#witchstorian

So as we were all sat there enjoying a very nice midday repast, the subject of holiday traditions came up. Our table of four fell to discussing various family festivities that had come down from immigrant ancestors and the places those ideas and objects came from. And then, because all of us were history buffs, out came the phones and we started looking up where those traditions started. Learned quite a lot about Swedish angel chimes and German Weisnachtpyramide, which was neat.

And then, somebody made the bright decision to ask little old ME if I knew of any odd or singular Christmas traditions. I physically FELT my brain revving up like a freshly-wound clock and the Grinch grin spreading across my face.

"Oh....I know a few."

Ten minutes of consensual info-dumping later, my colleagues had learned about Frau Perchta, La Befana, the Yule Goat (and the associated annual arson), and the origins of both St. Nicholas and the modern image of Santa Claus. It was nice to have a receptive audience, and I did my best not to prattle or take over the conversation (I asked several times if I was talking too much, always answered by "No! Go on!").

Then the colleague across from me was like, "Wow, that's all so neat! I've always wondered where we get some of the holiday symbolism that we take for granted. You know, like Santa, or bunnies and eggs at Easter."

The words, "Medieval passion plays," came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

"Medieval what....?"

"Um...permission to prattle on for a few more minutes?"

In the end, I stopped after the truncated bunnies-and-eggs explanation so I could actually eat, even though I kept getting questions. (And if you know me, you know I can go on for a solid hour on the topic.) It turned into a very enjoyable conversation, particularly for an introvert who was worried about getting burnt out by the whole experience. And on the walk back to the office, my colleague wanted to keep discussing things, and paid me what I thought was a very fine compliment:

"You always did strike me as a person with unusual interests. And I mean that in a good way. Like if I looked at your personal library or Spotify, it wouldn't include ANYTHING that's like Top Ten Most Popular On Tiktok."

(Not to be Not Like Other Internet Denizens, but she's objectively not wrong.)

It would, if the point of the thing were to celebrate a midpoint between two events, thus making the holiday a moveable feast (a holiday whose date is malleable and dependent on the timing of other events). But that's not the point of the thing, nor the reason for the observance. Allow me to clap on my Witchstorian hat and explain.

Halloween is technically a Catholic holiday, the night before All Saints Day on November 1st, when all the saints in the calendar who do not have a dedicated day are honored. (And yes, there is a saint for every day of the year. Several for each, in fact.) It is also known as the Feast of All Saints, the Feast of All Hallows, All Hallows Day, and Hallowmas. (Honestly, Hallowmas kind of slaps and I wish it was still in common use.)

So it follows that the night before All Hallows Day is All Hallows Eve, which you may recall from some Halloween movies and media. With regional slang and linguistic shift, Hallows Eve became Hallows Evening -> Hallow Even -> Hallow E'en -> Hallowe'en -> Halloween. You can still see the "Hallowe'en" spelling in books and articles from the early 20th century. The apostrophe stuck around for quite a while.

It's interesting to note that November 2nd in the Catholic calendar is All Souls Day, when the faithful remember and pray for the souls of the dearly departed. Combined with All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, it comprises a small three-day observance called Hallowtide, historically a time to remember and honor the dead.

So Halloween is datebound because of another holiday. But what about Samhain?

Victorian and Edwardian speculation about Ancient Celtic Pagan Practices notwithstanding (there are no written pre-Christian written records that cover it in depth), "Samhain" is the word for the month of November in Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) and Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic). The end of the month of October marked the end of the harvest season, so a festival was held to celebrate one more time before the long cold nights of winter fully set in. (October is Deireadh Fómhair in Gaeilge and Dàmhair in Gàidhlig, if you're curious.)

Technically speaking, Samhain is November 1st, not October 31st, but when your day ends at sunset, that means the night of the 31st is party time. The Wheel of Year generally marks Samhain as October 31st, but some models note that it goes from October 31st to November 1st. There are three other seasonal festivals in the Gaelic calendar that also occur at the beginning/end of a month - Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasa. And yes, these are still observed in the Isles today.

One sec.... -claps a festive twinkly wreath onto the Witchstorian hat- OKAY THEN. Buckle up, here we go.

So there are a few Winter Holiday Witches we could look to for this, or at least holiday figures who are Witchy or Witch-Adjacent. (The formalized folklore traditions may not always refer to them as witches, except perhaps in the Generic Word For A Terrifying Hag sense.)

Let's start with the nice one - Italy's La Befana.

This is a story you can whip out for your Christian relatives, if they seem receptive to a good holiday tale. It's definitely Church folklore, but it has a number of parallels to both modern witch aesthetic and Mystical Holiday Gift-Giver lore, and may have its' roots in older rural traditions.

The tale goes something like this:

It's certainly cited on a number of websites that talk about Quarter Days as religious observances, including the four seasonal festivals I talked about before. Samhain/Halloween is marked as a quarter day in the modern Gregorian calendar, but the Julian calendar would have had different dates. In particular, October 31 by modern reckoning would have been October 18, and October 31 on the Julian calendar would have actually fallen well into what is now November. (It's also worth noting that while the Holy Roman Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar in the 1500s, the UK didn't fully buy in until the mid-1700s and there were a few centuries where things were listed with two dates for each day to account for the two different calendars.)

The important thing to remember when assigning anything to the ancient Celts is that they did not leave written records. All we have are Caesar's writings, which are a hostile source at best, and records from medieval monks and scholars who wrote down details about contemporary rural practices and beliefs during their tenure, particularly those affected by changing orders from church leadership. Whether the practices and beliefs described directly mirrored more ancient practices or simply reflected centuries of syncretism is a matter for the scholars, but in any case, the observance of All Saints Day on November 1st was set down in the 9th century by Pope Gregory IV and it's very possible that Samhain traditions already occurring roughly around that time of year were rolled into the observance of Hallowtide.

It's also important to remember that a great deal of the roots of modern witchcraft and paganism are influenced by hermeticism, which prizes divine proportions, including exact lengths of time for special observances, such as halfway and quarterway points. And it's known that members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn published extensive volumes of writing on history and folklore (which ignored the historical record whenever they chose) that later influenced the people who created the foundations of the modern witchcraft movement.

But every time I see certain witch memes cross my dash, my eye twitches a little and I get that much closer to making a grumpy Witchstorian post about the importance of learning proper history and understanding that every community has rules and codes of conduct whether you like it or not.

Hello, witches! Since I’m always harping on about learning your history and checking your sources, I thought I’d help folks get a head start by compiling some source material.

To that end, I’ve started a Dropbox folder with a stash of historical texts on witchcraft, magic, and related topics. Nearly everything I’ve managed to find so far is public domain (thank you Project Gutenberg), with the exception of a very thorough herbal grimoire I found online some years ago and a book of witchcraft from the 1970s that appears to be out of print.

I will be continuing in this vein with future texts that I find. Everything will be public domain or cited to the source that it came from, in PDF format. I will NOT be including PDFs of any book currently in circulation with a copyright linked to a living author or estate. The point of this folder is that everything in it should be free for sharing and open use as research materials.

Below is the initial list of titles. I tried to include as many as I could find, with a focus on some oft-cited classics. I will be adding new texts as I find them.

A Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts on Witchcraft and the Second Sight, by David Webster (1820)

A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, by Wallace Notestein (1909)

British Goblins, Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions, by Wirt Sikes (1880)

Curiosities of Superstition, by W. H. Davenport Adams (1882)

Daemonologie, by King James I/VI (1597)

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats (1888)

Irish Witchcraft and Demonology, by St. John Drelincourt Seymour (1913)

La Sorcière, or The Witch of the Middle Ages, by Jules Michelet (1863)

Lives of the Necromancers, by William Godwin (1834)

Magic and Fetishism, by Alfred C. Haddon (1906)

Magic and Witchcraft, by Anonymous (1852)

Modern Magic, by M. Schele de Vere (1873)

Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics, by Richard Folkard (1884)

Practical Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing, by William Walker Atkinson (1908)

The Devil in Britain and America, by John Ashton (1896)

The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot (1594, 1886 reprint)

The Extremely Large Herbal Grimoire (date unknown, internet publication)

The Golden Bough : A Study of Magic and Religion, by Sir James George Frazer (1890)

The Illustrated Key to the Tarot, by L.W. de Laurence (1918)

The Magic of the Horse-shoe, by Robert Means Lawrence (1898)

The Mysteries of All Nations, by James Grant (1880)

The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy, by Charles John Samuel Thompson (1897)

The Superstitions of Witchcraft, by Howard Williams (1865)

The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut by John M. Taylor (1908)

The Wonders of the Invisible World, by Cotton Mather and A Farther Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches, by Increase Mather (1693, 1862 reprint)

Witch Stories, by E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn) Linton (1861)

Witch, Warlock, And Magician, by W. H. Davenport Adams (1889)

Witchcraft & Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland, by John Gregorson Campbell (1902)

Witches' Potions & Spells, ed. by Kathryn Paulsen (1971)

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that these texts are (with few exceptions) more than a century old, and may contain depictions, references, or language that are outdated and inappropriate. The point of including these documents is to provide access to historical texts for research and reference. Inclusion in the collection does not equal unconditional agreement with or wholesale approval of the contents.

Take everything with a grain of salt and remember to do your due diligence!

Oooo, let me get my Witchstorian hat....because there is some TEA here.

The association of tarot cards with various types of mysticism goes back to 18th-century France. The decks existed in Italy before then, as playing cards for various types of trump-style games, some of which are still played on the peninsula today. A French scholar by the name of Antoine Court de Gebelin, who is considered the grand-daddy of many later occultist philosophies, published a piece in 1781 on the allegedly-ancient origins of the symbols on tarot cards. He claimed that Ancient Egyptian priests had encoded their sacred text, The Book of Thoth, into tarot cards and that if a person knew how to read the symbols properly, they could unlock all of human knowledge.

Fun Fact: Gebelin knew precisely jack shit about Ancient Egypt. The language on the ancient papyri hadn't even been translated yet when he put forth these ideas (and once it was, none of it supported his claims). But Gebelin was very popular and he was a white guy in colonial academia, so nobody was asking inconvenient questions.

The same year, another French guy wrote an essay that posited that one could map the 22 Major Arcana cards onto the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This eventually led to members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn creating the Rider-Waite deck with Hebrew lettering and the tetragrammaton, because they were Ob.Sessed. with Jewish mysticism even though none of them were actually Jewish.

The Order created the first modern standard set and the rules for reading them in 1909-1910, and these were later expanded upon by Eden Gray in the 1960s, which gives us the tarot as we know it today.

There's a lot more to the story of tarot than this, but that's the TL;DR version of how the cards became mystical and why some decks include Jewish symbols. Which, quite frankly, they shouldn't, mystical associations or no.

If you're interested in the full story, you can check out the August 2021 episode of my podcast, Hex Positive - "The Trouble With Tarot." I wrote it in response to a then-prevalent argument that tarot originated with the Romani people and that the use of the cards was culturally protected. (Spoiler alert: they didn't and it's not, but I do address the connection in the episode.)

Personally, I don't feel like artistic decks water down the practical use of the cards anyway, but I do find that people connect more strongly to some decks. I love my Visconti-Sforza deck with its' classical artwork and old symbols, and I love my Golden Nouveau deck with all the flowery, flowy paintings. And I learned to read on the Faery Wicca tarot deck, which is exactly as fluffy and ridiculous as it sounds, but I love that one too.

So really, I think it's all a matter of personal preference. If the artwork and symbolism in a deck doesn't resonate with you, that's probably going to feel kind of useless to you personally. But somebody else might pick it up and go, "Wow! This is exactly what I've been looking for!" and have great success with their readings. To each their own.