PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT

From the editor: "Scotch, sombre, and sinister, this is an extraordinary and in some ways a dreadful book, a remorseless study of the devilish masquerade of religion inflicted on the Lowlands by the sixth James." -Michael Temple in TheReference

In the progress of the witch four comprehensive stages are noticeable. She was in the beginning the counsellor and consoler of man, the genius of the domestic arts, the treasury of knowledge, and the inspiration of belief. She was the prophet, priest, and king of paganism, and her territory was the world. In her second stage her children, grown up and envious of her, blessed her no longer, and there sounded the hour of challenge.

"A wise woman I am, and for that sin -to divers ill names men would pen me in."

Science had commenced the abduction of her ancient lore, and what had been popular superstition was rapidly becoming pure knowledge. Her decline set in. She sank from official recognition to the popular adherence of the common people. Her philosophy was welcomed as a defiance of social and religious tyrannies, and even formed its tenets into a political factor of revolution.

The third stage is the familiar and terrible period of the religious persecutions, when the Middle Ages were obsessed by a sense of the Devil abroad. The oldest antagonism of man-the conflict between the things of earth and of heaven-now found in the witch an actual physical victim, and the long degradation of the spiritual actually gave to those concerned in her oppression a sense of crusade and moral victory.

This study of witchcraft in social history goes beyond the boundaries of historical survey. It has seemed to me permissible to accept the witch not merely as an actual personage, but as a symbol of the predominant instinct toward what may be termed a philosophy of comfort,' against which ethics and pure knowledge have striven and are striving to-day. In her philosophy the witch appealed, whether in medicine, ritual, or literature, to what is recognized as ' popular' rather than to the scientific or arduous.

This line of least resistance as reproduced in modern life and thought is consequently, I think, of more than casual correlation to our subject, and it is upon this assumption that I have built the fourth and final phase of witchcraft... -IAN FERGUSON, March 1924

Pages: 218, Import
Special Interest: Magick, WitchCraft, Wicca, Shamanism, Occult, Anthropology, Ceremony, Secret Societies, History, Ritual, Study & Practice, Religion, Culture.

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