Author: Mr. Magpie (---.shawcable.net)
Date: 01-14-2005 09:47
Anituel,
You start off your column by saying, "I'm a real-world occultist, myself, which at the very least gives me the authority to tell you how you might like to use this stuff in your games."
Actually, it doesn't. As this column demonstrates, just being an insider isn't any sort of guarantee that a person possesses information that's better than anything that an outsider could pick up with a few web searches and a quick trip to the bookstore. For future columns, you might be better off saying, "I find this material interesting, which is why I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to introduce it into games. Here are some of my thoughts." Do that, and cut down on your use of the word "historically" to describe vague theories presented without any sort of support, and you've got a decent article.
I am *not* a real-world occultist, so it's possible that you have access to a vast amount of secret history of which I'm unaware, but I would have thought that if you were going to present a non-fiction reading list for European witchcraft, you'd want to point people towards books like Europe's Inner Demons (Cohn), Servants of Satan (Klaits), Magic in the Middle Ages (Kieckhefer), Ecstasies (Ginzburg), Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Russell), The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Levack), and ... well, my point is that there's a huge amount of literature out there, none of which was written by Scott Cunningham.
The history that you present doesn't show any real sense that you've thought about the subject. The history of witchcraft is more complicated than a conspiracy by the Church and aristrocracy to keep common people in their place; it's not as if ordinary people, once they joined the priesthood, were suddenly initiated into the Great Secret that Christianity only existed to oppress the poor. This sharp division between evil Church and good commoner is fine if you want to roleplay a fantasy version of Protestant polemics, but it's dubious on any other grounds. (Speaking of which, you might also want to ask yourself why, if the basic conflict over witchcraft is the one you describe, the trials carried on with even greater enthusiasm in Protestant countries that had no ecclesiastical central authority.)
My advice, then, is to throw away any pretense of being an authority on these subjects. You could even have fun going in the opposite direction: pick up a really awful piece of paperback occultism from the local bookstore and say to yourself, "What if *this* were the way that magic worked?" That way, you won't have to do any historical research and you won't end up with people like me stepping in and pointing out problems with your column. On the other hand, if you do want to carry on in the direction that you're going, please do some real work.
I don't want this response to discourage you. On the contrary, I'd like to see future columns on the same subject, either written more thoughtfully and with better research, or more creatively and with an open acknowledgement that you're not basing your ideas on the real world. But choose one, and don't confuse them.
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