Kyle Jones Book Review Synthesis:
Goetics in Macbeth and The Faerie Queene
Goetics—from the Greek goēteia, meaning sorcery or deceptive magic—refers to low, coercive witchcraft involving spirit-summoning and illusion. In Renaissance literature, it contrasts with higher theurgia or natural magic.
In Macbeth, goetics manifests in the Weird Sisters. Harold Bloom, in Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind, describes Macbeth as uniquely “in touch with the night world of Hecate and the Weird Sisters.” He calls Macbeth “a weird, an involuntary soothsayer,” whose proleptic imagination already harbors the darkness the witches merely echo. The Arden Shakespeare editions footnote the sisters’ ambiguity—they blend Norn-like fate with vulgar witchery, their prophecies blurring external evil and internal ambition. Their cauldron scene and apparitions exemplify coercive, chthonic goetic ritual, driving Macbeth’s descent into tyranny.
By contrast, C.S. Lewis in Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century approaches goetics through Spenser’s Archimago, the arch-sorcerer of The Faerie Queene. Archimago practices exactly this deceptive, shape-shifting magic—summoning sprites to create false Una and Redcrosse’s dream-visions. Lewis sees it as part of Spenser’s moral allegory, where goetic illusion tests virtue but remains contained within Faerie Land’s ordered world. Unlike Macbeth’s irreversible plunge, Spenser’s goetics serves the poem’s psychotherapeutic harmony—evil magic is vivid yet ultimately subordinate to the quest for Holiness.
The juxtaposition is stark. Macbeth’s goetics is tragic, psychological, and chaotic—Bloom’s “night world” consumes the hero. Spenser’s is allegorical, contained, and health-giving—Lewis’s “common wisdom” through images. One destroys; the other instructs.
