The Witchfinder-General is the head of His Majesty’s Finder Corps (known as HM Witchfinder Corps until 1952), the undisclosed agency tasked with classifying occult and otherwise anomalous phenomena in the UK and keeping their occurrence a secret from the general public.
1896–1900: W. B. Yeats
1900–1909: [Round Table gestalt leadership]
Yeats was discharged from his position in 1900 after his devastating loss in a magickal confrontation with Aleister Crowley, at that time HMWC’s enemy number one.
1909–1922: Francis Younghusband
1922–1935: Arthur Machen
1935–1948: Peter Fleming
Fleming’s management of the Witchfinder Corps during wartime included such feats as successfully placing an anti-Nazi geas around the island of Great Britain and the placement of a firewall in the collective unconscious against intrusions from German occultists, but his handling of the home front is more controversial, particularly when it came to the nascent public revival of the witch-cults. Supporters argue Wicca was successfully defanged as a threat to the public gestalt, but on the other hand, he still let the knowledge of the New Forest coven leak to the public in violation of all Corps protocols.
1948–1961: Ralph Izzard
1961–1974: Christopher Lee
1974–1987: John Bingham, Lord Lucan
Lord Lucan’s appointment befuddled many in the Corps, as he had no prior occult experience, and he immediately broke convention by ending his public life entirely rather than keep up a masquerade. Still, he ended up a much-needed reformer for the agency, finally lifting the ban on non-Abrahamic theurgy and increasing coöperation with overseas counterparts, such as David Lynch’s U.S. Occult Affairs Office and Dan Aykroyd’s Royal Canadian Witchfinders-General.
1987–1992: Marianne Martindale
1992–2000: [Round Table gestalt leadership]
Martindale’s thirteen-year term came to a swift end only five years in after it was revealed that she had acted as a double agent on behalf of St. Bride’s School, an Irish occult group which aimed to found its own cyber-republic separate from any temporal countries. The interregnum that followed was a disaster for HMFC; most infamously, the information firewall against Nick Land’s CCRU broke down, causing thousands in Silicon Valley to be infected by dangerous infohazards. The USOAO still hasn’t forgiven us.
2000–2013: Alan Moore
2013–present: John Constantine
John Constantine perhaps has the greatest cover story of all: officially, he is entirely fictional. A creation of his predecessor Alan Moore, he met him in a sandwich shop in 1993, and slowly continued to slip into consensus reality thereafter. Though those like him are ostensibly the very thing HMFC is meant to combat, Constantine proved a useful ally, and his semi-fictional nature has been nothing but an asset during his term as Witchfinder-General, allowing him to neutralise hyperstitions before they can even dream of breaking containment. That said, his time in office has been marred by instutitional rot in the USOAO, with many fearing he is not doing, or cannot do, enough to prevent the rising tide of “meme magic” and metaphysical civil warfare from crossing the pond.
