Witches

Selected Bibliography

The material available on the subject of witchcraft is vast. Any reader whose appetite has been whetted by this book should certainly read further.

In the interests of brevity, this bibliography has been drastically pruned to include only those books available to the general public. Good luck!

Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon. New York: Viking Press, 1979. Perhaps the best (and most current) general introduction to witchcraft available today; written by a member of the craft.

Bachofen, J. J. Myth, Religion and Mother Right. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967. The classic work on ancient matriarchy.

Bell, Jessie Wicker. The Grimoire of Lady Sheba. St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 1974. A modern grimoire by a Gardnerian witch.

Briggs, Katharine. Pale Hecate’s Team. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Beliefs in magic and witchcraft in Shakespeare’s time.

—. The Vanishing People. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. The definitive book on fairies by the eminent English folklorist.

Buckland, Raymond. Witchcraft from the Inside. St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 1975. A general history by a Gardnerian initiate.

—. The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1978. Another contemporary handbook on witchcraft.

Budapest, Zsuzsuanna E. The Feminist Book of Lights & Shadows. Venice, California: Luna Publications, 1976. The most widely used feminist grimoire.

Burr, George Lincoln, ed. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. The principal American witchcraft cases in the seventeenth century. Extracts from seventeenth-century texts by Cotton Mather and others.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: The Viking Press, 1970. Campbell’s series of volumes on primitive, Oriental, and occidental mythology should be required reading for anyone interested in religious myths.

Castaneda, Carlos. The Second Ring of Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. A female brujo in Mexico. Fantasy or anthropology—depending on your point of view.

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. London: W. Foulsham & Co., Ltd. The famous seventeenth-century herbal, still in use today.

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.

—. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. These two are essential reading for understanding how Catholicism contributes to female submission.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and English, Deirdre. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Press, 1979. Female health versus male medicine.

—. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. Old West-bury, New York: Feminist Press, 1973. The basic text on the suppression of midwives.

Fisher, Elizabeth. Woman’s Creation. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1979. A vital book on women’s contributions to the evolution of civilization.

Forbes, Thomas Rogers. The Midwife and the Witch. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1966. An excellent, scholarly study of witches’ and midwives’ contributions to medicine.

Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1949. First published in 1922, this classic work on comparative mythology has had great influence upon twentieth-century poetry and scholarship.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. New York: Random House, 1938. Freud’s classic work on animism, magic, totemism.

Gardner, Gerald B. The Meaning of Witchcraft. London: Aquarian Press, 1959.

—. Witchcraft Today. London: Rider, 1954.

—. High Magic’s Aid. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1975. The works of the famous English witch who almost singlehandedly revived witchcraft in England and America. The first two titles are nonfiction, the third fiction.

Glass, Justine. Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense. California: Wilshire Book Co., 1976. A general introduction to the craft as “the oldest religion in the world.”

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. A poet’s meditation on the Moon Goddess/Muse.

Gray, William Gordon. The Rollright Ritual. Cheltenham, England: Helios Book Service Ltd., 1975. A study of the Rollright Stone circle in Oxfordshire and its possible use in prehistoric times.

Hansen, Harold A. The Witch’s Garden. Santa Cruz, California: Unity Press, 1978. Herbs associated with witches.

Harding, M. Esther. Woman’s Mysteries. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A Jungian study of the Moon Goddess/Muse.

Harris, Marvin. Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches. New York: Random House, 1974. Provocative speculative essays about religion, witches, and other subjects by an anthropologist.

Hole, C. A. A Mirror of Witchcraft. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. A useful general introduction.

Holmes, Ronald. Witchcraft in History. Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1977. Another excellent introductory work on English witchcraft.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963. The splendid translation from which the description of Circe in this book is drawn.

Hoyle, Fred. On Stonehenge. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1977. Stonehenge seen as an astronomical calculator.

Hughes, Pennethorne. Witchcraft. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1952. Another useful general introduction.

Huxley, Aldous. The Devils of Loudun. New York: Harper & Row, 1952. Urbain Grandier and his raving nuns.

Kramer, Heinrich, and Sprenger, James. The Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. A modern reprint. Be prepared to be horrified.

Lethbridge, T. C. Witches, Investigating an Ancient Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. An ethnological introduction to witchcraft from the Murrayite point of view.

McCormick, Donald. The Hell-Fire Club. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1975. A popular history of the eighteenth-century rakes who dabbled in Satanism.

Martello, Dr. Leo Louis. What It Means to Be a Witch. Published privately, n.d.

—. Witchcraft, the Old Religion. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1975.

—. Witches Liberation. New York: Occult Magazine, n.d. Martello is a noted contemporary witch, gay activist, and civil libertarian who comes from a family of Italian witches.

Marwick, Max, ed. Witchcraft and Sorcery. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1975. An anthology of important contemporary essays on witchcraft, including A. D. J. MacFarlane’s critique of Margaret Murray, and essays on witch beliefs.

Mességué, Maurice. Health Secrets of Plants and Herbs. New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1979. Medicinal properties of plants discussed.

Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft. New York: The Citadel Press, 1970. A reprint of the classic work on witchcraft in the Middle Ages.

Michell, John. Secrets of the Stones. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Stonehenge from the astro-archaeological point of view.

Monter, E. William. Witchcraft in France and Switzerland. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1976. A scholarly work on continental witchcraft during the Reformation.

Murray, Margaret A. The God of the Witches. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

—. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1921. The books that began the ethnological approach to witchcraft.

Newell, Venetia, ed. The Witch Figure. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Essays on witchcraft and magic by various scholars.

Notestein, Wallace. History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1911. Reprinted in 1965 by Russell and Russell, New York. Another skeptical-rationalist history of witchcraft.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979. A study of early Christianity and its expulsion of the female aspect of the divinity from the organized church.

Pepper, Elizabeth, and Wilcock, John. Magical and Mystical Sites. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Ephesus, Eleusis, Delphi, Malta, the Basque country, Stonehenge, and other magical sites.

—. The Witches’ Almanac. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. A delicious popular almanac.

Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. A vast encyclopedia of witches, witchcraft, and the witch-craze; very useful, but heavy on the pecuniary-confiscatory theory of the witch-craze.

Russell, Jeffrey B. A History of Witchcraft. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Excellent, well-illustrated introduction.

Scot, Reginald. Discoverie of Witchcraft. Arundel: Centaur Press, 1964. A reprint of a fascinating seventeenth-century English work on witchcraft.

Seth, Ronald. Witches and Their Craft. London: Odhams Books, Ltd., 1967. Another basic study.

Shah, Ikbal Ali, Sirdar. Occultism, Its Theory and Practice. New York: Castle Books, n.d. Reprinted as Black and White Magic in 1975 by Octagon Press. Magical rites, implements, alphabets, circles, spells. A very useful compendium.

Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. Vol. I. Village Station, New York: New Sibylline Books, 1979. Ancient goddesses and their myths.

—. When God Was a Woman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Fascinating study of the archaeological traces of goddess worship.

Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

—. A Popular History of Witchcraft. Hackensack, New Jersey: Wehman Bros., 1973. Summers is a fanatical Catholic historian who despises Margaret Murray and sees the witch as an evil heretic, all demons as real, and Satan as our principal enemy. Fascinating reading.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. Essential reading; an Oxonian scholar’s study of the contrast between the world of the witch-craze and our own.

Williams, Selma R., and Williams, Pamela J. Riding the Nightmare. New York: Atheneum, 1978. A contemporary feminist study of the witch in history.

Wilson, Colin. The Occult. New York: Random House, 1973. A popular study of the occult.

Woods, William. A Casebook of Witchcraft. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974. A useful anthology containing excerpts from Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, Francesco Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum, and other seventeenth-century texts.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following works:

“French Flying Ointments: Three Recipes” from The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret A. Murray (1921) by permission of Oxford University Press.