Archive for the 'Classic Wiccan Bookshelf' Category
This book written in the middle of the 17th century in ancient English can either be humorous or frightening. This was written to aid good people in discovering witches in their midst so they might be killed!
Why did people want to kill witches? You can blame this action on the church, in order to have complete domination of peoples lives and fortunes it was necessary for the church to spread false rumors regarding witches. Like most decisions of the early church it was based on business and greed. If alternative religions were to be allowed that would compete with the church for donations and tithes.
Witches have never worshiped Satan, the Devil was invented by the church so good and evil could balance out. And scare the populace into following the decrees of the church lest they be condemned to hell.
If you can get past the Olde English writing this makes an interesting read.
inferior animals. The latter live only for the day, and see for the
most part only what is immediately before them. But man lives in the
past and the future. He reasons upon and improves by the past; he
records the acts of a long series of generations: and he looks into
future time, lays down plans which he shall be months and years in
bringing to maturity, and contrives machines and delineates systems
of education and government, which may gradually add to the
accommodations of all, and raise the species generally into a nobler
and more honourable character than our ancestors were capable of
sustaining.
Man looks through nature, and is able to reduce its parts into a great
whole. He classes the beings which are found in it, both animate and
inanimate, delineates and describes them, investigates their
properties, and records their capacities, their good and evil
qualities, their dangers and their uses.”
As a service to our readers we are searching out classic books on Wiccan subjects that are out of print and out of copyright. We are compiling there into PDF Format e-books for you to download here at no cost to help you become more enlightened. This is our first offering
THE WITCH-CULT IN WESTERN EUROPE, A Study in Anthropology, BY MARGARET ALICE MURRAY Published in 1921 at Oxford University in England.
This is from the Preface:
The mass of existing material on this subject is so great that I have not
attempted to make a survey of the whole of European ‘Witchcraft’, but have
confined myself to an intensive study of the cult in Great Britain. In
order, however, to obtain a clearer understanding of the ritual and beliefs
I have had recourse to French and Flemish sources, as the cult appears to
have been the same throughout Western Europe. The New England records are
unfortunately not published _in extenso_; this is the more unfortunate as
the extracts already given to the public occasionally throw light on some
of the English practices. It is more difficult to trace the English
practices than the Scotch or French, for in England the cult was already in
a decadent condition when the records were made; therefore records in a
purely English colony would probably contain much of interest.
The sources from which the information is taken are the judicial records
and contemporary chroniclers. In the case of the chroniclers I have studied
their facts and not their opinions. I have also had access to some
unpublished trials among the Edinburgh Justiciary Records and also in the
Guernsey Greffe.
This is a scholarly tome, chronicling the history of Witchcraft in Western Europe.
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