🔮 Witchcraft & the Occult 🔮

An interview with Professor Judith Noble – Professor of Film and the Occult

One of the benefits of relocating to the far south west of England has been the people I’ve met. Between the wilds of Dartmoor and spectacular beaches where the land meets the Atlantic ocean, there are an abundance of myths and legends still celebrated in Devon and Cornwall after being forgotten by the rest of England. There’s something in the air that attracts troublemakers.

Recently I interviewed Judith Noble, a practising witch, former Vice President of the Pagan Federation and founder of the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. I’ve known Judith for years and am fascinated by the way she combined her academic career with a personal life and creative practice that seemed incompatible with respectability.

Ironically, I think we’re probably more tolerant in the UK of witchcraft and the occult in 2023 than we are of free speech and divergence of thought, but that probably only started to be the case in the past decade. (It isn’t UK-centric, but I’m really looking forward to reading this new book: ‘The Cancelling of the American Mind’).

The number of people in the UK who responded to the census as having “No religion” rose from from 25.2% (14.1 million) in 2011 to to 37.2% (22.2 million) in 2021. Organised religion is on the decline, but my experience has been that we’re replacing it with self-enforced puritanism that’s even more polarised and intolerant.

I digress. In 2023 we’re tolerant enough of witchcraft that one UK university was applauded this year for launching an MA in Magic and Occult Science, but I’m sure that there were considerably higher barriers obstructing an artist who was practising the occult at the end of the twentieth century.

Professor Judith Noble - Photo courtesy of Arts University Plymouth

Judith Noble is an artist, filmmaker and practising witch. Earlier this year she was appointed as Professor of Film and the Occult (a world first, to the best of my knowledge) by Arts University Plymouth.

Judith is the co-founder and joint co-ordinator of the Black Mirror International Research Network, which publishes on contemporary and modernist art and the occult and esoteric. Her research centres on avant-garde film in the UK and US (1940-80), with specific emphasis on the work of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and women filmmakers, on surrealism and film, and on film, the esoteric and the occult. Judith worked for over twenty years in the film industry where, as Head of Production at Sgrin Cymru Wales, she developed and financed feature film scripts and executive-produced films by directors including Peter Greenaway and Amma Asante.

Alongside her careers in academia and the film industry, Judith has run pagan conferences and taught workshops on various aspects of witchcraft, magic and paganism. She founded the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, and is a former Vice President of the Pagan Federation.

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Your career has covered so many areas that I hardly know where to start. Can you begin by telling me about yourself as an artist and why you do the things you do?

I've been making art for a bit less than 50 years and I've been preoccupied with the same ideas and themes for most of that time, which are the world of magic and spirits, often in relation to the magic of the moon and tides. I was definitely influenced by the part of the world where I grew up, a remote area of Anglesey in Wales. I started creating art in earnest in my late teens as an artist filmmaker and have carried on since, in one way or another.

I’m still making work that reflects those ideas and since 2020 I’ve been part of a collaborative group of five artists called the Inner Space Exploration Unit (ISEU), which I'm really excited by. The ISEU came about during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the only way that we could meet was online and it's just grown from there.

We’re essentially a group of like-minded people, all of whom are artists and magicians. When we started we decided to use the opportunity to explore each other's inner landscapes, because during the lockdowns those were the only places we could travel. Now we create collaborative works online and more performative pieces at conferences and events, spanning a wide range of specialisms and practices.

What would you say motivates you as an artist?

One of my central concerns lies in trying to find ways that we can move out of the Anthropocene epoch, in which we’re doing so much damage to the world, and move on into the next one. I want to move beyond a purely anthropocentric way of seeing the world and try to include the rest of the beings that we share the world with. Recently, the way that has looked in practice has involved letting the sea co-create some of the work that I make.

Which reminds me that I found out this year that Judith Noble is not your only professional name. Can you tell me about the other name that you use?

I have two different writing lives. I have a conventional academic writing life as Judith Noble, which is the name I use when I write about film and the occult. I specialise in avantgarde and underground film. I’ve been writing a lot recently about Kenneth Anger, whose work fascinates me. Judith Noble is the name I use for academic books and conferences.

I also have a separate writing life under the pen name Levannah Morgan, which I’ve used for writing about witchcraft since around 1990. That happened because I was becoming quite involved in helping to organise the pagan movement in Britain, as part of the Pagan Federation. Within a couple of weeks of that work becoming visible publicly, some Christian fundamentalists looked me up in the phone book and I started receiving death threats.

A number of my colleagues told me that for their more esoteric work, they used pseudonyms, and they advised me to do the same. I’ve used the name Levannah Morgan ever since. I hope that times have changed and it’s no longer a risk to admit that Levannah is my pen name.

Tell me more about the work of Levannah Morgan.

Levannah has been quite prolific and published two books recently. There was ‘A Witch’s Mirror: The Craft of Magic’, which features photography by the really wonderful Nicky Wyrd and was published by The Universe Machine in 2021. Last year was ‘A Sea Witch’s Companion: Practical Magic of Moon and Tides’, which has a frontispiece by artist Ethan Pennell and was published by Robert Hale, an imprint of The Crowood Press.

That covers my writing life, which runs alongside my life as an artist. I’m currently working on another book for Robert Hale, with Ethan Pennell again, which will be delivered to the publisher early in 2024. There’s also another small volume by Levannah Morgan in the pipeline, a revised and expanded version of something that I self-published 20 years ago.

It sounds like there was a time that you had a need for separate identities, but now that time has passed?

I’m happy now for the names Judith Noble and Levannah Morgan to be connected publicly. It’s easy on the internet now to work out that we’re the same person.

I was once soundly pestered by a researcher from a TV company who wanted to do a witch documentary, of the kind I wouldn't want to be associated with, so I pretended to be my own assistant. The researcher insisted that she really had to speak to Levannah because they had been at university together! Although it gives rise to these odd and sometimes funny situations, writing under a pen name allows me to step out of one voice and into another. It’s a very creative way to work.

What attracts you to magic and the occult?

I’ve always been interested in magic. There was a degree of animism around in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I came from a part of the world where everyday magic was very much practised. I must be one of the last generation of people who didn’t have TV as a child. It wasn’t like I had strict parents who forbade it, but where we lived in Wales the TV reception didn’t really reach over the mountains, so we didn’t have a television and I didn’t miss it.

Growing up, you’d say hello to trees and rocks, because of the beings that lived in them, and there were places that you’d avoid. Adults did it, as much as children. All sorts of small, magical things happened and so magic is something that’s always been with me and never left. I managed to evade that process as a teenager where you’re socialised out of it. Now, I couldn’t separate magic from the art that I do and I wouldn’t want to.

Can you explain a little more about your beliefs? I feel like I’m constantly trying to understand better what drives people to believe the things that they do.

I find the word belief tricky, because it has connotations of a Judeo-Christian religious framework that expects you to believe in God and say so as an article of faith. Alternatively, the word belief has connotations of the dialogue between science and everything else, where you say you believe in things and people doubt you when you can’t scientifically prove their existence.

I’m not keen on the word ‘belief’, because I think things are more demonstrable than that. What happens to you, happens, whatever words you use to describe it.

That’s fair enough. Let’s circle back to your work as an artist then. Can you describe to me how you got started creating art in a way that was visible outside of your internal world?

During the glorious punk years, of which I was very much a part, I made the decision to go to art school. Between 1975 and 1978 I did a fine art degree. I have to explain that at that time, art education was incredibly sexist. It was quite normal to be told as a woman artist that your work was innately inferior to men’s.

People would regularly question what women were doing at art school when we couldn’t become serious artists, and then remind us that we weren't going to become serious artists because we were women. Those kinds of idiotic circular arguments were standard.

How did you respond to a world where it was normal to be told that you were inferior?

I became part of the feminist resistance, which involved occupying buildings and participating in quite extreme forms of protest. I was also very interested in the Goddess spirituality movement that was starting to take off in the mid 1970s, and I found meaningful connections within that.

Before I knew it, I was making work in a way that was radical for the time, technically and in terms of the medium that I pursued. I say radical because the other thing you found at the time was that if you weren't making paintings or sculpture, the traditional arts establishment types looked down on you.

What sort of art were you creating?

I needed a medium that worked alongside the passage of time, because I was making work about lunar, tidal and menstrual cycles. Photography and filmmaking was the obvious way for me to respond.

Straight after my degree I went to Reading to complete a Master of Fine Art, which is what you had to do if you wanted to become a serious artist in the UK (at that time there were very few postgraduate places available). By the time I’d finished my MFA I was exhibiting work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and other big venues, then I started to exhibit internationally. I carried on with the work and it all felt like it happened really quickly, as I continued combining art and magic and we moved into the early 1980s, when everything felt very political.

I worked intensively for a time with two writers called Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, who wrote a marvellous book called ‘The Wise Wound’, which is about the power of menstruating women and the power of the blood. I made a piece of work called ‘Water Into Wine’ in 1980, which was shown at the ICA, and followed that with a number of other films on similar themes. That was really my start as a practising artist.

That helps me to understand your beginnings as an artist, but I’m equally interested to hear how you became involved in witchcraft.

All that time, I'd practised magic and witchcraft of the kind that I'd learned as a child, sometimes on my own and sometimes with other women. I didn't become involved in what you might call organised witchcraft until later.

I've been involved in coven witchcraft since 1990 and continue to work closely with a small group of people that I share a magical practice with. I don’t want to talk about that in too much detail, because you make promises not to reveal anybody’s secrets. In broad terms you’d probably characterise it as worshipping the Gods by calling on them to be present in the people who invoke them. That's very intense, the sort of work you only do in a small group with people who you really trust. We practise a mixture of that and various forms of ritual and related magic.

How did you first get involved in that sort of magical practice?

Practising magic was something I’d been doing by myself in an unstructured way for a long time. It must have been around 1980 that I first started practising with other people. We were so engaged politically, back then, but in a different way than the politics of the 2020s. Spirituality was closer to our lives; you couldn’t separate the Goddess witchcraft that was happening in the women’s peace camps at Greenham Common from the anti-nuclear movement or the other issues people were mobilising around. There was a spirituality gestating that grew and evolved, a feeling in the air that I think many people looking back on that time would recognise.

I remember reading ‘The White Goddess’ by Robert Graves when I was 12 years old because it was listed in the footnotes of a wonderful Alan Garner book that I borrowed from the school library. Graves kept referring to paganism as the old religion, which led me to assume that it had died out. If paganism was something that wasn’t around anymore, then that made me some kind of weird throwback, so I decided I’d just have to do it by myself.

I never went out and looked for other people practising paganism and then from my teenage years onwards I became too busy engaging with women's liberation. The everyday sexism that you encountered in that era was so extreme that women's liberation seemed to be the most pressing problem.

Later, at the end of my twenties, I read various books on coven witchcraft. One that was really influential at the time was Vivianne Crowley's book, ‘Wicca’. So I did what everyone did in the pre-internet age. I wrote to her and was put in touch with a whole world of wonderful people that seemed to open up in front of me. I'm very, very glad it did. That was a formative period for me, of who I am and why I am this way.

Do you feel like the advent of the internet has changed the world? You’ve described opening a door and finding something that you didn’t know was there before. The internet removes some of the obstacles to opening those doors, but I worry that by making things easier we devalue those experiences.

The internet changes things hugely, but it doesn't solve your problems. The huge morass of information that you find on the internet today is unmediated. I look at it and don't know how people ever find anything. And how do you assess what you find? Before the advent of the internet, I could assess what I found. As a reasonably intelligent person, I could sift the people who were dangerous.

Spirituality attracts people who want to exploit other people, usually sexually. Person to person, one-on-one, you could suss out who the dangerous ones were. You could also identify the people whose magic had no substance behind it, who weren’t really doing anything. One of the issues with the internet is I don't know how you do that when it's online. You get words and images, but you don't get the full experience of being in a person’s presence.

I try to explain this to my children. I want them to understand that speaking to people online is a synthetic version of human contact that doesn’t fulfil you in the same way that spending time in a room with somebody does. Something is lost when people are reduced to words and pictures, you miss important cues.

That’s right, because it's also about the other kinds of information that you get, isn't it? I don't want this to sound elitist, because everyone's got the right to believe and practise what they want, but I could call anything witchcraft online and put it out there to attract followers. We could have a conversation where I offer to give all my secrets away for a paying audience.

Whereas before the Internet and the availability of such cheap physical publishing, there were basic safeguards in place. In the past, if someone had written a book and managed to publish it you could be more confident that there was real knowledge and practice behind it. Now, I can write anything and I can publish it very cheaply and there's no one to stop me, or to tell the world that what I’ve written is rubbish or worse, harmful.

The ease of publishing information online has created a world that is bewildering. I know fantastic people who work online and negotiate these systems brilliantly, but I'm not sure how the average person would find out about them. It’s like you said about your kids, how do they sift through the good information from the bad? I don’t have an answer for that.

You’re right that people can release anything online now, true or false. My daughter watches cooking tutorials online that have been edited to fit in 15 seconds and she’ll follow their instructions without understanding that these videos were edited for clicks, not accuracy. It used to be that if the BBC broadcast a recipe then it had gone through some sort of process to verify that it worked, but there’s no barrier to publishing on YouTube at all.

When you apply that principle to magic, the internet tramples over the idea of safeguarding as well. I wasn’t there at its inception, but I know that when the Pagan Federation was set up in the early 1970s, it was created in part to provide an ethical framework for people who wanted to get involved in witchcraft. If you contacted them, they would only recommend people who weren't going to exploit you. There’s no avoiding that witchcraft has sexuality at its heart; it's one of the great forces that we use in making magic. There will always be people who want to use witchcraft and paganism as means to exploit others sexually, which is terrible, but that’s the truth.

The Pagan Federation grew into an organisation that would only put you in touch with people who would behave ethically towards you. For example, although the age of consent in the UK is 16, for many years the Federation wouldn't deal with anybody under 21, because nobody wanted to inadvertently put young people in vulnerable positions.

Sadly that function has disappeared because there's no point in gatekeeping in an age where it's so effortless for people to contact each other on the internet. Anybody can groom anybody, in secret. Personal introductions were needed in the past and they acted as a safeguard, but now I don’t know how those introductions are mediated.

Sorry, I’ve taken you on a tangent. Can you tell me more about your work with the Pagan Federation?

From around 1991 until about 2017 I was involved in one way or another with the Pagan Federation. I was Vice President for a time at the beginning of the century, when Prudence Jones was President. We worked together to try to counter discrimination against pagans.

In the late years of the last century, people would lose their jobs because they were pagan. In child custody cases, somebody's paganism would be used as a reason to give their children to the other parent. We argued for the rights of people with different spiritualities to be able to express them without being discriminated against.

In Scotland, you can get legally married as a pagan, partly because devolution has worked out really well for Scotland and partly because they operated a really good campaigning organisation there. I’m no longer affiliated with the Pagan Federation in England but I'm proud to be a member of the Pagan Federation in Scotland, even though I don't live there. I have some great friends and colleagues in Scotland.

I've been part of a team running a conference called Pagan Phoenix SW in Cornwall for over 21 years. It moved online for the first time last year. The annual conference is for anyone interested in a broad definition of magic, witchcraft, and paganism. It has a hugely diverse range of speakers, from druids to academics to musicians. Practitioners of all kinds. In terms of my witchcraft and pagan activity, I like it more than anything because it's such a meeting place for all kinds of people, including some really wonderful eccentrics.

What’s one of the most memorable things that happened to you because of paganism?

The peace movement of the 1980s had huge pagan manifestations. I remember a fantastic joint ritual with Tibetan Buddhists in South Wales at midnight one Halloween, probably around 1985 or 1986. It involved a combination of witchcraft and a Buddhist Lama playing a human thigh bone trumpet to assist in the process of magically banishing American cruise missiles from Britain. Everything is connected.

Is it also true that you had something to do with the memorial for the last people in England to be killed for witchcraft?

In the mid-1990s, I led a guerrilla publicity campaign to have a memorial erected in Exeter for the last four people who were legally executed for witchcraft in England. The memorial has been there since 1995, on the wall of Rougemont Gardens by Exeter Castle. Three of the last people to be tried and sentenced to death for witchcraft in England came from Bideford, Devon. There's a really interesting set of circumstances around how that happened. They were three old ladies who were scapegoated in the most terrible way.

They deserve to be remembered, so we started our campaign by leaving mystery bunches of flowers with messages around Exeter. The place at Heavitree in Exeter where they used to hang people is now marked by a bus shelter called Gallows Corner. We left a large bouquet there then tipped off the media anonymously. This was pre-internet, and the local press and TV picked it up.

The story ran for several weeks because no one could find out who we were. We just kept doing a little bit more, guerrilla art actions, to keep the story in the public eye. Then we went to the city council and said, “How about a proper memorial for these people?” When they realised we were offering to raise the money to pay for the memorial, the council was happy for it to happen.

I also heard a rumour that you were a prison chaplain for a while. Is that true?

I was a pagan prison chaplain for 17 years, trying to provide some kind of spiritual support for pagans in prison across the West Country, mostly in Devon, England, but also in other prisons.

That came about in a really bizarre way. It came from the Pagan Federation and Vivianne Crowley, who I mentioned earlier. They contacted the person who led the coven I was part of at the time. In the early 1990s, the Home Office in the UK had decided that they were going to lock up a lot of road protesters. This was the era of the Newbury bypass and people living in trees to stop them from being cut down, and famously, a wonderful campaigner called Swampy, on the A30 in East Devon, very near where I live now, actually.

The Home Office had also worked out that if they locked up road protesters, the people they arrested were likely to be pagan. In the UK, if you're a prisoner, you have the right to be visited by a “minister” of your choice. So, the Government thought that they’d have to provide chaplaincy services for pagans. They put out a call for volunteers, and so I volunteered. I thought it was worth doing. Ironically, in 17 years as a chaplain, I never visited a road protester. I visited plenty of other people in prison for all sorts of reasons.

You make it sound so easy!

It wasn’t. The process of getting there was horrendous. Vivianne Crowley, Chris Crowley, her partner, a guy named Tony Meadows and I were the four volunteers, and we had to go to a meeting at Stafford Prison in the Midlands, where the prison chaplaincy was based. When we got there, there was this aggressive inquisition of evangelical Christians who didn’t want us there. They literally told us we were the work of the devil. We said, "You can't say that because we don't believe in the devil. You've got this wrong." But eventually, it happened anyway, and so there you go. I was a prison chaplain for a long time.

You do sometimes meet truly terrible person in prison, but more often, you just meet people who've really gotten lost. They're third, fourth, fifth generation victims of violence and abuse. They've never had a chance or any education. Yet, somehow in prison, they manage to read a book that interests them and sets them on a different path. I'm glad I did it and was there to support them.

You were also involved with another organisation, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, weren’t you?

Yes, again in the 1990s, which seems like a busy decade for me. I co-founded the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft with a woman from Exeter named Emma. I was working in arts funding at the time. Graham King took over ownership of the Museum from Cecil Williamson, who I can talk about later. I thought, why doesn't this museum have a friends’ organisation like all the other museums I deal with?

Through the Museum I met a wonderful person called Julian Vayne. I don't know how to describe Julian other than as a chaos magician and a witch and generally a wonderful person. He now runs the Blog of Baphomet. Julian and I worked together to get the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft registered as a charity, which was good fun. The Charity Commission is a very traditionally Christian organisation, but we presented to them as just another set of friends of another museum; a museum that happened to be about witchcraft…

The Friends sprang into being and almost immediately we had about 250 members. Julian and I sustained the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft together for ages. I stepped back from the Friends in 2018 after a long time and handed it over to other people.

You must have met some very interesting people through the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic?

I did. By the time I stood down, Graham King had left and Simon Costin, the current Director of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, was running it. But before that, I'd known Cecil Williamson, the original founder of the Museum for the last decade of his life. He got in touch with me through the Pagan Federation, although Cecil had nothing to do with paganism in any way, shape, or form. However, he got in touch with me initially saying that he was thinking about selling the museum and would I go and have a chat with him about how he might publicise the fact that he was going to do it.

I rapidly learned with Cecil, and anyone who knew him will tell you this, that he was the most wonderful magician. Probably the most remarkable I've ever met. He would get you into his life by some means or other because he wanted to know you. He’d find a pretext for getting to know you. Cecil was a really wonderful person and he taught me an awful lot about traditional witchcraft. He led the most fascinating life, which I'm sure you've probably heard about, including spying for Britain before World War Two by infiltrating the Nazi occult movements in Germany. Cecil was one of the team of people responsible for persuading Rudolf Hess to defect to Britain. He had this glorious wartime career and it was so fantastic that a lot of people assumed he had made it up.

After Cecil died, Graham King and I went to his house to help clear up his things. We saw the written evidence of his wartime activities, details of his pension from MI5 and all sorts of other fascinating stuff. Cecil was an amazing character. I don't think they make them like that anymore. He used to write big, long handwritten letters, telling you how to do things and how to solve magical problems. I still have a cache of those that I really treasure.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this conversation but you’ve surprised me at every turn. Is there anything obvious that I should have asked you about but haven’t, anything fascinating that I’ve missed?

Well I don't know why, but I wasn’t expecting to speak to you about coven witchcraft so I’m not sure that I’ve said everything I would want to say. Next time we speak, I’ll be more prepared. All the rituals of coven witchcraft are available on the Internet, they’re not secret, but there’s a deeper meaning that revolves around why you do things and how they make you feel. I'd be happy to talk about this again because I think that element of witchcraft is often misunderstood.

I think there's a feeling that witchcraft is all teenage girls in their bedrooms wearing pentagrams and purple velvet dresses. It's not that at all. I’d be happy to speak more about it because secrecy is overrated.

To paraphrase a great quote from Aleister Crowley: he said that had no respect for people who swore you to secrecy then taught you only the Hebrew alphabet. If you want to find out anything operational about magic, you can pick up that information anywhere but that doesn’t mean you’ll know how to practise it.

On Thursday 30 November Judith will give a free professorial lecture at Arts University Plymouth and Plymouth Arts Cinema: 'An Occult Avantgarde: Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger – magic, sexuality, gender and transcendence'. The talk will be live streamed if you can’t make it to Plymouth.

If this is your first time reading IF YOU GO AWAY, I’m P M Buchan, a transgressive writer who has written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and Scream: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement.

I’ve spent the last two years working on a novel, the latest draft of which is out for feedback.

In a former life I wrote comic-books. If you’re living in financial precarity, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m including a time-limited link to download the zero issue of HERETICS, a folk-horror comic that fell apart before it reached stores. This should give you an indication of the stories I like to write.

For Halloween I drove to Hell in a Cellar, billed as the UK’s scariest escape room, then onto Bristol’s FEAR Scream Park, which was even better than last year. I also visited Screamfest in Burton, which was transcendentally brilliant.

FEAR Scream Park 2023

My favourite maze was Love Hurts, themed around speed-dating in a rock pub, where you’re ushered into the dirty pub toilets, split into cubicles and encouraged to escape via the sewers.

Thanks for reading IF YOU GO AWAY. Please share this with a friend or get in touch if you want to discuss anything that I’ve written about.

Best wishes,

P M Buchan