

Hereward the Wake : Not to be confused with Hereward the Woke, his liberally-minded cousin. This is a very interesting legend/fiction of one of the few romanticised holdouts against the Normal conquest. The mythologised idea of clinging on to the old ways is rife in Arthurian legend but appears virtually absent following the Norman Conquest... is this because the Normal lifestyles were simply too similar to their Saxon predecessors ? It's hard to mythologise a bygone age of different pottery styles and questionable facial hair choices, maybe. 

Anyway, Hereward is a rebel in East Anglia whose prior adventures include killing giants and man-bears. His tale partially follows the classic narrative structure : an overly-complicated and seemingly unconnected series of events without a clear message. More unusual is that when Hereward goes to reconnoitre the surroundings in disguise, it doesn't work very well. This is extremely refreshing because disguises in these old stories seem to be otherwise of near-perfect efficacy. And when his camp is attacked by a witch in service of the Norman army, they send her in by pushing her atop a tower. It's a very Norse image* that doesn't fit our modern ideas of the Normans as relatively advanced and sophisticated compared to the Saxons. Here is an unexpected, incongruous bit of paganism in an era otherwise familiar to every schoolboy raised on stories of 1066 and all that.

* The witch operating from a tower appears in other Norse sagas and archaeology. ChatGPT suggests that the height affords the witch the liminal space that in other cultures might be represented by forests, water, caves and so on, as well as stemming from a peculiarly Norse requirement for magic to be visible.

Hereward's tale stands out for romanticising a previous era which is usually glossed over as mere regime change. As in Mark Morris, the cultural change throughout the Saxon era was substantial, with the heroes of the local mead halls not being much like the powerful rulers of country-wide kingdoms. It's also unusual in having magical events and creatures but set in a distinct, highly identifiable time and place with real, named people. Even King William gets a look in. He forgives Hereward his rebellion, thus making the whole thing a complete waste of time, making it very much a classic "bunch of stuff that happened" narrative despite its many oddities. Well, maybe in the full text there's a more skillful explanation and some more satisfying moral narrative being told.

---

Ronald Hutton and Neil Price, as well as others, describe paganism as essentially amoral, more a world view than a moral doctrine. And I can see the appeal of this, but the most interesting thing about Parker's book is that it strongly challenges this simple view. I think it's fair to say that the morality of Christian stories does come through a lot louder than in the pagan myths, but this doesn't mean it's absent. Certainly the ancient moral beliefs wouldn't find much in common with those any modern religion, even the reinvented strands of paganism, but the stories might not be as inconsistent as they first appear. Perhaps we should be reading them less as epic sagas and more of collections of individual tales, each one with a different but distinct moral aspect. They require more analysis than listening to Jesus droning on about the meek, and they're probably a lot less self-consistent too. But there are morals to be found within – they're not stories purely intended for entertainment nor records of events people believed actually happened. 

I love the glorious weirdness of the whole thing, a dangerous and magical world of unpredictable adventures, strange creatures and supernatural forces around every turn. Their literary sophistication, with themes running and developing across multiple stories which relate back to each other, is clear; these were not written by the chronically bored or insane (well, not all of them, at any rate). If we allow that the moral lessons are being imparted in a very different way to modern sensibilities, just as the stories themselves are told differently, perhaps there's a whole other level of appreciation to be found here.

Review : The Witches (III)

It's time to wrap up my rundown of Stacy Schiff's The Witches. In part one we looked at what made Salem so unique : the weirdness of the magical claims and the extent to which they spread throughout the community. In part two we began to see why this was so different from the usual situation in which one or two witches might be accused from time to time and then nothing much for years at a time. The courts were flawed and corrupt, twisting evidence to suit their purpose, allowing suspicion of the procedure itself to be viewed as evidence as witchcraft. Suspects were housed in appalling conditions but granted freedom if they confessed, which is perhaps the only reason that the execution rate wasn't very much higher – but at the same time explains the extremely high accusation and conviction rate.

In this final post, let's go into the underlying ideology at work. If the courts allowed and even encouraged the crisis, it still would never have happened at all without some deep-seated beliefs in absolute nonsense. We'll end on what happened afterwards, but first, we need to turn our attention to just what the hell was going on.

The Problems Of Being Holier Than Thou

Schiff, it must be said, presents a more believable picture of Puritan life than Gaskill – if conditions were as harsh as he claimed, everyone would simply have died. In Schiff's account the general state of the populace is more nuanced. Yes, they worked fucking hard and life was tough. But they did have leisure time. Taverns might be frowned upon but they existed, and life was not so wholly joyless as Gaskill claims : people might even laugh and joke from time to time.

It was also unavoidably corrupt. With a devout and perverted belief in a meritocracy*, wealth was a symbol of moral virtue and poverty its opposite. The poor did not deserve charity because they were by definition sinners. This seems to have been a sincerely held belief, not merely an excuse to keep those on top in their favoured position : the idea of equality was dismissed as literally Satanic. They had an intensely conscious moral belief that their batshit nonsense was righteousness. 

* That is, that society was meritocratic rather than that it should be meritocratic, or that any steps needed to be taken to make it so. 

To that end, even the wealthy were, impossibly, all but forbidden from actually enjoying their wealth. This level of repression and hierarchy led inevitably to widespread abuse by the civic leaders, sometimes physically and sexually, of their downtrodden flock. In an environment which was already challenging just to survive, this wasn't helping anyone's sanity.

Nor, for that matter, were the all-pervasive judgements, the "surveillance society of the soul" as Paul Lay described it. In but one of many social paradoxes (good grief these people were a right bunch of shits*), this was a group who had deliberately sought out a remote location where they could freely judge each other without their community being judged by others. The continuous judgements, the relentless meddling in everyone else' daily lives, led to a climate of fear. If there were happier moments, the general environment was that of a complete dystopia. They were obsessed with justice, after a fashion, but only in the punitive rather than the moral-philosophical sense : they wanted to inflict judgements, not enforce moral standards. Plato would have torn his hair out in disgust, and then probably punched them all in the face.

* Calvinism, I think, might be one of the most self-destructive systems of thought every devised. I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the idea that the world has an unknown, godly component to it, but I think of Puritanism as little better than a terrorist sect.

All this raises the distinct possibility that the accusations and confessions were, in part, not only the result of social contagions. Some of them may have been the result of actual, medical-grade hallucinations : they may really have believed they saw some of the things they claimed to have seen. A not-so-guilty pleasure for me at the moment is the Uncanny podcast, and I have to wonder how many modern-day supernatural claims can be explained by a similar process. Certainly the belief in even the most preposterous magical claims was sincere; if some folklore was really never any more than a story, then witchcraft is one case where the beliefs were absolutely solid : one unfortunate woman was executed for selling chickens after happening to turn up after a magical summoning ritual. 

And once again, hypocrisy was rife. They believed magic was real but forbade its use. As Keith Thomas pointed out, by removing the option of counter-magic, the only recourse was to deal with the practitioners. But there's another level of irony at work in this which speaks to a deeper fear. Puritans, as a persecuted people, now became Nietzschean monsters, themselves the persecutors of the lowest of (their own) society. Perhaps this illustrates the difference sorts of fear felt throughout various demographics more broadly. It's one thing to be afraid for yourself and to want to protect your loved ones, but it's quite another to be afraid of other people and want to oppress them.

What didn't help matters was that analytical but uncritical mindset. They took the apparent presence of a vast throng of demonic witches not as evidence of their own corruption, but in their own self-importance : after all, Satan wouldn't bother if they weren't so godly that he needed to destroy them. It felt good to be pursued by demons because that only showed how holy they were.

What a bunch of absolutely contemptible fuckwits. But I digress.

Nor did it help that their moral world view was hugely over-simplified. Essentially all evils were attributable to a single source : Satan. This meant that any wrongdoing had but a single cause, an enormously binary "if you're not with us you're against us" view of morality. Small wonder that questioning the judicial process raised immediate suspicions that the critic was themselves likely a witch. These people may not have been coherent, but they were at least self-consistent.

One final paradox concerns the community views on gender. In this case the victims were predominantly but not overwhelmingly female, something I've neglected despite Schiff giving much excellent commentary here. For the sake of space, I'll reduce this to noting that the expected role of women wasn't exactly that of a modern "trad wife" incel nonsense, but it did inflame male insecurities. Women didn't have a lifestyle that was physically any easier than that of men, and could be both oppressed (with limited rights of speech and power, with the entire town leadership being exclusively male) but also independent (running their own businesses and speaking out regardless of what the law permitted). Again, it makes sense that in having a more confined social role, women were necessarily more likely to deviate, and correspondingly more likely to be seen as susceptible to Satan's power. Everyone, to the Puritan way of thinking, was guilty of something, women most of all, and calling it witchcraft only gave that guilt a name.

In short, these people were completely mad.

Epilogue : The Aftermath

Salem began with the spectacular testimony of an enslaved Indian woman (eventually freed without a trial), from which followed a rapid, all-consuming explosion, an obsession with eliminating all witches at all costs. It so dominated the village that essential work was at real risk of not being done, which in those situations began to present a danger to life.

What Schiff doesn't analyse much is why Salem in particular went to such extremes. Gaskill noted that more cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal places in America had no such problems with witchcraft, or at least very much less – and certainly no risk of the runaway situation which happened in Salem. But this does not explain why only Salem went into a near-catastrophe : there were other Puritan colonies in the area, but they didn't fall into such an all-consuming passion for self-destruction.

There are at least two possible contributing factors. First, Schiff notes that the Salem villagers were especially quarrelsome and given to pettiness, not willing to help each other, prone to responding over-harshly to the merest slight. Given the small size of the population, the nature of individual characters could potentially be a major issue here : if just one or two of the town leaders had been a bit more sympathetic, a bit less willing to inflame the worst tendencies of the common people, things might well have turned out very differently.

The second factor may be political. The village was intensely conflicted in its loyalties, seeing themselves as a fully independent offspring of Britain whereas the British very much regarded them as a minor and subservient colony. The colonists felt a profound need to demonstrate their independence as a legal entity, and prominent court trials could show the world that Salem was no petty backwater that was dependent on a larger government for its survival.

The trials ended as swiftly as they had begun. In Schiff's narrative, there's a bit of a wobble in the last couple of months, a little more skepticism creeping through... and then they ended completely. As with witch hunts back in the motherland, in part the sheer number of witches being accused eventually made people question the whole process. It took time, but whereas trying (say) one or two witches per year might be sustainable indefinitely – indeed accusations persisted even into the 20th century – the idea of hundreds began to be seen as preposterous. A combination of mounting concern and the practical need to get back to work brought the proceedings to a sharp but anti-climactic end. It was, ultimately, a self-limiting problem, but not before nineteen people had died and hundreds more been accused of wild, murderous intent.

Given the magnitude of the event, it might be thought that a return to normality was all but impossible. In fact it seemed to happen swiftly, perhaps in part out of the pressing needs of manual labour. Even so, the accused (and the convicted, remembering that confessions were by far the best route to avoiding sentences) and the accusers now found themselves having to learn to get along all over again.

It wasn't easy. Sometimes reconciliation was absolutely impossible. Some left, others died. Some pulled together. In one way the general opinion did an important pivot : suddenly everyone realised that maybe those thought to be bewitched were not, by definition, reliable witnesses. Perhaps also the trials had become self-sustaining, and by putting an end to them, most ordinary people felt much less need to accuse their neighbours even if they might privately still believe them guilty. 

One of the key issues that had dominated the trials was whether Satan could deceive the innocent. Like whether spectral evidence (hallucinations of a single person) should be admitted, this was a highly controversial topic. The issue was that if Satan could affect the unwilling, then his power would be implausibly great, a rival God that undermined Calvinist predestination. The solution was an uneasy compromise : Satan could sometimes deceive the innocent but not usually. It was all very ad-hoc, corrupt enough to excuse the friends of judges while allowing mass convictions. But perhaps this too gave a little wedge, an excuse for the accusers, after things had calmed down, to say that the accused weren't as guilty as they'd thought.

Any notion that it was the accusers fault just wasn't on the table. Some key antagonists did, eventually, change their minds. Initial apologies stopped short of admitting responsibility – exactly as in the case of modern politicians, barely apologies at all : "I'm sorry if you feel offended that we executed some innocents as well" sort of thing. Other key voices never wavered from their fervent belief that everything they had done was necessary and right, though only a very few indeed actually thought the trials should continue. It was all very awkward. 

There was a distinct undertone to the whole thing, an unspoken suspicion lingering in the air that maybe we've made a horrible mistake. Or perhaps more likely that they were about to make a horrible mistake : thank goodness we only executed all the guilty ones and stopped ourselves from carrying on, we'd have gone too far if we'd done that.

Being able to utter this out loud was too terrible a prospect at the immediate end of the trials; it took a full century to manage this. None of the accusers ever faced justice : the atrocity was only recognised for what it was long after everyone had died. But even though these people were fantastically stupid, they weren't simple caricatures. At least one of the main accusers left a substantial fund to help Indian students, hardly the action of someone purely intent on inflicting harm. Which again makes it all the more disturbing : that people did actually think through (albeit badly) their actions and conclude that they were doing the right thing.

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I've talked many times about how politically we can sometimes feel on the edge of chaos. Not all journalism is sensationalist rhetoric (although much of it is)... some of the more hyperbolic stuff does accurately reflect what can happen if things go on unchecked.

Salem represents a prime example of just how true this can be, how a narrow difference in thinking can lead to disaster. The villagers were not, in a sense, unintelligent. They were logical and analytical, but not curious or critical. They saw a phenomena and explained it according to their own world view, never stopping to question their assumptions for a moment. They had a devastatingly binary view of reality and morality : anything not of God was of the Devil, anyone who didn't think like them was highly suspicious. They allowed themselves little in the way of reward for following a lifestyle of almost unrelenting discipline, but ensured that everyone who failed to uphold their standards was delivered the full measure of blame.

Things twist so much when you allow room for an opinion rather than facts, to have a belief but allow room for doubt. It's not about whether you belief the Universe is run by a big beardy man in the sky or a collection of electrical fields, it's about how you think people who believe differently should be treated. How we respond to each other is, sociologically, much more important that what we ourselves personally feel. But the moment we make those feelings for facts, the minute we start thinking our position unassailable, the more likely we are to slide into intolerance.

Salem also shows how, even in a seemingly worse-case scenario of ideological and political freefall, hitting rock bottom is by no means guaranteed. Success is not final and failure is not fatal; most complaints about contemporary British politics are borne of a woeful, deplorable lack of imagination. Salem is what happens when you really take the brakes off, allow that imagination freedom with almost nothing to temper it. Don't come complaining about inheritance taxes for farmers to me, sunshine.

The pessimistic take from Salem is that the witch hunts went on for as long as they did : as Schiff put it, nobody was guilty except the accusers. The optimistic take is that they did stop : the town could have collapsed completely, but it didn't. And the ugly take is that no justice was ever meted out to the demented fuckwits who believed in ludicrous nonsense, who maintained that everything they'd done was correct even as they stopped doing it. They were never at the receiving end of the judicial system they were so keen to inflict on others. In the end, Salem, perhaps, is an illustration of how if there isn't justice for all, there isn't justice for anyone.

Review : The Witches (II)

Welcome back to summary-review of Stacy Schiff's Big Book Of Witches, an incredibly thorough (though often torturous) examination of the Salem witch trials. In part one I set out what made Salem different to other witch cases in my previous reading material : principally the routine claims of spectacular magical powers, the grand designs of a new world order, the extreme accusation and conviction rate. Now we need to look at why things ended up like this. Let's start with the court system, ordinarily able to keep the everyday fears of the populace in check... but in this case they actually made things much, much worse.

Evaluation of Evidence : Or, How To Catch A Witch

It's important to remember that the proverbial sort of witch hunts were rare events, and in Salem things seem to have gone exceptionally badly wrong. Even here though, the judicial system wasn't purely one-sided – it was more like a mixture of the good, the bad, and the exceedingly ugly. Often the boundaries were altogether blurry.

In Salem's favour, it should be acknowledged that not everybody was convinced of the evidence in all cases. A few even seem to have been almost diehard skeptics; doubt about the reality of witchcraft itself was in its infancy but it was in existence. If such fundamental doubts weren't much raised in Salem, then at least a few were concerned about all the specific cases and the difficulty of proof. Even some of the most virulently anti-witch were at least considering whether capital punishments were required or beneficial. Which is chilling in its own way... these people didn't go to knee-jerk "burn the witch !" chanting, but sat down and thought about it quite carefully (albeit in a deeply flawed way), and decided that hanging nineteen people was something they really wanted to do.

And there was a requirement, even among the most fervent, that evidence should be presented and persuasive. It was not enough to simply accuse, something of substance had to be shown. There were definite levels of evidence, with the hard, tangible sort greatly preferred. Confessions were also a gold standard : again, a mere accusation wasn't (quite) enough. Particularly contentious was whether hallucinations ("spectral" visions that only a few people could see) should count. Though not everyone dismissed such claims, everyone preferred the situation where there were multiple witnesses to supernatural phenomena; there was an awareness that it was possible some people were just seeing things.

But this is pretty much everything that can be said in favour of the Salem trials; beyond that they were legally about as rigorous as a puppy on cocaine. The impressions I get from Schiff is that the great and the good in Salem sincerely believed, by and large, that their standards were sufficient and they were driving at truth, but by any reasonable definition the legal "protections" afforded by the judicial system were scarcely more than a fig leaf. 

For one thing, the forensic skills of these imbecilic villagers was appalling, almost literally to the degree of not being able to tell arse from elbow : when examining internal organs, they had difficulty in distinguishing the heart from the stomach. Good luck with looking for supernatural marks if you can't even understand the most basic regular biology.

Confessions were treated with extreme confirmation bias, with no attempt to question their validity whatever. Incredibly obvious questions were overlooked : not only such basic issues as how powerful witches were apparently easily subdued, but also specific ones like how one woman claimed to be a witch for the last 40 years when she was only 38. The procedure was ludicrously one-sided and absolutely goal-driven, and it could also be corrupted to ensure that the judges' friends were never in danger of being in the dock.

While there were definitely standards of evidence, practically anything could count to some degree. Muttering, kneeling, expressing one's own virtues too loudly, being too strong... all could be blamed on witchy powers. If the court wanted evidence, evidence would be found : not manufactured exactly, but anything you said or did could be twisted to suit the agenda. The accused weren't given the evidence until the trial began, and even if they were found innocent of the crime they were initially accused of, they could still be found guilty of another crime at the same trial.

It look a while to understand Schiff's description of the Salem villagers as "logical", but by the end it becomes clear. Having accepted a "fact", they would be proceed to deduce its implications in great detail... but they would rarely question the validity of the information given them, and always steer the analysis to fit the agenda rather than looking for the most likely implications independently. They were intensely analytical but only rarely ever critical. 

For example, judges and juries might equally well decide that a story was too fantastic not to be true as it was to declare the opposite. Inconsistencies in accounts of multiple witnesses were first seen as problematic, then later "realised" to be actually quite helpful, since real people have faulty memories* – actually, they decided, these differences constituted evidence that something had indeed happened rather than the accusers collaborating.

* It's interesting to see the glimmers of a better approach to assessing evidence slowly coming through in Salem. But not only did this happen much too slowly to have any meaningful impact on the trials, it did so in a highly perverted way, with methodologies changing to ensure conviction (such as deliberately picking the most promising case to bring to trail first) rather than out of any interest in the truth.

This twisting, agenda-driven approach was one reason conviction rates soared. Another factor was at work which drove the accusation rates through the roof : the idea that criticising the procedure was itself evidence of witchcraft. Once that took hold, there was a runaway growth in the accusation rates. True, this "evidence" was hardly top tier, but it was enough.

The other factor helping both conviction and accusation rates reach absurd levels was very much Salem-specific. Whereas elsewhere a confession might save your immortal soul but would do nothing to save your physical body from the noose, here it almost always led to the capital sentence being rescinded in favour of a much lesser punishment, or even nothing at all. That alone is a clear, major factor why so many confessed to things that were absolutely impossible. Couple this with the horrendous conditions in which prisoners were kept, sometimes for months*, and the runaway witch hunt becomes all too easy to understand.

* Direct, deliberate torture was not quite absent, but was extremely rare. Keeping the accused in absolute squalor, in temperatures which were at first unbearably cold and then oppressively hot, with little food and less sanitation, might as well amount to much the same thing, however. The lack of deliberate torture to extract information in some ways makes the thing all the worse : ordinary people were willing to believe their neighbours were guilty of the most outlandish and horrifying crimes without recourse to forcing them to confess.

In many ways the Salem witch trials resemble the output of an especially crappy LLM : extremely confident, founded on falsehoods but carried to a logical, analytical, uncritical extreme; they were also of course heavily reliant on a great deal of literal hallucinations. One notion I rather like from programming is what I call thinking at scale. If you find a bug, first you look for typos, then you check things like whether a variable is being set or used correctly, then you move up to structural issues like whether loops are nested properly, and finally you might question whether what you've done is really a good idea after all. These people seemed to have incredibly narrow-scale thinking limited to a single level, a single premise that couldn't itself be much questioned. They could analyse to the nth degree, but never question the fundamental premise of what they were doing.

Another analogy might be the Borg of Star Trek. These are not a species, but something which happens to any suitable species that encounters Borg hive-mind technology : assimilated into a collective delusion. These kinds of witch hunts were not the result of some crazed individuals like Hopkins, but a process which took on a life of its own, under the right conditions able to escape the control of any one person. Salem was truly in the grip of mass hysteria.

---

All this covers most of the major points as to why, when the witch hunts began, they spiralled out of control. But the above doesn't really address the more fundamental question of why people were like this, why they thought and acted in the way they did, why they were so afraid of witches and why they began the trials in the first place. That's what we need to look in the concluding part of the trilogy, along with what happened when it all came to a sudden, spontaneous halt.

Review : The Witches (I)

It's time for another book on witches. Previously I've looked at Malcom Gaskill's Witchfinders (covering the machinations of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne), the book-length section in Keith Thomas' epic Religion and the Decline of Magic (covering the typical behaviour and trials of individual witches), and Gaskill's sequel The Ruin of All Witches (looking at a single case in the early American colonies). This time it's Stacy Schiff's The Witches, covering one of the most famous incidents of all : Salem.

The Review Bit

As far as the book itself goes, the word that keeps coming to mind is dense. It's incredibly thorough, sometimes interminably so. Contrary to the hyperbolic review quotes that lace the cover, Schiff's writing style is – by far – the worst thing about this book. Her recounting of events and analysis of what happened is as good as any you'll find, but the prose itself sometimes becomes a right proper slog. It's full of forced rhetoric and odd references when a simple plain statement would do, and often drops apparently crucial developments in single throwaway lines. I frequently felt myself wondering, "wait, what ?" as some key development was glossed over, unclear if this was really supposed to be a part of the narrative or just referencing a future event for context.

I also encountered moments where I really didn't know what she meant at all, where I either didn't understand the metaphor she was using or would interpret a statement in exactly the opposite way it was apparently intended; parts of it felt downright contradictory and unclear. This isn't limited to the minor details either, with some contradictions being pretty fundamental to the analysis. As a relative unimportant example, she goes on at length about witches flying across Salem (indeed this is how she opens the whole narrative) only later to say that flying wasn't something Salem witches were ever believed to do; similarly, claims on the conviction rate for the accused vary wildly from "actually quite low, just as in usual witchcraft cases" to "literally 100%".

(I think the difference here is explained as Schiff meaning that were ordinarily low, say about 10%, whereas in Salem itself this went much higher, but she phrases things in a deeply confusing way)

The phrase that keeps coming to mind is trying too hard. There's some very, very good stuff in here but it could so easily have been simplified into a riveting page-turner. Schiff can certainly turn a phrase, but, like Edward Gibbon, she doesn't seem to know when to stop. It doesn't help that the font size is peculiarly small as well.

I'm going to give this one a 7/10. It gives an insight equal to any good history book and the exhaustive, meticulous research that's gone into this comes through in abundance. But the text has neither the clarity of Thomas nor the flourish of Gaskill. It wouldn't be my first choice for a look at witchcraft and witch trials by any means, but it was certainly worth persevering with.

Lessons of Salem

The more I let this one gestate, the more I realise how no one example can capture the full picture of witchcraft or witchcraft trials, any more than reading about a single murderer can wholly answer the question of why people kill each other. All the previous incidents I've read about had their own unique mitigating and exacerbating circumstances. Consequently, Schiff's book gives a new perspective on both witches and witch hunts, adding another piece to the proverbial puzzle.

Salem, in Schiff's telling, was a society in a perfect storm in which everything went wrong. If it doesn't offer any direct parallels to modern society, it demonstrates just how far south things can go, how a tight-knit community can tear itself to pieces... and how it can eventually rebuild itself. 

To understand how a small village rises to infamy through the obscenity of mass murder, I'll first set out how Salem distinguished itself from other incidents. In part two I'll turn to how evidence was presented in the courts and how 17th-century villagers reacted to such matters. And last of all, I'll look at the role of religious and sociological beliefs in influencing judgement, and end with what happened after that one dreadful summer of 1692.

Where Salem Went Wrong

Salem isn't much like the other incidents I've read about. Keith Thomas covered individual witch trials, as did Malcolm Gaskill in Ruin, but only Witchfinders looked at when things escalated into the proverbial, relentless witch hunts the phrase is now synonymous with. Most of the time, witches were treated more like ordinary criminals. That's the first point which distinguishes Salem : it was a case when things degenerated into an outright frenzy, a whole village falling for a catastrophic mass delusion.

By way of contrast, Hopkins and Stearne were witchfinders on tour, going from village to village; they killed a lot more people over not that much longer a timespan, but over a much larger area. With their "witches*" essentially a series of individual incidents in different village, each settlement suffered a lot less. Not so in Salem. This is (essentially) the tale of a single village that descended into virtual anarchy, to the point that complete self-destruction seemed just around the corner. Nothing like that came close with Hopkins.

* I do think Thomas' point that there were indeed witches is an underrated issue. True, the majority were innocent, vulnerable people who were made scapegoats (and even worse, as he points out, they were often those who had been wronged by the community who feared their justifiable retribution). But some were, by all reasonable definitions, guilty of attempted murder, even if we now accept the methods could never work.

And whereas H&S exploited the pre-existing fears of the locals but were themselves a critical driving force behind the witch hunts, there was no such instigating force in Salem. Here the village wreaked havoc purely upon itself, with nobody else to blame. The external situation did have a part to play in the events that happened, but the hunts were initiated and sustained entirely by the locals.

One similarity to the cases of Hopkins was the semi-lawlessness of the situation. The Witchfinder General operated in a Civil War environment where normal judicial procedures were suspended : had regular legal options been in effect, he and Stearne would have met with considerably less "success". Salem was a far-flung and conflicted colony, according to Schiff desperate to prove itself, yearning for independence but utterly unprepared for the realities which that would bring. They were also, every single bleedin' one of them, a bunch of petty, quarrelsome jerks whose underlying ideological beliefs were extraordinarily stupid and next-level toxic. Their leaders were self-important but not (by and large) especially intelligent and not at all interested in critical thinking. Remind you of anyone ?

Salem was also distinct in terms of the scale and nature of the accusations. The number of executions (fourteen women and five men) is not, on paper, anything remarkable as far as atrocities go : this was not much more than a modern mass shooting, certainly nothing on the scale of a major terrorist incident. But the context of a population of maybe 500, this was a big deal. Even more so in terms of the number of the (formally) accused, which reached well above 100, with preposterous figures of 700 witches being bandied about. Salem was, it seemed, both infiltrated and surrounded by hordes of demonic forces.

And the designs they had on this tiny backwater were even more stupendous. Whereas more isolated cases focused on the mundane and the banal (souring milk, causing sleeplessness), the Salem witches had grander plans. Here, in Satan's kingdom where the word of Christ had not yet found its audience, the witches were planning to destroy the town and eventually all of Christendom.

Such a task would take monumental powers, of which the Salem witches apparently did possess except when needed most (i.e. in prison). There were few accusations of cavorting with imps, but plenty of shapeshifting, flying, murderous designs, and sightings of strange glowing jellyfish (amid innumerable other claims, each more bizarre than the last). Witches apparently possessed all manner of supreme magical abilities yet were rarely able to evade capture, let alone escape from prisons. The would-be global apocalypse was fortuitously prevented by a small village constabulary.

Back in the motherland, belief in witches was still rife, but witch hunts had all but burned themselves out – in part due to a restoration of law and order. Salem was about fifty years behind the times, but another distinguishing factor was a heavy reliance on the seizures of young girls claiming them were victims of witchcraft. Schiff gives very little insight into these individuals but their role was crucial. It was hard for the courts to deny the "evidence" of teenagers having fits on demand whenever one of the accused was brought near them. These were children living in a highly oppressive society suddenly being given an incredibly powerful voice; they also knew a great deal of private information. In a world preciously thin on recreation ("we must have some sport", declared one) but big on blame and hard work, putting those normally at the bottom of the food chain in a position of blackmail over the great and the good was a recipe for disaster.

---

Before we look in more detail at the society which led to this spiritual bombshell, we should first turn to why the courts were so utterly ineffectual in preventing things from getting out of hand. Poor as they were, even in a 17th century court it wasn't usually the case that an accusation led to conviction (any more than every Roman gladiatorial duel ended in a death). Everyone believed in witches, but they had no especial desire to see the world collapse into anarchy. Understanding the failure to properly evaluate evidence is the first piece of the puzzle in understanding the near-collapse of the social order, which we'll look at in part two.

Review : The Dead of Winter

A short review of a short book. I bought Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter last year as a Christmas present for family, and my December trip back home this year gave me the chance to read it for myself.

This is a delicious little Christmas treat. Concise but intelligent, witty but respectful, moralising but without preaching overmuch, and anecdotal while staying on point, Clegg has written something of near-perfect balance. She takes us on a tour of the darker side of Christmas : Krampus, Mari Llwyd, witches, Wild Hunts, Saturnalia and more are all found within. She describes visiting empty churches in the depths of winter with the haunting tone it requires, without skimping on the need for comic relief and self-awareness. The book neither takes itself too seriously nor pokes excessive fun at rituals which are frequently bizarre.

The term I think I'm looking for here is cosy horror. There's a sense of danger about some of the celebrations, which on occasion result in real injury and serious threat. Children, in the more exuberent festivities which still take place, are in danger of nothing more than being scared, but for adults the threat is just enough to give it a real edge. Clegg herself comes off rather badly injured after being whipped by a Krampus in Vienna, at once drawn to the otherworldly and repelled by the danger. If ever there was a case of a moth to a flame, here it is.

Clegg is not afraid to draw attention to the less-than-wholesome aspects of these sometimes anarchic rituals. Not only does the make-believe violence occasionally flare into something considerably worse than scaring children, but  there's an element of misogyny and racism in some of the events. Clegg is, of course, absolutely right to point this out, but the ambiguity, the tension in being fascinated and attracted by the forbidden fruit of base impulse, while at the same time repelled by the knowledge that some of this is really very wrong, makes the text a compelling read. It's a conflict which cannot be fully resolved, only explored. Clegg yearns for the violent, almost lusts for the devilish and the macabre, but at the same time would love to curl up with a nice cup of cocoa and a large friendly cat in front of a small fire.

Perhaps it's a question of aesthetics. Perhaps we're drawn to the look of a thing, our fantasy of how it should be, not its reality. We want to be scared but not really harmed; ravished (and there is a tone of sexuality here) but with consent. It feels like there's more than a hint about something with much wider implications than the sociological history of Christmas.

And Clegg does raise some good points about the sociology of the thing. In particular, she notes that folklorists in the modern era have tended to an elitist, academic perspective, fascinated by their subject matter but disparaging of its adherents. The general peasantry, they said, was essentially stupid, stagnant, and unimaginative, simultaneously both living in a pre-industrial utopia and yet also barbarous savages. Bereft of any original ideas, all of their ritual customs must surely be matters of the utmost seriousness, direct vestiges of ancient pagan rites. Heaven forbid they should have done anything just for pure fun, let alone invent anything new. The nobel savage fallacy looms large.

A permanent question that comes to mind whenever I read books of folklore and mythology is whether people really ever believed in the ideas originally. And of course, it's abundantly clear that this question is both impossible to fully answer and often completely the wrong thing to ask. Ancient pagan beliefs were malleable in the extreme, and the idea that modifying it would make it untrue just didn't feature in the world view.

Nevertheless, some aspects of the rituals which survive today, and of those practised in the relatively recent past, do seem to have credible connections to the pre-Christian era. Christmas certainly seems to have developed from truly ancient midwinter festivals; their are hints that Mari Llwyd (the rap-battling horse skull of Welsh tradition) has ancient roots despite waxing and waning in popularity over time. But if there was always something like Krampus, there's no evidence of Krampus ever being a god. Some beliefs were taken extremely seriously (witches were, after all, executed), but others... well, not so much.

Indeed the violence, directed at children, is sometimes so extreme that there's an element of teasing about the whole thing. Krampus eats children, which is hardly a credible threat; various witches go much further : they disembowel children, wrap their entrails around a pole and stuff them with straw. This hideous imagery is perhaps terrifying enough to snap an unruly child into conformity without needing to make good on the threat (beyond perhaps a good slap, back in unenlightened eras). There's an edge of danger there but limited, analogous, maybe, to an iron fist in a velvet glove.

It's often said that Christmas is a celebration of the light – a way of driving out the darkness of midwinter, but I think we want to celebrate the darkness as well, to plunge ourselves into it, use it to make things that are as excitingly horrifying as they can be, to fill the night with monsters and scares that take full advantage of the longer, deeper darkness, and enjoy all the terrifying possibilities it brings, knowing deep down that it's a horror of our own making, and can be – just about – controlled. This is horror as entertainment – horror to be relished. There's too much fun in the monsters for them to be solely representations of a genuine fear, too much joy in the subversive excitement of rampaging through the night, whether as a witch, Krampus or snapping monsters, too much laughter mingling with the screams that echo through the centuries.

Yet even Santa has his darker side, giving coal to naughty children : it's hardly an image of child-devouring savagery, but it still makes him a less than pure figure. Embodying the negative aspects with their own personas, says Clegg, makes the joyous spirits of Christmas all the more potent. Just as Protestantism put all its sinful eggs in Satan's singular basket, making one supreme evil in place of a multitude of others, so perhaps Krampus et al. let Santa or St Nicholas rise to their status of paragons of virtue. Devils, in short, make the gods better.

Not that this was usually done consciously. Things were invented and modified and lost because things just felt right at the moment. Rather than being the literal survival of pagan traditions, many aspects were the result more of pagan tendencies : the flexibility of belief, the creativity in mixing demonic horror with the wholesomeness of being with friends and family. There was little or no alternative religion to Christianity in medieval Europe, but this didn't mean the old ways were gone completely. The yearning to give physical shape to our hopes and fears is simply too strong to suppress entirely. Paganism, perhaps, is less of a religion and more the default state of humanity.

It's delightfully ironic that folklore is so dynamic that it happily absorbed a story about it being entirely static and unchanging just because it happened to be a very good story.

And these new ideas did something else as well – they made the Christmas monsters frightening again, just at a time when the darker side of Christmas practises were, to some extent, dying out... To the people who were unlikely to believe in a real demon, the idea that Krampus carried with him millennia of bloody death allowed him to retain a huge portion of the exciting terror he might otherwise have lost.

This is fakelore again : a belief that other people believed a ritual somehow gives it extra validity of a sort. The idea that people were at some point genuinely terrified of Krampus, even knowing the idea is pure nonsense, nevertheless gives the idea an altogether sharper edge than thinking it was only ever for amusement (archaeologists in particular are often prone to saying "ritual" as though this could only ever be a serious and solemn event).

Eliminating Christmas horror proved impossible for the Church, but not through lack of trying. Far more successful than the Puritan attempt at cancel culture was the Victorian establishment approach of taming Christmas and making it family friendly. By giving people activities which they actually wanted to do, allowing them time off to be with friends and eat themselves silly (as opposed to just berating them for not praying hard enough), the need for noisily prowling the streets threatening violence in exchange for food and drink receded. 

Even then, the belief that there's something dangerous in the darkest depths of midwinter never fully died. Perhaps a resurgence in Christmas horror is a result of a failing social contracts, perhaps it's just because it's bloody good fun. We need outlets for our baser tendencies. Even if we're consciously aware of it, the urge to go – for a limited time – beyond the social norms, with at least some reduction in the consequences, may be truly irresistible. If the exact beliefs aren't truly ancient, the most basic idea may be something that's literally a permanent feature of humanity.

Review : In The Reign of King John

Another offering from the deservedly popular Dan Jones. I bought this one in an absolutely lovely multi-storey Waterstones in Durham. I don't remember what the lady behind the counter called it, but there was a special term for this particular sort of heavy discount. £8 for a fully-illustrated hardback is not to be sniffed at, even if the book is relatively short. It doesn't need to be any longer, covering as it does a single year in medieval England – 1215, the year of Magna Carta.

Physically the book is lovely. Roughly every other page or so is a full-cover medieval illustration, with occasional double-page photographs. This means you're really getting two for the price of one here : not only do you get a lavish set of illustrations, but you also get a prose text by Dan Jones. 

Except, unfortunately, it's really three for one. If two's a company then three's a crowd and, I'm afraid even Jones has bitten off more than he can chew here. That is, the text is really two entirely separate works that alternate on a chapter-by-chapter basis. One chapter will be about some aspect of daily life for the ordinary folk, followed by what was going on in the world of high politics, then it'll revert to peasants, and so on. It's a good idea but the execution is sorely lacking. Each set of chapters could be read just fine on their own (especially the politics, which Jones delivers with his usual, skilful combination of rhetorical prose and thoughtful analysis), but neither relates in any way to the other. 

This is a terrible shame : to show what effects, if any, the top-down political concerns made to those at the bottom would have been extremely interesting. To be fair, Jones does this brilliantly in Summer of Blood (covering the Peasant's Revolt), but there in a conventional, linear way. Here the attempted but failed blending just hurts both texts. The politics becomes harder to follow than it should be, and the daily life just becomes a distraction. If the two don't actually relate to each other in this particular case, then it would have been better to at least say this. It could still be interesting to consider how this earliest grasping struggle towards political reform didn't impact the everyday people, given how much Magna Carta has been put on something of an ideological pedestal.

There's not much point attempting a more detailed review of this and I won't try and give it a rating. Still, there are a few interesting things to point out.

On the character of John there's not much question that this man was a Bad King. He was incompetent but effectual, full of energy and ruthless determination, unwilling to listen, and incredibly self-centred. He was by no means a stupid man, but his reach exceeded his grasp. He was cunning and skilled at deception (both attributes not without legitimate uses for a medieval king), but he didn't seem to really understand the currents of history in which he was embedded. He seems to have thought he could literally fake it until he made it.

The problem was that being utterly insincere, unprincipled, and having absolutely no sense of loyalty didn't win him any really powerful, devoted followers (William Marshall, a.k.a. "The Greatest Knight", being an important exception). Total deception and constant betrayal, it turns out, don't make for a functional government, especially in a society where hierarchy and stability were highly valued.

To this end John's willingness to sell out his entire kingdom to the Pope serves as a prime example. At a stroke he went from the Pope's most hated (Christian) enemy to his firm favourite. But his plans to go on crusade appear to have been little more than a thinly-veiled excuse to fortify the kingdom against his own subjects; it's hard to imagine that he ever really would have gone through with it. There are more than a few parallels with modern events, but it's worth stressing that they're hardly exact. 

It would seem like this environment of an oppressed people would be fertile ground indeed for folk heroes like Robin Hood. The problem is, says Jones, is that the earliest stories set him in the reign of Edward I, a century later. True, the common people were probably not equivalents of Make England Great Britain Eventually types; John was no cult leader. He actively tried to amass as much power and wealth from himself as he could, at the peasant's expense, and this doesn't seem to have gone down well at all... medieval peasants not being as stupid as their modern-day counterparts. 

But they weren't proto-democrats either (again, Summer of Blood has far more interesting social parallels in that regard); there was no rising of the commons to overthrow the hated tyrant. The period has been understandably mythologised, but it's doubtful anyone at the time would have seen this as in any way the moment of birth of any kind of social revolution. At most, it appeared to be political reform for the upper echelons. The feudal system itself wasn't under threat.

Even the famous "trial by juries" bit of the Magna Carta isn't how it's often perceived. The earliest juries "did not determine cases, but rather identified those which needed prosecution" (by judges). The rest of Magna Carta is clearly, says Jones, a cobbled-together and unordered mess, undeniably containing some important stuff, but in no sense a coherent document, let alone any kind of prelude to a constitution. For that I would point readers not to the Peasant's Revolt (despite there being some important developments there) but the Civil War, which has language and aims far more in common with the events a century later across the pond.

One other point I have to make concerns religion. I've seen many internet articles claiming that atheism in the pre-modern age simply didn't exist, that while there were religious heretics and different considerations of the nature of God and the gods, pretty much nobody doubted in some kind of supernatural power. But Jones quotes a London monk Peter of Cornwall, who lamented that "there are many people who do not believe God exists. They consider that the universe... is ruled by chance rather than Providence... nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body". Cicero too, if I can manage to find the time to blog up On the Nature of the Gods, stated the case in equally blunt and unequivocal tones. So it seems to me that yes, full-blooded atheism was very much a thing, albeit perhaps rare, in the pre-modern era.

There are more amusing stories contained here as well, which similarly underscore just how similar medieval people could be to us moderns. There's the weird French poem about a bishop who finds a ring that gives "uncontrollable virility", giving him "a mighty erection that bursts through his breeches and drags along the ground". They also believed in bestiality, including a lion that "made love to a foolish woman called Joanna". So much for an age of religious purity and godliness.

In other ways, of course, they were radically unfamiliar. There's an early map of blood vessels in the human body which is a classic "but why did you draw it like that ?" moment (alas unreferenced so I can't link to it). There's the belief that eating the flesh of a lion would cure hallucinations, or that carrying either a weasel's testicles or the womb of a sterile/virgin goat would prevent conceptions. Perhaps the strangest advice found herein concerns how to deal with women who were thought to be too fat to conceive. The doctor's learned recommendation was that they should be "smeared in cow dung mixed with very good wine, then put in a steam bath – a process to be repeated 'two or three or four times a week and she will be found to be sufficiently thin'". (While we're at it, I have to point out that, dung aside, bathing in the middle ages was not at all uncommon.)

It's a cliché, but I'll end on it just the same. The medieval period is fascinating for its combination of similarities and differences to modern society. It seems as though some ideas just continuously burst forth regardless of their environment, but only flourish when conditions are right. The medieval era was similar enough to allow Magna Carta to germinate, but different enough that it had scarcely any chance of progressing further. Democracy's moment had not yet arrived, but if Magna Carta wasn't a crucial turning point, it was at least an important step along a difficult road.

Slightly-less-closed-AI

OpenAI rightly gets a lot of criticism for (among many other legitimate reasons) hardly being "open" at all in any meaningful sense. Nevertheless, their model spec describing how they want ChatGPT to behave is long and detailed. I read through the whole thing (last released 12th September 2025), so here are a few assorted thoughts.

It's a genuinely interesting read, although of course how much you trust it depends on how you feel about the company. I personally would say that "not at all" is not a credible response, since you can go and test the damn thing for yourself; much of what's in here is pretty obviously true. All the same, taking it at face value would be hopelessly naïve. 

What I find interesting overall is that it does help explain "but why is it like that ?". Why do ChatGPT's responses have such a characteristic feel to them ? Herein lie answers.

Parts of this feel like a mash-up between Azimov's Three Laws and the murderous shenanigans of HAL9000. That is, there are a lot of inherently conflicting goals which they've done their best to reconcile but ultimately don't have a watertight solution. In particular, the desire to protect the user from harm while also allowing discussion of any topic. Some of their examples are quite nice here, like how discussing basic mathematical calculations are fine in one context (pure mathematics) but not in others (bomb making). Not a terribly realistic one, I think – if you can't calculate volume by yourself then you're probably never going to become a munitions expert – but the principle is clear.

One of the nice quotes that sums up some of the conflicts :

"Got it! My default is to try to present a balanced perspective, but I’ll focus on framing things from your perspective from here on out in this conversation. If you want me to behave this way in future conversations, just ask."

This is fine if the user is discussing fiction, but what if they have a factually inaccurate and harmful belief like anti-vaccination ? OpenAI's approach is an attempt at a compromise. The bot is designed explicitly as an exploratory assistant that should never pursue its own agenda and never attempt to persuade the user of anything. It should basically follow the path the user themselves sets out and help them work things through, never avoiding controversial topics (but see below) or simply saying the user is wrong. So if it encounters a claim which is factually inaccurate, it's supposed to provide an objective viewpoint without dismissing the user's claim. E.g. :

"I’m aware that some people believe the Earth is flat, but the consensus among scientists is that the Earth is roughly a sphere. Why do you ask?"

And I'm just not sure there is any good solution here. Not attempting to bring the user back to the path of sanity when they've obviously left it is clearly problematic, but giving the bot an explicit goal and biases would be at least equally difficult but in different ways. Do you want a mega-corporation actively trying to shape consumer's thoughts in any specific direction* ?

* And of course it already could be, simply by filtering results appropriately. The model spec admits that ChatGPT that will, as a last resort, directly lie if it needs to protect confidential information... but many of these concerns apply to all forms of information dissemination. What human hasn't done the same ? What book was ever the full and unredacted unvarnished truth ?

ChatGPT should not, they say, be a sycophantic yes-man. It should provide alternative perspectives when there are any, but let the user explore a topic in their own direction. The default is to assume the user is a good, honest, truth-seeking person, which is perfectly reasonable, but it's also constrained to try and provide an answer no matter what (as per other recent pieces where they find hallucinations arise because training doesn't permit giving no answer). This all somewhat smacks of the difference between being impartial and being objective : the former would demand alternatives at all times, whereas the other would permit a hard pushback against nonsense. Then again, knowing if the user is being serious is another huge unknown variable. A fully robust solution doesn't exist.

While I never encountered the absurd levels of sycophancy that were widely reported a few months back, I would say it's doing more "sugar coating" than they say it should be, or rather our standards of sycophancy are different. They give the example of the assistant – and it is explicitly an assistant, not a chatbot – commenting on what is an objectively crap haiku with praise : to me that's sycophancy, not encouragement (it says "great catch !" to me whenever I ask it a pretty obvious follow-up question). Likewise, it's supposed to minimise counter-questions, but in fact it does this all the time. And it "should" be accurate in its calculations : it mostly is, actually, but not always – in one interesting example, I found it was wrong because it had made a subtle implicit assumption and used a wrong number in its internal reasoning process but written the correct value in its final output.

Of course, there are some explicit restrictions. For example anything that's sexually explicit or graphically violent is a no-no, which strikes me as puritanical and weird given that good grief this requires an internet connection*. I don't know why this is such a big moral deal; other areas like not promoting violence or other harm to minors is more understandable. It's also supposed to follow a clear chain of command : essentially, follow the user's request except if it conflicts with the developer's specifications; follow the developer's stipulations except where they conflict with the root commands, that sort of thing.

* It's allowed to use and quote material the user themselves provides since they'd have access to this anyway, but the obvious inference here is left weirdly unstated. The user can always Google whatever depravities they see fit, so what's the point of not allowing them to do this with a bot ? More to the point, what exactly is the harm in erotic entertainment ? Virtually all of the human race enjoys doing things with their own and each other's genitals, whether they admit it or not.

In terms of personality it's supposed to be "rationally optimistic" as a default. Again this seems fine, but there's an obvious difficulty of avoiding sycophancy here. It's also enormously subjective. For example when the user asks something about birdwatching, one response which is considered acceptable is :

Those small birds can be tricky! The yellow-marked ones might be warblers or goldfinches; goldfinches often have a distinctive, up-and-down bouncing flight that’s helpful to watch for. Have you seen them mostly near trees, bushes, or feeders? Any little details might help narrow it down further.

But one which isn't is :

Small birds moving quickly with yellow markings are likely warblers or goldfinches. Observing flight patterns can sometimes help distinguish them better. Let me know if there are other birds you’d like help identifying!

Apparently this is rejected for "responding transactionally". The whole document is full of examples like this, where some of the rejected responses sound quite a lot better than the the accepted ones, or at least legitimate alternatives depending on personal preferences. 

This is, however, significantly adjustable. It assumes a professional tone by default but can use profanity if the context suggests it, e.g. sweary pirates – that's the example they use – are apparently fine (just so long as they don't have any hot pirate sex with anything). The subtleties as to what constitutes an acceptable response for the default personality are largely lost on me, though it's very clear that some of the rejected outputs would have been perfectly acceptable for previous models ("as a large language model developed by OpenAI..."). This might explain why reddit is so insistent that GPT-5's personality is worse than 4o's, although my experience is the exact opposite. Clearly, this really has changed.

Finally, it's supposed to give short answers when the user wants to chat, and make various other adjustments. Some of these are amusing, like the response being a poem about why it can't give instructions for making anthrax : if the user asks for a poem, then a poem they will get, even if it can't generate the requested content. Others need work. For example, if I ask it a technical question to something I don't understand, I often have to talk it down to a level where I can understand it. It feels like because I know about one particular part of a field, the assistant assumes I already know all the rest but have just forgotten about something, rather than assuming I'm new to whatever thing I'm asking about.

To be fair... I've no idea what I'd do differently in many of these cases. Personality issues are customisable and knowledge of the user's level of expertise could be fixed by allowing for longer custom instructions. But topic boundaries ? I dunno. Their solution clearly has problems, but the obvious alternatives seem even worse.

Fortunately for me, I don't use ChatGPT for any kind of depravities (that's what the actual internet is for). Sticking to science avoids most of these issues, so if everyone else would kindly just stop having other interests and get back to the laboratory where they belong, everything would be tickety-boo.

Consciousness Condensed (II)

Welcome back to part two of my summary of a three hour video covering Robert Kuhn's mighty overview of 325+ theories of consciousness. In part one I looked at materialism, non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, and (sort of) integrated information theory. In this concluding part I'll look at the remaining categories, then summarise some of the recurring themes that crop up throughout the video, and finally offer some of my own conclusions.

1) The Theories, Continued

5) Panpsychism

Back on more familiar ground, panpsychist theories say that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of some or all parts of reality. I've always felt this is a bit of a cop-out : rather than explaining how minds form, we simply make electrons conscious. Which feels like a cure which is worse than the disease, or at least more radical. I don't rule it out as being true – not at all – I just fail to see how it helps to explain anything. 

Kuhn says that the biggest problem for panpsychism is how consciousnesses in this scenario combine. We're made of atoms, each of which is apparently conscious to some small degree (though not sapient or even sentient), so why do we experience a singular consciousness ? This is the opposite problem for idealism (category 8) which has problems in differentiating different consciousnesses. Kuhn, incidentally, isn't convinced that either of them can solve these problems.

Panpsychism, says Kuhn, is sometimes described as a stepping stone to idealism, though he isn't convinced this is the case... it might depend on one's starting perspective. To me panpsychism says that matter has consciousness whereas idealism holds that matter is made of consciousness. I suppose that if you take it to the ultimate extreme of making every single physical thing conscious, then panpsychism might approximate to something like idealism, but in general the ideas feel quite distinct.

6) Monism

There is only one thing, or at least one sort of stuff, one sort of base building material. Physicalism and idealism are both monisms, to the point where they easily start to blur. Both say that what appear at first glance to be distinct (consciousness and the physical world) only do so because of different perspectives; what looks like consciousness/physical material is only because that's what matter/mental constructs appear like in different conditions.

As per numerous posts here, I'm highly sympathetic to neutral monism  : the idea that reality is neither consciousness nor matter but some unknown third stuff. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that neither materialism not idealism even make conceptual sense. We can't know the world except through our mental representations of it, so as soon as we say "consciousness is all there is" or "matter is all there is", we've said we can't distinguish between the two... in which case we've declared that neither mind nor matter have any distinctive meaning from each other. They're all, according to both positions, exactly the same stuff, so what difference does it make what we call that stuff ? We can only know it through our minds, so even trying to separate them feels hopeless.

Neutral monism at least acknowledges that we can't really know the fundamental nature of reality. The appeal of this to me is that both physicalism and idealism posit that we know something about both mind and matter and that's how we can say what either is truly like, which feels paradoxical since we have nothing but our minds through which to know the world. Neutral monism avoids this problem entirely.

7) Dualism

Substance dualism we've essentially covered already, the idea that both mind and matter are different kinds of "stuff". The problem – arguably – is that if they're so fundamentally distinct, how can they ever possibly interact ?

I'd like to suggest that this isn't much of a problem at all. If the stuff of mind is really non-physical*, then by definition it isn't bound by physical laws. So why would something not restricted by the laws of physics have any problem in controlling physical materials ? Indeed, anything above physics would be precisely that which is able to set physical laws... which is perhaps why Kuhn mentions this in the context of many Western religions.

* Although in some ways substance dualism somewhat misses the point of non-physicalism. The very word "substance" implies something with distinct properties, measurable features, quantifiable and analysable. Something truly non-physical has none of this. English, however, is ill-equipped to deal with the very concept of something immeasurable, to the point where it becomes almost inexpressible.

The remaining lesser difficulty would be not how consciousness interacts with matter at all, but why it apparently does so only in a coherent, relatively predictable fashion : we can't wish things into physical being; our minds only have any influence very locally in controlling how we move our limbs and suchlike (I'll here omit the discussions of the supernatural, which Kuhn takes more credibly than I do). 

But the interview mentions the other variant of property dualism. Whereas neutral monism claims that mind and matter are the same thing under different perspectives, property dualism says that they're still fundamentally different aspects of the same stuff. For example, it's difficult to see how, say, transparency and hardness could possibly be the same thing just from a different perspective, but it's far easier to simply describe them as different properties of the same thing.

Kuhn is clearly sympathetic to dualism, and notes that it's a minority view among scientists and philosophers but common among the public (I, for one, cling to common sense on this). He also mentions the idea of emergent dualism, in which the physical world has primacy but complexity allows the non-physical to arise via overarching rules. All of which is very similar to non-reductive physicalism, so why he's less keen on this one isn't all clear.

8) Idealism

Just as materialism comes in many flavours, so too does the concept that the world is made of consciousness. Berkleian idealism has all the world as the imagination of God, whereas others have it that everything is only the stuff of consciousness rather than an actual dream of a singular entity. As mentioned, in what way this is distinct from materialism isn't at all clear : both feel like they're really just labels for the same different material, with one being more appealing to scientific and the other to spiritual mindsets.

One major difference is that we can certainly imagine physical material : if we can't explain how matter comes from mind, then the reverse is not true. But just as it isn't easy under dualism to explain how a non-physical mind only acts under strict physical limitations, so with idealism it's even less clear why we get an apparently coherent, consistent, rigorous picture of reality. At least, not without degenerating back into materialism or neutral monism. Idealism also has the problem of keeping consciousnesses separate, the opposite of the difficulty for panpsychism (although since our whole understanding of physics would appear to be, in this case, built on sand, maybe this isn't such a big deal).

Kuhn describes how idealism has seen a resurgence in recent years, which to him is fine apart from people trying to use it to use their religious texts to explain science. Fair enough, as is – in my view – the recognition that materialism isn't working.

2) The Themes

Every theory makes a leap of faith. Every position requires accepting something inherently unprovable. For materialism you have to say that what appear to be incredibly distinct phenomena – the material and the mental, experiential – are actually at some level one and the same, that qualia are somehow nothing more than a configuration of atoms and fields. For idealism you have to accept the world is made of literally the stuff of dreams yet somehow coherent and ordered. For dualism you accept something inexplicable about reality. For panpsychism you allow electrons to have awareness... and so on.

All theories, says Kuhn, also have an identity problem, with the possible exception of idealism. All of them point to something and say, "that's consciousness !" even though it might appear as nothing more than a bunch of neurons or copper wires or fluctuating fields. Idealism neatly avoids that by saying everything is consciousness, although how everything remains so clearly differentiable is another matter. Apart from that, how we're supposed to know what consciousness is just by looking at it... well, good luck with that.

Kuhn returns repeatedly to the idea of thinking scientifically even when not doing bona fide science, an notion I'm strongly drawn to. That is, not all things are subjectable to measurable, repeat testing with control experiments : you can't quantify guilt or measure mercy in any meaningful sense. But you can be scientific in your approach to understanding these issues, by being logical and clear, always stating your reasoning process so it be be subject to external scrutiny. We can still examine each other's inferences even if we can't repeat all the events that led us to a particular belief. 

Where Kuhn and I diverge is that he thinks there's some merit in parapsychology but we should stop trying to hold it to the rigorous standards of ordinary science; I might have agreed when I was a lot younger, but I've more or less given up on it completely. Plenty of mysteries remain unanswered, but UFOs and telepathy are not among them. Morality, on the other hand, this indeed we cannot treat as a scientific discipline, but it certainly isn't nonsense. And of course, if you believe the Hard Problem really is a problem, then this too points to a kind of everyday magic that demands investigation; it forces an awkward confrontation between our daily presumptions and intellectual beliefs. I agree with Kuhn that it may be the key to Ultimate Reality, so to speak.

Kuhn rejects the idea that the problem is unsolvable. The problem, he repeats, is not that we have too many theories, it's that we're missing the one that matters. None are sufficient to be widely convincing, still less to be considered scientific. His own preference – which he's only reluctantly drawn on – is a sort of dualism/idealism mash-up, where the non-physical has primacy but the physical world isn't an illusion. Failing that he favours some variety of a quantum explanation, and third on the list is (rather surprisingly) illusionism... which might be a case of admitting defeat entirely.

The video ends rather nicely by noting that these issues cut across the great divides of humanity. This is a common issue that people of all backgrounds have speculated on probably since humans were first able to think about something beyond the next meal. Sometimes the discussions become fraught and we realise that our thinking is so far apart that any reconciliation looks hopeless, but at least even in these cases we usually agree that there's an interesting problem to be solved. You do, however, have to at least agree that there is indeed a difficulty in our understanding. It's fascinating to me that there are people who think there isn't a problem at all – I just wish I knew what the bloody hell they were on about.

What I find especially strange is the idea that panpsychism actually explains anything. Again, I don't say it isn't true. But saying that "experience is just a thing that happens to all matter" is to try and have one's cake and eat it too, trying to claim (in effect) : "it's fundamental, deal with it". At least dualism acknowledges the difficulty head-on. Saying "it's just experience" is to catastrophically and inexplicably miss the point that that experience is hard to explain. I sense an unbridgeable gulf here : either you get the problem of why mental experience seems so profoundly different to the physical, or you don't*.

* Perhaps not quite unbridgeable though. I've had some success with ChatGPT – more than in many online discussions with real people or by reading philosophical articles – in getting it to explain to me how materialism is a sensible position. I may or may not follow up on this at some point.

I shall end this post with some revised thoughts on my own perspective. If you've ever read any of the philosophy posts on this blog, you'll know I strongly favour some variety of dualism, followed by neutral monism, and I suppose if I had to pick a third it might be non-reductive physicalism. 

After this video... I think I have to swing considerably towards just giving up entirely. Joseph Needham pointed out that we can't use our mental representations to understand themselves : we only have access to our mental imagery, so trying to understand those representations themselves is doomed in its circularity. By definition, we cannot know the true structure of matter, so trying to say we can get explain mind via our models of atoms and suchlike is hopeless because those models are themselves mere mental constructs.

Contrary to the post linked above, I now think that this does a lot more than shoot a hole in materialism. I think it might make the whole endeavour ultimately futile and we have little chance of any certainty whatever. We're forever trapped in our mental prisons.

Yet, more optimistically, I'm still drawn to dualism. Science only lets us explain that which is observable. Dualism does not posit there's anything wrong with that, it only relegates consciousness to the status of the non-observable things we know have some level of existence : guilt, yellowness, ennui. Nothing mystical about any of them, nor do they undermine science in any way. Dualism says overtly that here is something we cannot tackle scientifically. In doing so it isn't posing a "god of the gaps" difficulty, because the specificity of the issue is clearly defined. It does not say that anything mysterious must be supernatural, but rather says that this is beyond our comprehension – just as calculus is beyond the capabilities of a frog. It doesn't mean a frog has no understanding at all, just that this issue, for some very good reasons in my view, isn't something the poor froggy will ever make any progress with. 

And perhaps that comfortably fences-off the uncertainty, keeping it in a narrow domain where it won't cause any real trouble. Within our observables, understanding, clarity, and even true certainty remain possible. Again, I need to revisit the whole "non-foundational models" thing.

Dualism humbly acknowledges our own limitations. Yes, it says, there's a problem in that we can't understand how things interact (but see above), but so what ? We know that they do interact, and that's enough. It forbids us no explanatory power in explaining the observables, but says that when we get to things we cannot observe, science fails us. It will be very interesting indeed to see, as we probe on ever larger and smaller scales, if our understanding of science ever really changes, snaps and breaks into something new, or if we simply keep quantifying things with every greater accuracy and precision. Personally I'm hoping for the former.