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.

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch: Gwendolen Chant

I am very interested in fictional witches whose attitudes, characteristics and behaviour remind me of people I have encountered in real life, including energy vampires, horrible stepmothers, unpleasant teachers and negative colleagues.

Not only that, but I also have an unpleasant and unwelcome suspicion that some of these witches show and embody something of what I might have become by default if I had taken the path of least resistance and not faced reality, escaped the clutches of energy vampires, fought my fate, defeated my destiny and overcome many unseen influences.

Gwendolen Chant, who appears in Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life, is yet another witch of interest. There are some scenes in this book that make me feel very uncomfortable, not only because of how I was treated but because of how I felt and behaved – or wanted to behave – when I was much younger than I am now.

Gwendolen’s life before Chrestomanci 
Gwendolen Chant is around 12 years old; she is a very pretty and charming young girl, a golden-haired, blue-eyed princess; she has much innate magical ability; she is convinced that she has great talents and will achieve future fame; she displays queenly behaviour, feels destined for great things and expects to rule the world. 

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - MBTI

I lived much of my life without ever hearing of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is a form of personality assessment. 

I had always assumed that personality tests were superficial, generalised and irrelevant; I had never taken any interest in them. Someone mentioned the MBTI to me a few years ago: she asked me what my MB type was. I was interested, and decided to give it a go after finding some free tests online. 

In all cases, I came out very strongly as INTJ: introversion, intuition, thinking, judgement.  

I read some good-quality material describing the characteristics of this type and listing possible career options: it all seemed spot on. It explained a hell of a lot. It confirmed some things that I had always known or suspected. I have always said, “Does it work?” and expected things to make sense, and this is exactly what the descriptions say INTJs do! 

Long before I took the test, I had come to realise that certain missed opportunities that I had regretted very much, both at the time and for many years afterwards, would not after all have been right for me.  Some of the material I read provided an objective confirmation of my insights; these cases could now be closed for good.  

The material also confirmed my theory that the life I was forced to lead in my formative years might have been deliberately designed to ruin my prospects and cause maximum suffering. 

It was not just that my education was grossly deficient and that the work I had been forced to do could not have been more unsuitable, it was not just that my abilities, aptitudes, interests and personality had been completely ignored, it was as if someone had read the details of INTJ people and created the worst possible life for someone of this type. 

Dion Fortune on energy vampires

The occultist Dion Fortune made some interesting statements about energy vampires that are worth discussing.  I can’t remember which of her books they came from; I have paraphrased her words from memory and some scribbled notes.

She likened an energy vampire and victim to a bullfrog and sucked-out orange.

This is a very memorable image. I think it must apply mainly to powerful, driven and glamorous energy vampires, those who need and obtain excessive amounts of extra energy. Many energy vampires are being vampirised themselves - possibly by other people, possibly by some internal parasitic obsession or idea - so they appear shrivelled, diminished and sucked out too.

I am reminded of Petra Kelly, one of the founders of the German Green Party, who is reported to have got through seventeen secretaries in eight years:

“I loved her dearly,” said Heinz Suhr, a Green Party spokesman, “but some hated her. They called her a vampire, sucking the energy out of those around her. She was too big a star.”

Linwood Sleigh’s witches: Miss Heckatty, Mother Withershins and Winnie Jago

The Boy in the Ivy by Linwood Sleigh is yet another very good book that I remembered as containing modern-day witches and wanted to re-read. It is out of print; when I first saw how much was being charged for the few copies available, I decided to forget it! After a long time, I felt a sudden impulse to search online once again just in case; I found a copy on Amazon at a very reasonable price. When the book arrived, I found that it had been signed by the author!

Three of the witches it contains are of especial interest to me.

Miss Heckatty

When she first appears, Miss Heckatty is presented as a selfish, inconsiderate, annoying character, a ‘horrid old lady’. She moves some items a boy left on a window seat on the train to reserve it and takes the seat for herself. She knits during the journey and keeps jabbing the boy beside her with her elbow. 

Miss Heckatty is a learned lady; just like Dr. Melanie Powers in L. M. Boston’s An Enemy at Green Knowe, she is the scholarly type of witch. She too is hunting something – an extremely rare flower with magic properties as opposed to occult papers. Also just like Melanie Powers, Miss Heckatty goes to tea with a family because it gives her a pretext to get into a place where she hopes to find what she is looking for. The visit provides opportunities to look around and do some investigating. Witches often have ulterior motives for what they do.

Miss Heckatty is greedy: she takes the biggest cakes, but unlike Dr. Powers she does this openly. She is unkind to her worn, miserable, downtrodden students. 

Three fictional modern-day witches

I have always liked reading stories about witches, especially modern-day witches.

I no longer read such fiction just for enjoyment and escape: I am looking for examples of and information about the various types of unseen influences.

I remembered some books I read long ago that feature modern-day witches and have been re-reading them in the hope of finding relevant material. I already have enough for several articles: there are many connections to be made between some fictional modern-day witches and people I have encountered, and there are scenes in these books that remind me of incidents I have experienced myself. 

It is interesting that some of these witches were created by men, although on the basis of their first names one or two of them are often assumed to be women.

I will start with three very different modern-day witches of interest created by three very different authors. 

John Masefield’s witch: Sylvia Daisy Pouncer
The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, two children’s classic fantasy novels written by John Masefield, contain a character called Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, who is publicly a governess and secretly a witch.

She is said to have been modelled on Masefield's aunt, who raised him and his siblings after their parents died. She disapproved of his love of reading: she sent him as a teenager to live on a naval training ship to cure him of the filthy habit! She is also said to have been inspired by a hated governess who taught Masefield and his siblings.

White magic and black magic and the books of Stella Gibbons

My first encounter with the books of Stella Gibbons
It was my stepmother who introduced me to many of the works of Stella Gibbons. I have never much liked romance novels or books that are primarily about personal relationships, but my stepmother was so enthusiastic about the books that I decided to give them a try.  

I felt an attraction that I could not have put into words at the time. I found them civilised, elegant, witty and interesting; I liked the glimpses they gave me into other people’s lives: this expanded my horizons. I liked the descriptions of London and the natural world. I was only ten years old at the time, so I was too young to understand the undercurrents and subtle references to dark topics. This was the stage when a foundation was laid and seeds were sown for the future. 

My second encounter with the books of Stella Gibbons
A time came much later in my life when I decided to return to the past and salvage some good things I remembered. This operation included renewing my acquaintance with books I had enjoyed reading many years earlier.  I reread many of Stella Gibbons’s novels and short stories. I also found some of her books that I had never read before in second-hand bookshops.

I got much more out of reading them as an adult with some experience of life than I had in the past as a child – the reverse was true for some of the other authors I revisited.