Books: Mumble-Jumble

WITCHCRAFT — William Seabrook —Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Willie Seabrook is the Richard Halliburton of the occult. The Magic Island credulously expounded Haitian voodoo, introduced “zombi” into U. S. speech. Adventures in Arabia found Seabrook among the whirling dervishes, learning to become a trance mystic. Jungle Ways presented him studying magic on the Ivory Coast, photographing phallic monuments, eating human flesh (“like good, fully developed veal”). Asylum was a frank account of another weird region: a New York insane asylum where he was cured of dipsomania.

Last week Willie Seabrook, 54, announced: “I have outgrown . . . the attitude of willing and romantic wonder which characterized some of my earlier books.” Between the covers of Witchcraft he has swept the years’ litter of a disordered desk: a theory, anecdotes, old magazine articles, scraps from history, leftover items from former books, newspaper clippings, remarks on extrasensory perception—everything, in fact, but his blotter and pencils.

Seabrook’s theory: witchcraft (black magic) is potent, can kill by autosuggestion, just as psychotherapy (white magic) can rid folk of fancy-induced but very real ills. Corollaries: 1) the witch’s victim must fear, perhaps unconsciously, the power of magic; 2) witchcraft can affect only human beings.

Bits of entrail from the Seabrook cauldron:

>Description of a Black Mass. Ingredients: an apostate priest, a consecrated host, a virgin, a prostitute. Verdict: “Rather a bore unless one gets a kick out of blasphemy.”

>The “World Champion Lady Vampire of All Time”— Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, who liked to bathe in human blood, was condemned in 1611 for slaughtering some 300 peasant maids.

>The “Werewolf in Washington Square” — a Russian noblewoman who before Seabrook’s own two eyes in 1923 was hypnotized into lycanthropy and loved it.

>An adventure in which Seabrook, using black magic and a nail-studded doll, al most killed a French wizard who had cast a deadly spell over Mrs. Seabrook.

A mildly entertaining potful of scraps, Witchcraft would be more impressive had Seabrook, like a conscientious warlock, given it double toil and trouble.