What it is
Two different literatures share the word "witchcraft". The first, written between about 1430 and 1700, is the work of theologians, judges, and physicians arguing over whether witches existed, what they did, and how they should be tried. The accused left almost no books of their own.
The second begins in the twentieth century, when people began to call themselves witches as a religious identity, and it is written from the inside. Between the two stands a nineteenth-century romantic literature that imagined the witch as the priestess of a surviving Pagan religion. The historical evidence does not support that idea, but it gave modern Pagan witchcraft its founding story, and the books that carried it are part of the record.
Where to begin
For the trials, read Reginald Scot, who is funny as well as humane. For the modern movement, read Gardner's Witchcraft Today beside Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, one from the first generation and one looking back on it.
The age of the trials
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Canon Episcopi Latin. First recorded about 906. L 7
A piece of church law that dismisses as delusion the belief of certain women that they ride at night with the goddess Diana. For centuries it was the main authority against belief in the flight of witches, and the demonologists had to argue their way around it.
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Malleus Maleficarum Heinrich Kramer. Latin. 1486. L 7
"The Hammer of Witches": a manual on the reality of witchcraft, its association with women, and the procedure for trying it. It was less official and less universally accepted than its later fame suggests, but it went through many editions.
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De praestigiis daemonum Johann Weyer. Latin. 1563. L 7
A physician's argument that most accused witches were deluded or ill and should be treated, not burned. Weyer did not deny the power of the Devil, only the guilt of the women.
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The Discoverie of Witchcraft Reginald Scot. English. 1584. L 7
A country gentleman's attack on the whole belief, which exposes conjuring tricks and reprints charms and conjurations in order to ridicule them, with the ironic result that later magicians used it as a sourcebook.
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Daemonologie James VI of Scotland. English. 1597. L 7
A dialogue defending the reality of witchcraft, written by a king who had attended the examination of accused witches in person.
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Cautio Criminalis Friedrich Spee. Latin. 1631. L 7
A confessor who had accompanied condemned witches to the stake argues that torture produces confessions regardless of guilt. One of the books that turned opinion against the trials.
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The Wonders of the Invisible World and More Wonders of the Invisible World Cotton Mather, 1693, and Robert Calef, 1700. English. L 7
The Salem trials of 1692, defended by a minister and attacked by a merchant.
The romantic reinvention
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La Sorciere Jules Michelet. French. 1862. B 3
A historian's prose poem that casts the medieval witch as a rebel, a healer, and a priestess of nature. Brilliant, influential, and largely imagined.
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Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches Charles Godfrey Leland. 1899. B 5
Presented as the scripture of a surviving Italian witch religion, obtained from a Tuscan fortune-teller named Maddalena. Its authenticity has been argued over ever since. Passages from it passed directly into modern Wiccan liturgy.
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The Witch-Cult in Western Europe Margaret Murray. 1921. B 3
Argued from trial records that the witches were members of an organized pre-Christian fertility religion. Historians have rejected the thesis as resting on selective quotation, but for forty years it was widely accepted, and it supplied the historical claim on which Wicca was founded.
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The White Goddess Robert Graves. 1948. B 3
"A historical grammar of poetic myth": a poet's vision of a single ancient goddess of birth, love, and death, and of a tree alphabet encoding her calendar. Graves offered it as the truth of poetry. Many readers took it as history.
Gardner and Wicca
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Witchcraft Today Gerald Gardner. 1954. B 5
The book that announced the existence of a living witch religion in England, written by a retired civil servant who said he had been initiated into a surviving coven in 1939. It appeared three years after the repeal of the last English Witchcraft Act. With its sequel, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), it is the founding public document of Wicca.
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The Book of Shadows A manuscript tradition from about 1950. B 5
Not one book but a kind of book: the handwritten ritual text that each initiate copies. Gardner's own drew on ceremonial magic, Leland, Crowley, and folklore, and was much revised by Doreen Valiente. Versions have been in print since the 1970s.
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An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present and The Rebirth of Witchcraft Doreen Valiente. 1973 and 1989. B 5
Valiente wrote much of the best-loved Wiccan liturgy, including the usual form of the Charge of the Goddess. Her memoir of 1989 is the most candid inside account of the early years.
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What Witches Do Stewart Farrar. 1971. B 5
A journalist's report from inside a London coven, and the first widely read description of Wiccan practice by a participant.
Growth and change
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Drawing Down the Moon Margot Adler. 1979, with revised editions to 2006. B 6
A journalist's survey of Witches, Druids, and other Pagans in the United States. The best single portrait of the movement in its formative decades.
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Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft Raymond Buckland. 1986. B 5
A workbook in fifteen lessons by the man who brought Gardner's tradition to the United States in the 1960s. Known to its readers as the Big Blue Book, it taught a generation to practice without a coven.
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Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner Scott Cunningham. 1988. B 5
Made the case, gently and persuasively, that one could be Wiccan alone and self-dedicated. It marks the turn from an initiatory religion to a largely solitary one.
Druidry and other revivals
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Barddas Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams). Welsh and English. Published 1862. B 4
Presented as the ancient lore of the Welsh bards, and in large part composed by its collector. A forgery of genius and a real source for the modern Druid revival, whose rites still use its prayers and symbols.
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The Book of Druidry Ross Nichols. Published 1990. B 4
History and teaching by a leading figure of twentieth-century Druidry, issued after his death.
Modern Heathenry takes the Eddas and the Icelandic sagas as its primary texts, and the reconstructed Hellenic, Roman, and Egyptian polytheisms work from the ancient sources. Those are described under Pagan literature.
Folk practice
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Carmina Gadelica Alexander Carmichael. Gaelic and English. 1900. L 6
Prayers, blessings, and charms collected in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and islands of Scotland. Christian in form, older in feeling, and heavily polished by its editor.
Things to watch for
- Numbers. The figure of nine million executed witches is an eighteenth-century guess that became a slogan. Current estimates are in the range of forty to sixty thousand executions in Europe between about 1450 and 1750.
- The Old Religion. Wicca is a twentieth-century religion with older materials in it. That is no criticism of it. But books that claim an unbroken descent from the Stone Age are stating a belief, not a finding.
- Wicca and witchcraft. The words are not interchangeable. Wicca is one religion. Witchcraft is a far wider and older word, and many modern witches are not Wiccan.
- Oathbound material. Some initiatory traditions regard their ritual texts as private. Printed versions may be partial, altered, or published against their wishes.
On the shelves
The literature of the trials, with the critics who answered it, is shelved at the South Gate in class L 7, and charm collections in L 6. At the West Gate, the romantic and comparative studies are in class B 3, revival and reconstruction in B 4, modern Pagan witchcraft in B 5, and general works on modern Paganism in B 6. Newsletters and zines of the movement are in the Waters.