Within 24 hours, Ukrainian soldiers were reporting bullets missing them and a housewife in Kyiv brought down a drone with a tin of tomatoes (not, as some sensationalist early accounts reported, a jar of pickles). Coincidence?

Michael Hughes has form: five years ago, he was behind the binding ritual against Donald Trump, which involved the burning of an unflattering photograph of the President (a visually appealing photograph, it was made clear, would not be suitable materium). This ceremony had the option, as the President turned to ash, to chant either “So mote it be” — a ritual phrase in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism or Wicca — or, if preferred, “You’re fired”.

And even this hocus-POTUS was not unprecedented: magic regularly plays a part in resistance. The English occultist Aleister Crowley, for example, claimed to have invented Churchill’s V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis — in his Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, V represents Apophis, the destroyer, whose slaying of Osiris is symbolised by the swastika — although the general consensus among historians is that the V stands for Victory.

Crowley repeatedly tried to offer his esoteric services for King and Country, but each time was told that “the Director of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments to Mr Aleister Crowley and regrets he is unable to avail himself of his offer”. It seems that the only person, apart from Crowley himself, who suggested that he should play an official role in the war effort was Lord Haw-Haw, who said that his celebrating a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey would be as effective as Britain’s National Day of Prayer. Crowley, of course, took this as a compliment.

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Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Francis Young’s new book, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, sees Crowley as the last person to make a serious attempt to fill a role which has been a surprising constant in British history — magical advisor to the rulers of Britain. Merlin may have been a myth, but figures like John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astronomer, self-consciously placed themselves in his tradition. And even when belief in magic has disappeared from the body politic, the role has not: Dominic Cummings, that “wizard” known for practising the “dark arts”, is accused of bending people to his will through powers that no one really understands, or even can prove exist.

Cummings himself said he wanted to fill government with “weirdos” — “wyrd” means, of course, having the power to control the fates — and super-forecasters, albeit ones with a background in statistics rather than traditional methods of seeing the future. An adept told me that he knew Cummings had no interest in astrology when he didn’t capitalise on the fact that, when we left the European Union, Saturn and Pluto were conjoined in the sign of Capricorn. This was happening for the first time since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, making Brexit not just an echo of the Reformation but a rerun ordained by fate.

I’m not, of course, saying that Dominic Cummings is Merlin, only that people talk about him as if he were. To be fair, as Arthur C Clarke used to observe, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — which goes for the manipulation of big data as much as it does for “experiments” in previous reigns. Gunpowder, for example, was developed by alchemists, who had experience of sulphur and saltpetre; and the word for poisoning (veneficium) also meant witchcraft until the seventeenth century, when the ability of plants to kill was no longer believed to be an occult power.

And there has always been a political dimension to magic — especially in Scotland, where witch-hunting was one of the few ways in which the Scottish government could impose its authority on local magnates. Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for the witch trials last week omitted to mention their political role in legitimising the Scottish state. In England, it was much easier to prosecute someone for “compassing and imagining” the death of the king under the Statute of Treason than for actually committing treason.

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Why they burn witches in Scotland

By Diane Purkiss

But political magic was never just propaganda. Even in the twentieth century, the Anglican exorcist Gilbert Shaw was convinced that the General Strike was the result of Russian adepts projecting psychic forces at Britain to foment unrest and lead to Socialist revolution. Luckily, he was conveniently close to the ley line along which this psychic pressure travelled, and, by exorcising an ancient tumulus next to his church, was able to cut off this occult communication. A week later, the General Strike was over.

Father Shaw — like most Anglicans with an interest in the Occult, he was an Anglo-Catholic — quickly became the Church of England’s leading expert on combating black magic, and claimed, like Crowley and many others, that his preternatural assistance played its part in defeating Hitler. There was no officially approved magic resistance during the Second World War — and there hardly could be, the argument runs, since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not repealed until 1951 — but many modern Wiccans believe that there were unofficial rituals.

Gerald Gardner, the grandfather of modern Wicca, reports that he was initiated into a coven in the New Forest who performed a ritual on 1 August 1940 — Lammas Day — to prevent the Nazi high command invading. Or, rather, to prevent them wanting to invade: as he wrote, “The witches met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: ‘You cannot come across the sea, You cannot cross the sea, Not able to come, Not Able To Come’…  I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea in his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come”.

The account is corroborated by the occultist Louis Wilkinson, who claimed that some of the more elderly participants died as a result of the psychic energy they expended — while conducting the ritual naked, in the middle of the night, in England. Whatever the truth of the story, the New Forest coven is an important part of the founding myth of modern Wicca, and I have heard contemporary Wiccans vigorously maintain that it was this ceremony that foiled Operation Sealion.

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The hex against Putin, then, like the binding of Trump, is part of a long but hidden tradition. But there are differences. The Cone of Power has, according to Gardner’s account, been raised on three occasions: to prevent the Armada invading in 1588, Bonaparte in 1800 and Hitler in 1940. These rituals, as recounted by Gardner, concentrated on changing Hitler’s mind, or telling Bonaparte to think again. Even the spell against the Armada was about persuading the Spanish (“Go On, Go On, Not Able to Land”), although, since they had already embarked by the time the ritual was carried out (by Sir Francis Drake himself, according to Devonian folklore), it appeared to take effect by creating the storm that scattered the fleet.

Modern magic has given up on the idea of changing anyone’s mind. Like modern politics, the aim is not to persuade your opponent, not to influence his thoughts, but to bring ruin and destruction upon him, breaking his bones and casting him down into dust and ashes.

Some magical practitioners question the wisdom of this, and not just because of the Law of Threefold Return, the Wiccan principle that the energy you put out into the world will be thrice returned to you. More worrisome is the idea that Putin has his own protections in place. Aleksandr Dugin, the nationalist philosopher known as “Putin’s Brain”, is known to have an interest in the occult, dating back to his days editing Elementy. On its second issue, the magazine’s cover star was the goat-god Baphomet, who has an important role in Aleister Crowley’s cosmology. The fact that Russian troops entered Donetsk and Luhansk on 22.02.2022 does suggest that Putin is receiving a certain kind of advice.

Perhaps the most profitable line of attack is not against Putin himself, but against his soldiers. When young Russian soldiers entered Konotop — known from stories as a place where old women have occult powers — they were told by an elderly Ukrainian woman: “Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your dick to stand”. As Nicola Sturgeon did point out, a fear of witches is often a fear of women; and their words were enough to terrify any Russian man.

She was probably thinking of the recent past — the few centuries in which meteorological records have been kept. Figuring out past weather before that takes an ingenious combination of history, archaeology and science: eye-witness accounts and fluctuating grain prices are married with data from ice cores, grape-harvest dates and tree-ring sequences. But that tricky evidence indicates past climatic extremes that could provide “predictive points of reference for adaptation and loss reduction,” as Oliver Wetter, Jean-Laurent Spring et al argued in the science journal Climatic Change in 2014 (in a nice case of nominative determinism).

This evidence points to a Little Ice Age from around 1560. Winters were severe. Pieter Bruegel painted his hunters, their heads bent against the cold, trudging through deep snow towards villagers skating on a frozen river. But the Little Ice Age wasn’t just a deep freeze. It was also a “climatic seesaw”, writes Brian Fagan, of “arctic winters, blazing summers, serious droughts, torrential rain”. A winter storm in summer and a tropical hurricane at an unusual high latitude thrashed the Spanish Armada of 1588 far more roundly than the English warships.

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One great drought predates the start of the Little Ice Age by 20 years. In February 1540 rainfall effectively ceased, falling only six times in London between then and September. It was not only exceptionally dry but warm: it is probable that the highest daily temperatures were warmer than 2003 (the warmest year for centuries). Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle notes,

“This year was a hot summer and dry, so that no rain fell from June till eight days after Michaelmas [29 September], so that in divers parts of this realm the people carried their cattle six or seven miles to water them, and also much cattle died; and also there reigned strange sickness among the people in this realm, as laskes [dysentery] and hot agues, and also pestilence, whereof many people died…”

Edward Hall noted that the drought dried up wells and small rivers, while the Thames was so shallow that “saltwater flowed above London Bridge”, polluting the water supply and contributing to the dysentery and cholera, which killed people in their thousands. In Rome, no rain fell in nine months; in Paris, the Seine ran dry. Grapes withered on the vine and fruit rotted on trees. Even the small respite of autumn and winter was followed by a second warm spring and another blisteringly hot summer. Forests began to die until, in late 1541, rain fell and fell. 1542 was a year of widespread flooding.

It is reductive to argue a simple causative relationship between the climate and historical events, but it is equally false to suggest the weather had no effect at all. Excessive heat only needed to affect the judgement of one man, Henry VIII, to create deaths. In July 1540 the visiting French ambassador described as the “extraordinary sight” of three Catholics being hanged for treason and three Protestants burnt for heresy in Smithfield in London on the same day. A week later — Henry’s right-hand-man, Cromwell, being beheaded on the day that the aging king married a teenager. Maybe the king’s famous temper was worse when he had a sweat on him.

The effects of the great drought were less far-reaching, however, than the devastating conditions of the 1590s. Rain fell across Europe for the best part of four years, while mean winter temperatures dropped two degrees. Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describes it thus:

“…the winds, piping to us to vain,
As in revenge have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.”

Freezing rain meant the harvests of 1593, 1594, 1596 and 1597 failed. It’s hard to grasp what this meant in an age of subsistence farming; we can know there were no supermarkets and still fail to comprehend what it must have been like to live without any cushion against starvation. One harvest failure meant hunger; two in a row, dearth; a run of bad harvests, famine. Fear gripped as tightly as cold. Epidemics followed in famine’s wake. Prices rose to 40-year highs and, as Bob Marley sang, “A hungry mob is an angry mob.”

People rose up and authorities clamped down. On 13 June 1595, a crowd of three hundred apprentices protested the price of butter in Southwark market by seizing control and forcing vendors to sale at the old, lower price of 3d. a pound. A fortnight later, some of these apprentices were publicly whipped and set on the pillory, which itself instigated a riot. A thousand-strong crowd marched on Tower Hill, planning to “steal, pill[age] and spoil the wealthy … and take the sword of authority from the magistrates and governors.”

Food scarcity had quickly morphed into class hatred. Five of the apprentices were hanged for treason. Over the next year, there were attempted risings in Oxfordshire, Devon and elsewhere, while a Somerset JP observed to Lord Burghley that inequalities were worsening: “the rich men have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor.”

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How modernity erupted from a volcano

By Paul Lay

Years of hardship make some people richer and some people poorer or, more exactly, they make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Plus ça change. In the coronavirus pandemic, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Zoom founder Eric Yuan have increased their already gargantuan fortunes by several billions of dollars. In the UK, all that was required to make a profit out of other people’s pain was, apparently, to be chums with a Conservative. (The New York Times found in December that some $11 billion of UK central government contracts went to companies run by associates of the Tories, or with no prior experience or a history of fraud, corruption or other controversy. And that’s just the data that has been published.)

History has more to tell us on this. It was so cold in the terrible winter of 1607-8 that the trunks of large trees split open, and the Thames froze so solidly that people sold beer and played football on it: the first Frost Fair. The “Great Frost”, as an anonymous writer – maybe Thomas Dekker — called it in 1608, made the Thames “bankrupt”. London was cut off from commerce that relied on the river. Furloughed Londoners called it “the dead vacation”, for, Dekker wrote, “if it be a gentleman’s life to live idly and do nothing, how many poor artificers [artisans] and tradesmen have been made gentlemen then by this frost?”

Merchants could not ship goods, and neither wood nor coal could reach London. The price of fuel rose without mercy. Things were hardly better in the country: “the poor ploughman’s children sit crying and blowing their nails”, while “the ox stands bellowing, the ragged sheep bleating, the poor lamb shivering and starving to death.”

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These recurrent moments of climatic crisis did not just leave people cold and hungry. Many poorer families went continually into debt, forcing all members to work as many jobs as possible in the “economy of makeshifts”. Neighbourly relations were tested by the moral customs of hospitality and charity and the necessity of thrift and self-preservation. The witchcraft craze of the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, in which perhaps 45,000 died, was exacerbated by deep insecurity and resentment. Hunger, envy and anger created the mental space in which witchcraft accusations occurred.

The trigger for accusing a neighbour of witchcraft was often linked in some way to food and fertility — the death of the cow or the sale of a pig — some vital livestock that meant the difference between having enough and not. The institutional response to poverty was to introduce relief for the poor, but with moral judgements attached. The pernicious conceptual divide between the deserving and undeserving poor — those unable to work and those thought unwilling to work — remains with us. It was thought that beggars and vagabonds chose to be unemployed when in fact opportunities were contracting. The Vagrancy Act of 1597 ordered the punishment of “all wandering persons… able in body, loitering and refusing to work” by flogging, branding, transportation overseas, or confinement to gaol-like houses of correction that prefigured later workhouses and modern prisons.

What can we learn from these grim years? Most obviously, the slowly unfolding disaster of global warming means extreme weather events will be more common. We might not starve from harvest failure, but excess rain can make raw sewage overflow into homes and roads collapse — like the spectacular Highway 1 in California. Electricity grids can be knocked out by frosts or heatwaves; deep droughts reduce water supplies. “Present bias” makes it hard for us, writes Henry Fountain, to make the lifestyle changes that could prevent or mitigate catastrophe down the road, but the past and the future are begging us to do so.

But these extreme events also speak much to us after a year of lockdown. The inequalities between rich and poor have become stark and, like the “prentices” in Southwark, those who can least afford it are the worst hit. Those who have been made redundant or whose hours have been cut or who don’t know if they’ll have a job after Covid endure the gnawing anxiety, shame, and misery that money worries bring. But the deep insecurity created by furlough, job losses and ravaged self-employment is also emerging in other ways.

This has been a year of stresses and distresses which, coupled with the sheer insularity of lockdown, has exacerbated tensions between groups, producing a sense of feeling aggrieved and that certain disputes are irreconcilable. We are all under strain; trust is eroded. We look to provide for ourselves; we are quick to judge others. We may not accuse our neighbours of witchcraft, but we have our modern equivalents. If there is a cultural war, the deprivations of 2020-21 will have aggravated antagonisms. Even familiar bonds have been challenged by obedience (and disobedience) to lockdown rules.

Our forebears were inventive. They found new ways to survive in the face of unpredictable weather: they adopted new foods, like root vegetables and pulses, planted new crops, and used new methods for farming and preserving. In Austria, the cold gave the wine such low sugar content that much of the population switched to beer drinking. But, as the author of The Great Frost noted, “these extraordinary fevers have always other evils attending upon them”. We must be scholars of time and harken to the lessons she would teach us.