The History of Witchcraft

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From a wonderful book about the natural observations of the English forces, it turns out to be fairly typical, actually; the reason many men give is that they’re fighting for the countryside. It’s particularly annoying, then, that governments that want to weaponize their weapons and parade their own patriotism are willing to destroy the countryside they fought for and don’t think these men will mind somehow, or don’t think that they’re betraying anything. One such figure was peculiar to the western Alps. She was the female embodiment of winter, a female figure often called Bertha or Perchta or Befuna. She punished social disobedience and rewarded ‘goodness’. She was always portrayed as an old hag, because she represented cold and winter. It did not take long for intellectuals to note her resemblance to the witches with whom they were familiar from classical literature. Artifacts, things, actually last much longer than people, and can be passed on from one person to another—reused, reinterpreted, redeployed. So it feels really magical that you might come across such an object, as the modern Tom and Jan do, hidden in a fireplace. I was incredibly drawn to the idea of the very old item that you might suddenly come across one day, with nobody knowing it was there at all.

Yes. He talks about the feminization of sorcery and the extent to which sorcery effeminizes some of the shaman figures. I think all of us have a post-Victorian, romanticized view of sorcery. I think it could be a recognition of what our society doesn’t provide to us. And there’s not really a lot of point in a society—or a religion—that’s so delicate in its sensibilities that it doesn’t provide anyone with any emotional equipment to deal with challenges that they will end up facing. Challenges like bereavement. This might be the most “unknown” book on my list, but it probably shouldn’t be. Glass’s book is what Gardner probably wished his books were like, readable. Glass’s history of Witchcraft is not particularly good, but as a snapshot in time it’s a fun look into what people were thinking in 1965. Also of historical value is Glass’s use of the word “Wicca” with two c’s (Gardner spelled it with one “c”) and as the name of the Craft of the Wise, religious Witchcraft. Modern-day witches of the Western World still struggle to shake their historical stereotype. Most practice Wicca, an official religion in the United States and Canada. Before people were publicly identifying as Witches several books were released that helped “set the stage” so to speak. Without these books, Witchcraft as we know it today would be much different.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. The Witches’ Way: Principles, Ritual and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft& Eight Sabbats for Witches by Janet & Stewart Farrar (1986/1988) The Angels of Mons was based on a short story about Agincourt bowmen written by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen. But people took it for a real report, and then started saying they’d seen it, too” 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. Moving on to the witches, I agree that it’s saying something absolutely gorgeous about a refusal to judge between ill effects and good effects and to discriminate.

Briggs is a superb historian. I remember reading this book when it came out, and being blown away by it. It takes the reader deep into a world of social obligations (and their breaches) and networks of people, mostly in economically fragile farming communities. Here, witches reflected the anxieties of their neighbours, who therefore, in a sense, made witches: you can’t have one without the other. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “ In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem. The greed and haughty pride of the Pyncheon family through the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, where the family’s enfeebled and impoverished relations now live. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation–or its downfall.” Would you say then, reading over these books, the appropriate response ought to be something more like fear, or a measured awe or appreciation? Just the degree to which this was even allowed, that the inner censor can be turned off and silenced, is really encouraging. Typically, when we think about the witch trials, one of the things we tend to come up with is some sort of ‘Oh my god, I feel worried, I feel thwarted, I feel like all these women who’ve gone before me ended up being hanged for their pains’. Caryl Churchill, in the play Vinegar Tom (1976), has a sort of scene where a woman is standing in front of the mirror, asking herself what’s stopping her. Ewen doesn’t provide much in the way of analysis. There is a substantial, very useful, introduction, but the really incredible thing about this book is how Ewen managed to comb through the archives, then held in the Public Records Office in London, and find almost all of the witchcraft indictments hidden there. He was an amazing researcher, who provided raw data for subsequent generations of historians.

But we’re nothing like as terrified as we once were. That, in a way, is what all of these books are about. What these writers are trying to do is encourage people to face truthfully the fact that mortality is still a problem the human race has not solved. We mostly now manage our feelings about death by pretending it’s not happening. And that’s not really managing your feelings—that’s actually just burying your head in the sand. I first read Red Shift when I was 15. I’d first read his earlier (and much more accessible) books The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. What I remember about reading Red Shift is that it was completely unlike any book I’d ever read, in that it trusted the reader to make sense of things without holding one’s hand at all, or explaining anything ever. There’s no info dump; there’s no narrator; there’s no Dumbledore figure who in the last chapter plods in and says ‘Harry, I’m going to tell you everything.’ None of that ever happens.