From top: Aleister Crowley; David Langwallner

‘Witchcraft was hung in history
But history and I
Find all the witchcraft we need’

Emily Dickinson,

“People think I can sprinkle some magic dust on their cases – but some cases are not winnable. I spend much of my time saying, “Stop, you’ll lose.” Then I hear the words, “This is a matter of principle.”

Lord Pannick. Hamlyn Lectures on Advocacy

I write this for Broadsheet as a companion piece to those contributions on advocacy and the importance of public debate provided inter alia to Cassandra Voices and The English-Speaking Union.

I am singularly influenced by the Hamlyn lectures of Lord Pannick. which I have recently digested and which, as well as trotting over the usual ground rules of not fabricating or misleading questions and the importance of circumspection, addresses the questions of magic, and a crucial realisation, which Americans often fail to understand, that advocacy is magic, sorcery and voodoo and is a nonlinear art.

That is a serious cause and reason for legitimate doubt and self-reflection. Doing what you do. But for what purposes and with what effects? Special effects? And it involves an investigation of the ethics and morality of magic which intersect, in my view, with the ethics of advocacy.

Other things also prompted this. A client of mine has asked me to do something as she was told by a medium that a man called David would be of assistance. Well, a very irrational way to get a brief. The Supernatural. Intuition.

Further, the man from Broadsheet is extremely interested in the anatomy relevant to our present age of human evil and has frequently referenced Aleister Crowley as an exemplar and presager of our awful Satanic times. Well, that is also a belief in paganism, diabolism and magic of which advocacy is part of. So, there is a fine line between aspects of advocacy and human evil. A very fine line.

Objections to Crowley as a person might be captured in this extract from his Hymn to Pan:

I am gold, I am God, 
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave; and I rape, and I rip, and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,

So, one can understand resistance to another dark art advocacy. Though, in the interests of balance, when people associate witchcraft, magic, or sorcery exclusively with evil, I am also reminded of how deeply evocative the phrase Papal Bull is. And Christianity has persecuted witches and developed its own primitive sorcery.

The persecution of witches was initiated primarily by Hopkins, Witchfinder General, in The UK, who applied torture techniques such as water-boarding,  also evident in the inquisition and in our day and age to induce a confession.

Stacy Schiff’s book, The Witches (2015) about The Salem Witch Hunt demonstrates how, in Freudian terms, a witchunt is a conversion disorder, a transformation or a sublimation, which causes the hysteria of persecution and prosecution and, of course as the book makes clear, this hysteria is easily accomplished, often by hysterical prosecutors or by illicit techniques and not just physical torture, but psychological torture or cognitive bias. And the confusion of God and guilt. Confess to your sins.

In this respect, one chapter of the man who was for many years the Prosecutor of the Southern district of New York is called God Forbid and has nefarious lines like: ‘God forbid that trash talking misanthrope kill someone.’ The moral puritanism and cleanliness are appalling and the tone decidedly off.,

And the vulnerable can be played on. and not just by advocates. Children, as Schiff’s book makes clear, can be led to believe that a day worker slaughtered rabbits. False allegations are also linked to hysterical parents or authority figures.  Then and now. Their brains turned to mush by persistent questioning, But not just children. the inappropriate or vulnerable adults in the room. The prey?

Salem has plagued American society and consciousness ever since. The modern variants are the communist persecutions both in the 1920s and 1950s McCarthyite-era. The later political witching led to Arthur Miller writing the famous play The Crucible (1953) using Salem as a historical metaphor for what happened then. Of course, Miller himself was targeted by that political witch-hunt, as were many communist sympathisers or indeed even those with a slight leftist tinge.

Schiff’s book also demonstrates though how a conventional puritanical or fundamentalist or orthodox thought leads to a hatred of difference and sorcery that starts the problem. The cascade. The neurosis. The witch-hunt. The hatred of difference and exceptionalism and indeed nuance and Satanism, or perceived Satanism, is also equated by narrow-minded people with subversion and dissidence and it is the provenance and bailiwick of the ignorant and the superstitious. Or those with interests and axes to grind.

A witch, or a warlock  is conventionally assumed in all instances as someone in league with the Devil and not as they are, either magical or a sorcerer. As an advocate,  you can be a sorcerer with language and appeal to often irrational motivations. But it does not mean you are the devil incarnate. The conventional definition of a Warlock is an oath breaker, and no true advocate misleads, as Lord Pannick intimates, but many do.

There are gradations of advocacy as in Harry Potter and magic. Sorcery is low grade. Magic a higher form. Not for nothing is the inner cabal of the bar and other cabals known as Magic Circle. Sorcery is merely results-driven. There is no consultation of principle. It has often been termed a crime against God and humanity.

That is the opposite of true advocacy, as Pannick makes clear, though he does not like to lose. Nor do I. for losing in the present universe has awful and disproportionate consequences. There must be restraints and grace in defeat.

But to deny the pagan spirit to deny the magic is also to deny the essence of advocacy. To fail to understand that it is a dark art and to be reflective of same is to deny the essence of it.

Turning the lens on myself, I have represented far from popular people, Mr. John Gillgan, for instance, where I was alternately vilified and sainted for my representation, reflecting a crucial awful feature of our dumbed-down age, to identify an advocate with his client.  But explaining that to vox populis is very difficult.

Should a skill set however exceptional be used to represent certain folks or rather should the demonology of advocacy be constrained in a more prosaic form? But then are you doing your best? Or merely going through the motions?

Points for reflection on the dark art I practice and the moral and ethical ambiguity of this brand of magic.

David Langwallner is a barrister, specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner

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