West Country Witchcraft

[Mountain Witch]

Got this one as a Kindle freebie a few days ago ... ran through it in a couple of hours. (US Paperback UK Paperback)

 

Only about 20% of the book is devoted to stories of witchcraft in the West Country. Another 30% or thereabouts is tourism information ... and this is the reason I won't immediately delete it off my Kindle as I do plan on visiting that area some day. The remaining 50% is a rehash of witchcraft history as a whole, personal anecdotes and some recipes and spells either directly copied or modified from another source. (I might add that the authors have a decided Wiccan bent.)

 

The writing suffers terribly from either a complete lack or horrendous job of editing. The Kindle formatting sucks as well; as an example, in their recipe section what I'm sure is meant to be fractions of teaspoons shows up as a superscript "1", verbiage, and then a number I presume is the denominator.

 

The Kindle edition is back up to $5.99/£3.97 as of this writing. Wait until it comes back to free (if it does) before downloading.

[Seed]

Hi MW,

 

You may find Popular romances of the West of England by Robert Hunt and Fairy Faith in Celtic countries by W Y Evans-Wentz of more interest if you enjoy West Country lore with a view to one day visiting our fair land :-) Both publications are freely available on the Sacred Texts site.

[sarasuperid]

I got this book free a few days ago too. Too bad about free books that are only available for a few days, you don't have time to read and review them while they are still free! I've read about a third of it, still in the mostly history and folklore section. I was starting to wonder if it ever got to the practical stuff. Thanks for the review.

[Cam]

The book decidedly takes a wiccan slant, which pretty much takes over from pp. 51 to pp. 64 - titled (the chapter titled Modern Witchcraft in West Country).

 

At the beginning of the book they start off with what I consider to be more of a propaganda platform, rather than dealing with West Country Witchcraft. On page X it states the Malleus Maleficarum defines witches and witchcraft and that it was essentially aimed at further suppression and dis empowerment of women. The authors seem to forget that many of the pointing fingers accusing someone of witchcraft were the fingers of women. So are the women dis empowering themselves?! Hardly, imo. More likely a women or group of women didn't like the women for one reason or another. Men also did the accusing - of women and other men. If one checks history, it was designed for the most part to deal with heretics, who at the time, were mostly men. Then the authors talk about the treatment of women during the inquisition, ignoring the torture and death of many men branded as heretics or witches. The authors further state "In our eyes it was an overtly female act of genocide and one that all branches of the church...sweep under the carpet to this day". Genocide against females...give me an @@#@$% break. The inquisition was aimed at everyone, and many a neighbour - female and male pointed fingers. It is much more likely it was about power, revenge (against one's neighbour or to get rid of one's business competition), religion, fear and money. Old women with property would naturally be a target. So were men a target. So were children a target.

 

The way the book started out almost put me off reading any further into the book. It was lucky it was summer and there was no hearth fire, or it would most likely have ended up there, LOL.

 

They then go on to speak of Pellers and their charms and cures, as well as superstitions, familiars, gypsies, stories about various Pellers (mostly female, even though most Pellers were male), and magical geographic sites.

 

The book goes on to cover various spells and charms, amulets and talismans. But, nothing I have not read before.