Updated and Revised 2nd Edition! Irish Witchcraft from an Irish Witch is a delightful mixture of academia and accessibility; a book that explores Witchcraft in Ireland: how it was, is, and will be. It succeeds where many books have failed - fulfilling the longing for real Irish Witchcraft, while crafting the delicate balance between learning from the past and weaving a modern system based on truth and respect. Lora O'Brien is an Irish Draoí (user of magic) working closely with her heritage and her native land, providing a contemporary guide to genuine practice. Irish Witchcraft from an Irish Witch explores the past: -- Providing an investigation of the Witches' place in Irish mythology. -- Looking at Witchcraft and magic by examining the customs connected with the Sidhe (the Irish Fairies). -- Examining historical evidence of the Witch trials that swept across the island of Ireland through the ages. And the present and beyond by: -- Working with Irish Gods and Goddesses, landscapes, and energies. -- Examining the wheel of the year, with its festivals, cycles, and seasons of Irish culture. -- Looking at ritual progression through a Witch's life: magical training, physical growth. -- Providing alternatives to the traditional stages of a child's life in modern Irish culture. When it was released in 2004, this was the first traditionally published Pagan book ever written by an Irish author. It was the book that this author had sought, for over a decade previously... The 2nd edition of this book continues to do now what it did for so many on first publication - it bridges the gap between 'Celtic' NeoPagan nonsense, and authentic Irish Pagan Practice.

This is the first academic overview of witchcraft and popular magic in Ireland and spans the medieval to the modern period. Based on a wide range of un-used and under-used primary source material, and taking account of denominational difference between Catholic and Protestant, it provides a detailed account of witchcraft trials and accusation.

Witch trials in the European or American sense were not common in Ireland although they did occur. In this book the stories of four remarkable court cases that took place from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century are told; other chapters chronicle the extraordinary lives of individuals deemed to be practitioners of the black arts – hedge witches, sorcerers and sinister characters. The book gives a unique insight into the fascinating overlap between witch belief and the vast range of fairy lore that held sway for many centuries throughout the land.

Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient's recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied 'sensory shifts' and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.

Early medieval Ireland is remembered as the "Land of Saints and Scholars," due to the distinctive devotion to Christian faith and learning that permeated its culture. As early as the seventh century, however, questions were raised about Irish orthodoxy, primarily concerning Easter observances. Yet heresy trials did not occur in Ireland until significantly later, long after allegations of Irish apostasy from Christianity had sanctioned the English invasion of Ireland. In The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish, Maeve Brigid Callan analyzes Ireland's medieval heresy trials, which all occurred in the volatile fourteenth century. These include the celebrated case of Alice Kyteler and her associates, prosecuted by Richard de Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, in 1324. This trial marks the dawn of the "devil-worshipping witch" in European prosecutions, with Ireland an unexpected birthplace.Callan divides Ireland’s heresy trials into three categories. In the first stand those of the Templars and Philip de Braybrook, whose trial derived from the Templars’, brought by their inquisitor against an old rival. Ledrede’s prosecutions, against Kyteler and other prominent Anglo-Irish colonists, constitute the second category. The trials of native Irishmen who fell victim to the sort of propaganda that justified the twelfth-century invasion and subsequent colonization of Ireland make up the third. Callan contends that Ireland’s trials resulted more from feuds than doctrinal deviance and reveal the range of relations between the English, the Irish, and the Anglo-Irish, and the church’s role in these relations; tensions within ecclesiastical hierarchy and between secular and spiritual authority; Ireland’s position within its broader European context; and political, cultural, ethnic, and gender concerns in the colony.

This book combines two classic topics in social anthropology in a new synthesis: the study of witchcraft and sorcery and the study of rumors and gossip. First, it shows how rumor and gossip are invariably important as catalysts for accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. Second, it demonstrates the role of rumor and gossip in the genesis of social and political violence, as in the case of both peasant rebellions and witch-hunts. Examples supporting the argument are drawn from Africa, Europe, India, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.