Dig that title font! Just a few years shy of the bicentennial, here's a book that examines America's homegrown Sturm und Drang of witchcraft and scientific achievement, at a time when technological society looked about ready to shake itself apart into a morass of irrationalism. It's moonshots and black masses, swinging sorcerers and zapped out zombies, as Emile C. Schurmacher shows us WITCHCRAFT IN AMERICA TODAY!
There's no slacking on our magical mystery tour, with Schurmacher binging through some black magic barnstorming cross country, from "The Official Witch of Los Angeles County" Louise Huebner to New York City's resident witches uptown, downtown, and Harlem besides. Down to Haiti, and the Everglades, and over to Pennsylvania, with a checkup on Southwestern Amerindian magic courtesy late ethnographer Washington Matthews. Anton LaVey makes his obligatory grubby cameo, with Schurmacher keyed in on his advertising/showbiz background and none too overawed at the overstuffed and oversexed state of his Satanic Church. Schurmacher has some fun riffing on the poor state of mail order witchcraft guides and "plastic magic" in Chapter 21 - The Charlatans and Chapter 22 - Packaged Witchcraft. Pound for pound you can't beat the density of his reporting, and at some point you have to just relax and let the tidal wave of witchcraft wash over you. A word of advice - Schurmacher says that "witch" is the proper title for both women and men, and that "warlock" is a term only posers use!
Looking at his career background, you can see why author Emile C. Schurmacher delivers the goods. He made his bones as a newspaper columnist and freelance writer for men's adventure magazines, in this latter role dispatching hard boiled reportage on "The Free Love Kashgai Tribe" and other such sexed up subjects. Some of his stories were collected into themed books:
Like other witchcraft explainers of the time Schurmacher takes a chapter to rubberneck on the Manson murders, though he manages to have his satanic cake and eat it too by tsk-tsking the media's salacious coverage. His background does him well in reciting the most ghastly occurrences with clinical detachment.
Schurmacher wraps it up by circling back, repeating his theme of the friction and frisson between witchcraft and science in our modern schizoid times with the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Could this high tech chain of catastrophe have been put into motion via ... witchcraft?
Well, probably not.
But ... what if?
Paperback Library, 1970
So much frission. So much!
ReplyDelete