Unseen Influences: evil operates by the rulebook

Evil is said to operate according to certain rules. For example, anyone who has watched vampire films will know that they can’t come in unless you invite them. Dracula lurks outside the window trying to hypnotise someone into opening it for him. I vaguely remember a horror film with a black magician who tricks someone into inviting him in and offering him a drink of water – this gives him some kind of power over the household. 

The message here is that if you know the rules they operate by, you can defend yourself against and perhaps even defeat the dark forces. 

One of these rules seems very strange:  it says that victims must consent in advance to whatever evil is worked upon them. This seems very unlikely: who would agree to this? No one would knowingly consent to being taken away and tortured. No one would agree to be exploited and destroyed. 

The answer is that naïve and gullible people can be tricked and unprotected and vulnerable people who cannot look after their own interests and have no one to do it for them can be taken advantage of. 

Evil people load the dice against their intended victims and cheat them. They manipulate, manoeuvre and confuse people into doing things that they would never consider if they were in their right minds and a healthy state or had someone suitable to protect and advise them. Evil people – or forces - engineer situations that close off all avenues except the one they want their victims to take.

Unseen Influencers: The Women in Black by Madeleine St. John

I remember reading a review of this book when it was first published, which was in 1993. The review was in a free magazine that was given away at many stations; I used to take a copy if it was handed to me, but it never had much content that I thought worth reading. 

I read the book section in one issue, and saw a review of The Women in Black. The book’s outline did not sound very promising - sales assistants in the dress department of a Sydney department store in the 1950s are not what I would normally want to read about - but my radar picked something up. I had learned to respect these inner promptings so I bought the book.

My radar chose well. On one level the book makes a passable light read; on another level it acts as a teaching guide by providing examples of unseen influences of a positive kind. I did not immediately realise this: the insights came to me gradually in the following years.

The most significant character in The Women in Black is called Magda. She has a very beneficial influence on her fellow workers and their lives and families; deliberately or unconsciously she arranges their affairs so that they all get their heart’s desire. She is a wonderful example of someone who is the exact opposite of an energy vampire and a saboteur; she is a giver and a facilitator and everyone around her benefits from knowing her. The ripple effect spreads throughout her sphere of influence.

Be very careful what you dwell on: getting caught in one's own traps

I have had some more ideas about Charlotte Brontë, and I want to pass on my interpretation of certain significant events in her life. I think that some of them can be attributed to what I think of as psychological black magic.

Charlotte Brontë and her siblings were obsessed with the Duke of Wellington, England’s hero of the time. He starred in many of the wonderful, Byronic stories that they created from their imaginations. Both Charlotte and Emily Brontë created dark, romantic heroes; it is likely that they thought of the Duke, whose real name was Arthur Wellesley, as dark and romantic too.

Charlotte eventually married a dark man whose first name was Arthur. Was this just a coincidence, or a case of ‘Be very careful what you wish for ...’? He annoyed her when he hung around and dogged her footsteps through the village, but perhaps he was drawn in and caught in a psychic trap.

Her letters show that she was a great daydreamer: she had an almost lifelong habit of ‘making out’ as it was then called. This helped her to escape from her surroundings and painful memories, and provided some compensation for an unsatisfactory life. 

Some of her imaginings were so intensely vivid that they were almost hallucinations. She went in for two types of daydreaming: one where it was similar to watching TV and she did not know what would happen next, and the other where she mentally choreographed the events and invested a lot of energy in them, living them as if they were real. Some of the results went into her books.

Aryan supremacy: blond hair and blue eyes versus black hair and brown eyes

The idea that people from the Nordic race are superior to those from other races was of enormous importance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They propagated that the best kinds of human beings were Northwestern Europeans, white-skinned people with blue eyes and blond hair; this meant that races such as the Negroid, Slavic and Mediterranean and people with black hair and brown eyes were considered to be inferior. 

Similar ideas affected people whose lives are of interest to me. 

When I first read a biography of Louisa May Alcott, I learned that her father was what we would now call an Aryan supremacist. Bronson Alcott was tall, and he had blond hair and blue eyes. He said that such people were superior to dark-haired people with black hair and brown eyes. Louisa resembled her mother, who could have passed for Spanish or Italian.

Bronson Alcott thought that his colouring indicated associations with the light and good, angelic forces; this implied that Louisa and her mother were not only inferior, but also dark, evil and demonic. When Louisa brought home a young man with fair colouring, Bronson said, “Sir, you are a child of light”. Why was this issue so important to him? What effect did his views have on Louisa and her mother?

Is it just a coincidence that Louisa was born in Germantown, Philadelphia? This reminds me of the connection between the Mitford family, Unity Valkyrie and her Aryan supremacist grandfather Bertie Mitford in particular, and Swastika, Ontario.