5 Books to AVOID
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Sat Mar 27 10:23:20 1999
There is a ton of misinformation on witchcraft out there.  Many people missed the flood of new evidence, and so continue propagating theories we now know are untrue.  Moreover the Burning Times are an intensely emotional subject, therefore many people give in to the lure of hatred and prejudice, and produce works of "scholarship" that are simply bigotry with footnotes.*p*The following are five books I highly recommend you avoid.  Or, avoid reading as history -- many of them played an important role in the development of Wicca and modern ideas about witches.  Thus they're part of our history, even if they do a lousy job of describing our ancestors' history.*p**br************************p**br*1) _Witchcraze_ by Anne Llewellyn Barstow.  Barstow is quickly replacing Margaret Murray as the primary source of misinformation in the popular market.  Most people realize there's something wrong with Murray;  most DON'T realize that Barstow is also flawed.  And readers aren't finding this out, because historians consider _Witchcraze_ so blatantly ludicrous that they don't bother to comment upon it.  Which leaves people with the mistaken impression that this is a basically okay book.*p*Well, it's not.  The research is erratic.  Some of it is good, some of it isn't.  And the analysis is abysmal.  Read the book closely and you'll notice a disturbing fact:  none of the data actually supports Barstow's thesis that witch-hunting was woman-hunting.  The beginning and intensity of the Hunt doesn't correlate in any way to women's rights.  Scotland killed a thousand times more witches than Ireland;  Russia was as sexist as Germany, yet it only killed 10 witches.  _Witchcraze_ also includes mind-boggling sexual and ethnic stereotyping, and ignores enormous quantities of evidence:  anything that contradicts her theory.  For instance, she insists that Iceland didn't have any "real" witch hunts.  Why?  Because 95% of Icelandic witches were men, and Barstow can't explain how that could occur.*p*The second half of the book is fantasy, pure and simple.  Barstow takes a couple of unusual trials and pretends that they're the norm.  She pretends that most witches were healers (they weren't -- usually 10% or less of the accused were healers).  She pretends all were women.  She pretends that most trials had sexual elements.  In summary, about 10% of this book is useful, and the rest is pure garbage.*p**br*2 & 3) _The Witch-Cult in Western Europe_ and _The God of the Witches_ by Margaret Murray.  Back in the 1920's, Murray suggested that witches were really members of a Pagan cult that worshipped "the Horned God of the Witches".  Her research was horrible.  She misquoted texts, ignored tons of evidence, used only trials that involved copious amounts of torture, assumed that confessions extracted under torture were reliable, assumed that no one was ever falsely accused of witchcraft, etc., etc.  The list of her errors could go on for pages.*p*Because of this, historians have generally ignored her works.  Unfortunately they became extremely popular in non-academic areas.  For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica used it until the '60's.  Murray's theory, based exclusively on witch-hunting propaganda, is almost the reverse image of real witchcraft.  We've found evidence of individual practitioners, not covens of thirteen.  Some witches worshipped a goddess, but we haven't found a "horned god".  And while some historical witches were Christo-Pagans, most weren't.  Even those who seem somewhat Pagan still considered themselves Christian.  Self-identified Pagans are almost non-existant*p*If you're researching historical witchcraft, Murray's book is useless.  It will tell you what withcraft *wasn't*, not what it was.  However Murray had a tremendous impact on Gerald Gardner, therefore if you're researching the history of Wicca, this is an important text.*p**br*4) _Witches, Midwives, and Nurses_ by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.  Ehrenreich and English's book has had a great impact on the feminist community's understanding of witchcraft.  Which is sad, because the research is pitiful.  The authors only appear to have read three or four books on the subject (and none of them are very good).  Then they picked up a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum and assumed that it was an accurate guide to how witch trials were run (it's not...).*p*The result:  the theory that most witches were female healers and midwives, and the witch-trials were doctors' attempt to destroy these women's power.  Within ten years we knew this was untrue.  Only a small percentage of witches were healers (male OR female).  Most were not accused by doctors or male elites.  In fact, "white" witches accused five times as many "black" witches as doctors did.  However this theory remains extremely popular, and forms the back-bone of most of the pop-feminist analysis of the Burning Times.  Despite the fact that we know it's not true...*p**br*5) _Satanism and Witchcraft_ by Jules Michelet.  Don't get me wrong:  I *like* this book!  Michelet's story of how an oppressed peasant woman turns to witchcraft and devil-worship to strike back at her oppressors is a GREAT tale.*p*It's just not history, in any way, shape or form.  The biggest problem is it never happened.  Notice there aren't any dates in the book?  That's because it's set in a mythical, nightmare version of the Middle Ages.  Michelet took things from ten different centuries, smooshed them all together, and pretended they were the "Middle Ages".  Worse, most of his information on witchcraft came from the forged witch trials of Etienne Leon de Lamothe Langon.  (Those are those monstrously large trials, supposedly run by the Inquisition of Toulouse and Carcasonne, where as many as 400 women were killed in one day.)  These trials never really happened -- which was very bad news for the accuracy of this book.*p*So good story, baaaad history.  Read it if you want a fun piece of historical fiction.  Just remember that it's about as accurate as your average Harlequin Romance or Fabio bodice-ripper.*p*