'Eko; Eko; Azarak': Witchcraft, medieval gibberish and queer untranslatability in High Magic's Aid

Lewis, Liam 2024. 'Eko; Eko; Azarak': Witchcraft, medieval gibberish and queer untranslatability in High Magic's Aid. Sexualities 10.1177/13634607241287419

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Abstract

The literature of neopaganism often evokes an indigenous medieval past to resist social and religious convention and assert a queer identity in the present. Using theories of untranslatability, this article shows how a medieval incantation mobilizes queer language and forms communities in the novel High Magic’s Aid by Gerald B. Gardner. This novel outlines the keys to the religion Gardner sought to promote in the 1940s: pagan witchcraft. It features an initiation incantation spoken by a High Priestess, beginning: ‘Eko; Eko; Azarak’, which is a cobbling together of a ‘sorcerer’s cry’ and a gibberish passage from a medieval French play. This chant, which is linguistically meaningless, nevertheless acts as a microcosm of modern witchcraft ideology, and enables practitioners of the Craft to establish a cultural contact with a transtemporal medieval past (identified by indigenous mythologising and the ability to summon demonic spirits), thus unsettling linguistic and temporal hegemony through untranslatability. In this way, High Magic’s Aid depicts a modern witchcraft continuously rediscovering itself as a queer religion resistant to cultural translation, even as its untranslatable aspects are adapted into mainstream contexts in ways that counter this agenda.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	1363-4607
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 October 2024
Date of Acceptance:	15 July 2024
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2024 10:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172638

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