Sources for Witchcraft: Miss Marple as an Unexpected Source

I am re-reading Agatha Christie's The Thirteen Problems. I last read this book in 1995. I am not in the habit of keeping records of what I read – although I do note passages or quotes I want to be able to come back to – and the reason I remember this twentieth anniversary so precisely is of course that I was in a rather difficult time of my life. 

The precise circumstances were that I was a Benedictine novice. I was the last remaining of three novices in my noviciate – it was very apparent to me that not only was the community incredibly dysfunctional, despite there being some men there, now dead, who were the closest I have ever come to meeting real Christian saints, but it was also dominated by someone who in retrospect I can see as being very personality disordered. If at this point you have had a strong emotional reaction to those rather emotive words, I would just say to you that personality disorders are actually very common. Many executives of big corporations have symptoms of personality disorder, and in fact it is their disordered personalities which make them able to get to the top of organisations, which subsequently was exactly the case with the person I am talking about. The problem with these people, of course, is that because they identify the issue with their own safety, and also do not believe that other people's emotions are real, because they don't have any themselves, they can do a great deal of damage. I am not going to go into details – that is not the purpose of the post – but suffice to say that I have experienced the psychological abuse of which Catholic clergy are capable, at first hand. When this man's dramatic downfall comes, I will happily post here about how the authorities of his order know full well what he's about. My only sorrow is that that there is no point going to the police about him – the things I know for a fact about him can all be demolished by his facile tongue as my imagination or by means of attributing his own 'interests' to me. Needless to say I have not failed to resort to magical means to mimimise his damage to others and isolate him into his own little world: since he is personality disordered he will ultimately always self-sabotage until he accepts he is his problem, and so magically it is easiest to let him screw himself up.

In tandem with experiencing this abuse I have experienced how ones loved ones do not believe the fact that one is being abused. Over and again in the literature on child abuse (obviously I was an adult at the time), the tale is told of the target of abuse trying to tell someone and not being believed. Certainly in my situation, where I was capable of resisting the psychological intimidation and abuse to which I was suspect, and he would dearly have loved to have sex with me but could see that trying it on would give me the material to finish him, the most useful thing that I could have had would have simply to be believed by my mother. She did not. The only effect of this is to add to the abuse the person is suffering.

Into this situation came Miss Marple. I read this book in the evenings in bed. I found a woman of completely independent thought, who had the clarity of vision to stick by her own guns and this saw to the heart of the problem, and thirteen times, had the correct idea of what was happening. This is surely close to the heart of the witch figure, as somebody who stands apart, gets information in all sorts of ways, mostly unrecognised by everyone else, and is prepared to stick to their conclusion until it is proved right, which it will be.

One of my companions in the novitiate commented to me one day that he couldn't understand why I had seen through this person before he had. I told him at the time that I felt the monk of whom I speak had carefully put a front on what he was about, which my fellow-novice would see as being legitimate. For example, he decided he would try to give me a hard time, but told my fellow novice that the motivation for this was to test my vocation. He believed this at the time, although I told him it was a complete lie – it is not for nothing that nowadays I can recognise a good old-fashioned bully from a mile off – and it was not until the monk in question managed to get my fellow-novice alone in a car, put his hand on his genitals and said, 'What about it?', that he began to suspect he wasn't that interested in living his monastic commitment.

I think the reason I found Miss Marple's clarity of vision and refusal to be taken in by the way other people thought about things, was that, even though my Myers-Briggs personality test came out INFP at the time, I was actually already feeling my way towards the fact of being an INFJ. In fact the sentence I write above about Miss Marple's character being close to the archetypal witch figure, could also go for the INFJ personality. I had to mature into it, clearly, but definitely had the many traits already. This fact also indicates the basic cracks in my relationship with my mother, which inevitably led to it blowing apart when it was stressed by both of us getting older, with all the health problems that that involved. There are some of those lists on the internet along the lines of 'things never to say to an INFJ'. In fact, reading those lists, all of them are things that my mother routinely said to me over and over again: a friend asked me whether she winds me up on purpose. I can only answer that she does a fair imitation of it, not least because if you keep on saying things to someone that you know drives them up the wall, well, what can I say. The key one here, of course, is not being believed. This was often dressed up as 'you do exaggerate,' 'you make it up as you go along,' and so on, but the key thought being expressed here was always that the younger Hound was a liar. Touchy, and over-serious, as well. All of them guaranteed to have an INFJ foaming at the mouth; in fact I'm surprised it took me as long as 38 years to do an INFJ door slam on her.

I can see in the incidents of which I write here, and the inspiration I took from Miss Marple, the younger me feeling my way towards being the mature me. Miss Marple's example actually helped me, not only in a traumatic time of life when disbelieved and thus isolated by my own mother, but also towards becoming truly me, and arriving as a witch.