Nicholas Stuart Gray’s witch: Mother Gothel

The witch Mother Gothel appears in Nicholas Stuart Gray’s story The Stone Cage, which is a re-telling of the Rapunzel fairy tale. Rapunzel is a maiden with very long hair who is kept prisoner by a witch at the top of a tall stone tower.

The book is currently unobtainable: all I could find was the dramatised version of The Stone Cage, which is better than nothing. This play has also been performed under the name The Wrong Side of the Moon.

Mother Gothel as depicted in The Stone Cage is based on a real person - Nicholas Stuart Gray’s mother. 

Mother Gothel is introduced
“She is a witch, in the worst meaning of the word. A creature of malice, egotism and cruelty. She is so interested in herself, that she has little time to spare for anyone else’s feelings or well-being. She considers the world against her, and beneath her. She is absolutely alone, and does not even realise that she minds the fact…Once, long ago, she was beautiful. Now, she would be avoided by anyone with sense…”

More about Mother Gothel – in her own words
“Obey me, crawl to me, cringe, and love me!”

“I do not forgive anything – ever.”

“I have little or no sense of humour. It’s quite fatal to true wickedness.”

This reminds me of something Richard Hannay says in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages: “I saw it as farce… and at the coming of humour the spell died”.  

“It’s best to catch ‘em young…Before their minds open. When they know nothing, except what you choose to tell them. See nothing but what you care to show. When right and wrong are words to juggle with, and black and white is interchangeable...”

This too is familiar: Dominick Medina, the villain of The Three Hostages, wipes the memories of his young captives and fills their minds with his own creations. The mention of black and white reminds me of another of Hannay’s comments: “I felt that I was looking on at an attempt, which the devil is believed to specialise in, to make evil good and good evil...” 

Nicholas Stuart Gray’s witch: Barbara

Barbara is the main character in The Stranger, a short story in Nicolas Stuart Gray’s book The Edge of Evening. She does not at all resemble the witch Huddle, who also appears in this book. She is described as being neither young nor old, neither ugly nor pretty. She has brown hair and violet eyes, and is slim and rather tall. 

Barbara has little in common with other witches I have written about. For example, she is not seeking some black magic book, magical artefact or other item as are Lucy M. Boston's Dr. Melanie Powers, Robin Jarvis's 'nasty piece of work' Rowena Cooper and Linwood Sleigh's‘horrid old lady’ Miss Heckatty; she is not power crazy nor planning to rule the world like Diana Wynne Jones's  Gwendolen Chant; she is not cruel and evil like Sheri S. Tepper's Madame Delubovoska, nor is she surly and unpleasant like Joan Aiken's Mrs Lubbage.

Her problem is that she is miserable; she is a stranger in a strange land; she hates her life in a world where kindness is dreadfully lacking and wants to get away from it. She is tired of people telling her to pull herself together. 

She has learned magic and sorcery just to obtain the power to find a world of her own, a place that is right for her, somewhere with people who speak her language, somewhere she can meet her own kind and be happy at last. She is so desperate for help that she performs a summoning ritual and conjures up a demon – whose name is Balbarith – and orders him to obey her. She commands him to show her other worlds and how to enter them.

Compelled to obedience by the power of Barbara’s spells, Balbarith shows her a few worlds, none of which is suitable. He then finds a fairly reasonable sort of place, simple and happy looking. It is full of flowers, fields and sweet, friendly animals and birds. Barbara likes it very much.

Angela Brazil, her brother, and the child prodigy pianist

Reading about J. M. Barrie and his infiltration of the Llewelyn Davies family has reminded me of a chilling little story that I read in The Schoolgirl Ethic: Life and Work of Angela Brazil by Gillian Freeman. 

The victim in the case was a boy called Gilbert Morris; the villains were the schoolgirls’ fiction writer Angela Brazil and her brother Walter.  Angela appears to have been the main driving force, decision maker and giver of orders in this affair; it is likely that Walter just followed her lead and went along with her wishes.

Gilbert Allan Morris was a child prodigy, a professional pianist who made his first public appearance at the age of six. He was born in 1901 and came to the attention of the Brazils when he was 12 years old; Angela was in her 45th year at the time and Walter in his 52nd.

The Brazils took Gilbert up, railroaded him towards a career that they believed would bathe them in reflected glory, raised his hopes then pulled the rug out from under him. They gave with one hand and took with the other; they made plans and arrangements on his behalf without informing him. He became enmeshed in the tentacles of their household and was driven by their pressure to the edge of destruction.

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part III

A brief summary of Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria makes it seem like a complete fantasy, a children’s story that is interesting and entertaining but has little relevance to real life. I have actually found much of it familiar, informative and very useful - not so much the purely supernatural parts but the scenes involving mind control and manipulative behaviour. 

It is ironic that this little book is considered suitable reading for eight-year-olds yet it has caused me to produce so much material that I decided to break my article first into two then into three parts.

Telepathy, spying and psychic attacks
One member of Aunt Maria’s circle gives Mig a book of pictures, the kind a little girl will love. Some of them are indeed of flittery little fairies, but others are frightening and sinister: the worst one is titled ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ and makes Mig feel ill. This seems like a message, a warning, and reminds me of one of the disturbing pictures sent to Marianne in Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper.

Jane Austen and J. M. Barrie: intriguing deaths of two future in-laws

There are many different types of unseen influences to be investigated. Of particular interest to me are cases of creative people who have a bad effect on those around them. 

I have listed some ‘sacrificed sons’ in one article; I have highlighted the early deaths of Louisa M. Alcott’s brother-in-law and younger sister and the convenient death of Jane Austen’s future brother-in-law in another. 

From the latter article:

“…Cassandra became engaged to a military chaplain who was sent overseas and died of yellow fever somewhere in the Caribbean. His patron said that he would never have taken the young man out there if he had known that he was an engaged man. Why didn’t he ask, and why did no one tell him? The end result was that Jane Austen kept her chosen companion: Cassandra never considered marrying anyone else...”

I have just read something about J. M. Barrie that has brought the Jane and Cassandra Austen case very much back to mind. 

The Brontë family misfortunes: curse or coincidence?

I have written elsewhere about the witch Biddy Iremonger, a major character in Wilkins’ Tooth aka Witch’s Business by Diana Wynne Jones. She deliberately puts a curse on the man she had intended to marry when he chooses someone else. This curse hits him and his family very hard: his wife has to go into a home for mentally ill people, and his pale, shabby, neglected children are considered peculiar, old fashioned and strange looking. 

Reading about the effects of her curse makes me feel very uncomfortable: it all reminds me very much of what happened to and in my own family after my step-mother left in a fury because of disappointed hopes.

It also reminds me of another family: that of Charlotte Brontë. 

The strange, old-fashioned appearance of the children, the unsuitable housing, the dreadful school, the suffering, the ill health, the blighted lives, the terrible state that Branwell Brontë was reduced to, the ‘too little too late’ successes and the untimely deaths have all been recorded in family letters and described by many biographers. Some of it is very familiar: once again my own family comes to mind.

The Biddy Iremonger story left me wondering whether there was someone who could have put a curse on the Brontë family. 

I refreshed my memory by re-reading some biographical material, and found a person of interest.

Unseen influences: good luck and good timing

There are people for whom nothing ever seems to go right. It seems as though someone has cursed or put an evil spell on them. They make bad decisions and miss opportunities; their timing is always off; everything they want seems out of reach, and if they do get something they want it turns sour; they get bad service and never seem to find good bargains; they find unpleasant people everywhere they go. They may feel paranoid – for good reason.

I have had experience of this, and attribute it to being under the influence of energy vampires.

It is possible to break the spell, lift the curse, turn bad luck into good and completely turn our lives around.  This gives us feelings of positive paranoia: we feel that the universe is arranging things just for our benefit.

An example of this happened to me as recently as yesterday. I had been looking for some weeks for an item for my home office. Nothing I found online or in shops seemed ideal: I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, just that I would know it when I saw it. The model I liked best was in the US and would have cost a fortune in shipping fees, so I thought that I would have to settle for something unexciting that would merely serve its purpose.