The Black Toad

The Black Toad
Author: Gemma Gary
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-01-08
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780738765693

Discover the magical practices of Devon and the author's homeland of Cornwall. Within the West Country, the charms, magical practices, and traditions of witchcraft survived long after they had faded in other parts of the British Isles. This book explores the region's fascinating practices of working with spirit forces of the land, the faerie, and animal and plant energies.

West Country Witchcraft

West Country Witchcraft
Author: Gillian MacDonald
Publisher: Green Magic
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2013-09
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780952767039

Wherever you travel in the West Country of England you will encounter evidence of Witchcraft, past and present. Somerset, Devon and Cornwall each have their own essence and unique energy. As a whole this area has been a safe haven since the Ancient Celts and their magical beliefs, and home to many a witch. These witches have adopted many guises over the years. West Country Witchcraft looks at witchcraft in its many forms, both historical and contemporary. There are descriptions of the practitioners, their stories, tools and spells and the magical sites that are used.

Traditional Witchcraft

Traditional Witchcraft
Author: Gemma Gary
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-01-08
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780738765716

Gemma Gary explores modern approaches to ancient practices of witches, charmers, and conjurers of the 18th and 19th centuries. The practices described within this book are rooted in the traditional witchcraft of multiple British streams, making its charms and spells adaptable for practitioners in any land. Topics include fairy faith, the underworld, the Bucca, places of power, magical tools, and more.

Cursed Britain

Cursed Britain
Author: Thomas Waters
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2019-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300249454

The definitive history of how witchcraft and black magic have survived, through the modern era and into the present dayCursed Britain unveils the enduring power of witchcraft, curses and black magic in modern times. Few topics are so secretive or controversial. Yet, whether in the 1800s or the early 2000s, when disasters struck or personal misfortunes mounted, many Britons found themselves believing in things they had previously dismissed – dark supernatural forces.Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

Spells from the Wise Woman's Cottage

Spells from the Wise Woman's Cottage
Author: Steve Patterson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-01-08
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780738765686

Discover a wonderful collection of traditional 19th-century charms and spells from Old Joan, the wise woman at Boscastle's Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Explore the stock and trade of the working witch through the ages as well as fascinating artefacts and magical techniques that were once features of life in the small villages of Devon and Cornwall in southwest England.

Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England, 1640-1789

Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England, 1640-1789
Author: J. Barry
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781349332298

Using south-western England as a focus for considering the continued place of witchcraft and demonology in provincial culture in the period between the English and French revolutions, Barry shows how witch-beliefs were intricately woven into the fabric of daily life, even at a time when they arguably ceased to be of interest to the educated.

Cornish Witchcraft

Cornish Witchcraft
Author: Jason Semmens
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0954683935

Presumed lost in the years since William Henry Paynter's death 40 years ago, this book is the first publication of Paynter's manuscript work on Cornish Witchcraft and folk magic. In the inter war years of the 1920s and '30s Paynter set about recording witch narratives and folklore in Cornwall and Devon, capturing stories and narratives of witchcraft and witch beliefs before they vanished as the 'old folks' died. Paynter was unable to find a publisher for his manuscript in 1939, and the papers were not among his archive when he died in 1976. The manuscript of Paynter's Cornish Witchcraft was recovered in 2009 and became available for study. In publishing this edition, Paynter's rich store of witch stories and folk beliefs becomes widely available for the first time.

Witches of America

Witches of America
Author: Alex Mar
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0374709114

"Witches are gathering." When most people hear the word "witches," they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, witchcraft is a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day magic. Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon. This sprawling magical community compels Mar to confront what she believes is possible-or hopes might be. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.

The Witches Are Coming

The Witches Are Coming
Author: Lindy West
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 031644989X

In this wickedly funny cultural critique, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and Hulu series Shrill exposes misogyny in the #MeToo era. This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you. From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one. In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history. West writes, "We were just a hair's breadth from electing America's first female president to succeed America's first black president. We weren't done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog's whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, 'If I can't have you, no one can'—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House." We cannot understand how we got here‚—how the land of the free became Trump's America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact-checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.