Cambridge University Press is making a new book free to download.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagining the Witches’ Sabbat: Visions of Darkness Since 1900<\/em> <\/a>is a new work by Ethan Doyle White. He is author of several academic works on Wicca and Witchcraft and a member of the editorial board of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n This free download is availalble only through July 17, 2026. Print copies can be ordered too, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cambridge University Press is making a new book free to download. Imagining the Witches’ Sabbat: Visions of Darkness Since 1900 is a new work by Ethan Doyle White. He is author of several academic works on Wicca and Witchcraft and a member of the editorial board of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"Download a free book on the witches' sabbath","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[100,4,29],"class_list":["post-14319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-scholarship","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-3IX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":889,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=889","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":0},"title":"Hunting the Good Graves","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 9, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Caroline Tully, an Australian Witch, has started blogging with an emphasis on artistic expressions about Pagan religion and remembering the dead.Under the photo of a Black Sabbath album cover that she found inspirational once upon a time, she writes:I may as well go on and say that I think my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Wicca\"","block_context":{"text":"Wicca","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=wicca"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":267,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=267","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":1},"title":"H\u00e4xan Continuing our sporadic investigation\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 20, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"H\u00e4xan Continuing our sporadic investigation of cinematic paganism, M. and I watched H\u00e4xan (\"Witches\"), a 1922 silent Swedish film that is available subtitled in English as Witchcraft through the Ages. Released just before Margaret Murray swayed English-speaking readers with her \"survival of the Old Religion despite persecution\" theory, this film\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6687,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6687","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":2},"title":"Blogging Break Over, Book Stuff Ahead","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"I have taken a brief and unwanted break from blogging, but I hope that it is over. First the MacBook Pro that I use for writing and blogging developed a weird, possibly demonic (or daemonic) directory corruption that flummoxed even the specialists up at Voelker Research. About the same time,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Australia\"","block_context":{"text":"Australia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=australia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12197,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12197","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":3},"title":"Lucifer, Women, Witches, Freedom","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 20, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Here Caroline Tully offers a detailed review of Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Per Faxneld. This is more a literary than a religious Satanism, although any story of Satan has its religious underpinnings: Although they attributed positive qualities to the figure of Satan,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"folklore\"","block_context":{"text":"folklore","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=folklore"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/satanic-197x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9245,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9245","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":4},"title":"Our Salem Film Festival","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 8, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by J. W. Ocker's A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts, M. and I held a little Salem film festival. (We skipped The Lords of Salem.) In order of creation, we watched these three movies:\u00a0 Three Sovereigns for Sarah (1985), Hocus Pocus\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13560,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13560","url_meta":{"origin":14319,"position":5},"title":"Helen Cornish on Witchcraft Drumming and Chanting","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 9, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"The article \"Musicking and Soundscapes amongst Magical-Religious Witches Community and Ritual Practices\" by Helen Cornish is available as a free download from Religions journal. Abstract Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Britain\"","block_context":{"text":"Britain","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=britain"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14319"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14324,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14319\/revisions\/14324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Of all the dark visions to haunt the cultural imagination, few have proven so pervasive as the witches’ Sabbath or Sabbat \u2013 an idea born in the fifteenth century. The Sabbath, however, did not remain there, and this Element explores some of the ways in which the witches’ Sabbath has been reimagined since 1900. It considers how early twentieth-century scholars, most notably Margaret Murray and Montague Summers, took it as evidence of a real witches’ religion, and how later historians like Carlo Ginzburg drew upon it in their search for ancient shamanisms. It examines how occultists such as Gerald Gardner, Austin Osman Spare and Andrew Chumbley integrated sabbaths as key elements of their own new religions. Finally, it outlines the role of the Sabbath in literature, film and television, where it has continued to terrify and titillate.<\/blockquote><\/p>\n\n\n\n