The Visions of Isobel Gowdie

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie PDF Author: Emma Wilby
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837642079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
The confessions of Isobel Gowdie are widely recognised as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Using historical, psychological, comparative religious and anthropological perspectives, this book sets out to separate the voice of Isobel Gowdie from that of her interrogators.

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie PDF Author: Emma Wilby
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837642079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
The confessions of Isobel Gowdie are widely recognised as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Using historical, psychological, comparative religious and anthropological perspectives, this book sets out to separate the voice of Isobel Gowdie from that of her interrogators.

The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie

The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie PDF Author: Michael McGrinder
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533090560
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
sobel Gowdie has been unfairly labelled "The Witch Queen of Scotland" largely due to her confessions to witchcraft being a matter of historical record. Michael McGrinder tells Isobel's story on a grand canvas spanning a period of seventeen years. This full-length play is not for the prudish nor is it for the faint-hearted, but neither is it for those without a sense of humor or deep compassion. It is for those who like a good story well-told and for those especially who enjoy a love story. It is definitely for all who appreciate great theatre!

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits PDF Author: Emma Wilby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In the hundreds of confessions relating to witchcraft and sorcery trials from early modern Britain we frequently find detailed descriptions of intimate working relationships between popular magical practitioners and familiar spirits of either human or animal form. Until recently historians often dismissed these descriptions as elaborate fictions created by judicial interrogators eager to find evidence of stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Although this paradigm is now routinely questioned, and most historians acknowledge that there was a folkloric component to familiar lore in the period, these beliefs and the experiences reportedly associated with them, remain substantially unexamined. Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits examines the folkloric roots of familiar lore from historical, anthropological and comparative religious perspectives. It argues that beliefs about witches' familiars were rooted in beliefs surrounding the use of fairy familiars by beneficent magical practitioners or 'cunning folk', and corroborates this through a comparative analysis of familiar beliefs found in traditional native American and Siberian shamanism. The author explores the experiential dimension of familiar lore by drawing parallels between early modern familiar encounters and visionary mysticism as it appears in both tribal shamanism and medieval European contemplative traditions. These perspectives challenge the reductionist view of popular magic in early modern British often presented by historians.

Invoking the Akelarre

Invoking the Akelarre PDF Author: Emma Wilby
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782846220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 667

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Book Description
With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.

Salem Possessed

Salem Possessed PDF Author: Paul Boyer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674282663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it. From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.” Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.

Bitter Magic: Inspired by the True Story of a Confessed Witch

Bitter Magic: Inspired by the True Story of a Confessed Witch PDF Author: Nancy Hayes Kilgore
Publisher: Milford House Press
ISBN: 9781620068427
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A chance encounter leads teenaged Margaret into the circle of Isobel Gowdie, a "cunning woman" who practices magic and travels in the fairy world. But Scotland is aflame with wars over religion and "correct" belief-English against Scots, Catholics against Protestants-and in the Scottish Highlands, the witch craze is at its height. When Margaret starts to meet with Isobel to learn magic, Isobel is accused of witchcraft, and Margaret becomes a suspect, too. Can Margaret's tutor, Katharine, a Christian mystic, affect the outcome? Bitter Magic is inspired by the true story of the witchcraft trial of Isobel Gowdie in 1662.

Wiccapedia

Wiccapedia PDF Author: Shawn Robbins
Publisher: Union Square + ORM
ISBN: 1402789033
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Learn how contemporary practitioners go about the magickal business of witchcraft, including how to cast spells positively for better results. Wiccapedia provides a fresh, innovative, and thoroughly up-to-date look at witchcraft—and gives readers a prescription for happiness. “Spiritual life coaches” and celebrity witches Shawn Robbins and Leanna Greenaway unlock the secrets of the Wicca universe, explaining what it means to become a “simply fabulous” 21st-century Witch. Newfound Witches will learn how to tap into magic, re-empower themselves, and realize their dreams through a little witchy know how.

The Occult Laboratory

The Occult Laboratory PDF Author: Michael Hunter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0851158013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Magic, science and second sight in 17c Scottish Higlands, with new edition of Kirk's Secret Commonwealth.

Satan's Conspiracy

Satan's Conspiracy PDF Author: P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 9781862321366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Synthesizing the evidence for magic and witchcraft in 16th-century Scotland, this book profiles unpublished manuscripts, 19th- and early-20th-century transcriptions, and passing remarks in the histories of shires and boroughs. Preliminary suggestions are made about how these sources can be interpreted, so that nature scholars of Scottish witchcraft in particular will be able to more easily construct their theories with the analyses provided.

Contemporary Religious Satanism

Contemporary Religious Satanism PDF Author: Jesper Aagaard Petersen
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754652861
Category : Religion
Languages : ru
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Despite the fascinating nature of religious Satanism, it has attracted little scholarship until relatively recently. This book brings together a group of international scholars to produce the first serious book-length study of religious Satanism, presenting a collection that will have wide appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. The first part contains broader studies of influential groups and important aspects of the Satanic milieu, especially regarding historical developments, the construction of tradition and issues of legitimacy. The second part narrows the view to regional variations, especially with studies on Northern and Eastern Europe. The third part consists of primary documents selected for their representational and informational value.