First, as a person who uses magical means to cause harm (as judged by their contemporaries). Hutton starts his book by outlining four potential definitions of the word “witch”. What should we, in the even smaller world of Gardnerian Wicca, make of his latest? This review will look at Hutton’s The Witch: A history of fear from ancient times to the present (Yale University Press, 2017) and in parallel at Gardner’s original work that introduced Wicca to the wider world: Witchcraft Today (Rider and Company, 1954). Within the much more limited circles of witchcraft, his reception is more divided there are those who raise him for sweeping away our most outlandish creation myths on the one hand, and on the other, those who feel he is given too much sway precisely because of his academic credentials. Each of Ronald Hutton’s books is greeted with enthusiasm by the general academic community and by the intelligentsia who read the kind of papers that review his kind of books.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |