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The History of Witchcraft

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Even in these early times, was the phenomenon gendered? I’ve heard that a common misconception is that all accused witches were women—the trope of the witch as an evil woman, or dark seductress—when actually, there may have been many men who were thought to be witches as well. People often get this wrong—it’s a famous urban myth that there are now so many people on the planet that they outnumber the dead. They really don’t. The dead outnumber us twenty to forty times. It’s part of the reason that London’s so much higher up now, geologically and archeologically, than it was. A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett: “ Tiffany Aching, a hag from a long line of hags, is trying out her witchy talents again as she is plunged into yet another adventure when she leaves home and is apprenticed to a real witch. This time, will the thieving, fighting and drinking skills of the Nac Mac Feegle the Wee Free Men be of use, or must Tiffany rely on her own abilities?” Wiccans avoid evil and the appearance of evil at all costs. Their motto is to “harm none,” and they strive to live a peaceful, tolerant and balanced life in tune with nature and humanity.

It’s the idea that behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions. It’s the fear you feel of death. If you visit any battlefield—even battlefields that are now quite old, like those of the First World War—there’s a haunting sense that here the dead still are, and they’re not going away. For instance, there’s this vast ossuary at Verdun, which has the bones of 55,000 unidentified men in it. There are still trenches where men were buried alive and they haven’t been reburied yet.

Table of Contents

Frazer was not a Witch or a Pagan, but much of what we believe in Greater Pagandom comes straight from Frazer. The modern Wheel of the Year Cycle containing a sacrificial god comes from Frazer, as do many of our ideas about sabbats such as Samhain or Beltane.

The Witches’ Way: Principles, Ritual and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft& Eight Sabbats for Witches by Janet & Stewart Farrar (1986/1988) The publication of “Malleus Maleficarum”—written by two well-respected German Dominicans in 1486—likely spurred witch mania to go viral. The book, usually translated as “The Hammer of Witches,” was essentially a guide on how to identify, hunt and interrogate witches. The town, yes. But have you been to the village? The village renamed itself in the nineteenth century, so many people don’t know it’s there. It renamed itself Danvers. It’s got a memorial to the Salem witches that lived there. The one that lived there that many people know about is Rebecca Nurse. Her house is still there and you can go visit it. Unlike the town, it has this hushed quality. It’s like walking with death. You’re right—the town of Salem is this creepy monetization of the terrifying aspects of the past. That to me is a little uncomfortable. I sometimes want to say to people: you realize actual people died here, right? This isn’t fun. Yes, which is just really weird, actually. One of the oddities about the English that comes from my research on food is that they’re not really very happy with themselves for a people that are often accused of arrogance. They want to eat other people’s food, adopt other people’s fashions, live in other people’s kinds of houses, and, ideally, have a completely different climate and landscape than the one they actually have. Sounds a bit like method acting. And Willerslev says something like that, too—he introduces and defines shamanism and then says it’s a practice of mimesis: “the meeting place of two modes of being-in-the-world—‘engagement’ and ‘reflexivity’”, “not a theory but a ‘faculty’”.This tour de force by another great historian, Lyndal Roper, adds another three crucial dimensions of the history of witchcraft: emotion, psychology and gender. And a theme that combines all three – a theme that runs through the book – is that of fantasy. Witchcraft was not just a crime or a theological construct or a paranoid fear: it was an outlandish confection of the imagination, but one that had real meaning for some confessed witches. Witchcraft was a dream of power for otherwise powerless people, especially poor, elderly, marginal women. I think Edward Thomas, perhaps more than anyone, was alive to the incredible strangeness of England as an entity that had been inhabited for thousands of years by people who had left ample traces, and yet those traces are still lined with other forms of life that also supersede and go beyond those local Anglo-Saxons or Romans or Celts. So it’s that mixture, again, of things that transcend time, and things that are embedded in time, that I think he’s very good at. You can find a translation of it now on the internet, but that’s not very interesting. So I sat there with a complete Lewis Carroll trying to work out what the keyword was. Interestingly, I had a student who worked it out from scratch a few years ago by working out that the first sentence must be ‘I love you’.

Though not my favorite work by Valiente (give me her memoir The Rebirth of Witchcraft everyday of the week!) this is still a tremendous book. It’s a how to book from the woman who wrote many of Modern Witchcraft’s earliest rituals. And Valiente can be counted on to provide clear and practical instructions. The first truly great “101 Book” to come from Great Britain. In modern secular culture, there are rigid distinctions between satanic, demonic, ghostly, haunting and evil. But actually it sounds like these groups were much more porous. I’m aware that there’s an earlier edition of this book, but the 1989 version is the one most of us are familiar with, and it was in every major bookstore throughout the 1990’s. Not only that, it was sometimes in the Feminism section and not the New Age or Witchcraft section at Barnes and Noble. Wow! This was the first easily available book articulating women-only Witchcraft, which makes it highly influential. (I often find myself in disagreement with Budapest-and that’s putting it mildly, especially when it comes to issues concerning trans-women.)

Those people were trapped—the Salem witches were trapped in the same kind of way that you could be trapped on Love Island. People don’t really realize this, but Salem was this tiny clearing in the woods. There was a town in the sense that it was a port, but it’s reasonably distant from the village. If you only had your feet, it would be very distant from the village. Say you’re Abigail Williams and you’re ten years old (she’s one of the principal accusers). You’re living with maybe 200 people and they’re the only people you know. They’re the only people you’ve ever known. There’s no television. There are no books except the Bible. And that’s your world. It’s horrifying! American audiences probably know these two books better as the combined A Witches’ Bible, but they all hold up completely on their own. These two works by the Farrars (with an assist from Doreen Valiente) were the first complete peak inside contemporary Wiccan-Witchcraft coven practice ever published. And unlike the Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows, the Farrars offered context and insight into just how to pull off ritual! Out of all the books on this list, these volumes remain among my most read Witch books.

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