A new picture of British witchcraft and witch trials

The trend in modern witchcraft studies has been to picture the "confessions" of accused witches as mostly obtained under duress, including torture, with the details supplied by inquisitors eager to confirm their own notions of witchcraft taken from "learned" treatises on demonology.

Recently, some historians have urged that we take the narratives of the accused more seriously. They suggest that the stories contain genuine folkloric traditions of the British rural poor--not about selling one's soul to the Devil, but about certain men and women, known as "cunning folk" , who gain powers of healing and divination by their relations with ancestral spirits of the British countryside, usually desribed as fairies or spirits of the dead.

In "Cunning Folk And Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions In Early Modern British Witchcraft And Magic," historian Emma Wilby studies the witchcraft confessions carefully and locates a consistent thread of folk belief and practice beneath the diabolical veneer applied by the interrogators. She then takes these beliefs and, using a comparative anthropological approach, compares them with shamanic tradition and practices from Siberia and North American Indians, and finds many points of apparent similarity.

In the end she suggests that a popular tradition of native shamanism persisted among the British peasantry since pre-historic times (she asserts that many parts of rural Britain were only thinly Christianized up until the dawn of the modern era). She sugggests that this tradition was the mysticism of the illiterate, comparable to the contemplative visions of the more elite, learned and celebrated narratives of recognized, orthodox Christian mystics and saints.

A fascinating, frequently mind-blowing book, whose ultimate message is that people will always tend to find their own source of mystical experience, even when they are barred from the orthodox channels of the elite milieu they canot hope to enter.