A Review
of:
StevePatterson: Spells from the Wise Woman’s Cottage (Troy Books 2016)
&
Giles Watson:A Witch’s Natural History (Troy Books 2013)
Steve
Patterson’s book is based on the exhibition in the Museum of Witchcraft and
Magic in Boscastle with the same name and using this historical depiction of a
cunning woman’s kitchen/workspace Patterson is leading us into a greater
presentation of folk magic and cunning practices in the West Country commonly
ascribed to the wayside witches by Cecil Williamson. Also found here is Old
Joan’s Book of Spells, a collection of spells demonstrating the art practiced
by the wayside witches at the sea shore of the West Country since the 18th
Century.
Patterson is
in this presentation of spells and arsenal also occupied with time and world
view and is using this presentation to also enter into the significant
historical transition that marked the modern idea of Witchcraft through the
friendship and eventually alienation and parting ways between Cecil Williamson
and Gerald Gardner. Patterson is merely highlighting the differences of perception
and vision between the two men as explanatory for the modern day continued
discourse and disagreements concerning witchcraft and what a witch truly is.
And it is in
this depiction and description of the wise woman’s cottage and the book of
spells Patterson allows the image of the wayside witch to rise and take form as
a contrast to the idea of the witch embodied within Gardner’s religious child,
Wicca. In doing this Patterson contributes clarity to our understanding of what
a witch is and for him the integral and vital part is, as it was for Cecil
Williamson, about the familiar or famulus and this is in truth an element of
vital importance for the witch and in highlighting this factor it also makes it
more understandable to understand where the dividing lines between the witch
and the cunning one is to be found.
And speaking
of the famulus, Troy Books also released Giles Watson’s A Witch’s NaturalHistory in 2013, which I will also comment on in extension of the familiar. The
essays in this book were originally published as a series in The Cauldron and
were such refreshing and stunning account of exactly the many familiars of the
witch. Watson takes us through crows and slugs, bugs, veneficum and adders analyzing
behavior, virtue and meaning in cunning depth. In doing this he give voice to
the secret movements of nature and enables a deep and marvelous understanding
of nature, her works and her inhabitants.
I adored
these articles when I first read them and it was the same pleasure in reading
them again, this is simply one of those books that is amazingly rewarding to
read due to how it expands your horizons and deepen your understanding and
provides avenues for magic and mystery in how we look at nature after the pages
has ended in such way that we are more able to marvel in the mysteries of
nature possessing these perceptions Watson has shared with the reader.