ABSTRACT
Until now this book has, in terms of the authors and characters considered, been overwhelmingly male. Of course being the demonic sex is an ambiguous privilege and a dubious honour, but in these pages the demonic has increasingly seemed to be the grit in the oyster of integrity and experience. To that extent, it’s a predicate worth having. Which, no doubt, is why in its grandest forms it has been reserved for the historically dominant gender. Witchcraft may be the female form of the demonic, but this isn’t a book about witchcraft, because witchcraft is the demonic at a certain remove. Of course the dividing line between the demonic and witchcraft is a fine one, but it is nevertheless real and important. Witchcraft is by definition the technology of the demonic. It stimulates and harnesses that by which it is ultimately overwhelmed, and if this is true of the demonic as well, the demonic in its fullest form involves a more intimate identification, even identity with the Devil himself. Like the witch, the demonic protagonist falls prey to the Devil, but not before in an important sense he becomes the Devil. Faustus tastes the bliss and the sorrows of Satan for himself. The witches are devilish, but it is in Macbeth that the Devil most fully stalks and ruins the earth in human form. And so too with Stavrogin; so too with Leverkühn. Thinkers like Kierkegaard write not at all about witchcraft but directly about the demonic, which Kierkegaard avers is involved in almost all ordinary lives. The element of magic, of demonic technique, drops away altogether, leaving the thing itself.
