"A Discovery of Witches": A Review Essay.

As of June, 2019 there is no response to my communications from any U.S. lawyers, judges, police or political officials as media sources also continue to be denied the opportunity to answer my questions (or those of others) concerning these matters, or to explain why "free and independent" journalists cannot do so.

Nothing has been returned to me nor has there been any denial of allegations made by me and also by others as to the criminal actions of New Jersey lawyers and officials affiliated with the Office of Attorney Ethics (OAE). 

I have not been asked to refrain from sending items to the U.S. Supreme Court or U.S. Justice Department. 

There is only silence and a struggle behind the scenes, evidently, to determine which political faction has greater "influence" with law enforcement or judges to say nothing of politicians as well as deciding, perhaps, which governmental entities are most corrupt or amenable to persuasion of one kind or another.

Newspapers from New Jersey have disappeared from the Port Authority building. 

I have been told before witnesses that The Record is no longer being published. 

I have reason to believe otherwise. 

I will try to find this newspaper at other locations in New York and New Jersey as well as searching online sources.  

My next essay focusing on disgusting recent revelations of corruption and more filth in New Jersey; deaths due to negligence at long-term care facilities and child molesting networks; criminal fraud among lawyers and judges; tainted politics and even greater environmental contamination leading to more diagnosed cancer cases will be sent to: Justice Steven Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court; William P. Barr, Esq., U.S. Attorney General; the Cuban Embassy in the U.S.; and The Chicago Tribune newspaper.

I will do my best to continue to write as further attacks on this text are always anticipated and as more crimes targeting NYPL computers may prevent me from writing on any given day. 

I continue to experience obstructions and attempts to prevent me from writing even at public computers. 

I can never be certain of returning to this site in order to complete this essay but I will struggle to do so in order to clarify the difference between "daemons" and "demons."    

"A Discovery of Witches": September, 2018 UK; April, 2019 US: Teresa Palmer (Diana Bishop); Mathew Goode (Mathew Clairmont); Alex Kingston (Sarah Bishop); Owen Teale (Peter Knox); Valerie Pettiford (Emily Mather); Louise Brealy (Gillian Chamberlain); Edward Bluemel (Marcus Whitman); Alysha Hart (Miriam Sheperd); Mazin Buska (Satu); Trevor Eve (Geber, outstanding performance); Elarica Gallagher (Juliette); Greg McHugh (Hamish); Tanya Moodie (Agatha); script/adaptation: Kate Brooke. 

Primary Sources:

Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (New York & London: Penguin, 2011).

Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night (New York & London: Penguin, 2012).

Deborah Harkness, The Book of Life (New York & London: Penguin, 2014). 

Alternative Reviews:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/a_discovery_of_witches.

Jenny Turner, "'A Discovery of Witches' by Deborah Harkness," The Guardian, February 11, 2011, posted online at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/discovery-of-witches-deborah-harkness-review.

Elizabeth Hand, "Books: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness," Washington Post, March 3, 2011, posted online at http://www.thewashingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03102/ak2011030206303.html.

A list of one hundred sources reflective of my discussion illustrating only some of the references in the novels will be attached to this essay. 

"Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind."

As I found myself fuming at the disappointing finale to my favorite TV series of many years, "Game of Thrones," (GOT), I made the happy discovery of a new AMC series entitled "A Discovery of Witches" based on a trilogy of novels by Deborah Harkness that I have decided to read. 

I am nearing the completion of the first of these novels containing a story that seems not only entertaining, but also far more ambitious than most reviewers have (so far) suggested or admitted. 

It is unfortunate if these books are relegated to the ghetto of so-called "Romance" literature (this seems unlikely now) because many men will be discouraged from discovering a tricky or unexpectedly subtle narrative exploring important political, literary, and historical themes. 

Gentlemen, if you hope to understand women -- good luck by the way -- reading books that "ladies" or "female persons" enjoy can tell you a great deal about these bizarre "magical" creatures.    

If the GOT writers decided on a tragic ending in which lovers die together, after the usual murders and suicides familiar to all of us from Shakespeare's plays and classic Operas by Verdi and Puccini, the humorous and even banal or absurd character developments of the final episode could only be out of place and unfortunate or ridiculous.

What were they thinking at the GOT writers' conferences?   

"A Discovery of Witches" invokes the classic discussion of witches and witchcraft by Montague Summers whose books feature a lengthy exploration of the phenomenon he called "the discovery of witches" and "perceptions of black magic." 

It happens that the so-called "witch craze" in Western history remains the subject of a hotly contested and fascinating debate that has attracted the attention of academics from multiple disciplines in the humanities and sciences for decades, if not centuries, in many parts of the world very much including the USA.

Ms. Harkness is a professor of history (who tries to keep her magic in check) during her daytime hours at the University of California. 

Besides the serious scholarship which concerns her as an academic Ms. Harkness has noticed the scores of popular novels about magical creatures, vampires and witches and many kinds of magic, in an effort to make a killing by writing a best-selling book. 

There is (and always will be) plenty of curiosity about magic and the "enchantments" that we are assured have been "lost" in the modern world with industrialization, the rise of science and the scientific world view, also the decline of the arts. ("What you will ...") 

Among the most fascinating suggestions of "A Discovery of Witches" -- both the novel and TV series -- is the linkage or continuity between "magic" within and beyond our spiritual traditions and the emergence of the Scientific Revolution from the practice of alchemy and what has been described as "black magic."

This complex historical and philosophical process of modernity has been traced to the era described by Jacob Huizinga and many of his successors as "The Waning of the Middle Ages." 

Periodization is always a contested matter but, say, the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries constitute the crucial age for the study of the pre-history of modernity or what is called the Italian Quatrocento (Renaissance) and also for understanding the holocaust against women described as the "witch craze" and, curiously and most importantly, it is also the age of Courtly Love featuring idealizations of "the distant ladies" served by knights in shining armor coinciding suspiciously with the emergence of the cult of the Virgin Mary. 

The paradox in the "conceptualization" of the women characters at the center of these novels and TV story is illustrative of the new and more complex scholarly understanding of the dialectic between idealizations of women in Romantic literature and demonizations and hatred of women which feminists have emphasized in discussions of such traditional conceptualizations.

Ambiguity about what women "are" or the "feminine powers" as well as the "magic" of falling in love that parallels the mysteries of identity in metaphysics is not a matter of philosophy or literature alone but also what determines men's and women's lives together in society given the eternal struggle by the sexes for power and authority. 

References to Dianne of Poitiers and Marie de Medici or to the "Lais" of Marie de France are not lost on those with a fondness for historical scholarship or great poetry as well as what has come to be known as the "herstory" of feminist thought. ("Is clarity enough?" and "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")   

Deborah Harkness as a historian of ideas is professionally concerned with these matters, as I say, which is why she has chosen to share these questions with a wider audience by dramatizing them in an accessible story. ("Master and Commander" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")  

Professor Harkness is also a lover of literature and (I suspect) a closet romantic whose text refers to Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, Anne Rice and A.S. Byatt as well as Umberto Eco, John Updike, Margaret Drabble, Lyndsay Clarke, and many other novelists classified as popular yet with undoubted academic credentials as serious artists. 

The "bewitchment" that is falling in love and the philosophy of passion are, evidently, well known to this author whose prose is clear and effective enough even as the verses of George Herbert "Love's Alchemy" and Percy Bysse Shelley's "Love's Philosophy" explode in the mind of the reader (as they are meant to) at crucial moments in the story: 

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeam kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

The powers of nature or the classical elements (wind and water, fire and ice) are feminine as Maria Louisa Von Franz (who is specifically mentioned by Ms. Harkness) and Emily Jung have noted in their study of the grail myth that is symbolic of all knightly "quests" for adored ladies. (See the acknowledgments to the first novel in the trilogy.)  

Ms. Harkness "acknowledges" that "A Discovery of Witches" is a "book about books." 

In other words, as with most good novels, there is a portmanteau quality to these works that adds to the pleasure of reading the books or even viewing the series. 

In a recent interview Deborah Harkness calls this the "hunt for Easter eggs" by readers and viewers of the films (like me) who have found thousands of surprises in the various texts. For a few examples of these "surprises" consider that Mathew Clairmont, the vampire with whom all-American witch Diana Bishop falls desperately in love, lives in an ancestral castle in the south of France (where the songs of Courtly Love were first sung) that is called "Sept Tours" (Seven Towers) even as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" purchases an ancient home in Britain called "Carfax" from the French "Quatre Face" (Four Faces or Towers) while Mathew also provides explicit references to Anne Rice's "Vampire Lestat" and "family of fiends" in New Orleans from his recollections of his own previous lives.  

The literary trap doors focusing on the library and the missing book (there is indeed an Ashmole 782 volume "missing" from the Bodleian library) and a magical text at the heart of the mystery that concerns all of the characters parallels plot devices from A.S. Byatt's "Possession" and "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, but equally relevant are John Fowles' "The Ebony Tower" (Eliduc) and Iris Murdoch's novels "The Green Knight" and "The Book and the Brotherhood." 

Mathew Clairmont's description and the highly intelligent performance by Mathew Goode are gestures at such icons as "Mr. Darcy" from Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and "Heathcliff" from Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights."

Women's romantic fantasies seem to hover about this tall and dark-haired archetype to be "tamed" by a woman's love that is reflected in the mastering of the powerful horse that Diana chooses to "ride," as it were, on her visit to Mathew's home.  

The theme of transformation or metamorphosis in medieval magic and in Darwin's later evolutionary theory to say nothing of the "language" of DNA that is akin to the mystical poetry of the "Book of Life" in which each of our lives is a single page reinforces the serious point about life and art, but also science as "intertextual" phenomena as Jacques Derrida might have expressed it. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")  

"When I read Darwin and saw how he seemed to explore the alchemical theory of transmutation through biology, I remembered stories about a mysterious book that explained the origin of our species -- daemons, witches, and vampires." (A Discovery of Witches, p. 150.)

The slightly malicious humor and intellectual play should not obscure some of the darker subtexts in the narrative concerning evil and sexism that are also an unfortunate part of our historical legacy as products of European civilization. 

"A Discovery of Witches" is an historian's novel or story that is filled with ideas providing invitations to join in "time-walking" with the author into our fascinating past. 

After a brief summary of the plot of the first season and novel I focus on distinguishing three of the primary or weightiest themes of the narrative: There is, as I have noted, the "Romance or Courtly Love" theme drawing upon classic works in this tradition and the scholarship of such distinguished predecessors and fellow Oxfordians as Maurice Keen, C.S. Lewis and Kenneth Clark; I then turn to feminist issues concerned with the literal "demonizing" of women's power and female eroticism that are only touched on here because this is an enormous topic in academic research that is only beginning to be explored adequately; finally, evil and magic as "presences" in Western artistic culture reflecting the transformations of Medieval alchemy into the Scientific Revolution leading to modern science-technology suggests an uncomfortable association between the destruction of close to a million "witches" in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Nazi holocaust and other horrors in the twentieth century conducted "scientifically" and aligned with the undeniable humanistic accomplishments of science and technology such as improvements in medical care and in the material conditions of persons' lives to say nothing of our better understanding of the universe.  

Jeffrey Burton Russell opens his magisterial study of Witches in the Middle Ages with these words and a warning:

"To understand witchcraft we must descend into the darkness of the deepest ocean of the mind. In our efforts to avoid facing the realities of human evil, we have tamed the witch and made her comic, dressing her in a peaked cap and setting her on a broom for the amusement of children at Halloween."

Perhaps this is also reflective of the ambiguity in our societal view of women:

"Thus made silly she can easily be exorcised from our minds, and we can convince our children -- and ourselves -- that 'there is no such thing as a witch.' But there is, or at least there was. A phenomenon that for centuries gripped the minds of men from the most illiterate peasant to the most skilled philosopher or scientist, leading to torture and death for hundreds of thousands [and perhaps for a million women or more at a time when the population of Europe was a fraction of what it is today,] is neither joke nor illusion."  

Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, p. 1 (emphasis added).

"The baby showed a silver rose in one hand, a golden rose in the other." 

Diana Bishop is a superstar academic already tenured at Yale in her early thirties and flirting with a return to Oxford University, as a full professor this time, after having earned a "D.Phil." in the study of alchemy and history of science (very much like Deborah Harkness). 

Professor Bishop's contention that alchemy together with "witches' magic" were encrypted and embryonic attempts to "do" science during the late middle ages when the church enjoyed a monopoly on learning and power -- the only real "magic" -- that was enforced brutally or even lethally is also a central meaning of the "text" we have entered by reading this novel and seeing the TV series. 

"Magic," we are told in this story, "is desire made real." 

By this definition science and art may well qualify as kinds of magic. 

In doing research for a lecture to dazzle her hosts and lock-in the offer of a professorship, Professor Bishop requests "Ashmole 782" -- an ancient book from the Bodleian Library's shelves -- that was believed lost and "bewitched" but that in fact appears for her, a mere American witch, who refuses to use her powers after the deaths of her parents during her childhood.

Diana will discover that she has been "spellbound," as it turns out by her well-meaning parents, who were seeking to protect her from "envious" witches determined to steal her powers. 

The very same envious witches were responsible for the murders of Diana's parents on a trip to Nigeria in search of that mysterious and powerful magic said to "run in the family." 

Diana's all-inclusive power (unknown to her) features the control of the elements, witch-wind, -water, -fire, -earth, time-walking, telepathy, and more. 

Witches and others will stop at nothing to obtain the book that Diana alone was able to conjure from the library's shelves in order to steal her great powers. 

"Ashmole 782" is clearly "The Book of Life" (or the key to the "Philosopher's Stone") containing the secrets of all magical creatures and their origins as vampires, witches, daemons. 

The analogy between this magical book and Darwin's "Origin of Species" along with developments in DNA theory is made at several points in the story:

"[Mathew:] 'Your nuclear DNA tells us about you as a unique individual -- how the genetic legacy of your mother and father recombined to create you. It's the mixture of your mother's genes and your father's genes that gave you blue eyes, blond hair, and freckles. Mitochondrial DNA can help us to understand the history of a whole species.' ... "

" ... [Diana:] 'That means the origin and evolution of the species is recorded in each one of us.'" (A Discovery of Witches, p. 159.)

If DNA theory is accurate, as it seems to be, each one of us is "the book of life." 

The tensions between "species" mirrors the conflicts between races and religions in human history, especially during the middle ages, as well as the struggle for "survival of the fittest" as all magical beings are endangered in the contemporary world.  

"Mating" by members of different species, such as vampires and witches, is strictly prohibited by the governing body of the magical underworld called "The Congregation" in which each group is represented.   

The appearance of the enchanted book has released a supernatural alarm system bringing all kinds of witches, vampires and demons to Oxford to discover the location of the text and the witch who called it forth. 

Not all of the magical creatures are friendly or well-disposed towards the being who may be in possession of this priceless book.

Mathew Clairmont, a brilliant scientist and medical doctor but also an alluring and powerful vampire who happens to be over one-thousand-five-hundred-years-old (and he does not look a day over 35!), approaches Diana to warn her of the dangers and offers to protect her because this mysterious book may provide the means to the survival of all magical creatures. 

Mathew fulfills Diana's mother's prophecy concerning a "Dark Knight" who will help remove the chains that bind her daughter's magic. 

Mathew is literally a knight of what were once called "The Templars" later "The Knights of the Order of Lazarus" and a survivor of the crusades who will "place his sword at the feet of the lady of the quest." 

All of the elements, in other words, of the "heroine's journey" or woman's myth of self-becoming, that is, "achieved identity" in Jungian terms by means of a "servant masculine power" are present in the narrative adding to the allure of the tale. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")  

Obvious examples of this kind of story that is almost always found in popular romance literature in one form or another include "Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella," "Repunzel," Snow White," and many others. 

The key symbol of the "Alchemical Child" on the frontpiece of the Ashmole 782 book burned into Diana's flesh features the "silver rose" (female) and golden rose" (male), moon and sun, necessary for the "Chemical Wedding" or union of opposites (man and woman, vampire and witch) that will transform the forces of nature at the will of the "product" of that union. 

Lyndsay Clarke's "The Chymical Wedding" is a novel that comes to mind as well as the same author's wonderful book about "Parzival" and the Holy Grail. 

Diana and Mathew fall in love despite the displeasure of nearly all other characters in the story which is appropriate to the themes of "Courtly Romance": Tristan and Isolde is mentioned by implication, but then so is the story of Abelard and Heloise, equally relevant are "The Romance of the Rose" and "The Song of Roland" whose authorship is disputed unlike the copyright to "A Discovery of Witches." 

A false friend, Gillian Chamberlain, betrays Diana to Peter Knox and Satu, warlock and evil witch coveting the "enchanted" book and spellbound Diana, only to be murdered for her dastardly deed by Mathew much to my approval and applause. 

Sinister vampires Domenico and Geber together with the seductive Juliette (Mathew's former lover) plot to destroy our heroine and her knight in shinning armor, as evil creatures usually do, and to enlist the powers of the Congregation in doing so. 

Geber is based on a medieval Pope who was said to keep the head of a witch in a box as a kind of oracle to be consulted on special occasions. There is indeed such a talking head (a powerful ancient sorceress called "Meridien" trapped for centuries in an iron mask) who warns repeatedly of the "witch with the blood of the lion and the wolf."

It was Geber who first possessed the now missing book purchased from a great wizard in Toledo when the city was part of the Islamic world. 

Diana will visit Mathew's ancestral home to meet the powerful and very ancient Ysabeau (named for the princess separated from her lover by a curse that made him a wolf by night as she became a hawk by day). 

"The sword of separation" is one of the classic features of Courtly Love. 

On a stroll in the garden of Mathew's castle Diana will be swept up by the evil Satu who, literally, flies away with her to a ruined castle owned by Geber. 

Diana is tortured, branded, and tossed into a cavernous abyss where visions guide her efforts to meet Mathew and his brother Baldwin, a fellow vampire and member of the Congregation, as they arrive to rescue her. 

Diana taps into her magic, finally, in order to fly into Mathew's arms as we head for the final episode of season one. 

The series has been renewed for two more seasons allowing for the completion of the story and the accumulation of enormous wealth by all of the persons concerned in this project. 

Safely returned to Sept Tours Diana and Mathew will "mate for life" only to return quickly to Diana's childhood home where a nearly lethal attack against Mathew on the part of Juliette (beware of jealous females especially if they are vampires) will require the final release of all of Diana's power, including the ability to time-walk or escape into a different era in history, the Elizabethan age, where Mathew can catch up with friends like Christopher Marlowe whose Doctor Faustus is quoted and used as a portal to the English Renaissance so as to find the person who first enchanted the "Book of Life." 

A chess piece (the "White Queen" in the form of the goddess "Diana the Huntress") lost on a wager by Mathew to Marlowe provides a clue. 

The "White Queen" is a powerful figure in alchemy as well as in magic that points readers and viewers back to the illustration seen very briefly when Diana opened "Ashmole 782":

"I turned my attention to the illustration that faced a gap where the missing pages should be. It showed a tiny baby girl floating in a clear glass vessel. The baby held a silver rose in one hand, a golden rose in the other. On its feet were tiny wings, and drops of red liquid showered down on the baby's long black hair. Underneath the image was a label written in thick black ink indicating that it was a depiction of the philosophical child -- allegorical representation of a crucial step in creating the philosopher's stone, the chemical substance that promised to make its owner healthy, wealthy, and wise." (A Discovery of Witches, p. 11.) 

"Aurora Consurgens was one of the most beautiful  texts in the alchemical tradition."    

Diana's visit to Mathew's home and to his library or study to examine a pristine copy of the alchemical text Aurora Consurgens is crucial to the meaning of the story. 

To begin with readers and/or viewers encounter Mathew in the context of his traditional role or identity as "knight protector" of his realm. There is a detailed description, for example, of his suit of armor kept in his study. (A Discovery of Witches, p. 321.)

Mathew's library contains the otherwise lost copy of Aurora Consurgens with the total number of illustrations or hand-painted illuminations that feature the "White Queen":

"Aurora Consurgens was one of the most beautiful texts in the alchemical tradition, a meditation of the female figure of Wisdom as well as an exploration of the chemical reconciliation of opposing forces. The text in Mathew's copy was nearly identical to the copies I'd consulted in Zurich, Glasgow, and London. But the illustrations were quite different." (A Discovery of Witches, p. 267.) 

This ancient book is the work of a woman as are the illustrations which is nearly unique and perhaps a tribute to the supposed Persian origins of the Courtly Love tradition. 

Known to posterity as "Bourgot Le Noir" (The Lady in Black") this subtle medieval artist responsible for the book communicates the components of the classic mysteries in a language of metaphors: 

"There were two illuminations -- just as Mathew had promised -- that weren't included in any known copy of Aurora Consurgens. Both appeared in the final parable, devoted to the chemical wedding of gold and silver. The first accompanied words spoken by the female principle in alchemical change. Often represented as a queen dressed in white [emphasis added] with emblems of the moon to show her association with silver, she had been transformed by Bourgot into a beautiful, terrifying creature with silvery snakes instead of hair, her face shadowed like a moon eclipsed by the sun." (A Discovery of Witches, p. 267.) 

Diana in our story is the "White Queen" placed on a pedestal who is symbolized by Mathew's lost chess piece. 

There are in fact a number of additional references to chess moves, openings and traps, in the novel that are used in the scripts for the series as well. 

When Diana is captured by the "Black Queen" (Satu), for instance, the attempt on her life or tortures is described as a queen's "gambit" by Ysabeau.  

Mathew is, of course, the "knight" whose task is to protect the queen even to the point of self-sacrifice, if necessary, as required by the rhetoric of "Courtly Romance."

T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" is alluded to in passages featuring a game of chess between the leading characters and the off-stage presence of "death." 

The role of the "Lady of the Quest" in stories of Platonic Love is to deliver the wisdom that can only arrive with great suffering for adoration of her by a faithful knight-protector. 

Evidently, women in these stories (and in life) delight in causing men to "suffer" for loving them. 

To underline the identification with the "White Queen" Diana refers explicitly to Boethius in whose masterpiece "The Consolations of Philosophy" philosophy is personified as "Sophia" -- a lady "dressed in white" as the "Queen of the Sciences" -- who appears in order to engage in philosophical chit-chat as the author is being tortured to death. (A Discovery of Witches, p. 322.)

Diana also refers to Giordano Bruno whose championing of scientific truth resulted in his being burned at the stake to hint at her own courage and willingness to face any danger borne by Mathew in pursuit of the truth about her life. (A Discovery of Witches, p. 236.)

All the components of the quest are brought together at this point in the narrative: the great lady in white who rules this allegorical adventure from the pedestal on which she is placed by her knight in shining armor sets the challenge for him that is meant to free her mystical powers even at the cost of his life so that she may fulfill her dreams. 

This universe of discourse that amounts to the invention of romantic love in our civilization and, thanks to cinema, now also throughout the world providing the rituals of courtship for generations of couples down to the Romantic poets and even into our jaded era to the extent that we continue to believe in or hope for romance, if we do, incorporates a paradox captured in the very illustrations examined by Diana.  

The lady placed on a pedestal wearing a wedding dress symbolizing virginity as well as the tantalizing promise of erotic bliss (provided her heroic knight manages to live through the adventure) may be transformed into a terrifying figure with serpents in her hair usually by a rival for adoration and this can happen very quickly in any narrative. 

Some of this is a result of the duality in Christian feminine identity, but it also has to do with fear of great power or talents in the hands of women, especially certain kinds of women. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.") 

Idealized women in medieval tales of romance were almost always drawn from the aristocratic class while the women burned as witches usually were wandering healers or older peasant women no longer able to work in farming and unlikely to serve as romantic leads in fairy tales.   

The key to acceptance of the lady's suitor and what allows for her true freedom and happiness, not surprisingly, is the knight's submission to the lady's power of choice. 

Significantly, as depicted in tapestries and other images "successful couples," as they say in California, hold hands at the level of the heart while deference is always for the lady's wishes. 

After the evil dragon is slain and the treasure chest is opened the lady of the quest remains the only ruler of the "spiritual kingdom that is marriage" if courtship is to become what Shakespeare describes as the "marriage of true minds." 

Denis de Rougemont and Robert Solomon have made the point in different ways that if courtship is poetry then marriage is a televised situation comedy. 

I will close this section of my essay by quoting two of Diana Bishop's most distinguished Oxford colleagues who are, sadly, now departed, Kenneth Clark and Maurice Keen (leaving C.S. Lewis for a later section of this review), and with the suggestion that Professor Keen may have provided the best answer to Mr. Clark's questions concerning the Platonic Love tradition:  

"Of the two or three faculties that have been added to the European mind since the civilization of Greece and Rome, none seems to me stranger and more inexpressible than the sentiment of ideal or courtly love. It was entirely unknown to antiquity. Passion, yes; desire, yes of course; steady affection yes. But this state of utter subjection to the will of an almost unapproachable woman; this belief that no sacrifice was too great, that a whole lifetime might properly be spent in paying court to some exacting lady or suffering on her behalf -- this would have seemed to the Romans or the Vikings not only absurd but unbelievable; and yet for hundreds of years it passed unquestioned. It inspired a vast literature -- from Chretien de Troyes to Shelly -- most of which I find unreadable; and even up to 1945 we still retained a number of chivalrous gestures; we raised our hats to ladies, and let them pass first through doors, and, in America, pushed in their seats at table."

Kenneth Clark, Civilization, pp. 63-64 ("Romance and Reality").

Curiously, "Sir Kenneth" fails to note that the elaborate cultural construct which he embodied, as the ideal British "gentleman," was a direct product of the medieval codes of chivalry to which Mathew Clairmont is bound and that he deploys to invoke (or compel) the feudal obedience of his brother, Baldwin, and others in a knightly order whose sacrifices in battle, even to the death, for a lady (who happens to be a witch) would be a matter of unquestioning obedience and loyalty to an oath given years before for any true knight.

Maurice Keen devoted intense scholarly attention to the phenomenon of "chivalry" and the contemporary manifestations of this constellation of cultural practices and images in art, many of which are absorbed, subconsciously, by men and women in America and Europe before we ever become consciously aware of them, if we ever do realize their true sources, and he argues for the continuing importance of these ideas not only in art but also within Western mores and manners:

"If a genuine age of chivalry is to be sought, it is surely in the middle ages, and not the early modern age, that would most locate it, somewhere between, say, the year 1100 and the beginning of the sixteenth century: somewhere, that is to say, between the launching of the first crusade and the Reformation, somewhere between the composition of the 'Song of Roland' and the death of Bayart, between the time when the triumph of the Norman horsemen at Hastings was recorded in the Bayeux tapestry and the triumph of artillery. But was there ever, really, an Age of Chivalry even then? Was chivalry ever more than a polite veneer, a matter of form rather than a social influence of any signification, let alone 'the glory of Europe'? And if it ever was more than a matter of form and words, what was it? ..."

Maurice Keen, Chivalry, p. 1. 

Professor Keen's book contains the specific codes and oaths that Mathew Clairmont would have accepted as a medieval knight and that he would have regarded as binding for eternity and against the world if necessary.  

Chivalry for medieval men and women was a kind of religious order and not a social club.  

"My name is Satu ..." 

The duality surrounding witches and witchcraft (white and black magic) is reflective of the more fundamental and paradoxical tension in Western civilization concerning women and sexuality that has received a great deal of attention from psychologists, philosophers, and historians.

This tension certainly becomes most powerful and central with the arrival of Christianity. 

"Mary the Mother of Jesus" and "Mary the Magdalene" represent twin-aspects (or archetypes) of  a woman's identity, mother and lover, from a male point of view that becomes all-inclusive in the ethos of  European societies. 

Christianity also denies and even demonizes the body and eros that is quickly associated with woman thanks to Eve's munching on that famous apple in Eden. Accordingly, during the middle ages evil is increasingly represented in feminine form. ("'Westworld': A Review of the TV Series.")

Specific historical events during the late middle ages -- a period described by the American historian Barbara Tuchman as "calamitous" to such an extent that it could be analogized to the dismal twentieth century -- compelled a superstitious culture to search for the "causes" or "sources" of God's wrath in a particular group of the population which was seen as suitably mysterious, elusive, dangerous, or all of these things. 

The idea of a "cause" of misfortunes would have been understood very differently by persons in a pre-scientific age. 

Empirical phenomena would be interpreted or perceived in the middle ages in accordance with religious concepts or a priori understandings of reality that were mystical or mythical as opposed to "factual" in our sense.   

The transition from a "magical" to a scientific "paradigm" is one of the themes of the novels and TV series, as I have suggested, that is not itself determined by the "evidence" of the senses but rather this transition is what determines the content of what is held to be the evidence of the senses.   

Women were, of course, the perfect candidates for the "role" of sinister creatures conspiring with the devil to betray God's good people from within Christendom. 

Theologians engaged in lengthy debates about women's power to tempt men from the path of salvation providing learned discussions concerning the relative intelligence of female persons by comparison with animals and their male superiors or angels and demons. 

These discussions have in fact been pursued for generations and negative stereotypes of women have been deeply ingrained in Western civilization for centuries. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")

The entanglement of our romantic idealizations with corresponding alienations and projections of hatreds on to women means that feminine identity (what "womanhood" means in our culture) also becomes problematic, or a source of guilt, as well as offering claims of entitlement to the few women happily perched on a pedestal during their youth. 

The crucial factor to determine whether a woman is to be feared or placed on a pedestal in popular culture is not beauty. 

All women depicted in stories are expected to be beautiful and comments on a woman's appearance as a means of discrediting what she says are still quite common. 

The determining factor with regard to feminine character in myth or Western art is sex or erotic power. 

Not all beautiful women are sexually alluring; not all women with great erotic power are flawlessly beautiful; but while sexuality is always desired or powerful as a quality in or "of" women, it is never a morally neutral quality, but always one that may render a woman evil (or the source of evil) in any narrative. 

The more overtly sexual is a woman character in popular culture or narrative the more likely she is to be depicted as evil or a "witch."

These aesthetic devices or symbols have been appropriated by Hollywood, usually unconsciously, with the consequence that the femme fatale in "hardboiled" detective fiction, for example, is usually a very sinister figure and inevitably she is the source of trouble for the hero. ("Raymond Chandler and the Simple Art of Murder" and "Out of the Past.")

These brief statements are confirmed by historians describing efforts by thinkers during the middle ages to correlate the occurrence of dreadful events (the Black Death or plague, crop failures, and invasions from the Islamic world) with the intensified search for "evil witches" luring men to their doom and bringing about the deaths of innocent children. 

"Medieval Europe was under attack and the later Middle Ages were overflowing with conspiracy theories; Jews, lepers, witches and infidels were all targeted as the new 'enemies from within,' plotting to destroy European Christendom in a diabolical  conspiracy engineered by Satan himself. Gradually the figure of the witch began to emerge as the ultimate symbol of this covert evil working against society from within and the paranoia of the Middle Ages was carried over into the early modern period, sustained and propelled by a deep-seated fear of the devil." 

Lois Martin, The History of Witchcraft, pp. 11-12. 

Much of the same language used to describe witches in past centuries is echoed in remarks made in our time by persons commenting on sex workers and other disfavored women in American culture who embody these inherited contradictions concerning sexuality and romanticism. ("Protecting Sex Workers.") 

For religious fundamentalists today and inquisitors centuries ago gender ambiguity or any woman's powerful sexuality are sure signs of evil. 

Any woman who, as it were, "opens her legs" must be insidious and wicked especially if she is an artistic genius or exceptionally gifted intellectually. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")   

A Discovery of Witches places power in the hands of a female protagonist and invites audience members/readers to accept and even become comfortable with women's "magic" defined in many ways and with a smile for a scientific age. 

Discussions of sex in witchcraft have become common during recent years especially among feminist scholars: 

" ... sex in any of several forms was the essential ingredient," Lauren Paine comments, "before a witch could be tried, convicted and put to death."  

Obviously, all women are both sexual and maternal. In women's stories the authorial self is often divided in complex characters sharing these qualities of distant idealized virtue and/or warm erotic appeal. 

Ms. Harkness has created a protagonist, "Diana Bishop," with a strong erotic nature revealed in a fondness for medieval "bundling" even as her evil and dark-haired feminine creatures Satu (witch) and Juliette (vampire) are defined by a tendency to envy things that belong to Diana such as her magic and her boy-toy Mathew. 

" ... [Witchfinder and judge] Franz Buirmann ... appropriated all the property of his victims and became a wealthy man. The wife of a court official named Peller was stripped and shaved, the custom before torture, then she was raped by a torturer's assistant and put to torture. When she screamed Judge Buirmann, who was among the crowd of male witnesses, rammed a soiled rag into her mouth. Later this woman was placed, bound, into a straw hut that was set afire."   

Lauren Paine, Sex in Witchcraft, p. 73.

The torture and destruction of women with sexual energy or forbidden knowledge who were deemed "uncontrollable" is still very much with us as is the fear of women's "magic" -- especially when it is used to win elections (or an Oscar nomination) in America or Britain.

"Whoever can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead." 

One interesting sub-text or a minor theme in this story that I have touched on earlier is the interpretation of how "scientific revolutions" or changes in governing theoretical understandings of empirical reality unfold or develop. 

Professor Harkness has been greatly influenced, I suspect, by Thomas Khun's now classic text in the history and philosophy of science entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 

At the outset of the TV series, for example, Diana Bishop delivers a lecture at Oxford in which she points out that alchemical texts -- also works associated with magic and witchcraft -- were interpreted by historians in the past as mere allegorical narratives to be read in exclusively metaphorical terms. 

These books are now understood, more importantly, to contain coded communications of dangerous scientific knowledge formulated and transmitted outside the control of the Christian church and beyond the formal explanatory systems of the medieval age that included "universities" governed by religious orders. 

The earliest attempts to "represent" the chemical components of the universe were imagistic and metaphorical not because they were fanciful, but for the excellent reason that knowledge not under the control of priests contravening theological wisdom could result in a person being burned at the stake, like Giordano Bruno, not merely for "possession" of such knowledge but also for presuming to "inquire" in ways not sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities. 

Many so-called "witches" were early healers experimenting not only with natural remedies and trial-and-error methods, but also with means of achieving prohibited contraception and termination of pregnancies in their early stages usually at the behest of "unmarried young women" who may have had little to do with "choosing" sexual encounters with members of the aristocracy or, indeed, clergymen.     

Aristotle's understanding of the "cosmos" accepted after St. Thomas Aquinas as essentially the Christian view of scientific reality was a matter of "eternal absolutes" in perfect balance where the natural and moral orders reflected symmetries in compliance with universal natural laws or moral ordinances without exceptions.

Accordingly, great disasters, diseases, spreading crime or military losses were obvious indications of "imbalances" between the natural and moral orders of the universe.  

Without justice or denials of merited punishment for great crimes natural catastrophes would certainly spread and grow more severe.

Balance was essential and, when necessary, had to be restored with appropriate compensatory harm done to those who were found to be "wrongdoers" or guilty of monstrous thoughts (or sins) such as rejection of the true faith. 

It is not that medieval men and women were "stupid" or evil since within their worldview their actions appear entirely comprehensible and rational. 

To men and women living within a radically different semiotic and meaning system from that of the modern world the instinctive naturalism and rational empiricism of educated persons today, evidenced by the search for "facts" and scientific laws formulated mathematically to explain empirical phenomena, would have seemed idiotic or insane.  

A woman who develops a lethal infection can only be reaping the consequences of her sins such as an adulterous affair with another woman's husband that may have taken place a year earlier. 

With her death -- after torture, of course -- moral balance may be restored to the community and all will be well in the judgment not only of lawyers and judges or priests but also of respected physicians in the middle ages.   

Aristotle's "syllogistic" and "universalistic" logic is highly static because it did not provide for mechanical development outside the teleological scheme in accordance with abstract laws, as Newton would do later, nor for the transformations ("transmutation") in organic entities over time foreshadowed in alchemy and medieval magic that is perfectly realized in the later Darwinian evolutionary theory.  

Professor Harkness may be surprised to discover that, in addition to Thomas Khun and Michael Polanyi as well as other philosophers and historians of science, Alasdair McIntyre in a review essay commenting on Professor Khun's scholarship agrees with her concerning the ways in which dominant "paradigms" in science "shift" to allow for "factual evidence" not previously understood to be factual due to flawed interpretations or theoretical constructs placed beyond question that are permitted to govern what are held to be the "facts" in the first place:

"The natural sciences, in spite of the anti-historical cast of mind which so often informs the ways in which they are taught and transmitted, cannot escape their past. But to have recognized this is to have reached a point at which it is possible to turn back from the history of the natural sciences to that of philosophy and to inquire whether the relation of past and present in philosophy can be understood [to be] if not the same, at least in a closely analogous way." (McIntyre, "The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past," in Philosophy in History, pp. 44-45.) 

Women burned as witches may have been among the first experimental scientists in the history of Western medicine. 

These women were often more successful in treating illnesses than professional or court physicians who, for example, treated hernias by castrating men suffering from them whereas "witches" treated the condition in a manner remarkably similar to methods developed much later in the history of the healing arts. 

Witches and midwives had a much better record also in delivering babies and coping with many other illnesses. 

If this more modern view of witches is accurate (I believe that this interpretation is essentially correct), then many of the further points made by Professor Harkness and her fellow historians -- including the very distinguished Diana Bishop -- concerning the need for a careful re-reading of alchemical texts and the books of witchcraft is also accurate: 

"It thus turns out that, just as the achievements of the natural sciences are in the end to be judged in terms of achievements of the history of those sciences, so the achievements of philosophy are in the end to be guided in terms of the history of philosophy." (McIntyre, "The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past," in Philosophy in History, p. 47; please see my essay: "Where we are now.") 

"Before you can see the light, you have to deal with the darkness."   

Each section of this essay is preceded by a heading or single sentence borrowed from the first novel in the trilogy by Deborah Harkness. This concluding section of my review is the one exception to the rule. 

We have a tendency to trivialize and dismiss our ancestors. 

We laugh at their scientific ignorance or willingness to accept supernatural explanations for naturally occurring phenomena. 

We often fail to realize that superstition and the willingness or yearning to suspend disbelief are still very much with us in Western civilization.

Recently friends and family members and I ordered a large Chinese take-out meal as we settled down to see a movie. 

I noticed that, at the conclusion of the meal, everyone reached out eagerly for his or her "fortune-cookie" and read the messages received with amazing attention. My "fortune" said: 

"Before you can see the light, you have to deal with the darkness."

How very fitting an epigraph for this particular writing project was provided by this well-placed fortune-cookie. 

Literary personifications of "evil" always reveal the contents of our subconscious minds for better or worse, sometimes for better and worse. 

Women and now science rather than religion seem to be at the center of our ideas about evil today as well as what we think of as "magic." 

There continues to be a darkness or sinister ambiguity about our conceptualizations of feminine power and eroticism that simply will not be easily extirpated from Western culture even today.   

I believe that Professor Harkness is exploring these very issues surrounding women, magic, science and power as well as romance in the trilogy as a whole. I certainly look forward to reading the other volumes of the series of books that together constitute a kind of literary "haunted house" with scary rooms and things that pop out at you from dark corners but also illuminating explorations of vexing issues in history and philosophy.

The performances in the TV series are simply outstanding. 

Teresa Palmer is lovely and perfect for this role but she was a little lost initially or, perhaps, overwhelmed which is understandable given the experienced stellar cast of British stage actors forming the core of this ensemble. By the finale of the first season, however, I believe that Ms. Palmer found her way and filled-in the shading in her portrait of "Diana Bishop."  

Trevor Eve steals every scene in which he appears by conveying a delicious sense of menace merely from the slow intonation of his lines in a Shakespearean baritone bearing all of the darker colors of the spectrum.  

Mathew Goode is superb and is enjoying himself as much as audience members with a slight tongue-in-cheek quality to his intonations of endearments as he growls like an Oxford educated wolf.

Owen Teale delights in playing villains adding the envious warlock in this soon-to-be classic performance to his resume. 

Mazin Buska as "Satu" is welcome to kidnap me any time she likes. 

Elarica Gallagher as "Juliette" convinces the viewer that death from a vampire's bite is a fate to be envied. 

I promised a word of wisdom from C.S. Lewis, the inventor of "Narnia," regarding these stories and adventures involving magical creatures and knights in shining armor. 

Professor Lewis was a tutor for many years at New College, Oxford University where his students included actors, like Richard Burton, also an academic author whose expertise concerned medieval "Courtly Love" and fantasy literature:

"It seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. It seems -- or it seemed until lately -- a natural thing that love (under certain conditions) should be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St. Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become aware how far from natural it is. Even our code of etiquette, with its rule that women always have precedence, is a legacy from courtly love, and is felt to be far from natural in modern Japan or India. Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary elements in it have made the background of European literature for eight hundred years."

The following sentences are especially important for contemporary readers and viewers to bear in mind because they are what we are most likely to forget in our cynical age:

"French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth [century.] They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature."

The Allegory of Love, pp. 4-5 (emphasis added). 

What follows is a partial list of sources supportive of my discussion in this review essay.

Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism (Maryland: Barnes & Noble, 1989), pp. 1-17, pp. 18-34. ("And all shall say, without a use this shining woman lived, Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms ..." William Blake on the "ideal" of woman's identity.) 

Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minn.: U. Minn. Press, 1988), pp. 239-271.

St. Augustine, Confessions (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 53-69 ("Book III"). 

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (New York: Bantam, 1985, 1st Pub. 1818).

John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe Expanded (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2005), pp. 6-56.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn (New York: Ballantine, 1968).

Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990, 1st Pub. 1989), pp. 178-220 ("Cathars and Troubadors") and pp. 221-252 ("Science and Magic").  

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (New York: New American Library & Signet Classics, 1959). 

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: A Biography 2 Volumes (New York & London: Alfred Knopf, 1995, 2002).

Giordano Bruno, Heroic Frenzies (North Carolina: U. North Carolina Press, 1964).  

Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1972), pp. 107-132.

A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (New York: The Modern Library, 2000, 1st Pub. 1990). 

Joseph Campbell, "The Mythology of Love," Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam, 1973, 1st Pub. 1972), pp. 152-173.

Joseph Campbell, Introduction and Editor, The Portable Jung (New York & London: Penguin, 1971), pp. vii-xxxii. 

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1995, 1st Pub. 1605). (The new and more controversial Burton Raffe translation edited by Diana de Armas Wilson is more accessible to American readers.)  

Kenneth Clark, Civilization: A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 61-87 ("Romance and Reality").

Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding (London: Picador, 1990).

Lindsay Clarke, Parzival and the Stone From Heaven: A Holy Grail Romance Retold for Our Time (London: Thorsons, 2001). 

Michael Crighton, Timeline (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

Margaret Drabble, The Witch of Exmoor (London: Harcourt Brace, 1996). 

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983, 1st Pub. 1980).

Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (New York: Crown Pub., 1952, 1st Pub. 1916), pp. 21-24 ("The Idea of Time in Physics"). 

Richard Ellman, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 152-228 ("The Portrait of Mr. W.H.").

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1969).

John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 107-133. 

John Fowles, Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), pp. 152-159. 

Anne Freemantle, ed., The Age of Belief (New York: New American Library, 1954), pp. 53-71. (From The Consolations of Philosophy: "Divine Philosophy, Sophia, sayeth: 'But I pray thee,' quoth she, 'see how boldly and inviolably thou approves't that which we said, that the most Sovereign God is most sovereign goodness'" ... and love.)

Jean Froissart, Froissart: Chronicles (London: Penguin Classics, 1978). (Based on Lord Bernier's translation of 1927.)  

Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddess: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Fawcett Books, 1992), pp. 58-70.

Goethe [Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe] The Sorrows of Young Werther (London & New York: Penguin Classics, 1989, 1st Pub. 1774).

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York & London: Penguin/Putnam, 1995), pp. 144-211.  

Martin H. Greenberg, ed., A Taste for Blood: Fifteen Vampire Novellas (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1992), pp. 208-233. (H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" is not quite as "magical" as the Bishop residence, but it is much more sinister.) 

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage, 2000, 1st Pub. 1999), pp. 231-344. 

Ian Hacking, "Five Parables," Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, & Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 1984), pp. 31-48. 

John R. Haule, Pilgrimage of the Heart: The Path of Romantic Love (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1992), pp. 62-81.

Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (London: Pelican, 1965, 1st Pub. 1952), pp. 71-115. 

Johan (Jacob) Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Doubleday, 1954, reissued as "The Autumn of the Middle Ages," University of Chicago Press, 1996). (Rodney J. Payton & Ulrich Mammitsch translators.)

Emma Jung & Maria-Louise Von Franz, The Grail Legend (London: Coventure, 1986).  

Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1984), pp. 64-82.

Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London & New York: Routledge, Keegan & Paul, 1957), pp. 164-191.

Frank Kermode, Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism 1958-2002 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003), pp. 98-118.   

T.S. Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U. Chicago, 1970).

Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (New York & San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979). 

Marjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2011, 1st Pub. 2008), p. 75. ("In October, 1901, [Ernest] Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, a 25-year-old British chemist at Montreal, began a joint study of thorium and its radiation and were soon faced with the possibility that it could be turning into another element. Soddy recalled how he stood stunned at the thought and let slip, 'this is transmutation,' 'For Mike's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation,' warned Rutherford, 'they'll have our heads off as alchemists.' ..." [emphasis added]). 

Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1982), pp. 5-340. 

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1958), pp. 1-43.

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 1964), pp. 75-91.

Jill Line, Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love (London & Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2004, 2006), pp. 1-9, pp. 86-96. (Ficino, Courtly Love, and Shakespeare's Interpretation of Plato.)

John MacMurray, Reason and Emotion (London: Faber & Faber, 1935, 1962, 1995), pp. 68-85.  

Joseph Margolis, Science Without Unity: Reconsidering the Human and Natural Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 51-100.

P.M. Matarasso, Translator and Introduction, The Quest of the Holy Grail (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 134-164 ("Sir Lancelot").  

Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds (New York: Avon, 1977).

Alasdair McIntyre, "The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past," Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 1984), pp. 31-48.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain (New York: Barcourt Brace, 1948, 1976), pp. 30-67. 

Iris Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Penguin, 1987).

Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight (London: Penguin, 1993).

Maureen Murdoch, The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wellness (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1990), pp. 38-60. 

Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 314-334 ("Love and the Individual").

Lauren Paine, Sex in Witchcraft (New York: Toplinger, 1972), pp. 78-84.

Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being (Chicago: U. Chicago, 1969), pp. 123-180. 

Betty Radice, Translator & Introduction, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (London: Penguin, 1974), pp. 127-136.  

Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire (New York: Ballantine, 1976).

Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat (New York: Ballantine, 1985). (" ... something altogether magical happened to time." The Vampire Lestat was "born" in the same region as Mathew Clairmont.) 

Candace Robb, The Cross-Legged Knight (London: William Heineman, 2002). 

Michael Romkey, I, Vampire: The Confessions of a Vampire -- His Life, His Loves, His Strongest Desires (New York: Ballantine -- Facett Gold Medal Book, 1992), pp. 5-19. ("Women are my weakness ...") 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (London: Penguin, 1953), pp. 234-257 (J.M. Cohen's translation with commentary). 

Alan Ryan, ed., The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 2-6. (Lord Byron's gentlemanly "vampire" must have known Mathew Clairmont.) 

George Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons., 1927), pp. 12-13.

Philip Sewald, Christianity and Eros: Essays on the Theme of Sexual Love (London: SPCK, 1976), pp. 39-50, pp. 51-74. (" ... the relationship between man and woman, to be consummated, must transcend the limits of this world." See page 59.) 

Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453 (New York: Atheneum, 1978), pp. 153-188, pp. 213-231. (The motto of John Duke of Bedford defines, perfectly, the values of medieval knights as regards their adored ladies: A vous entier.) 

Dan Simmons, Lovedeath (New York: Time Warner, 1993), pp. xv-xxvii. (Richard Crashaw's maxim for vampires and witches: "Love, thou art absolute sole lord of life and death.") 

Irving Singer, Editor & Introduction, George Santayana, Essays in Literary Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons., 1956), pp. 94-101 ("Platonic Love in Some Italian Poets"). 

June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 229-260. 

June Singer, "A Silence of the Soul: The Sadness of Successful Women," The Quest (Summa, 1989). 

Robert Solomon, Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor (New York: Prometheus, 1990), pp. 16-32. 

Robert Solomon & Kathleen Higgins, The Philosophy of Erotic Love (Topeka: U. Kansas, 1991), pp. 1-9, pp. 13-78. 

Stendhal, On Love (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1967). 

Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Classics, 1993, 1st Pub. 1897).  

James Stourton, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 2016), pp. 319-361. 

Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (London: Routledge and Keegan & Paul, Ltd., 1926).

Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: Routledge and Keegan & Paul, Ltd., 1928).

Brian Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Katherine Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles (Athens & London: U. Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 169-191. 

Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (Penn.: Templeton Press, 2015), pp. 73-100. 

Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (London: J.M. Dent, 1993, 1st ed., 1987 "Everyman Edition"), pp. xi-xxvii (D.D.R. Owen translation, introduction, and notes, combined with the classic nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translations of these stories).

Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1993), pp. 53-92. 

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons., 1978). 

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (New York: Fawcett, 1984).  

Hans-Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963), pp. 125-138 (D.C. Schindler translation). 

Maria-Louise Von Franz, Editor & Translator, Aurora Consurgens (New York & London: Pantheon, 1965).

Leopold Von Ranke, History of the Popes: Their Church and State 3 Volumes (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 3-24 (Volume 1).

Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage, 1976, 1983), pp. 81-117, pp. 121-133.

James Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: New American Library, 1968), pp. 117-119.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 1985). 

Oscar Wilde, "The Nightingale and the Rose," The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (New York: Signet Classics, 1990), pp. 23-31. 

Charles Williams, All Hallow's Eve: A Novel (New York & London: Noonday Press & Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1948). (Introduction by T.S. Eliot with discussion of the personification of evil in feminine form.)

Charles Williams, A Touch of Death (New York: Flying Eagle Pub., 1952). (Reissued by Hard Case Books in 2006).   

Charles Williams, Witchcraft: A History of Black Magic in Christian Times (New York: Meridien Books, 1971, 1st ed. 1959), pp. 93-122, pp. 123-152.