ABSTRACT
Interest in the subject of witchcraft has grown enormously in recent decades. Practising witches such as Starhawk describe it as ‘reborn’, ‘re-nascent’ as a magical practice, whilst for others its renaissance lies in research and discussion of its history.1 As it is remade and grows, it also changes. At present, witchcraft is less likely than at any time in its history to be seen as an exceptional matter, concerned with hysteria, cultic depravity, gynocide (the mass murder of women) or other extremes of human behaviour. Instead it is being reconstructed as part of a continuum of activities and beliefs worthy of exploration and investigation in both its historical and modern incarnations. ‘Witchcraft studies’ seems to have reached a moment of critical mass where it is noticed in and beyond the academic world as a coherent body of scholarship and as a subject in its own right. Public and academic curiosity have met in unexpected ways: enter ‘witchcraft’ as a search keyword on the world wide web, and both pagan networks and university resource centres will be listed. Several universities now run undergraduate modules and postgraduate programmes of study dealing partly or exclusively with the subject of witchcraft, and sustained interest from the academy, the media and the general public has fuelled a spate of theses, articles and books. Most bookshops now contain a section on occult and historiographic writings on the subject of witches – a section full of surprising contrasts, as Jim Sharpe notes in his 1996 history of English witchcraft, Instruments of Darkness.2 Contemporary handbooks on Wicca, the Tarot, earth magic and palmistry sit cover to cover with severely rationalist texts, feminist readings of witchcraft plays and microhistories of significant cases several centuries old. Starhawk and Sharpe cohabit self-consciously on the shelf. This profusion and confusion of interest is reflected outside the bookshop, in a way which reinforces a growing perception
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1 Starhawk (Miriam Simos), subtitled her The Spiral Dance (1979; New York: HarperCollins, 1999) with the words A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess.
