I see how all that ties together and it’s marvelous. Let’s talk about your second choice by Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts by Z. Budapest (1989)

Tell us about your logic of choosing these books, because many of them are not directly about witches or witchcraft. In the 1950’s and 60’s the first public Witches stepped forward in Great Britain and the United States. Though none of them felt comfortable writing a “101” book, much of their early work does contain a few things that are readily identifiable to most of us today. None of these books have aged well, but they remain valuable peaks into a different era. The Crucible by Arthur Miller: “ Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.” Most people think that witches are a Christian invention. But the idea of the witch who flies in the night and draws power from dark cosmic forces to work her ill will on others pre-dates Christianity, probably by many centuries. The witch roused Samuel, who then prophesied the death of Saul and his sons. The next day, according to the Bible, Saul’s sons died in battle, and Saul committed suicide.

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The Tree was the first book to describe an entire Witchcraft system/tradition with some sort of depth, and unlike Sheba’s Book of Shadows, it broke no oaths while doing so. I often think of The Tree as a book for solitaries, but as Aidan Kelly points out in the comments below, it does contain a full compliment of the usual ritual roles one finds in a coven. Still, if you were a solitary, this was probably the place to start in the 1970’s. The easy equation of autism with madness was one of the most nightmarish aspects of the response to her. My eldest daughter is autistic, so I have to come out and say I have a vested interest in neurodiversity. But equally, I thought that a lot of it was about the same kinds of issues that crop up repeatedly in the witch trials, most famously at Salem, where little girls actually seize the opportunity to get their annoyingly, obstreperously bossy elders into tons of trouble. There’s a wonderful ballad by one of the descendants of the Salem witches called ‘I, But a Little Girl’. This is one of the things that the accusers at Salem say: “we be but little girls”. And with Salem there’s a bit of the theme park aspect that you mentioned earlier with respect to the Reformation and ossuary at St. Paul’s, too. If you visit today, surrounding the quiet, quaint memorial is a town that’s a total tourist trap. It’s a little tasteless.

Though not my favorite work by Valiente (give me her memoir The Rebirth of Witchcraft everyday of the week!) this is still a tremendous book. It’s a how to book from the woman who wrote many of Modern Witchcraft’s earliest rituals. And Valiente can be counted on to provide clear and practical instructions. The first truly great “101 Book” to come from Great Britain. It’s the idea that behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions. It’s the fear you feel of death. If you visit any battlefield—even battlefields that are now quite old, like those of the First World War—there’s a haunting sense that here the dead still are, and they’re not going away. For instance, there’s this vast ossuary at Verdun, which has the bones of 55,000 unidentified men in it. There are still trenches where men were buried alive and they haven’t been reburied yet. Those people were trapped—the Salem witches were trapped in the same kind of way that you could be trapped on Love Island. People don’t really realize this, but Salem was this tiny clearing in the woods. There was a town in the sense that it was a port, but it’s reasonably distant from the village. If you only had your feet, it would be very distant from the village. Say you’re Abigail Williams and you’re ten years old (she’s one of the principal accusers). You’re living with maybe 200 people and they’re the only people you know. They’re the only people you’ve ever known. There’s no television. There are no books except the Bible. And that’s your world. It’s horrifying!Charlotte was deeply disturbed by her own feelings, and I think you could argue that’s a pretty good index of what happens in the witch trials. A reminder: most of the accusers were women as well, in England. One of my very favorite witches uses what’s described as a dried piece of flesh for fortune-telling. It’s not very clear how she uses it, nor do we ever learn in the course of the trial what the flesh was. Was it animal flesh? Was it human flesh? What was it, actually? A warning of tyranny on the way’ … Samantha Colley as Abigail Williams in the Old Vic’s 2014 production of The Crucible. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In England, 90% of the accused were women. But in other countries, more than half of the accused were men” De Blécourt then declares that my five chosen global characteristics for a witch are ‘historically inaccurate’ because I do not give a pact with the devil ‘absolute priority’ in them, to fit the Continental European norm. In fact the demonic pact fits neatly into my fourth characteristic of a witch worldwide, that such a person is inherently evil and/or works in alliance with superhuman powers of evil. I go on to explain that early modern Europe was, however, unique in the world in extending this trait into the adoption of a fully-formed satanic anti-religion. De Blecourt also faults me for neglecting the figure of the ‘profiteering (male) witch’ from one area of north-western Europe, while admitting that it would not fit my definition of witches, as humans who cause harm by uncanny means. I would suggest that it would thereby not fit most people’s definition of a witch either.Originally published in 1970, this was another foundational text for me and other witchcraft scholars of my generation.

Behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions” So we find that the supernatural, in the form of a perpetual haunting, can be a cipher of emotion and trauma. In The Viking Way, Price also talks about female sorcery in this period and demystifies common misconceptions about practices of shamanism. Is the picture of ‘sorcery’ he ultimately posits very different than our modern image of what a female sorceress was? The other recurring character that I absolutely loved is this, pictured on the cover. Even though this isn’t the edition I first read it in, I love it, because it features the Neolithic hand-axe. All three of the couples possess this hand-axe and use it in different ways; it’s the unity of power between them. The consequence was that in deleting good relations with the dead, people were inspired to a greater level of fear than before about the passing of time. The visible figures of the poor, elderly, disabled trundling around, looking as though they weren’t long for this world, came to represent old age and death for them. Let’s not forget that in Norse myth, old age is an old woman. And she beats Thor at wrestling because even Thor can’t top old age! People often get this wrong—it’s a famous urban myth that there are now so many people on the planet that they outnumber the dead. They really don’t. The dead outnumber us twenty to forty times. It’s part of the reason that London’s so much higher up now, geologically and archeologically, than it was.That makes me think of you saying a few minutes ago that so many of those persecuted as witches in early modern England were elderly—were the people whose sons, children and fellow community members had to face (or had trouble facing) the fact that they were going to die. We foist the facts of the external narrative to match what we internally feel to be true, which is often nuanced, complicated and impossible to explain. Sounds a bit like method acting. And Willerslev says something like that, too—he introduces and defines shamanism and then says it’s a practice of mimesis: “the meeting place of two modes of being-in-the-world—‘engagement’ and ‘reflexivity’”, “not a theory but a ‘faculty’”.