Sidonia the Sorceress
Reprinted with permission from TLC
On Monday evening 19th October 1998 Caitlin gave a reading from
Sidonia the Sorceress, at Oz House in Berkeley, Ca. of the obscure German Romantic historical novel which became a late-Victorian occult best-seller. Crowley himself most likely read the combined edition of Wilhelm Meinhold's two great witch novels, published in two volumes by the Reeves and Turner company of London in 1894. Very possibly it took the place of his assigned texts in chemistry and history and philosophy for several evenings as a Cambridge undergraduate. (It seems that a good deal of what later would become the Section Two reading list for Probationers of the A A formed Crowley's personal undergraduate curriculum of alternate and occult education, pursued in the freedom of college scholarship at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1890s.) The two works, Sidonia the Sorceress and The Amber Witch, are recommended together on the reading list, with only the bald comment that "These two tales are highly informative." As the text of Sidonia is quite long and now extremely rare, we will share a xerox copy and discuss the romance of witchcraft and the descriptions of occult practices in this story, with readings of a few selected passages.
Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold (1797-1851) was raised on the remote Baltic island of Usedom, where his father was a Lutheran pastor; he was educated and took orders in the Lutheran church, qualifying as a Doctor of Theology. After receiving an isolated parsonage he began an obscure literary career in his spare time. He took his subjects from local Pomeranian history, and produced an early tragedy and a quantity of lyric verse. A collection of his poetry was circulated in 1824, and was commended by Goethe. In a historical magazine Meinhold published a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, claiming to have transcribed it from a seventeenth century source, though in fact he had fabricated the entire text. When Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, took enthusiastic notice of the forged document and wanted to have it republished, Meinhold was forced to admit his fraud, but the king nevertheless praised the work, and financed an edition of it which appeared in 1841-2 as Die Bernsteinhexe (The Amber Witch). It fed in to a current historical controversy regarding the role of the Roman church in local German witch prosecutions after the Reformation, and hence attracted attention at first, though this turned to resentment as Meinhold's forgery of the document became known. Some critics refused to believe him, and he even showed his notebooks and rough drafts to reviewers as evidence of composition. After the controversy died down he was punished for fooling the literary establishment by being ignored completely for the rest of his life. A few years later he published a second, and even longer, work based upon another Pomeranian witch prosecution, originally entitled (after the defendant in the case) Sidonia von Bork. It appeared as volumes 5, 6 and 7 of a collected edition of Meinhold's works published near the close of his life (in 1846-8), attracting no attention whatsoever.
Meinhold remained obscure in Germany, where his works are still ignored, and he does not rate mention in the standard reference works. There was however a vogue for his tales among English readers after his death, and both of the Pomeranian witch-trial accounts appeared in English translation. Sidonia the Sorceress was translated by
Lady Jane Francesca Elgee, wife of the great ocular surgeon Dr William Wilde, who in her youth at mid-century had been a fashionable celebrity in Ireland, publishing romantic poetry in the newspapers under the name of "Speranza." Six feet tall, flamboyant and beautiful, "a very odd and original lady," she was a learned woman, particularly accomplished as a linguist, and a committed patriot who looked to future European involvement for Ireland as an alternative to British domination there. She published thirteen books, Sidonia being by far the most successful and going through many editions. Her son
Oscar Wilde, whom she supported and encouraged throughout his life, became one of the greatest literary critics, comic dramatists, and tragic victims of the 1890s, and always admired her greatly.
Frater Hrafnkel
Index
The Amber Witch
Sidonia The Sorceress Volume One
Sidonia The Sorceress Volume Two
