Post by Advice on Sept 19, 2023 19:45:06 GMT
Witching hour, also called devil’s hour, in folklore, the time at night when the powers of witches and other supernatural beings are believed to be strongest, usually occurring at midnight or 3:00 AM. The term also has a modern colloquial meaning that refers to a time of unpredictable or volatile activity, such as the unsettled, colicky sleep of infants or the final hours of stock trading. Some beliefs set the witching hour’s boundaries between 12:00 AM and 3:00 AM or between 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM. Biblical references to the death of Jesus were calculated as having occurred at 3:00 PM. Accepting this calculation, the inversion or opposite of this time was then considered the “devil’s hour.”
Coven, the basic group in which witches are said to gather. One of the chief proponents of the theory of a coven was the English Egyptologist Margaret Murray in her work The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921). According to her, a coven consists of 12 witches and a devil as leader. The number is generally taken as a parody of Christ and his 12 disciples. (An alternate theory, stressing the Murray view of a pre-Christian tradition of witches, explains 13 as the maximum number of dancers that can be accommodated in a nine-foot circle.) Although this soliloquy, which was written between 1599 and 1601, mentions “the very witching time of night,” one of the first recorded uses of the term witching hour appears in the poem “Nightmare” by Elizabeth Carolina Keene, from her collection Miscellaneous Poems, published in 1762. In modern times American author Anne Rice published The Witching Hour in 1990, the first novel in a best-selling trilogy about a family of witches living in New Orleans.
The folklore of many cultures offers advice on how to ward off supernatural powers or harness them to one’s advantage, with specific instructions on what to do at the stroke of midnight. In the folk beliefs of Nordic (Scandinavian) cultures, for example, an unmarried woman could see the face of her future spouse by peering into a well at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve. According to 19th-century Irish poet and folklorist Lady Jane Wilde, a number of Irish love charms and rituals against harm involved tonics taken at midnight or visits to graveyards or churches at that particular time.
In modern times the term witching hour has become an colloquialism for other periods of unpredictable or troublesome activity. Parents may use it to describe the fussy period in infancy when a baby tends to cry continuously, usually during the same time each day and at night. In investing, the witching hour is the last hour of trading before stock options, futures, and indexes expire, which occurs on the third Friday of each month. When multiple types of derivatives contracts expire on the same day, it is called double or triple witching. Such periods are characterized by high levels of activity and volatility as traders rush to roll out and close expiring contracts to maximize their profits.
The association of witches with midnight is rooted in folk beliefs that supernatural phenomena are most prevalent at certain times of the day and year. Much like seasonal events, such as the solstices and equinoxes, midnight was deemed to evoke magic, allowing for unpredictable and possibly malevolent happenings. It is said that during the witching hour the boundary between the living and the dead becomes blurred and the living are more sensitive to the spirits of the dead. Witches, sorcerers, and fairies were among the spirits and figures believed to have stronger powers during these times and to carry out their mischief or dark practices at night.
Each member of a coven is said to specialize in a particular branch of magic, such as bewitching agricultural produce, producing sickness or death in humans, storm raising, or seduction. The actuality of covens was also accepted by Montague Summers, a well-known Roman Catholic writer on witchcraft in the 1920s and 1930s, and more recently by Penne Thorne Hughes in his Witchcraft (1952, 1965). Many students of witchcraft, however, dismiss the Murray theory of covens as unfounded and based on insufficient evidence. Nonetheless, 20th-century witchcraft groups continue to use the term coven, and reports of coven activity in the United States and Europe are not uncommon.
Incubus, the demon in the male form that seeks to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women; the corresponding spirit in the female form is called a succubus. In medieval Europe, union with an incubus was supposed by some to result in the birth of witches, demons, and deformed human offspring. The legendary magician Merlin was said to have been fathered by an incubus. Parallels exist in many cultures. The word incubus is derived from the Latin incubus (“nightmare”) and incubare (“to lie upon, weigh upon, brood”). In modern psychological usage, the term has been applied to the type of nightmare that gives one the feeling of a heavyweight or oppression on the chest and stomach.
Occultism, various theories and practices involving a belief in and knowledge or use of supernatural forces or beings. Such beliefs and practices—principally magical or divinatory—have occurred in all human societies throughout recorded history, with considerable variations both in their nature and in the attitude of societies toward them. In the West the term occultism has acquired intellectually and morally pejorative overtones that do not obtain in other societies where the practices and beliefs concerned do not run counter to the prevailing worldview.
Occult practices Centre on the presumed ability of the practitioner to manipulate natural laws for personal benefit or on behalf of another; such practices tend to be regarded as evil only when they also involve the breaking of moral laws. Some anthropologists have argued that it is not possible to make a clear-cut distinction between magic—a principal component of occultism—and religion, and this may well be true of the religious systems of some nonliterate societies. The argument does not hold, however, for any of the major religions, which regard both natural and moral law as immutable.
The Western tradition of occultism, as popularly conceived, is of an ancient “secret philosophy” underlying all occult practices. This secret philosophy derives ultimately from Hellenistic magic and alchemy on the one hand and from Jewish mysticism on the other. The principal Hellenistic source is the Corpus Hermeticism, the texts associated with Hermes Trismegistus, which are concerned with astrology and other occult sciences and with spiritual regeneration. The Jewish element is supplied by the Kabbala (the doctrine of a secret mystical interpretation of the Torah), which had been familiar to scholars in Europe since the Middle Ages and which was linked with the Hermetic texts during the Renaissance. The resulting Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition, known as Hermetic, incorporated both theory and magical practice, with the latter presented as natural, and thus good, magic, in contrast to the evil magic of sorcery or witchcraft.
Alchemy was also absorbed into the body of Hermitic, and this link was strengthened in the early 17th century with the appearance of Rosicrucianism, an alleged secret brotherhood that utilized alchemical symbolism and taught secret wisdom to its followers, creating a spiritual alchemy that survived the rise of empirical science and enabled Hermetic to pass unscathed into the period of the Enlightenment. In the 18th century the tradition was taken up by esoterically inclined Freemasons who could not find an occult philosophy within Freemasonry. These enthusiasts persisted, both as individual students of Hermetic and, in continental Europe, as groups of occult practitioners, into the 19th century, when the growth of religious skepticism led to an increased rejection of orthodox religion by the educated and a consequent search for salvation by other means—including occultism.
But those interested turned to new forms of occultism rather than to the Hermetic tradition: on the one hand to spiritualism, the practice of alleged regular communication between the living and the spirits of the dead through a living “medium,” and on the other hand to theosophy, a blend of Western occultism and Eastern mysticism that proved to be a most effective propagator of occultism but whose influence had declined markedly by the late 20th century. Indeed, despite the 19th-century revival, occult ideas have failed to gain acceptance in academic circles, although they have occasionally influenced the work of major artists, such as the poet William Butler Yeats and the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and occultism in Europe and North America seems destined to remain the province of popular culture.
Hag, in European folklore, an ugly and malicious old woman who practices witchcraft, with or without supernatural powers; hags are often said to be aligned with the devil or the dead. Sometimes appearing in the form of a beautiful woman, a succubus is a hag believed to engage in sexual intercourse with sleeping men, causing severe nightmares and leaving the victim exhausted. Although viewed in most lore as the antithesis of fertility, the hag is believed by some scholars to be a remnant of primitive nature goddesses.
Coven, the basic group in which witches are said to gather. One of the chief proponents of the theory of a coven was the English Egyptologist Margaret Murray in her work The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921). According to her, a coven consists of 12 witches and a devil as leader. The number is generally taken as a parody of Christ and his 12 disciples. (An alternate theory, stressing the Murray view of a pre-Christian tradition of witches, explains 13 as the maximum number of dancers that can be accommodated in a nine-foot circle.) Although this soliloquy, which was written between 1599 and 1601, mentions “the very witching time of night,” one of the first recorded uses of the term witching hour appears in the poem “Nightmare” by Elizabeth Carolina Keene, from her collection Miscellaneous Poems, published in 1762. In modern times American author Anne Rice published The Witching Hour in 1990, the first novel in a best-selling trilogy about a family of witches living in New Orleans.
The folklore of many cultures offers advice on how to ward off supernatural powers or harness them to one’s advantage, with specific instructions on what to do at the stroke of midnight. In the folk beliefs of Nordic (Scandinavian) cultures, for example, an unmarried woman could see the face of her future spouse by peering into a well at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve. According to 19th-century Irish poet and folklorist Lady Jane Wilde, a number of Irish love charms and rituals against harm involved tonics taken at midnight or visits to graveyards or churches at that particular time.
In modern times the term witching hour has become an colloquialism for other periods of unpredictable or troublesome activity. Parents may use it to describe the fussy period in infancy when a baby tends to cry continuously, usually during the same time each day and at night. In investing, the witching hour is the last hour of trading before stock options, futures, and indexes expire, which occurs on the third Friday of each month. When multiple types of derivatives contracts expire on the same day, it is called double or triple witching. Such periods are characterized by high levels of activity and volatility as traders rush to roll out and close expiring contracts to maximize their profits.
The association of witches with midnight is rooted in folk beliefs that supernatural phenomena are most prevalent at certain times of the day and year. Much like seasonal events, such as the solstices and equinoxes, midnight was deemed to evoke magic, allowing for unpredictable and possibly malevolent happenings. It is said that during the witching hour the boundary between the living and the dead becomes blurred and the living are more sensitive to the spirits of the dead. Witches, sorcerers, and fairies were among the spirits and figures believed to have stronger powers during these times and to carry out their mischief or dark practices at night.
Each member of a coven is said to specialize in a particular branch of magic, such as bewitching agricultural produce, producing sickness or death in humans, storm raising, or seduction. The actuality of covens was also accepted by Montague Summers, a well-known Roman Catholic writer on witchcraft in the 1920s and 1930s, and more recently by Penne Thorne Hughes in his Witchcraft (1952, 1965). Many students of witchcraft, however, dismiss the Murray theory of covens as unfounded and based on insufficient evidence. Nonetheless, 20th-century witchcraft groups continue to use the term coven, and reports of coven activity in the United States and Europe are not uncommon.
Incubus, the demon in the male form that seeks to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women; the corresponding spirit in the female form is called a succubus. In medieval Europe, union with an incubus was supposed by some to result in the birth of witches, demons, and deformed human offspring. The legendary magician Merlin was said to have been fathered by an incubus. Parallels exist in many cultures. The word incubus is derived from the Latin incubus (“nightmare”) and incubare (“to lie upon, weigh upon, brood”). In modern psychological usage, the term has been applied to the type of nightmare that gives one the feeling of a heavyweight or oppression on the chest and stomach.
Occultism, various theories and practices involving a belief in and knowledge or use of supernatural forces or beings. Such beliefs and practices—principally magical or divinatory—have occurred in all human societies throughout recorded history, with considerable variations both in their nature and in the attitude of societies toward them. In the West the term occultism has acquired intellectually and morally pejorative overtones that do not obtain in other societies where the practices and beliefs concerned do not run counter to the prevailing worldview.
Occult practices Centre on the presumed ability of the practitioner to manipulate natural laws for personal benefit or on behalf of another; such practices tend to be regarded as evil only when they also involve the breaking of moral laws. Some anthropologists have argued that it is not possible to make a clear-cut distinction between magic—a principal component of occultism—and religion, and this may well be true of the religious systems of some nonliterate societies. The argument does not hold, however, for any of the major religions, which regard both natural and moral law as immutable.
The Western tradition of occultism, as popularly conceived, is of an ancient “secret philosophy” underlying all occult practices. This secret philosophy derives ultimately from Hellenistic magic and alchemy on the one hand and from Jewish mysticism on the other. The principal Hellenistic source is the Corpus Hermeticism, the texts associated with Hermes Trismegistus, which are concerned with astrology and other occult sciences and with spiritual regeneration. The Jewish element is supplied by the Kabbala (the doctrine of a secret mystical interpretation of the Torah), which had been familiar to scholars in Europe since the Middle Ages and which was linked with the Hermetic texts during the Renaissance. The resulting Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition, known as Hermetic, incorporated both theory and magical practice, with the latter presented as natural, and thus good, magic, in contrast to the evil magic of sorcery or witchcraft.
Alchemy was also absorbed into the body of Hermitic, and this link was strengthened in the early 17th century with the appearance of Rosicrucianism, an alleged secret brotherhood that utilized alchemical symbolism and taught secret wisdom to its followers, creating a spiritual alchemy that survived the rise of empirical science and enabled Hermetic to pass unscathed into the period of the Enlightenment. In the 18th century the tradition was taken up by esoterically inclined Freemasons who could not find an occult philosophy within Freemasonry. These enthusiasts persisted, both as individual students of Hermetic and, in continental Europe, as groups of occult practitioners, into the 19th century, when the growth of religious skepticism led to an increased rejection of orthodox religion by the educated and a consequent search for salvation by other means—including occultism.
But those interested turned to new forms of occultism rather than to the Hermetic tradition: on the one hand to spiritualism, the practice of alleged regular communication between the living and the spirits of the dead through a living “medium,” and on the other hand to theosophy, a blend of Western occultism and Eastern mysticism that proved to be a most effective propagator of occultism but whose influence had declined markedly by the late 20th century. Indeed, despite the 19th-century revival, occult ideas have failed to gain acceptance in academic circles, although they have occasionally influenced the work of major artists, such as the poet William Butler Yeats and the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and occultism in Europe and North America seems destined to remain the province of popular culture.
Hag, in European folklore, an ugly and malicious old woman who practices witchcraft, with or without supernatural powers; hags are often said to be aligned with the devil or the dead. Sometimes appearing in the form of a beautiful woman, a succubus is a hag believed to engage in sexual intercourse with sleeping men, causing severe nightmares and leaving the victim exhausted. Although viewed in most lore as the antithesis of fertility, the hag is believed by some scholars to be a remnant of primitive nature goddesses.