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 Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Poetics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

Changing perspective: An “optical” approach to creativity

Stoyan V. Sgourev
ESSEC Business School - Paris, 3 Avenue Bernard Hirsch, CS 50105, Cergy Pontoise Cedex 95021, France

A B S T R A C T

The paper proposes an “optical” approach to creativity, involving a modification of the way reality is viewed. Perception is notably absent from
sociological accounts of creativity, examining practices of recombination embedded in social relations. Drawing on the work of Michael Baxandall, I
propose a framework where creativity emanates from the disruption of “structures of attention”, allowing to see common elements in uncommon
ways. The mechanism of disruption transpires on the billiard table, when contact between two balls provokes the repositioning of other balls,
modifying distances and angles of visibility. Creativity results when actors use someone else’s solution to think through their own problems,
provoking reinterpretation of established ways of doing. The mechanism is illustrated with discussions of El Greco and Paul Cézanne. The
framework builds on the growing sociological interest in social optics, indirect influence, reverse causality and endogeneity. It provides opportu­
nities for meaningful interaction between art history, network research, neuroscience and the sociology of creativity.

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something.” John Ruskin

1. Introduction

Scholarship on creativity is increasingly interdisciplinary, diffusing to sociology, organizational and cognitive sciences from its
traditional psychological base (see George, 2007; Hennessey and Amabile, 2011; Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020). Common across
disciplines is the understanding of creativity as a configuration of elements that are rearranged and connected in ways that are not
obvious (Tarde [1903 (1890)], Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020). In the combinatorial view, actors borrow elements from each other to
create something unexpected (Simonton, 2004). But it is also recognized that creativity is not only about connection: it also involves
imagination, playing with possibilities (Lumsdaine and Lumsdaine, 1995: 14). Imagining involves recognizing a relationship between
two things that others do not see or recognize (Amabile, 1996; Fong, 2006). Preceding connectivity is the ability to identify dis­
crepancies and opportunities, to “see” elements and patterns that others do not (Berns, 2008).
To “see” is one of the more complex verbs in the English language, as it encompasses several activities, including to “perceive”,
“become aware of” and to “understand”. The concept of seeing as analysis and representation has a storied history in philosophy and
art. For Plato and Aristotle, the eye was the most important of the five senses and the analytical master of visualization. For Leonardo,
the most reliable source of knowledge was looking at real things and phenomena. His diaries and sketches attest that he did not rely
merely on “seeing”, using the eye as a photographic tool. For him, seeing in an analytical manner was a key step in the process of
creation.1 His goal of seeing as “understanding” could be realized only through the analysis of vision and of the workings of the mind
(Kemp, 2004).
It is, therefore, surprising that issues of perception and vision tend to be absent in literature reviews of creativity research (e.g.
George, 2007; Hennessey and Amabile, 2011; Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020). Tellingly, perception is mentioned among the

E-mail address: sgourev@essec.edu.

1
From his writings: “The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the primary means by which the sensus communis of the brain may
most fully contemplate the magnificent works of nature” (Kemp 2004, p.51).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101581
Received 24 April 2020; Received in revised form 27 May 2021; Accepted 2 June 2021
Available online 17 June 2021
0304-422X/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

consequences of interest in the sociological study of creativity, but not among its antecedents, as an explanatory factor (Godart, Seong,
& Phillips, 2020: 490). However, developments in neuroscience testify to the fundamental role of perceptual processes in creativity.
New visual stimuli or an unfamiliar environment serve to jolt the attention system and force the brain to start reorganizing patterns of
perception (Shimamura, 2013). It is recognized that when the brain has a difficulty predicting what would happen next is a potential
source of new insights (Chatterjee, 2013). Many of the great innovations began with a change in visual perception; key insights were
triggered by visual images (Berns, 2008). Visual perception is connected to personal experiences; these shape the formation of neural
networks that, on their turn, influence perception and behavior (Onians, 2007).
This paper articulates an “optical” approach to creativity that integrates cognitive processes of perception and vision relevant to
sociological analysis. It starts with the assumption that the primary form of creativity involves a modification of the way in which
reality is viewed (Cohen 1998: 44). As Schopenhauer (1851: 93) famously observed, the problem is not so much to see what nobody has
yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees. This implies that creative insight derives from
seeing common elements in uncommon ways. One does not see the same thing, because one is not looking in the same way or is not
looking from the same viewpoint as others.
In articulating the complex perceptual game underlying the identification of new possibilities I draw on the scholarship of Michael
Baxandall. His work on the social factors of perception and the interplay of materials, evaluative principles and styles in art production
(Baxandall, 1980, 1985, 1988) is increasingly featured in sociological research (e.g. Tanner, 2010). But I develop two aspects of his
scholarship that have attracted little attention by sociologists so far – his model of “reversible” social influence (Baxandall, 1985) and
his exploration of “structures of attention” – patterns of “seeing” and “not seeing”, of co-existing light and shadow (Baxandall, 1995).
Baxandall never formulated a theory of creativity but such is implicit in his studies, analyzing mechanisms of perception and influence.
I argue that these mechanisms contribute to an optical perspective on creativity that connects to recent developments in the sociology
of culture and network research. A key objective of this approach is to facilitate exchanges between sociology of creativity, art history,
social psychology and neuroscience.

2. Influence and Attention

The sociological study of creativity examines how the circuits of influence between actors structure their combinatorial activities
(e.g., Collins, 1998; Burt, 2004). It remains debatable whether high or low degree of social connectedness is more conducive to
creativity (Cattani, Colucci, & Ferriani, 2016), but the prominence of connecting practices in creativity is uncontested (Godart, Seong,
& Phillips, 2020). Yet, other research traditions tend to prioritize cognition at the expense of connection. For example, Simon (1985)
viewed creativity as a type of problem-solving behavior that requires a deliberate break from routine and search for alternatives
outside the existing domain. Organizational scholarship and neuroscience document processes of disruption and repurposing of
cognitive routines and schemas (e.g., Ocasio, 2011; Berns, 2008), underlying the emergence of novelty. The assumption here is that
perceptual processes precede the connecting practices that focalize the sociological approach.2
There are sociological accounts that are accommodating to cognitive processes, embedding cognition in social structures and social
processes (e.g., DiMaggio, 1997). An excellent example is the research stream on “social optics” (Zerubavel, 1997), postulating that
perception is not “objective” in nature, proceeding in consistent tunneling through “socialized” minds. Perception is conditioned by the
specific lens through which we observe and the way others around us perceive (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 23). Recent studies attest that the
perception of visual stimuli is contingent on social markers, such as status or expertise – the degree to which people internalize relevant
cognitive schemas used in social evaluation (e.g., Sgourev and Althuizen, 2014). The “social-embeddedness” of perception implies that
the ways in which we perceive objects and infer relationships between them is structured by cognitive schemas (Rossman, 2012) and
by our position in networks of social relationships (Zerubavel, 1997). It is in this cognitive-relational space that can be positioned the
model proposed by Baxandall (1985).
Baxandall’s scholarship acknowledges the salience of social relations in creative advances, but the primary question for him is not
whom the actor is connected to, but whom that actor pays attention to. The “structures of attention” in a field – who pays attention to
whom, overlap only partly with the networks of relations. Actors pay attention to those who are socially proximate, but also direct part
of their attention to socially distant actors who are relevant to task completion (Zuckerman and Sgourev, 2006). The attention
structures are not “organizational” in nature (e.g., Ocasio, 2011), as they include other producers to whom ego is connected by way of
(mutual) observation (White, 1992).
For Baxandall (1985, 1995) the creative insight emanates from the ways in which the practice of viewing alternates between modes
of attention and inattention (or “reduced” attention). The former is “endogenous” in nature, involving focal vision and directed by
cognitive demands for information about objects in sight. The latter is “exogenous”, involving peripheral vision, operating more
quickly and automatically. These two basic modes are intricately linked, as attention switches from a state of “focus” to that of
“inattention” in response to external occurrences, creating a sense of “restlessness” in the viewer (Baxandall, 1995). For example, in a

2
These perceptual processes take place predominantly among producers, rather than on the audience side, in the form of social evaluations.
Therefore, the proposed framework can be categorized as “supply-side” in nature.

2
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

work of art there may be visual elements that create uncertainty and provoke interest, thereby “focalizing” attention. Control of the
viewer’s attention is a key aspect of the visual appeal of masterpieces, but is equally important in explaining the patterns of attention
that underlie the circulation of ideas in a given field. In this perspective, the field of art can be understood as a “market in attention,”
defined by an exchange or “a barter of attentions valuable to the other” (Baxandall, 1995: 135).3
To understand shifts in styles or artistic practices requires examining the changing structures of attention, provoked by occurrences
of different nature – technological, conceptual or relational. It is in the process of “attending” to peers, objects or ideas in the course of
movement in social space that novelty is generated. But this movement is not the classic, Humean model of causality where an actor X
influences actor Y, who influences another set of actors on her turn. Baxandall proposes instead a more intricate model of influence,
invoking the “field offered by a billiard table. On this table would be very many balls…and the table is an Italian one without pockets. Above all,
the cue-ball, that which hits another is not X, but Y. What happens in the field, each time Y refers to an X, is a rearrangement. Arts are positional
games and each time an artist is influenced, he rewrites his art’s history a little.” (Baxandall, 1985: 62-64).
Decades after its formulation, this remains a strikingly original statement on the mechanics of social influence, motivating an
alternative perspective on the socio-psychological mechanisms of creativity to established frameworks (e.g., Godart, Seong, & Phillips,
2020). What attributes credibility to it is that it resonates with theoretical developments in sociology over the last decades. This
resonance becomes apparent in the redirection of scholarly attention from direct to indirect social ties, recombination to repositioning,
directionality to reversibility of social influence, and exogeneous to endogenous effects.

2.1. Direct and Indirect Ties

Social embeddedness is traditionally articulated in terms of direct social ties that range from strong to weak in nature (Granovetter,
1985). Network scholarship is largely focused on friendship and influence networks (e.g., Burt, 2004; Stovel and Shaw, 2012), applied
to explaining a broad range of behavioral outcomes. In the model of causality proposed by Baxandall, however, the attention is
reoriented from direct to indirect ties, and from mechanics of direct social impact (i.e. one billiard ball (X) hitting another (Y)) to that
of oblique impact by way of “repositioning” (other balls are becoming more or less accessible to Y after impact by X). For Baxandall the
direct social impact of an individual on another individual (i.e. by way of discussion on a topic of common interest) is only one of the
ways in which influence proceeds in art. A potentially more consequential mechanism is that of exposure to the network of references
in which an artist is embedded.
This network includes the set of relevant others that one is paying attention to. The network of references is related to, but is distinct
from the traditional networks of friendship and help/advice. As Zuckerman and Sgourev (2006) demonstrate, actors are able to
differentiate clearly between direct sources of information or advice, and indirect contacts serving as role models or sources of
inspiration. The “indirect” network exhibits distinct effects on key behavioral outcomes from the more traditional networks based on
direct social contact.
Similarly, Ibarra, Kilduff and Tsai (2005) emphasize the fact that social structure is composed not only of direct ties, but also of
cognitive ties that define common perceptions and orientations, and that constitute a basis for the creation of direct ties.4 The
assumption is that people develop an indirect tie between them when they have the same perception of the importance of an idea or
practice (Ibarra et al., 2005, p. 367). A “perceptual” network is composed of indirect, cognitive ties between individuals, based on
similarity of cognitions. Perceptual and behavioral networks overlap only partly and differ in the extent to which they predict out­
comes. In this logic, any field of activity can be represented as a marketplace of perceptions that compete for adoption by individuals.
Their adoption then influences patterns of social interaction.
Consider the art world in the early 20th century Paris, comprising tens of thousands of artists, exposed to unprecedented surfeit of
influences, such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, African, Japanese and Russian art, and a host of other categories. The
composition of the reference sets of these artists was important, as references provided not only particular techniques that could be
deployed, but also a set of problems to solve. Artists faced a multitude of options from which they could choose their references, and
the choice of references had consequences for the type of problems that they would seek to address and for the ways in which they
would address them (Baxandall, 1985).

2.2. Recombination and repositioning

Reference sets are not static – they change with the appearance of new styles or the evolution of existing ones. This process is
important because it carries the potential for originality – by adding or removing references, artists modify their research agenda, the
priority given to identified problems and the relations among the references within their set. This dynamic configuration of references
serves as a “prism” through which influence is refracted, structuring perceptions and artistic pursuits. In other words, the reference set
shapes what artists perceive to be both relevant and important, and this is what then shapes their objectives – the problems they are

3
How distinct this framework is from sociological accounts of creativity is attested in a recent review (Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020), where the
word “attention” is of theoretical pertinence only in the context of evaluation – as attention allocated by external audiences across competing
configurations of elements. The manner in which Baxandall (1995) poses structures of attention as the key element of an interactive process between
artists is unprecedented.
4
Lizardo (2006) formulated a similar framework, where cultural taste constitutes the basis for the formation and maintenance of social re­
lationships. Consumption and tastes create social boundaries and rearrange networks.

3
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

looking to resolve or the ideas they are trying to formulate. In this logic, the configuration of references – their composition and
positioning relative to each other, conditions perception, predisposing one to seeing some things, but not others, responding to some
developments, but not others, incorporating some ideas, but not others. The “repositioning” of references thus allows or prevents one
from seeing new things or from seeing old things in a new light.
The theoretical importance of the “repositioning” mechanism is twofold. First, it provides an alternative to the mechanism of
“recombination” (or bricolage), whereby actors selectively draw on different sources as cultural toolkits, mixing elements to suit their
strategic designs (e.g. Durand et al., 2007; Navis and Glynn, 2010). Repositioning is a distinct mechanism, as elements are not bor­
rowed and mixed, but are repositioned relative to other elements and are then reinterpreted in a way leading to the generation of
novelty. The creative insight derives from perception, from the act of seeing.
Second, repositioning complicates the geometry of perception and influence. When making a reference to another artist, influence
can be direct – by borrowing something from her or addressing problems that this artist considers important. But it can also be indirect,
when using someone’s else solution to think through one’s own set of problems or by re-directing attention to an obscure source of
information that allows for a different perspective on an existing problem. Repositioning modifies the structures of attention – the
exchange of attention between artists (Baxandall, 1995), predisposing to seeing some things more distinctly than others.
The analytical focus is not on practices of recombination by people, but on the exchanges of attention between people. These ex­
changes may take the form of exposing others to a set of ideas or elements, modifying their cognitive availability or “retrievability”
(Schudson, 1989), but also nudging others to reconsider a problem in new light. Creative insight tends to emerge in the course of
complex positional games on the billiard table, in a way that combines the path dependence of the movement of balls on the table with
the elements of chance related to unscripted changes in the observation angles, originating from chance encounters or clashes.

2.3. Directionality and reversibility of social influence

What adds complexity is the reversibility of social influence. In network studies influence is typically one-directional. Whether in
help/advice networks or the diffusion of innovation, a network member affects a peer by transmitting information, by exercising
influence or encouraging adoption. Accordingly, the most central members of the network – i.e. brokers, are the most important
sources of influence (Burt, 2004), best positioned to combine resources and ideas from many contacts (Collins, 1998). But for Baxandall
influence is never one-directional; when one artist influences another, the former’s position also changes as a result of the impact,
pushing her closer to some of the balls on the table and further away from others. The effect of “reversibility” – a person modifying the
positioning of a contact upon referring to her as a source of inspiration and influence, reminds of the principle of reversibility in studies
of materiality.5
Research on materiality tends to explore the interplay among objects, ideas and people (Jones et al., 2017, Boxenbaum et al., 2018).
It documents how materials allow or limit possibilities for action, encompassing the range of activities that an object makes available to
a user, who enacts a specific set of these possibilities (Faraj and Azad, 2012). Objects facilitate the use of particular features, but users
define the functionality of the object through the practice of its use (Yaneva, 2009). Network research highlights a different form of
interplay – between individual identity and networks. Identities control networks, but networks constitute the relational bases for the
modification of identities (White, 1992). Ibarra et al. (2005, pp. 362-363) state this interplay unambiguously – networks affect
identities; identities affect networks on their turn. Along similar lines, Baxandall postulates a dual process, whereby artists choose their
references, but the references attract (or repel) choosers on their turn. When artists make a reference to a peer in their artworks, they
affect the reference sets of others, as their choices codify the affirmation of an identity that can be viewed as attractive or undesirable
by others. This model is dynamic and interactive in nature, marked by the coevolution of the field and of the actors participating in it
(Garud and Karnøe, 2001). The “repositioning” provoked by one ball hitting another on the table has repercussions beyond the focal
pair. The mechanics of a field where every actor, irrespective of her position, can exert influence on the configuration of the balls on the
table through her choices, are substantively different from the traditional core-periphery structure of fields (e.g. Bourdieu, 1993). The
core is the domain of “stars”, connected to other eminent members of the field. Those at the center of the field have better knowledge
and access to opportunities than those at the periphery, influencing the choices at the periphery (Collins, 1998). But status distinctions
are less pertinent when influence tends to flow both ways: peripheral actors have a more active role to play.

2.4. Exogenous and endogenous effects

The self-generative nature of references in this framework associates it with the tendency in the sociology of culture toward greater
attention to the endogenous nature of change. The analytical focus in this perspective is on causal processes within culture, inde­
pendent of exogeneous (relational, technological or material) factors. Studies document how internal mechanisms drive social pro­
cesses (Kaufman, 2004), attributing a key role to naturally evolving dichotomies that serve to differentiate between “us” and “them”
(Lieberson, 2000; Abbott, 2001). Hence, the driving force of creativity is not the traditional “exogeneous” combinatory practice,
through which actors create novelty in conjunction with other actors (e.g. Durand et al., 2007; Navis and Glynn, 2010), but an “in­
ternal” process guided by simple behavioral rules of differentiation and contrast (Lieberson, 2000, Abbott, 2001). Attention is

5
It also reminds of probably the most famous statement on reversibility in sociological scholarship – Giddens’ (1986) “structuration”. Social
structures shape people’s practices, but at the same time, practices constitute (and reproduce) social structures. Note also the reversible influence
between culture and networks in Lizardo (2006).

4
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

redirected to the ways in which fields create the preconditions for schism – for actors to differentiate themselves from the mainstream
by referencing and identifying with contesting paradigms (Abbott, 2001). This framework is consistent with White’s (1992) model of
producers observing and reacting to each other by adjusting their output or differentiating products. From such efforts emerge
identities that structure the organization of fields into peer networks by shaping individual choices of materials, techniques and
narratives. Accordingly, we can expect that artists self-select into networks, based on their affinity with materials, techniques or
concepts, and that their choices reflect upon the choices of their peers by re-arranging the balls on the table, creating clusters of balls at
higher or lower level of opposition and contrast (Baxandall, 1985).

3. Positioning the model

Relative to established sociological frameworks (see Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020), the presented model offers a new perspective
on creativity, emanating from the disruption and redirection of patterns of attention. This model derives from Baxandall’s (1985,
1995) work on perception, which remains largely ignored by sociologists, in contrast to his earlier work, more directly pertinent to the
sociology of art. Tanner (2010) documents the sociological relevance of Baxandall, showing how his work has been used to reinforce
“institutionalist” frameworks. For example, the concept of the “period eye”, capturing the salience of the knowledge of artistic codes in
perception and evaluation, resonates with Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualization of the role of cultural capital in social inequality. The
“field” concept and the analysis of arts as “positional games” constitute other areas of affinity between the two frameworks.
For Baxandall (1972, 1980) artistic choices operate within institutions and conventions, which affect the nature and quality of
artistic work. Unsurprisingly, Becker (1982) draws on his scholarship in developing the argument that art is not the unique product of
individual “genius”, but the mundane product of networks of cooperation (Tanner, 2010). For both authors, an artwork is made
possible by a chain of cooperation involving other artists and genre conventions, mediating interactions between members of the art
world. The professional organization of art is manifested in networks of production that organize the creative process, procure ma­
terials, stabilize techniques, organize careers and shape the distribution of value (Becker, 1982).
Baxandall’s approach is institutionalist in nature, as he analyzes art production in its relation to a marketplace of taste and values.
This marketplace defines the circumstances that influence artistic choices – their techniques, the narratives they use or influences they
absorb. Similar to Becker (1982) and Bourdieu (1993), the market creates conditions for competitive self-differentiation among artists
in positional games. But there is a key difference between their approaches; what he conceptualizes is not how the system conditions
individual choices, but how artists react to and seek to out-do each other in the marketplace. He operates within an art-historical
tradition, which prioritizes agency, the autonomy of the artwork and artistic exchanges.
Baxandall recognizes that artistic creativity is embedded in network dynamics of cultural and material elements (Godart, Seong, &
Phillips, 2020), but for him the artist and the work of art remain central, rather than the social context (Zolberg, 1990: 55). He em­
phasizes the material agency of art in constituting the social order, rather than just reproducing it. In his insistence on the active
character of the artwork he diverges from both institutional theories (Bourdieu, 1993; Becker, 1982), and Actor-Network theory
(Latour, 1995)6, becoming a “guiding spirit” in the constitution of the “New” Sociology of Art (Tanner, 2010). This research stream
disputes the assumption that art worlds, rather than artists, make works of art (Becker, 1982), emphasizing the unique, non-routine
nature of artistic work, and the autonomous aesthetic and social impact of the artwork (e.g. De la Fuente, 2011, Dominguez Rubio &
Silva, 2013).
Central to this framework is the interaction between a social agent and a cultural object. As Griswold (1987: 24-25) points out, the
pivot of Baxandall’s framework is the social agent, for whom a probable structure of intention can be constructed. The agent is a
problem-solver, confronted with a practical, geometrical or logical problem, for which there is no reactive way of doing it (Baxandall,
1985: 69).7 The impetus for the resolution of the problem is often external in nature, but in contrast to sociological accounts, agency
rests with the receiving actor. Similar to Giddens (1986) or Sewell (1992), Baxandall (1985) conceives of individuals as "knowl­
edgeable" or "enabled" agents, capable of putting their structurally formed capacities to work in creative ways. But for him creativity is
not reducible to the knowledge of a rule or a schema, or to the practice of transposition and extension of schemas to new contexts
(Sewell 1982: 18). The knowledge of cultural schemas does not provide a sufficient explanation of the ability to act creatively, as
demonstrated in his analyses of the aesthetic function of the practical experience of craftsmen at handling material objects (Baxandall,
1980, 1988).8
Furthermore, he redirects the currents of influence in creative activity, as the agent chooses to be influenced in seeking solutions to a

6
Baxandall’s approach shares with Actor-Network theory and the sociology of translation (e.g. Latour, 1995) the assumption that creativity
derives from the interplay of people, objects and technologies, but not their tendency to “decenter the study of creativity from humans” (Bartels &
Bencherki, 2013: 5). Creativity in these perspectives does not result from “actants” – people and objects, - interacting with one another, but has a
hybrid constitution (Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020: 493).
7
This behavioral model bears resemblance to the “sensemaking” paradigm of Weick (1995) in its emphasis on problem-solving and control of
attention, but is fundamentally different in the underlying motivation of pursuit of distinctiveness, rather than construction of meaning and
reduction of uncertainty.
8
If Baxandall’s agent is exposed to alternative narratives or frameworks for innovation, the critical process for Baxandall is not how these
narratives coordinate action (e.g. Bartel and Garud 2009), but how the agent chooses among the multitude of narratives and frameworks in the
marketplace and what he or she identifies as worthy of attention. This is where the perceptual dimension of cognition and the “billiard table” model
become relevant.

5
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

problem by associating with a network of ideas, methods or peers. It is the artist who chooses to take something from another artist and
who is thus the active partner in the relationship (Onians, 2007). Influence is the choice of references from within a network of other
artists; one’s choices modify one’s position in the network by drawing closer or moving away from a given reference. An artist does not
look for inspiration from her paint supplier; it is not the extended chain of cooperation (Becker, 1982) that instigates creative insights,
but the network of other producers (White, 1992), and this is the network that Baxandall overlays on the billiard table. The choice of
“billiards” to describe the positional game between artists contrasts with Becker’s (1982) approach, which resembles a chess game
(Pessin, 2017: 49-50). It involves a social situation in which actors with divergent interests do something together, with a similar
respect for rules and conventions, with each player analyzing the situation and gauging the opponent’s foreseeable responses to her
own moves, adjusting her actions to include new information provided by other’s reactions.
Baxandall’s game similarly encompasses a sequence of shifting positions, but the manner in which the balls enter into contact with
each other is different from the chessboard, as control is only partial. When a ball strikes another, it provokes a change in the
configuration of balls on the table that modifies not only distances between balls, but the angles of their visibility. This “optical”
dimension is a distinctive feature of the Baxandall model and is what sets it apart from more familiar theoretical frameworks.
The metaphor of the “billiard” table is invoked by some authors, such as Griswold (1987: 14), in describing how the comprehension
of a past artist is affected by the reception of her inheritors. The social construction of the role of a precursor in the exchange between
the past and present is a genuine, but limited, application of a model that provides an alternative conception of influence and crea­
tivity. The reluctance of sociologists to engage more systematically perception and attention in their theories has resulted in a
disequilibrium in the sociology of art: we understand much better why artists repeat conventions in their work (Becker, 1982;
Bourdieu, 1993), than what provokes them to stop doing so and redirect their attention to new sources or possibilities. The behavioral
model of Baxandall (1985) is a good starting point in this endeavor, encouraging the conceptualization of the social mechanisms that
regulate the interplay of attention and inattention. The objective is to explain the genesis of those moments of “restlessness” (Bax­
andall, 1995) that disrupt cognitive routines and visual habits, thereby opening the way for creation.
In the next section I illustrate the change in analytical perspective with a brief discussion of three emblematic figures in the history
of art, brought together on the billiard table in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The discussion of the resonance of the collision of
two balls (Cézanne – Picasso) or how the collision of central balls changed the position of a peripheral ball (El Greco), is not meant to be
historically exhaustive or to “validate” the theoretical framework. Its objective is to illustrate the relevance and plausibility of the
developed framework, to demonstrate the workings of a mechanism and to suggest ways to further develop the model and subject it to
rigorous testing (Siggelkow, 2007).

3.1. El Greco

Born in Crete, Domenikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco) (1541-1614) painted religious icons, before he departed for Venice and then
Rome, finally settling down in Toledo, Spain. His rendering of religious themes was stylistically unconventional. Drawing on
Byzantine, Venetian and Mannerist sources, he developed a highly expressive, idiosyncratic style with no identifiable predecessors
from the Italian masters, nor followers for the next three centuries (Wethey, 1962). Unlike his contemporaries, El Greco did not
represent reality in a balanced composition, conveyed through clear narrative and harmonious colors. His paintings featured elongated
faces and deformed figures, accentuated by bright, contrasting colors. The absence of balanced proportions and harmonious coloring
puzzled his contemporaries (Baetjer, 1981). In 1724 his style was condemned as contemptible and laughable by the art historian
Antonio Palomino.9 El Greco was largely ignored and viewed with incomprehension until the late 19th century; the dramatic change of
his fortunes occurred only in the early 20th century.10
Imagine a bright red ball in the corner of a billiard table, collecting dust for centuries, before changes in the principles of evaluation
impelled a number of other balls to start moving toward the red ball. This ball does not move by itself to the center, but other balls
move to it instead, making it appear more central. El Greco’s rejection of naturalistic representation in favor of elongated figures,
bright colors and expressiveness resonated with avant-garde artists in Paris and Berlin, looking for ways to overcome the constraints of
realistic representation. Delacroix, Millet and Degas owned examples of his work, Cézanne and Sargent copied him, while Picasso
borrowed from him on multiple occasions.
The key figure in the repositioning of El Greco was Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, whose book published
in 1910 established El Greco not only as an Old Master, but as a contemporary artist. Meier-Graefe (1962[1910]) observes that many of
the principal inventions of Modem art, such as colored shadows, the dissolution of contours, and the combination of cadences and
contrasts are already presupposed in El Greco. "He has discovered a realm of new possibilities. All the generations that follow after him live in
his realm. There is a greater difference between him and Titian, his master, than between him and Renoir or Cézanne. Nevertheless, Renoir and
Cézanne are masters of impeccable originality because it is not possible to avail yourself of El Greco’s language, if in using it, it is not invented
again and again, by the user” (p. 458).
This statement employs the language of repositioning, referring to distances between balls on the table – between El Greco, his
predecessor and contemporary artists, to establish his proximity to the latter, rather than the former. The originality and identity of El

9
Palomino’s El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado (1724) contains important biographical material relating to the prominent Spanish artists at
the time.
10
The frequency of appearance of his name in French books (available in Google Ngram), testifies to the lack of interest before 1892, followed by a
gradual rise in the reference rate, and steeper increase in the first decades of the 20th century.

6
S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

Greco’s art become apparent when changing the point of observation from the oeuvre of Titian to that of Renoir and Cézanne. Meaning
is relative and “optical” in nature; contemporary artists contribute to the repositioning of the Old Master by borrowing from him. This
is not the process of borrowing from the past to apply it in the present, but reinterpreting something taken from the past in light of what
is happening at present. Meier-Graefe (1962[1910]) asserts the reversibility of influence, as Renoir and Cézanne made the compre­
hension of El Greco easier, but El Greco made modern artists more understandable to contemporary audiences by helping place radical
aesthetic developments in historical context.
This complex perceptual process led to the rearrangement of the “structures of attention”. As the field is changing in a way that casts
light on an obscure artist, this also contributes to making other artists more or less visible, redirecting attention to some artistic
tendencies and away from others. A previously peripheral ball becomes a reference point for others and with every additional
reference, its visibility is enhanced. El Greco becomes more comprehensible in the context of contemporary art, and his solutions serve
to guide the search process of contemporary artists. These artists are increasingly recognizing the credibility of his vision, and as a
result of adopting his viewpoint, they are better able to identify opportunities for developing their own style.
This form of optical interplay, whereby El Greco’s art reoriented the attention structures and search process of contemporary
artists11, whose perceptions then enhanced his visibility, transpires as well in the words of Franz Marc, a key figure in German
Expressionism, “we refer with pleasure and steadfastness to the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution
of our new perceptions on art” (Kandinsky-Marc, 1987, pp. 75-76). The attention of Expressionist artists was naturally attracted to the
expressive distortions in El Greco’s style, but other artists were attracted to other aspects. Paul Cézanne appears to have been the first
to decipher the structural code in the morphology of El Greco, using it to further his formalist pursuits (Denis, 1920). In his Blue Period
Picasso drew on the cold tonality of El Greco in developing images of ascetic figures with elongated faces, but his early Cubism
embodied his attention to other aspects of El Greco, such as the structural analysis of compositions and the interweaving of form and
space (Johnson, 1980). Picasso considered El Greco’s formal structure as Cubist, and it is likely that the distortions and materialistic
rendering of time in his early Cubism derived from observations of El Greco (de la Souchère, 1960: 15). Dynamic shifts in perspective in
the early 20th century enabled artists to see like El Greco, recognizing what he represented on the canvass as meaningful. But as a result
of adopting his viewpoint, artists were able to see differently, reimagining past developments in contemporary light.

3.2. Cézanne

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. His main contributions relate to the exploration of the
formal structure of reality, as represented on the canvass. While his Impressionist contemporaries were primarily concerned with
capturing the ephemeral effects of nature, Cézanne was preoccupied with the questions of permanence and stability, of constituting a
structural framework for painting through the arrangement of lines and forms (Robbins, 1963). The structure of a painting makes it a
tangible reality in itself, independent from the represented objects.
The wide-ranging influence of Cézanne on early Modern art has relatively little to do with relational factors, as the artist retreated
from the Parisian art world in Southern France. His exhibition at the 1907 Salon d’Automne was paramount in enhancing his visibility,
attracting the attention of young artists in Paris (Moser, 1985). Cézanne’s explorations of geometric simplification and optical phe­
nomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Gris and others to experiment with complex multiple views of the
same subject, and, eventually, with the fracturing of form (Moser, 1985). Braque recognized the fundamental role of Cézanne’s optical
advances in inspiring him to move away from Fauvism and search in another direction: “It [Cézanne’s impact] was more than an in­
fluence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective” (in Rubin (1989, p. 353). The
pursuit of pictorial elements that are solid and durable in their representation repositioned the balls on the billiard table, inciting
emerging artists to reevaluate their own work in relation to that of Cézanne (Donnell-Kotrozo, 1979).
Cézanne’s insistence on reconstructing nature according to a system of basic forms resonated with Picasso’s pursuits at that time. In
Cézanne’s work Picasso found a model of how to distill the essential from nature in order to achieve a cohesive surface that expressed
the artist’s singular vision (Donnell-Kotrozo, 1979). Picasso identified in Cézanne a working method and a framework within which to
address the key problems confronting art in the early 20th century.12 He was not a passive receptacle of that influence, but had “a
discriminating view of the past in an active and reciprocal relation with a developing set of dispositions and skills” (Baxandall, 1985: 62). He
correctly identified the most valuable aspects of Cézanne’s style – viewing subjects from shifting positions and reducing representation
to geometric forms. By incorporating these principles, Picasso translated Cézanne for a broader audience, making his art more
accessible (Baxandall, 1985). Cézanne’s formal experiments were materialized and illustrated in the early Cubism of Braque and
Picasso. By referencing earlier work, an artist changes somewhat the perspective on the original, placing it in different light. Cubism
reflected and refracted prior developments, allowing viewers to adopt and adapt Cézanne’s viewpoint, in a similar manner to how El
Greco’s particular vision was adopted and adapted by Expressionism.
A distinctive feature of Cézanne is the richness of his references. He studied assiduously masterpieces of Poussin, Chardin, Ver­
onese, Rubens and Delacroix, among others. His reading of art of the past was instrumental in developing a method for reconstructing

11
The exhibition “El Greco and Modern Painting” at the “Prado” in 2015 made this point empathically, highlighting the ways in which El Greco
influenced the pursuits of Pollock, Cézanne, Picasso, Manet and others.
12
These problems can be summarized as (1) how to represent threedimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas without creating a mere
illusion of depth, (2) how to resolve the tension between form and color, and (3) how to resolve the conflict between instantaneousness and
sustained engagement (Baxandall 1985, pp. 44-45).

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the object. Even as a mature artist, Cézanne continued to rethink his decisions in light of passages of paintings by masters such as
Chardin. The delicate optical instabilities in Chardin’s painting were writ large in Cézanne, giving rise to spatial ambiguities and
disjointedness in the composition that laid the foundations for the radical experiments in the next decades (Locke, 2015). Visual in­
stabilities in Chardin were refracted through and magnified by Cézanne, provoking formal Cubist experiments that introduced dis­
tortions, multiple viewpoints, and ambiguous spatial relations into visual representation (Antliff and Leighten, 2001).
The impetus to break up, analyze and reassemble objects into abstract forms originated in the working method of Cézanne and the
sources on which it was based. Cubism then amplified the spatial disjunctions present in Cézanne in a manner corresponding only
loosely to his intentions (Robbins, 1963). The same way that viewers could better understand the formal experiments of Cézanne
through the prism of early Cubism, they could better recognize the delicate unevenness of Chardin as a result of viewing Cézanne
(Locke, 2015). Such shifts in perspective associated with the repositioning of balls on the table are essential in the creative process.
What emerges in the end is intrinsically related to, but not determined by what came earlier; a sequence of re-viewing and
re-evaluating prior developments creates preconditions for novelty.

4. Implications for theory and methodology

Creativity research is traditionally dominated by psychological work on personality traits (Sternberg, 2006; George, 2007), with a
more recent sociological current exploring the social-structural factors of novelty generation (Burt, 2004; Collins, 2008; Cattani and
Ferriani, 2008). There is strong evidence for the salience of combinatorial practices in creativity and innovation, as embedded in
configurations of social relations (Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020; Simonton, 2004). Yet, there is also much to suggest that attention to
relations and recombination should be complemented with perceptual factors. As worded by Steve Jobs: “Creativity is just connecting
things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”13
Along similar lines, Le Corbusier (1960: 27) noted that: “Drawing is first and foremost observing. At that moment, invention ensues”.
Perception looms large in the creative process. Kuhn (1962) conceived of “paradigm shifts” in science as largely perceptual in
nature, conditioned by beliefs and personal experiences. For Simon (1985) practices and events that disrupt and refocus attention
facilitate the creative break from routine. The observation that creative insight derives from a change of vantage point (Berns, 2008), as
an actor moves through social space, allowing her or him to see common elements in uncommon ways, defines the proposed “optical”
approach. Its objective is to contribute to the sociological study of creativity by integrating perceptual dynamics and the role of
“attention” as a regulator of perception (Berns, 2008).
To that end, I drew on the multifaceted scholarship of Baxandall (1985, 1995), who proposes that the classic causal chain does not
do justice to the complexities of social influence and creativity. Actors are involved not only in practices of recombination, mixing old
elements in new combinations (e.g. Rao et al., 2005) but also those of repositioning, which modify their viewpoint and the relevance of
what is observed at any point in time. Creativity results when actors use someone else’s solution to think through their own problems,
provoking reinterpretation of established ways of doing. Cézanne repositioned the balls on the table through his “formal” methods.
Picasso reinterpreted him, affecting the pursuits of others, but not in the same way, as his explorations were refracted through personal
or collective identities, giving rise to distinct styles (e.g., Sgourev, 2013). Creative insight is “optical” in nature when it derives from a
change in perspective. This change can be due to the “repositioning” of balls on the table, modifying the angles of visibility and
distance between balls. It can also be brought about by the refraction of viewing by personal experiences (Berns, 2008; Onians, 2007),
or a Gestalt-switch that occurs when one identifies a visual image as one thing and, then, as another (Kuhn, 1962). Communication is
inherently ambiguous; images and symbols are “polysemic” and can be variously interpreted (Schudson, 1989: 155), creating pos­
sibilities for the generation of new meaning.
As Kronfeldner (2009) notes, the study of creativity is plagued by a paradox – either creativity is naturalistically unexplainable (if it
brings about genuine novelty) or what is actually explained is not genuine creativity (if it does not bring about genuine novelty).
Originality demands independence of a product of mind from the causal influence of an original. In the “repositioning” framework
control is only partial, as sequences of ball movement may lead to sudden changes in the angles of visibility that are not reducible to
initial conditions. The metaphor of the billiard table captures elegantly the mix of determinism and chance that makes creativity
amenable to analysis, but tantalizingly unpredictable.
Baxandall’s work has been leveraged by sociologists to reinforce institutionalist approaches to art (Tanner, 2010). I drew instead on
underexplored themes from his late scholarship to articulate optical dimensions of creativity. Compared against the premises of the
sociological study of creativity (e.g. Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020), this approach appears unusual in prioritizing perceptual to
relational factors. But this is an opportunity more than a hindrance. Network scholarship is increasingly recognizing the need to
connect relational and cognitive processes in explaining social outcomes. Ibarra et al. (2005) formulate a recommendation for scholars
that echoes Baxandall – to analyze closely the marketplace of perceptions in which different cognitive schemas compete for attention
and adoption, alerting actors to different options. An important theoretical challenge is to position mechanisms of novelty generation
in cognitive-relational space, examining how social networks act as regulators of (in)attention, or how structures of attention influence
relational dynamics.
The proposed framework, based on reference networks, depicts one trajectory of the complex interplay between cognitive and
relational processes but other approaches may explore other networks or outcomes. Consider Prato and Stark’s (2013) analysis of

13
From an interview in Wired magazine (1996), available at: http://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/

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S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

“network attention structures”. Attention has connective properties, creating links across issues in an organization’s field of view, and
among competitors who pay attention to the same issues. The authors share the assumptions with the present framework that behavior
is shaped by one’s viewpoint, location in attention networks and exposure to the views of others. Another similarity is the attention to
indirect social ties and mechanisms of social influence (i.e. structural equivalence, Lorrain and White (1971)), which allow to escape
the analytical constraints of direct influence. Naturally, integrating oblique social impact through indirect exposure approximates
closer reality, but presents acute challenges related to measurement and data collection.
The development of appropriate empirical methods for studying attention structures will allow an improved understanding of the
dynamic interaction between individual and social-structural factors in creativity (Csikszentmihályi, 1996). Both theoretical and
empirical research is needed on connecting trajectories of direct and indirect social influence to attention structures. For example,
Sgourev (2021) shows how a technological development in the mid-19th century encouraged a small group of artists to develop and
materialize new ways of seeing on the canvass. Artists with a common attention structure, paying attention to the same peers,
techniques and set of ideas, self-selected into loose networks that coordinated contesting actions. The interaction of social networks
and attention structures contributed to changing the perspective on what was possible in artistic representation.
One of the most valuable features of the Baxandall model is that it reinstates agency to actors, confronted with social conventions
and chains of cooperation (Becker, 1982). The artist navigates the complex environment of creation, funding and marketplace
competition. Social, economic and cultural contexts define the circumstances of individual choices and interpretations, but the actor is
entitled to her individuality by selecting her formative sources of influence. Creative breakthroughs emerge from a discriminating view
of the past and present, identifying some of the potential sources of influence as worthwhile of attention. This approach is resolutely
sociological in postulating that choices are guided by identities – by the sense of self in relation to the market. It is in the act of choosing
– whom to pay attention to, where to exhibit or what techniques to employ, that repetitive practices are interrupted and possibilities
for invention appear. Similar to White (1992), a market in attention structures individual activity by way of mutual observation and
relative positioning.
Baxandall’s framework anticipated developments in sociological scholarship, including the growing attention to the social bases of
perception, to indirect social influence, reverse causality and endogeneity in culture. Developments in network research and cultural
sociology have rendered his metaphor of the “billiard table” more apposite, demonstrating how later developments may reinforce the
validity of past arguments. This validity is not restricted to the artistic domain, as the postulated mechanisms are general in nature.
However, the framework emerged from the artistic domain and incorporates assumptions about the salience of creativity, the nature of
interaction between producers and the importance of the reference set, which do not apply equally across social contexts.
The postulated mechanisms need to be tested in a systematic manner. An important empirical challenge in operationalizing
structures of attention is capturing who pays attention to whom or what. One possibility is using primary data to identify networks of
references and sequences of referencing. Alternatively, artificial intelligence and large digital databases can be leveraged to extract
information on peer references or shared exposure, such as participations in relational events (i.e., art exhibitions). Content analysis
and topic modelling can be applied in the analysis of personal communication, as a source of information on attention. Experimental
studies and research in neuroscience can be helpful in connecting brain activity to patterns of visualization and distribution of
attention (e.g. Onians, 2007).
The presented framework is intentionally parsimonious, featuring basic principles that future research can modify or extend. It does
not account for degrees of creativity, even if it is clear that not every change of perspective leads to novelty. Repositioning is not limited
to a single table; in reality, multiple tables are connected in ways that condition the movement of the balls. For example, the emergence
of abstract art was shaped by developments in philosophy, music, physical sciences and optics (Roque, 2003). On its turn, art
contributed to shifting perspectives in fields, such as fashion, decoration or ballet. A related way to extend the framework is to allow for
people to connect tables. I retained Baxandall’s (1985) original conception of balls corresponding to artists. But one can also position a
player with a cue stick at the head of the table, with balls corresponding to ideas. Not only people, but also ideas compete for attention
(Ibarra et al. 2005). Adopting the idea as a unit of analysis would require further theoretical work, refining the repositioning
mechanism and connecting to other research streams, such as that on networks of ideas or concepts (e.g. Godart, 2018).
Sociology has a distinctive contribution to make to the study of creativity (Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020), but distinctiveness does
not mean detachment from other research traditions. We need to explore how creativity is embedded in cognitive-relational space,
how attention structures emerge and interact with relations. The objective is to explain the state of “restlessness”, of disruption of
cognitive patterns that predisposes to the emergence of novelty. As recommended by Harrison White: “How do you know where you get
an idea from? A hint, a perspective, a point of view, that’s what you’re after”.14

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101581.

14
From an interview with White available at: https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/theoryatmadison/papers/ivwWhite.pdf

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S.V. Sgourev Poetics 89 (2021) 101581

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Stoyan V. Sgourev is a professor of management at ESSEC Business School, France. He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral
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research has been featured in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Organization Science and Academy of Management Journal, among others.

11
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holy water, and victory was assured. If all assaults of the devil were
so straightforward and so vincible, the path to Heaven were broad
and smooth indeed.
It was, perhaps, the popular sense of victorious ability against her
spells which protected the witch, _per se_, against over-severe
persecution until towards the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Absolute confidence in the power to suppress an evil diminishes the
urgency for its suppression. Here and there a witch was executed,
local persecutions of inconsiderable extent occurred, but for general
holocausts we must wait until the more enlightened times of a James
I. or a Louis XIV. The witch of the Dark Ages might count upon a life
of comparative security, sweetened by the offerings of those who,
pining for present joys, acted upon the advice of Omar Khayyam
rather than following that of their ghostly advisers. Meanwhile,
however, a mass of tradition and precedent was growing up, to be
put to deadly purpose in the animadversions of learned sixteenth
and seventeenth century writers upon the vile and damnable sin of
witchcraft.
By the eleventh century the witch was firmly identified, in the popular
as well as the ecclesiastical mind, as a woman who had entered
upon a compact with Satan for the overthrowing of Christ's kingdom.
The popular conception of her personality had also undergone a
change. By the twelfth century there was no more question of her as
a fair enchantress—she was grown older and uglier, poorer and
meaner, showing none of the advantages her compact with the Evil
One might have been expected to bring in its train.
The increasing tendency towards dabbling in things forbidden
brought about greater severity in its repression, but it was not until
the days of Innocent VIII., when witchcraft was officially identified
with heresy, that the period of cruel persecution may be said really to
have begun. Sorcery in itself was bad enough; associated with
heresy no crime was so pernicious and no punishment too condign,
especially when inflicted by the Holy Inquisition. The inquisitorial
power was frequently misused; the fact that the possessions of the
accused became forfeit to her judges when tried in an ecclesiastical
court may seem to the sceptic to provide ample reason why the
ecclesiastical authorities undertook so many more prosecutions than
did the civil. But of the absolute sincerity with which all classes set
themselves to stamp out so dreadful a crime, the portentous and
voluminous writings of the period leave no doubt whatever. Catholic
and, after the Reformation, Protestant, rich and poor, patriot and
philanthropist alike, vied with each other in the enthusiasm with
which they scented out their prey, and the pious satisfaction with
which they tortured helpless old women to the last extremity in the
name of the All-Merciful.
From the fourteenth century onwards the type of recognised witch
varies only in detail. Though not invariably she is commonly the
conventional hag. If young, she has been led astray by a senior, or
taken to the Sabbath in childhood under constraint—which was not,
however, regarded as a valid defence in time of trial. Many such
were executed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in many
cases mere children. But it was the toothless hag whose mumblings
held the public ear and became acknowledged as the truest type.
Even when men ceased to fear her she lost nothing of her grotesque
hideousness to the childish mind, and as such has become finally
enshrined in the nursery lore of Europe. As such, also, I have
endeavoured to reconstruct her in her habit as she lived in the eyes
of her mediæval contemporaries elsewhere in this volume.

CHAPTER IV
THE HALF-WAY WORLDS.
Having decided, very early in his earthly career, to acknowledge a
supernatural world, Man promptly set to work to people it after his
own image. One not providing scope for his quickening imagination,
he added another to it, supplementing the heavenly by the infernal,
good by evil—if, indeed, as is more probable, he did not rather
deduce good out of evil. But just as there are many stages between
high noon and midnight, so to the world he saw and those he
imagined he added yet others which should act as their connecting
links. Between the divine and the human he placed the semi-divine,
between the human and the infernal the half-human. He mated God
with Man and both with Devil, and dowered them with a numerous
family, God-Man, Man-Devil, God-Devil, and so on, until the
possibilities of his earlier imagination were exhausted. Each has his
own world—and the stars cannot rival them in number; each world
has its cities and its nations, differing in all things save one—that all
alike feel, act, think, after the manner of mankind. So is it, again, with
the other universe of half-way worlds, filling the space between the
human and the bestial—centaur, satyr, were-wolf, or mermaid, all
alike reflect the human imagination that has evolved them—to
nondescript bodies they unite the reflected mind of man.
Conforming to the general rule, the witch is but one dweller in a half-
way world that is thickly populated and in itself forms one of an
intricate star-group. Externally at least, its orbit nearly coincides with
that of our human world, in that its inhabitants are for the most part
of human origins acquiring those attributes which raise them above
—or degrade them below—the commonalty subsequently to their
birth. This not invariably—nothing is invariable to the imagination.
Thus the fairies, although not human beings, may yet be witches—
demons also, unless many grave and reverend authorities lie. Under
certain conditions they may even become human beings, as
mermaids may—many a man has married a fairy wife—and it is an
open question whether they have altogether lost their hope of
Heaven, as witches invariably have. As witches, they must be
regarded as belonging to the White, or beneficent, type; for although,
as Mercutio has told us, they may sometimes play unkind pranks
upon the idle or undeserving, they have always a kindly eye for the
virtuous, and frequently devote themselves altogether to good works,
as in the case of Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, and others equally difficult to
catalogue. For the more we investigate the various orbits of the half-
way worlds, the more do we find them inextricably interwoven. The
Western Fairy or Oriental Djinn may partake of half-a-hundred
different natures—may pervade half the imaginative universe—and
as does the Fairy, so does the Witch. Hecate, a goddess, was yet no
less notorious a witch than was Mother Shipton, a human being of
no elevated rank. The were-wolf, though usually of human
parentage, might yet have been born a wolf and obtained the power
of taking human shape from some subsequent external cause. The
Beast in the fairy story, though at heart a youthful Prince of
considerable attractions, once transmogrified might have remained a
Beast for good and all but for his fortunate encounter with Beauty's
father. Who shall say exactly in which world to place, how to class
beyond possibility of confusion, Circe—witch, goddess, and woman,
and the men she turned to swine—or the fairies and mermaids who
have, usually for love, divested themselves of their extra-human
attributes and become more or less permanently women—or those
human children who, stolen by the fairies, have become fairies for
good and all—or how distinguish between all of these and the ladies
with romantic names and uncertain aspirates who deal out destinies
in modern Bond Street.
Even if we agree to confine the witch to the narrowest limits, to
regard her, that is to say, as primarily a human being and only
incidentally possessed of superhuman powers and attributes, there
still remain many difficulties in the way of exact classification. Her
powers are varied, and by no means always common to every
individual. Or, again, she has the power to turn herself corporeally
into a wolf or a cat—which brings her into line with the were-wolf, just
as the cat or wolf may under certain circumstances transform
themselves, permanently or otherwise, into a human witch. She may
acquire the mind of a wolf without its body; on the other hand, many
a beautiful princess has been transformed into a white doe by
witchcraft. So with her male colleagues—sorcerer, magician, wizard,
warlock, male-witch, diviner, and the rest of the great family. We may
reach firm ground by agreeing to recognise only such as are of
human origin, though by so doing we rule out many of the most
eminent—the great Merlin himself among them. But even so, it is
impossible to dogmatise as to where the one begins, the other ends.
There have been many male-witches—more particularly in Scotland
—as distinguished from wizards. Wizard and warlock again, if it be
safe to regard them as distinct species, though differing from
magician and sorcerer, are yet very difficult of disentanglement. The
position is complicated by the fact that, just as a man may be clerk,
singer, cricketer, forger, philanthropist, and stamp-collector at one
and the same time, so might one professor of the Black Art take half
a dozen shapes at the same time or spread over his career.
There is indeed but one pinnacle of solid rock jutting out from the
great quagmire of shifting uncertainty—witch, wizard, were-wolf, or
whatsoever their sub-division—one and all unite in one great
certainty: that of inevitable damnation. Whatever their form, however
divergent their powers, to that one conclusion they must come at
last. And thus, and only thus, we may know them—posthumously.
It is true that certain arbitrary lines may be drawn to localise the
witch proper, even though the rules be chiefly made up of
exceptions. Thus she is, for the most part, feminine. The Scots male-
witch, and those elsewhere occurrent in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, might as correctly be termed wizards or
warlocks, for any absolute proof to the contrary. The witch, again,
has seldom risen to such heights in the profession as have her male
competitors. The magician belongs, as we have seen, to a later
stage of human development than does the witch, but, once evolved,
he soon left her far behind; it is true that he was able to avail himself
of the store of knowledge by her so slowly and painfully acquired.
With its aid he soon raised himself to the highest rank in the
profession—approaching it from the scientific standpoint, and leaving
her to muddle along empirically and by rule of thumb. Nor was he
content until he had made himself master of the Devil—using Satan
and all his imps for his own private ends—while the less enterprising
witch never rose to be more than the Devil's servant, or at best his
humble partner in ill-doing.
The Magician, whatsoever his own private failings, has certainly
deserved well of posterity. Just as the quack and the Bond Street
sybil are representatives of the witch in the direct line, so, from the
alchemist and the sorcerer are descended the great scientists of our
own day—an impious brood indeed, who deny that their own father
was aught but an impostor and a charlatan. The proprietor of, let us
say, "Dr. Parabole's Pellets," is own brother—illegitimate though he
be—to the discoverer of the Röntgen ray. The researches of the old-
time sorcerer into the Forbidden, whatever their immediate profit, at
least pointed out the direction for more profitable researches. Merlin,
Cornelius Agrippa, or Albertus Magnus, had they been born in our
day, would certainly have achieved the Fellowship of the Royal
Society—and with good reason. It is to the search after the
philosopher's stone and the elixir vitæ that we owe the discovery of
radium. It was only by calling in the aid of the Devil that mankind
acquired the prescience of a God.
The witch proper, on the other hand, did not trouble herself with
research work. Having attained that dominion over her fellows dear
to the heart of woman, she was content to rest upon her laurels.
Certain incantations or charms, learned by rote, the understanding of
the effect and cure of certain poisons—these were sufficient stock-in-
trade to convince her neighbours, and perhaps herself. Doubtless Dr.
Parabole, however aware in the beginning of the worthlessness of
his own pills, comes after years of strenuous advertising to believe in
them. He may stop short of taking them himself—at least he will
prescribe them to his dearest friend in absolute good faith. So with
the witch, his grandmother. Many, no doubt, of the millions offered up
as sacrifice to the All-Merciful, were guiltless even in intention; many
more allowed themselves to be convinced of their own sinfulness by
the suspicions of their neighbours or the strenuous arguments of
their judge-persecutors; many were hysterical, epileptic, or insane.
But the larger proportion, it is scarcely too much to say, only lacked
the power while cherishing the intention—witches they were in
everything but witchcraft.
We thus may briefly state the difference between the witch and the
magician as that the one professed powers in which she might
herself believe or not believe, inherited or received by her, and by
her passed on to her successors without any attempt to augment
them. The magician, on the other hand, was actually a student of the
mysteries he professed, and thus, if we leave aside his professional
hocus-pocus devilry, cannot be considered as altogether an
impostor. With the alchemist and the astrologer, more often than not
combining the three characters in his one person, he stands at the
head of the profession of which the witch—male or female—brings
up the rear. Another distinction is drawn by sixteenth-century
authorities between witches and conjurers on the one side, and
sorcerers and enchanters on the other—in that while the two first-
mentioned have personal relations with the Devil, their colleagues
deal only in medicines and charms, without, of necessity, calling up
apparitions at all. It is to be noted in this connection that the sorcerer
often leads Devil and devilkin by the nose, in more senses than one
—devils having extremely delicate noses, and being thus easily
soothed and enticed by fumigations, a peculiarity of which every
competent sorcerer avails himself. Thus, Saint Dunstan, and those
other saints of whom it is recorded that they literally led the Devil by
the nose, using red-hot pincers for the purpose, were but following
the path pointed out for them by professors of the Art Magical.
Between the witch and the conjurer a wide gulf is fixed. The conjurer
coerces the Devil, against his infernal will, by prayers and the
invocation of God's Holy Name; the witch concludes with him a
business agreement, bartering her body, soul, and obedience for
certain more or less illusory promises. The conjurer is almost
invariably beneficent, the witch usually malignant, though the White
Witch exercises her powers only for good, if sometimes with a
certain mischievousness, while the Grey Witch does good or evil as
the fancy takes her, with a certain bias towards evil. The wizard,
again, though often confused with the male-witch, is in reality a
practitioner of great distinction, possessing supernatural powers of
his own attaining, and, like the magician, constraining the Devil
rather than serving him. He also is capable of useful public service,
so much so indeed that Melton, in his "Astrologastra," published in
1620, includes what may pass as a Post Office Directory of the
wizards of London. He enumerates six of importance, some by
name, as Dr. Forman or "Young Master Olive in Turnbull Street,"
others by vaguer designations, as "the cunning man of the Bankside"
or "the chirurgeon with the bag-pipe cheek." He includes one woman
in the list, probably a White Witch.
The Diviners, or peerers into the future, form yet another sub-section
of dabblers in the supernatural—and one which numbers very many
practitioners even in our own day. Naturally enough, seeing that the
desire to influence the future is the obvious corollary to that of
knowing it, the part of diviner was more often than not doubled with
that of witch or sorcerer. Divination is an art of the most complicated,
boasting almost as many branches as medicine itself, each with its
select band of practitioners. Different nations, again, favoured
different methods of divining—thus the Hebrews placed most
confidence in Urim and Thummim; the Greeks were famous for
axinomancy, the machinery for which consisted of an axe poised
upon a slate or otherwise handled. This method was as apt for
present as for future needs, being especially potent in the discovery
of criminals. Crime detection by divination has been—and remains—
greatly favoured in the East. The Hindus, in particular, place greater
reliance upon it than upon the more usual methods of our Occidental
police, and many stories are told of the successes achieved by their
practitioners. Nor is this surprising in cases where the diviner shows
such shrewd knowledge of human nature as in that, oft-quoted,
whereby all those under suspicion of a theft are ranged in a row and
presented with mouthfuls of grain, with the assurance that the guilty
man alone will be unable to swallow it—a phenomenon which nearly
always does occur if the thief be among those present—and not
infrequently when he is not! This and similar stories, though scarcely
falling under the heading of divination proper, are so far pertinent to
the subject that they suggest the explanation of many of its more
remarkable successes. Tell a nervous man that he is destined to
commit suicide upon a certain day, and, granted that he has any faith
in your prophetic powers, the odds are that he will prove the
correctness of your prophecy. We may compare with this the
powerful influence of "tapu" upon the South Sea Island mind. Many
natives have died—as has been vouched for by hundreds of credit-
worthy witnesses—for no more tangible reason than fear at having
incurred the curse of desecrating something placed under its
protection. It may be added that the Islanders, observing that white
men do not suffer the same fate, account for it by declaring that the
White Man's Gods, being of a different persuasion from their own,
protect their own votaries.
Divination proper takes almost innumerable forms. Without entering
too closely upon a wide subject, a few examples may be profitably
quoted. Among the best known are Belomancy, or divination by the
flight of arrows, a form much favoured by the Arabs; Bibliomancy (of
which the "Sortes Virgilianæ" is the most familiar example);
Oneiromancy (or divination by dreams, honoured by Archbishop
Laud and Lord Bacon among others); Rhabdomancy (by rods or
wands. The "dowser," or water-finder, whose exploits have aroused
so much attention of recent years, is obviously akin to the
Rhabdomancist). Crystallomancy, or crystal-gazing, was first
popularised in this country by the notorious Dr. Dee, and still finds
many votaries in Bond Street and elsewhere. Hydromancy, or
divination by water, is another variety much favoured by the Bond
Street sybil, a pool of ink sometimes taking the place of the water.
Cheiromancy, or Palmistry, most popular of any, may possess some
claim to respect in its least ambitious form as a means towards
character reading. Divination by playing-cards, another popular
method, is, needless to say, of later, mediæval origin. The Roman
augurs, who, as every schoolboy knows, deduced the future from the
flight of birds, provide yet another example of this universal pastime,
perhaps the least harmful sub-section of the Black Arts.
Among the most brilliant luminaries of the half-way worlds are those
twin-stars inhabited by the Alchemist and the Astrologer. The
pseudo-science of star-reading may be supposed to date from the
first nightfall—and may thus claim a pedigree even older, if only by a
few months or years, than that of Magic proper. Alchemy, despite its
Moorish name, has a scarcely less extended history. It owes its birth
—traditionally, at any rate—to the same Egyptian Man-God who first
introduced witchcraft and magic in their regularised forms to an
expectant world. Its principles having been by him engraved in Punic
characters upon an emerald, were discovered in his tomb by no less
a person than Alexander the Great. It should perhaps be added that
doubts have been cast upon this resurrection. However that may be,
it was much practised by the later Greeks in Constantinople from the
fifth century A.D. until the Moslem conquest of the city. From them
the Arabs adopted it, gave it the name by which it has ever since
been known, and became the most successful of its practitioners.
To attempt any close study of the great alchemists were foreign to
my present purpose, and would entail more space than is at my
disposal. At the same time, so close was their connection, in the
eyes of the vulgar, so intimate their actual relationship with
witchcraft, that it is impossible altogether to ignore them. What is
more, they lend to the witch a reflected respectability such as she
can by no means afford to forgo. They held, in fact, in their own day,
much the same position as do the great inventors and scientists of
to-day. Mr. Edison and Mr. Marconi, had they been born ten
centuries since, would certainly have taken exalted rank as
alchemists or magicians. As it is, in ten centuries a whole world of
magical romance will have been very likely woven about their
names, even if they have not been actually exalted to divinity or
inextricably confused with Lucifer and Prometheus. While some of
their predecessors may have actually claimed power over the
supernatural—either in self-deception or for self-aggrandisement—
the great majority undoubtedly had such claims thrust upon them,
either by their contemporaries or by posterity, and would have
themselves claimed nothing higher than to be considered students of
the unknown. The Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ may have
served indeed as the ideal goal of their researches, much as they do
under their modern form of the Secret of Life in our own time; but
their actual discoveries, accidental and incidental though they may
have been, were none the less valuable. After such a lapse of time it
is as difficult to draw the line between the alchemist-scientist and the
charlatan as it will be a century hence to distinguish the false from
the true among the "inventors" and "scientists" of to-day, so
absolutely do the mists of tradition obscure the face of history.
Leaving out of the question such purely legendary figures as Merlin,
we may class them under three headings, and briefly consider one
example under each. In the first may be placed the more or less
mythical figures of Gebir and Albertus Magnus, both of whom, so far
as it is now possible to judge, owe their ambiguous reputations
entirely to the superstitions of their posterity.
Such a personage as the great Arabian physician Gebir, otherwise
Abou Moussah Djafar, surnamed Al Sofi, or the Wise, living in the
eighth century, was certain to gain the reputation of possessing
supernatural power, even had he not busied himself in the discovery
of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir. Though he found neither,
he yet in seeking them made other discoveries little less valuable,
and it is scarcely too much to say, made their discovery possible in
later centuries. Thus, in default of the means of making gold, he
gave us such useful chemicals as nitric acid, nitrate of silver, and
oxide of copper. Incidentally he wrote several hundred treatises on
his two "subjects," an English translation of one, the "Summæ
Perfectionis," having been published in 1686 by Richard Russell,
himself an alchemist of respectable attainments.
Albertus Magnus, again, gave every excuse to the vulgar for
regarding him as infernally inspired. That is to say, he was a scholar
of great attainments in a day when scholars were chiefly remarkable
for their dense ignorance, and fully deserved some less ambiguous
sobriquet than that bestowed upon him by some writers of "Founder
of the Schoolmen." A Dominican, he held the chair of Theology at
Padua in 1222 while still a young man. Grown weary of a sedentary
life, he resigned his professorship and taught in many of the chief
European cities, and more particularly in Paris, where he lived for
three years in company with his illustrious pupil, Thomas Aquinas.
He was at one time appointed Bishop of Regensburg, but very soon
resigned, finding his episcopal duties interfere with his studies. Of
the twenty-five folios from his pen, one is devoted to alchemy, and
he was a magician of the first class—so, at least, succeeding
generations averred, though he himself very likely had no suspicions
thereof. Among other of his possessions was a brazen statue with
the gift of speech, a gift exercised with such assiduity as to exhaust
the patience even of the saintly Thomas Aquinas himself, so that he
was constrained to shatter it to pieces.
Roger Bacon, inventor and owner of an even more famous brazen
head, was no less illustrious a scholar, and as fully deserved his
admiring nickname "The Admirable Doctor," even though he were
not in actual fact the inventor of gunpowder and the telescope, as
asserted by his admirers. A native of Somerset, and born,
traditionally, the year before the signing of Magna Charta, he might
have ranked among the greatest Englishmen had not his reputation
as a magician given him the suggestion of being a myth altogether.
Something of a heretic he was, although in orders, and his writings
brought down upon him the suspicions of the General of the
Franciscan Order, to which he belonged. Pope Clement IV. extended
protection to him for a time, even to the extent of studying his works,
and more particularly his "Magnum Opus," but later the Franciscan
General condemned his writings, and he spent fourteen years in
prison, being released only two years before his death. But his
historical achievements were as nothing to his legendary
possession, in partnership with Friar Bungay, of the Talking Head.
Less garrulous than Albertus' statue, it emitted only three sentences:
"Time is. Time was. Time is past." Its last dictum, having
unfortunately for all audience a foolish servant, and being by him
held up to ridicule, it fell to the ground and was smashed to pieces,
thus depriving its inventor of his cherished scheme—by its help to
surround England with a brazen rampart no whit less efficacious
against the assaults of the King's enemies than are our present-day
ironclads.
Friar Bacon was not undeserving of the posthumous popularity he
achieved in song and story, for he it was who made magic and
alchemy really popular pursuits in this country. So numerous were
his imitators that rather more than a century after his death—in 1434
—the alchemical manufacture of gold and silver was declared a
felony. Twenty-one years later Henry VI., being, as he usually was, in
urgent need of ready money, saw reason to modify the
Governmental attitude, and granted a number of patents—to
ecclesiastics as well as laymen—for seeking after the Philosopher's
Stone, with the declared purpose of paying the Royal debts out of
the proceeds. In which design he was, it is to be feared,
disappointed.
Dr. Dee, the friend and gossip of Queen Elizabeth, may be taken as
marking the point at which the alchemist ceases to be an inhabitant
of any half-way world and becomes altogether human. A Londoner
by birth, he was born in 1527, became a B.A. of Cambridge
University and Rector of Upton-upon-Severn. His ecclesiastical
duties could not contain his energies, and so well versed did he
become in arts magical that, upon a waxen effigy of Queen Elizabeth
being found in Lincoln's Inn Fields—and a waxen effigy had only one
meaning in Elizabeth's time—he was employed to counteract the evil
spells contained in it, which he did with such conspicuous success
that the Royal Person suffered no ill-effects whatever. Unfortunately
for himself, Dr. Dee acquired in course of time a disciple, one
Edward Kelly. Kelly proved an apt daunter of demons, but he was
totally lacking in the innocent credulity so noticeable in the character
of his reverend mentor. At his prompting Dr. Dee undertook a
Continental tour, which resulted in disaster of the most overwhelming
and the total loss of Dr. Dee's good name. It is true that he may be
considered to have deserved his fate, for so absolute was his belief
in his disciple that when that _chevalier d'industrie_ received a
message from a demoniacal familiar that it was essential for the
success of their alchemical enterprises that they should exchange
wives—Mrs. Dee being as well-favoured as Mrs. Kelly was the
reverse—the doctor accepted the situation with implicit faith, and
agreed to all that the spirits desired.
Among other seekers after the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir
Vitæ who may be briefly referred to were Alain de l'Isle, otherwise
Alanus de Insulis, notable in that he actually discovered the elixir, if
his contemporaries may be believed, and who so far lived up to his
reputation as to defer his death, which occurred in 1298, until his
110th year; Raymond Lully, who, visiting England in or about 1312,
was provided with a laboratory within the precincts of Westminster
Abbey, where many years later a supply of gold-dust was found;
Nicholas Flamel, who died in 1419, and who gained most of his
occult knowledge from a volume written in Latin by the Patriarch
Abraham; and, to come to later years, William Lilly, a famous English
practitioner of the seventeenth century, and an adept in the use of
the divining rod, with which he sought for hidden treasures in
Westminster Abbey, possibly those left behind him by Raymond
Lully.
Perhaps no symptom of civilisation is more disquieting than the
increasing tendency to compress the half-way worlds—built up by
our forefathers with such lavish expenditure of imagination—into the
narrow limits of that in which we are doomed to spend our working
days—not too joyously. We have seen how the alchemist and the
magician from semi-divine beings, vested with power over gods and
men, have by degrees come to be confounded with the cheap-jack
of a country fair. So it has been with many another denizen of the
Unseeable. Consider, for example, the once formidable giant.
Originally gods, or but little inferior to them, so that Olympus must
exercise all its might to prevail against them; at one time a nation in
themselves, located somewhere in Cornwall, with kings of their own,
Corcoran, Blunderbore, and the rest, aloof from man except when,
for their pastime or appetite, they raided his preserves, vulnerable,
indeed, though only to a superhuman Jack; where are your giants
now? Goliath, though defeated by David, was yet not dishonoured, in
that he was warring not against a puny, sling-armed shepherd, but
against the whole might of the Jewish Jehovah. There were giants
on the earth in those days, the Scriptures tell us, and that in terms
giving us to understand that a giant was to be regarded with respect,
if not with admiration. Polyphemus, again, though outwitted by a
mortal, was none the less a figure almost divine, god-like in his
passions and his agony. The whole ancient world teems with
anecdotes, all proving the respectability of the old-time giant. And to-
day? I saw a giant myself some few years back. He was in a show—
and he was known as Goliath. A poor, lean, knock-kneed wavering
creature, half-idiotic, too, with a sickly, apologetic smile, as though
seeking to disarm the inevitable criticism his very existence must
provoke. Yet he was not to blame, poor, anachronistic wretch. Rather
it was the spirit of the age, that preferred to see him, set up for every
fool to jeer at, at sixpence a time, in a showman's booth, rather than
to watch him afar off, his terror magnified by distance, walking
across a lonely heath in the twilight, bearing a princess or a captive
knight along with him as his natural prey. The same spirit that has
made the giant shrink to an absurdity can see only the charlatan
beneath the flowing robes of the astrologer; and has argued the
witch even out of existence.
So it is with the mermaid. They showed one at the same booth
wherein the degenerate giant was mewed. A poor, shrunken,
grotesque creature enough, yet even so it might have passed for a
symbol, if no more, had they been content to leave it to our
imagination. Instead they must explain, even while they pocketed our
sixpences, that the whole thing was a dreary sham, concocted out of
the fore-quarters of a monkey and the tail end of a codfish, the whole
welded together by the ingenious fingers of some Japanese
trickmonger. Yet there are those who would uphold such cruel
candour, who would prefer to pay sixpence in order to see an ape-
codfish rather than to remain in blissful ignorance, rather than
imagine that every wave may have its lovely tenant, a sea-maiden of
more than earthly tenderness and beauty. Civilisation prates to us of
dugongs and of manatees, and other fish-beasts that, it says, rising
upon the crest of a wave, sufficiently resemble the human form to be
mistaken for it by credulous, susceptible mariners. But is not our faith
in that tender story of the little mermaid who, for love of a man,
sought the earth in human shape even though she knew that every
step must cause her agony, every foot-mark be outlined with her
blood—is not it better for us to believe that fairy-tale than to cram our
weary brains with all the cynical truths of all the dime-museums or
schools of science between London and San Francisco?
Even those who smile at Neptune and his daughters cannot refuse
the tribute of a shudder to the Man-Beast. For however it be with the
mermaid, the were-wolf is no figment of the imagination. Not the
fanciful alone are convinced that many human beings partake of the
nature of certain beasts. You may pass them by the hundred in every
city street—men and women showing in their faces their kinship with
the horse, the dog, cat, monkey, lion, sparrow. And not in their faces
alone—for their features do but reflect the minds within them—the
man with the sharp, rat-like face nine times out of ten has all the
selfish canning of the rat. We have no need to seek for further
explanation of the centaur myth—to argue that some horseless
nation, seeing horsemen for the first time, accepted the man and his
mount as one and indivisible; there are plenty of men who have as
much of the equine as of the human in their composition. So it is with
the wolf-man—the were-wolf. He exists, and to this day, despite all
your civilising influences. Not among savages alone—or chiefly. He
roams the streets of our great cities, seeking his prey. Perhaps he
lives in the next street to you—a prosperous, respected citizen, with
a shop in Cheapside, a wife and family, and the regard of all his
neighbours. The wolf in him has never been aroused—may never
be. Only, let Fate or chance so will it, and—well, who can tell us Jack
the Ripper's antecedents? And where in all the annals of lycanthropy
can you find a grimmer instance of the man-wolf than Jack the
Ripper?
With the were-wolf we return to closer contact with witchcraft proper.
It is true that the were-wolf was not always bewitched. Sometimes
the tendency was inborn—the man or woman was transformed into
the wolf at each recurrent full moon. In France—and more
particularly in the South, where lycanthropy has always had one of
its strongholds—the liability of certain individuals, especially if they
be born illegitimate, to this inconvenience is still firmly credited by the
popular mind. The were-wolf may be recognised for that matter, even
when in his human form, usually by the shape of his broad, short-
fingered hands and his hairy palm. It is even possible to effect a
permanent cure should the opportunity occur, and that by the simple
means of stabbing him three times in the forehead with a knife while
in his lupine shape. Again, in Scandinavia and elsewhere certain
men could transform themselves into wolves at will—a superstition
arising naturally enough out of traditions of the Berserkers and the
fits of wolfish madness into which they threw themselves. Yet again,
as Herodotus tells us, lycanthropy was sometimes a national
observance. The Neuri, if the Scythians were to be believed, were in
the habit of changing themselves into wolves once a year and
remaining in that shape for several days. But more frequently the
change was attributable to some evil spell cast by a witch. It is true
that the wolf was only one of many animals into whose shape she
might condemn a human soul to enter. Circe is, of course, a classical
example; Saint Augustine, in his "De Civitate Dei," relates how an
old lady of his acquaintance used to turn men into asses by means
of enchantments—an example which has been followed by younger
ladies ever since, by the way—while Apuleius' "Golden Ass" gives us
an autobiographical testimony to the efficacy of certain drugs
towards the same end.
Doubtless because the wolf was extirpated in this country at a
comparatively early date English were-wolf legends are few and far
between. They could indeed only become universally current in a
country mainly pastoral and infested by wolves, as, for instance, in
ancient Arcadia, where indeed the were-wolf came into his highest
estate, or in many parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to-
day. In certain Balkan districts the were-wolf shares the attributes of
the vampire, another allied superstition which is by no means without
its foundations of fact. Most people must have, indeed, been
acquainted at some time or other with the modern form of vampire,
individuals who unconsciously feed upon the vitality of those with
whom they come into contact. Many stories have been written, many
legends founded upon this phenomenon, to the truth of which many
people have testified from their own experience. At which point I
leave the subject to those with more scientific knowledge than
myself.
In case there should be any who desire to transform themselves into
a wolf without the trouble and expense of resorting to a witch, I will
close this chapter with a spell warranted to produce the desired
effect without any further outlay than the price of a small copper
knife. It is of Russian origin, and is quoted from Sacharow by Mr.
Baring Gould. "He who desires to become an oborot (oborot = 'one
transformed' = were-wolf) let him seek in the forest a hewn-down
tree; let him stab it with a small copper knife and walk round the tree,
repeating the following incantation:

On the sea, on the ocean, on the island, on Bujan,

On the empty pasture gleams the moon, on an ash-stock lying
In a greenwood, in a gloomy vale.
Towards the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf,
Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs;
But the wolf enters not the forest,
But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale.
Moon, moon, gold-horned moon
Check the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives,
Break the shepherds' cudgels,
Cast wild fear upon all cattle,
On men, on all creeping things,
That they may not catch the grey wolf,
That they may not rend his warm skin!
 My word is binding, more binding than sleep,
More binding than the promise of a hero!

"Then he springs thrice over the tree and runs into the forest,
transformed into a wolf."

CHAPTER V
THE WITCH'S ATTRIBUTES
In his very learned and exhaustive treatise, "De la Démonomanie
des Sorciers," the worthy Bodin, with enterprise worthy of a modern
serial-story writer, keeps his reader's curiosity whetted to its fullest by
darkly hinting his knowledge of awesome spells and charms
commonly employed by Satan's servants. Unlike the modern writer,
however, he refrains from detailing them at length in his last chapter,
fearing to impart knowledge which may easily be put to the worst
account. However valuable a testimony to his good faith and
discretion, this would certainly have brought down upon him the
strictures of modern critics, and might indeed have entailed serious
loss to the world had not other less conscientious writers more than
rectified the omission.
It were, of course, impossible to include within the limits of such a
volume as is this—or of a hundred like it—one tithe of the great store
of spells, charms, and miscellaneous means towards enchantment
gathered together in the long centuries since the birth of the first
witch. So also it is impossible to select any particular stage in her
long evolution as the most characteristic, as regards her manners
and customs, of all that we imply by the word "witch." On the other
hand, she has definitely crystallised in the minds of those of us who
have ever been children, in the shape of the "horrid old witch" of fairy
lore; and just as, in a preceding chapter, I have endeavoured to
reproduce one of her working days—as imaged in the popular mind
—so the witch of the Middle Ages may best be chosen when we
would reconstruct her more human aspect.
Of her actual appearance, divested of her infernal attributes, no
better description could be desired than that given by Reginald Scot
in "The Discoverie of Witchcraft":—"Witches be commonly old, lame,
bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen,
superstitious, and papists"—(it is perhaps unnecessary to point out
that Scot was of the Reformed Faith)—"or such as know no religion;
in whose drousie minds the devill hath goten a fine seat; so as, what
mischiefe, mischance, calamitie or slaughter is brought to passe,
they are easilie persuaded the same is doone by themselves,
imprinting in their minds an earnest and constant imagination hereof.
They are leane and deformed, showing melancholie in their faces to
the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad,
devilish."
Endowed with so unfortunate a personality, it is not surprising that,
as Scot goes on to inform us, the witch should have found it difficult
to make a living. It is indeed an interesting example of the law of
supply and demand that such woeful figures being needed for the
proper propagation of the witch-mania, the conditions of mediæval
life, by their harsh pressure upon the poor and needy among
women, should have provided them by the score in every village.
You may find the conventional witch-figure to-day in the lonely
hamlet or in the city workhouse, but, thanks to our better conditions
of life, she has become almost as rare as have accusations of
witchcraft against her.
The only means of subsistence open to her, Scot goes on, is to beg
from house to house. In time it comes about that people grow weary
of her importunities. Perhaps they show their impatience too openly.
"Then," says Scot, "she curses one or the other, from the master of
the house to the little pig that lieth in the stie." Someone in the wide
range between those two extremes will be certain to suffer some
kind of mischance before long—on much the same principle as that
which gives life to one of our most popular present-day superstitions,
the ill-luck attending a gathering of "thirteen at table." Any such
disaster is naturally attributed to the old beggar-woman—who is thus
at once elevated to the dangerous eminence of witch-hood. Nor did
the sufferer always wait for her curse. Edward Fairfax, for example,
the learned seventeenth century translator of Tasso, upon an
epidemic sickness attacking his children, sought out their symptoms
in a "book of medicine." Not finding any mention of "such agonies"
as those exhibited by his children, he determined that some unholy
agency must be at work. His thoughts turned, naturally enough, to
the gloomy forest of Knaresborough, within convenient distance of
his abode. Nothing could be more suspicious than the mere fact of
living in such a suggestive locality, yet Margaret White, widow of a
man executed for theft, her daughter, and Jennie Dibble, an old
widow coming of a family suspected of witchcraft for generations
past, were imprudent, or unfortunate, enough to live within its
borders. The natural result attended their rashness—and so earnest
was the worthy Fairfax that he set the whole proceedings down in a
book, adding a minute account of the symptoms and delusions of the
invalids.
As the King has his orb and sceptre, the astrologer his spheres and
quadrant, so the witch has her insignia of office. And it is a strong
indication of her descent from the first house-wife that most of them
are domestic or familiar objects. The imp or "familiar" who attends
her may have the form of a bird or dog, but is far more often the
most domestic animal of all, the cat. Frequently it is malformed or
monstrous, in common with Satan himself and all the beings who
owe him allegiance. It may have any number of legs, several tails, or
none at all; its mewing is diabolic; it may be far above the usual
stature of its kind. Usually it is black, but is equally eligible if white or
yellow. As is a common incident of all religions, the symbol is
sometimes confused with the office, the witch and her cat
exchanging identities. Thus witches have confessed under torture to
have formerly been cats, and to owe their human shape to Satan's
interference with natural laws. A piebald cat is said to become a
witch if it live for nine years, and the witch, when upon a nefarious
errand, frequently assumes a feline shape.
A characteristic of the witch, in common with demons and imps in
general, is that she does everything contrary to the tastes and