'In satanic circles', Michael Pye, The Scotsman, 13 December 1969

The Scotsman, Saturday 13 December 1969, page 19. Michael Pye reviews three books together: June Johns's King of the Witches (Peter Davies, 35s), Alan Hull Walton's The Open Grave and a reprint of Sir Walter Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Writing months after the murder of Sharon Tate, Pye argues the press has turned witchcraft into 'a Sunday newspaper's dream'. He calls Sanders 'a very odd case indeed' and 'a pale white witch', and is hard on Johns's 'meretricious little book', which he finds brisk and readable but shallow, its nude photographs at odds with its claims of seriousness. One of the sharpest reviews the biography received in Britain. How to cite: Michael Pye, 'In satanic circles', The Scotsman, 13 December 1969, p. 19. Alexandrian Witchcraft Timeline & Archive.

In satanic circles MICHAEL PYE JUNE JOHNS: King of the Witches (35s. Davies). ALAN HULL WALTON: The Open Grave (30s. Spearman). SIR WALTER SCOTT: Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (42s. S.R. Publishers). SHARON TATE is dead. She died, so the Californian police say, at the hands of a druggy, sadistic, satanistic little band, the outer outcasts of hippiedom and the very sort of people that practitioners of white magic most rigorously exclude from their circles. I suppose we are back where we were, at the time of the Beaverbrook Press attack on Aleister Crowley. Because people have not the slightest idea of what a witch is, what the significance of the witch law Wicca is, what witches do and why, the whole subject turns into a Sunday newspaper’s dream, prurient, eccentric, deviant. Which last witchcraft is, if this is a Christian nation. It is a religious as well as an estatic cult. The persecution of witches has left witch-lore in a rocky state where any group can reinvent what rituals suit them. But there is something more substantial in witchcraft, and in ceremonial magic. One shouldn’t have to say that there is something far, far more substantial in the complexities and the subtleties of the Kabbalah but even that system gets smudged by the dirty goings-on of certain people who profess to practise and comprehend magic. Alex. Sanders is a very odd case indeed. He claims to be King of the Witches (he has rivals). His background is mixed. Witchcraft does run in his family, he seems sincere about the witch-law although he has on no very good authority altered it, he sees witchcraft as the worship of a god not far removed from the God of Christianity. A pale white witch, indeed. He lived for a period off a couple who wanted him as a substitute son, he admits a period of debauchery and sexual experiment associated with black magic, he comes through June Johns’s meretricious little book as a prig who has had a good time. The impression of having your cake and eating it is partly Miss Johns’s fault. She prints the Sanders’ version of witch-law, defends the sincerity and the harmlessness of the cult; and illustrates the whole lot with the sort of photographs which are dedicated in respectable books, to demonstrating that women have no pubic hair. The mixture of sense and nudie pix is overpoweringly hypocritical. What little good the book can do - and it is a brisk, efficient, good read - is vitiated by its shallowness. Connoisseurs of non-scholarship should read Miss Johns’s nine-page history of witchcraft. Splendid stuff, in a sour sort of way. Alan Hull Watson’s new book is a collection of testimonies on ghosts and magic and demons. He gives Huysmann’s account of a Black Mass (and we all know why Huysmann was la-bas, don’t we, friends, so we’re not taking him very seriously, are we?). He quotes and compiles and amuses. Some of his material is splendid – Sinistrari solemnly debating the sexual life of succubi. Most of it is very interesting. His book makes no great claims, and it's fun. The new edition of the Scott letters is a photo reprint of the 1884 edition, introduced by Raymond Lamont Brown. It's a model, needless to say, of the balance between dramatic narrative and assembling reasonably substantiated information. Scott’s history, particularly his history of ideas, is often peculiar, but his observation, and his sense of what has been observed, is splendid. A fireside book par excellence, as well as an intriguing collection. None of these three will do anything to teach outsiders what witchcraft is. The first two suggest that witchcraft, when it comes to the crunch, is something for the professional writer to do, when he’s stuck for a subject. Only it is more, more important and more subtle. It didn’t kill Sharon Tate; knives did that.