Witchcraft is a practice that has ancient origins and has been present in various cultures throughout history. It is often associated with the use of supernatural powers and abilities, usually for a selfish or negative purpose. The term "witchcraft" itself is derived from the Old English word "wiccecræft", which means the craft of the witch. In many societies, witchcraft was feared and condemned, leading to the persecution of those believed to be witches. This was particularly prevalent during the time of the European witch hunts in the 15th to 18th centuries. Many innocent people, mostly women, were accused of practicing witchcraft and were subjected to horrific torture and execution.
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
Many innocent people, mostly women, were accused of practicing witchcraft and were subjected to horrific torture and execution. However, it is important to note that witchcraft is not inherently evil or negative. It can be seen as a spiritual practice that seeks to harness the natural energies of the universe for healing, protection, and personal growth.
I spent a week becoming a witch and the results were worrying
I t’s the new year. I could have given up booze and bacon, or embarked on a punishing new fitness regime. But these seemed too harsh for the drab days of January and besides, I had more ambitious plans for personal transformation. Namely, to turn myself into a witch.
At this opening of a scary new decade, we’re in the midst of a resurgent interest in all things mystic, superstitious or more than a little bit woo. As the New Yorker magazine observed, “astrology is currently enjoying a broad cultural acceptance that hasn’t been seen since the 1970s”. And its cousin in dogged resistance to logic, specifically witchcraft, is also having something of a moment, refitted for the age of self-care as a way for women to reconnect with themselves and the natural world. Think crystals, not cauldrons. Last summer, Publishers Weekly noted that witchcraft was one of the strongest trends in the “mind-body-spirit” category, and the interest shows no sign of abating.
While never knowingly on trend – it took me five years to attempt a jumpsuit – I decided, for once, to seize the cultural zeitgeist. I picked up a copy of the newly published The Modern Witch’s Guide to Happiness by Luna Bailey and set my cynical self a New Year, New Me challenge.
40 books to read while self-isolating
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40 books to read while self-isolating
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe
A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
40 books to read while self-isolating
1984, George Orwell
The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
40 books to read while self-isolating
To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
40 books to read while self-isolating
Middlemarch, George Eliot
This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Secret History, Donna Tartt
Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Dune, Frank Herbert
You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
40 books to read while self-isolating
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
40 books to read while self-isolating
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Trial, Frank Kafka
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
40 books to read while self-isolating
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40 books to read while self-isolating
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
Monday
Right. This witching business. One of the things I need, along with a suspension of belief in the scientific underpinnings of the universe, is an altar. Not to sacrifice a goat upon – no, this book is whiter than a student union snowflake – but to claim a space for “creativity, spiritual growth and guidance”. Recommendations include some bright cloth, salt (“protective and purifying and represents the Earth’s energy”), plus objects to suggest earth, fire, air, water and spirit. I manage a pot plant, a small bottle of Polish plum vodka (spirit and fire in one – boom) and a stripy scarf. It doesn’t look anything like the Instagrammable extravaganza in the book, but at least it made me tidy my bedside table. By the end of the day, though, it has been joined by a light smattering of cat hair and my four-year-old’s lego T rex. Is the universe trying to tell me something?
Witches collect objects that suggest earth, fire, air, water and spirit (Joanna Kosinska/Unsplash)Tuesday
Crystal-shopping time: no self-respecting witch in this new age of Aquarius would be without these ubiquitous lumps of pretty rock. I take myself to a gift shop. The book informs me that I should allow myself to be drawn to the crystal that has meaning for me. I position myself in front of a stand of crystal bracelets. Will it be the pastel-pink rose quartz, with qualities of “love, peace and tenderness” apparently laced into its silicon and oxygen atoms; or the “playful” inky-black bornite? I close my eyes, then open them. I found myself uncannily drawn to something, after all. It’s the price tag. Ten quid! I am propelled out of the shop by unseen forces.
Wednesday
Finally, some advice I can wholeheartedly embrace: five tips for making simple connections with nature, from touching leaves to noticing sights and sounds. Tricky but not impossible if you’re schlepping to work on the tube; easy where I live and instantly soothing. A frail yellow autumn leaf clinging by a thread; a rubbery weed poking through a desert of gravel; you get the picture. Another edict is to appreciate the seasons, including picking up an acorn or pine cone in autumn and keeping it through winter. Turns out I was witchy all along, as some colleagues would probably attest: in my coat pocket I still have a perfect, hard conker that I found in October. I don’t believe it offered me protection through the winter months, as the book claims; I just like the feel of it. I suspect a large part of the appeal of witchcraft today is the emphasis it places on slowing down, switching off from your phone and taking notice of the natural world.
Crystals are essential – but they don’t come cheap (Dan Farrell/Unsplash)Thursday
Since I am well into my first week as a witch, I decide the time has come to attempt my first spell. None of the “magick” incantations listed involve putting a pox on my enemies, which will be a relief to the landlord who has failed to fix my broken boiler; they’re all perky personal growth exercises. After a skim, I settle on a “burning and banishing spell”. This involves writing down worries or unwanted personality traits on a piece of paper, then setting fire to it. Next to “tax return” I put “knee-jerk scoffing cynicism”. I would have set it on fire but I was too cynical to waste a match.
In fairness, there is a reasonable body of evidence to suggest that “journaling” is good for us. Taking time to think about and articulate what we want to let go of is no doubt psychologically healthy; for me, it’s the puff of smoke that’s a step too far.
The Modern Witch’s Guide to Happiness (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd)Friday
The last weekday, and time to take it up a level: I open the chapter on tarot and prepare to dabble in divination. I don’t have an actual set of cards, but witchcraft has a relaxed, homespun kind of vibe so I improvise. I raid my daughter’s toy drawer, find a set of sea-creature playing cards, and get reading. I must focus on my personal objectives, then hold the cards or lay them on a surface. The book suggests I start by selecting three cards and using them to answer three questions: “What is my dream? What is stopping me? What is the reality?”
If you go looking for a pattern in tarot cards, you will find it (Getty)I turn three cards over: dolphin, shark, dolphin. The interpretation should apparently come from my own intuition. Dolphins are playful creatures; sharks are scary. For an actual moment, I find myself thinking: this makes sense! I want to spend more time on creative work; fear is holding me back; but the reality is I’m still a creative person underneath.
And there we have it: confirmation bias. You go looking for a pattern, and you will find it, even in a pack of deeply non-mystic marine-animal cards bought to entertain a small child on a rainy holiday in France. Our brains are built to leap to conclusions, to see what’s not really there – helpful if the twitching leaves might hold a crouching sabre-toothed tiger; misleading in modernity. It’s part of the reason we’re all such credulous suckers, still seduced by superstition at a time when we have the technology to make a space probe orbit Saturn.
Saturday and Sunday
I spend the weekend pondering all things witchy. On the one hand, it’s hard not to snort coffee through your nostrils when you read that water that has had rose quartz soaking in it can be given to soothe traumatised animals. On the other, witchcraft is no less irrational than any other religion and many of its practices are in fact a fairly reasonable response to the major challenges of our time. Rediscovering nature, reclaiming the sexist trope of the witch as a symbol of female empowerment, switching off from the constant thrum of social media and consumerism: what’s not to like?
Many of witchcraft’s practices are a fairly reasonable response to the major challenges of our time (Getty)
(Getty Images)The answer, of course, is that however benign or even beneficial the rituals, it’s all built on a wobbling base of bats***. No matter how many spells we cast to ask the universe for help, the universe isn’t listening. On a personal level, it’s probably better for us to just accept that life doesn’t always go our way and lower our expectations: Catherine Gray’s wonderful The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary is a lovely new year read on finding the magic (no k needed) in the mundane. And on a broader level, the recent zest for the mystic is part of a worrying backlash against the enlightenment values that have driven human progress. On the one end of the political spectrum, you get the anti-vaxx movement; on the other, climate change deniers. Standing in the light of a full moon to recite our resolutions may be harmless, but as a society we shun science at our peril.
Many modern practitioners of witchcraft, often referred to as Wiccans or witches, follow a nature-based religion that celebrates the cycles of the earth and worships a goddess and/or god. Witchcraft is characterized by various practices and rituals, which can differ among individuals and traditions. These may include spellcasting, divination, herbalism, and the use of ritual tools such as wands, athames (ritual knives), and cauldrons. Some witches also work with familiars, which are believed to be spiritual beings or animals that assist them in their magical endeavors. Modern witchcraft has gained popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of individuals interested in exploring their own spiritual beliefs and connecting with the natural world. There are now numerous books, online resources, and communities dedicated to the study and practice of witchcraft. It is important to approach witchcraft with respect and caution, as with any spiritual or magical practice. It is not a quick fix for personal problems or a means to achieve power over others. Rather, it is a journey of self-discovery, personal empowerment, and connection with the divine..
Reviews for "The role of familiars in witchcraft"
- John - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to learn about witchcraft, but this book just didn't live up to my expectations. It felt more like a collection of basic information that I could have easily found online rather than a comprehensive guide. I was hoping for more in-depth explanations and practical advice, but it just skimmed the surface of each topic. Overall, I found it to be quite disappointing and would not recommend it to anyone looking to truly delve into the subject.
- Sarah - 1/5 stars - The title "Introduction to witchcraft" is very misleading. This book barely scratches the surface and doesn't provide any substantial information or guidance. It felt more like a glorified pamphlet rather than a comprehensive introduction. I was expecting to learn about the history of witchcraft, different traditions, and practical exercises, but instead, I got vague explanations and generic advice. Save your money and look for something more substantial if you're genuinely interested in learning about witchcraft.
- Alex - 3/5 stars - I had some mixed feelings about "Introduction to witchcraft". While the book does provide some basic information for beginners, I found it lacking in more advanced topics. Additionally, the writing style felt a bit dry and uninspiring, making it hard to stay engaged. It may be a decent starting point for someone completely new to witchcraft, but if you're looking for a more comprehensive and engaging read, I would recommend exploring other options.