The Occult, Magic & Witchcraft: An Exploration of Modern Sorcery

by Charles Olliver

Examining everything from occult symbols to mysterious magics to corrupt demonology, Magic and Witchcraft gives a comprehensive overview of the hidden histories of sorcery and superstition. With a careful and considered eye, Olliver surveys the origins of magic, considers its relationship to religion and spiritualism, and discusses how we should deal with experiences outside our understanding through the new science of metapsychics.

ABOUT THE Arcturus Hidden Histories brings together gripping accounts of unexplained phenomena, supernatural sightings, incredible conspiracies and other mysterious experiences which lurk beneath the surface of our known world.

Genres: Witchcraft, History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2022

Reviews

[Libby]

honestly stopped reading it after seeing several spelling mistakes. no clue wtf this book is but the language is unnecessarily complicated and the author goes on and on about the same subject. boring, hard to read and not very interesting.

[Ophelia]

The issue with this book that may trip a reader up is that it isn't made clear it's a reprint of a 1920s book. This unfortunately means a lot of the views presented in the essays are outdated. It provides a very interesting snapshot of the thinking of the time period, but is in no way a comprehensive history of the occult.

The misprints in the text don't do it any favours either.

[Prendia Qehaja]

Somewhat okay introduction to Occultism but with plenty of spelling mistakes and parts that are poorly explained. Gave up halfway through.

It plants a decent occultism seed, however the water to grow the rest of the tree can be found from different sources elsewhere.

I found some of the diagrams pretty good to help visualize concepts.

Also, as other comments say, it is a reprint of an earlier text, so it’s not ‘modern’ as of the 21st Century, but as of 100+ years ago which is undoubtably a much different time.

[Aaron Baker]

Kindle Edition

Very interesting. However the information is quite outdated and there are numerous mistakes in the text. Some letters are replaced by numbers making it annoying to read.

[Fay Babette]

This could of been such a good book. Instead it was dry and difficult to read.
Had this been done in a factual manner or with more pictures it would of been okay for the way it was wrote/laid out.
This was more of a history essay and a bad one at that.

[Spencer Kain]

Nowadays a little outdated but I liked the look back to how someone from a hundred years ago thought and felt about still relevant practices.

[The Book Witch]

I dnfed this about half way through.

To be fair, the introduction does give you a heads up about the time it was written in, the sources and so on and did say that some things stated will be out of date. And there were many concepts and ideas in what I read that were out of date. And the ones that weren't I already knew from other books I've read.

Honestly I got very little out of my read. I ended up dnfing it because even though I wanted to give it a bit more of a chance, because the topics I was more interested in were in the following chapters, I wasn't focusing because my mind had already dnfed it in a sense. There is no point to reading more if you are not taking anything in, not just because the book leaves a lot to be desired but also you won't focus.

I honestly did not know what to rate this and I decided to leave a rare book unrated. That's how little impact it had on me.