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Hereditary Witchcraft: Secrets of the Old Religion
Discover the real sources of many of the traditions, beliefs, and techniques of modern Witchcraft! And what author Raven Grimassi reveals in Hereditary Witchcraft is the documented ancient roots of the Old Religion. One-by-one, Grimassi goes through the tenets of Witchcraft and shows their ancient sources. The association of the pentagram with Witchcraft goes back at least 2,500 years. The idea of the four elements goes back to a philosopher named Empedocles of Sicily in around 475 B.C.E. The practice of many covens today of having a Priestess, Priest, and Maiden can be traced back over 2,000 years to ancient Pompeii. This book is filled with history, myth, and folklore. But it is also filled with rituals and techniques that you can do. On these pages you will learn how to prepare and banish a magic circle. You'll learn rituals you can do by yourself, including those for the Solstices, Diana's Day, and Cornucopia. With this information you can become a follower of the Old Ways! Of course, one of the most famous aspects of Witchcraft is magick. Grimassi doesn't disappoint here, either. You'll learn runic magick and divination; you'll learn about doing magick with the Moon and stars; you'll learn secret symbols and the powers of herbs. If you are a Witch―or you're thinking about becoming a Witch―this is one of the most important books you could possibly have. You'll find the documentation to support the antiquity of your beliefs and the way Witchcraft is practiced today. This book is both a guide for everyday life and a resource to discover Wiccan origins. If you don't have a copy of this book, get one today. You'll use it for the rest of your life.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1999
About the author
Raven Grimassi
47 books111 followersRaven Grimassi was an American author of over 20 books, and a scholar of paganism with over 40 years of research and study in the genre of Wicca, Stregheria, witchcraft and neo-paganism.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 26, 2017
I loved this book really put a lot in prospective on the craft. The story's that she adds in this book on the gods and goddess are great and worth a double read. This books is staying on my fav. shelf.
May 31, 2009
When I was younger I was very much into the Wiccan religion. I haven't read anything related to Wicca in years, but I managed to remember this book fairly well, which means it must have been pretty good!
September 6, 2026
The word hereditary used to carry enormous glamour in Witchcraft. Tell a room full of Pagans in the 1990s that your grandmother taught you a charm and people leaned in. Tell them your family had secretly practiced the Old Religion for generations and somebody would eventually ask whether you were accepting students. Raven Grimassi understood the power of that idea better than almost anyone, and Hereditary Witchcraft is saturated with it. Blood, family transmission, Italian folk practice, hidden teachings, the Old Religion, and the possibility that fragments of something much older survived inside apparently ordinary customs all become part of the same imaginative landscape.
I no longer accept the historical argument as confidently as Grimassi presents it. Showing that the pentagram is ancient does not establish an ancient continuous religion of witches who used it in the modern sense, just as tracing the four elements back to Empedocles does not demonstrate historical continuity between ancient Greek philosophy and a twentieth-century coven. The book makes that leap repeatedly. Yet I find Grimassi more interesting when I stop asking whether he has proved an unbroken witch religion and start looking at the pieces he is assembling. Italian folk magic, Diana and Aradia, the Benandanti, spirits, Faery belief, lunar practices, classical religion, family customs, and modern Witchcraft really do have histories worth exploring. The trouble is not that the pieces are invented. It is that the seams between them are sometimes hidden.
The chapters on blood and hereditary transmission raise questions I find much more interesting now than whether somebody had a literal witch grandmother. What actually survives through families? A prayer nobody thinks of as magic, a fear of the evil eye, a remedy, a way of interpreting dreams, a particular relationship with the dead, a superstition about the Moon, the habit of leaving something behind for a household spirit. None of those things needs to constitute a secret family religion to matter. Culture can carry magical assumptions for generations without anyone assembling them into a formal tradition. I wish Grimassi had trusted that quieter form of inheritance more often because it is both historically plausible and, to me, more mysterious.
There is also plenty of actual Witchcraft here once the historical argument loosens its grip. Grimassi includes circle work, seasonal rites, Italian folk magic, lunar and stellar material, herbs, symbols, runic work, and divination. As usual with him, I respond most strongly when he stops trying to prove that the Craft is old and simply practices it. He had a gift for creating the feeling that Witchcraft belongs to an inhabited world where gods, ancestors, spirits, plants, symbols, and memory remain active around us.
I think that is why I continue to read Grimassi with affection despite disagreeing with him so often. He belonged to a generation that desperately wanted modern Witchcraft to have ancestors, and sometimes that desire caused history to carry more weight than it could bear. I understand the impulse better now than I did when I was younger. Queer people know something about searching the past for evidence that people like us were always there, especially after institutions spent centuries pretending otherwise. The temptation is to turn fragments into an uninterrupted lineage because continuity feels like legitimacy.
These days I think Witchcraft needs that reassurance less. Something does not have to descend intact through blood for us to inherit it meaningfully. A tradition can be reconstructed, revived, adapted, remembered incorrectly, rediscovered, or consciously created and still become powerful through practice. Hereditary Witchcraft sometimes mistakes antiquity for authentication, but beneath that is a much better question about what witches receive from the people who came before us and what we choose to pass on. That question has only become more interesting with time.
I no longer accept the historical argument as confidently as Grimassi presents it. Showing that the pentagram is ancient does not establish an ancient continuous religion of witches who used it in the modern sense, just as tracing the four elements back to Empedocles does not demonstrate historical continuity between ancient Greek philosophy and a twentieth-century coven. The book makes that leap repeatedly. Yet I find Grimassi more interesting when I stop asking whether he has proved an unbroken witch religion and start looking at the pieces he is assembling. Italian folk magic, Diana and Aradia, the Benandanti, spirits, Faery belief, lunar practices, classical religion, family customs, and modern Witchcraft really do have histories worth exploring. The trouble is not that the pieces are invented. It is that the seams between them are sometimes hidden.
The chapters on blood and hereditary transmission raise questions I find much more interesting now than whether somebody had a literal witch grandmother. What actually survives through families? A prayer nobody thinks of as magic, a fear of the evil eye, a remedy, a way of interpreting dreams, a particular relationship with the dead, a superstition about the Moon, the habit of leaving something behind for a household spirit. None of those things needs to constitute a secret family religion to matter. Culture can carry magical assumptions for generations without anyone assembling them into a formal tradition. I wish Grimassi had trusted that quieter form of inheritance more often because it is both historically plausible and, to me, more mysterious.
There is also plenty of actual Witchcraft here once the historical argument loosens its grip. Grimassi includes circle work, seasonal rites, Italian folk magic, lunar and stellar material, herbs, symbols, runic work, and divination. As usual with him, I respond most strongly when he stops trying to prove that the Craft is old and simply practices it. He had a gift for creating the feeling that Witchcraft belongs to an inhabited world where gods, ancestors, spirits, plants, symbols, and memory remain active around us.
I think that is why I continue to read Grimassi with affection despite disagreeing with him so often. He belonged to a generation that desperately wanted modern Witchcraft to have ancestors, and sometimes that desire caused history to carry more weight than it could bear. I understand the impulse better now than I did when I was younger. Queer people know something about searching the past for evidence that people like us were always there, especially after institutions spent centuries pretending otherwise. The temptation is to turn fragments into an uninterrupted lineage because continuity feels like legitimacy.
These days I think Witchcraft needs that reassurance less. Something does not have to descend intact through blood for us to inherit it meaningfully. A tradition can be reconstructed, revived, adapted, remembered incorrectly, rediscovered, or consciously created and still become powerful through practice. Hereditary Witchcraft sometimes mistakes antiquity for authentication, but beneath that is a much better question about what witches receive from the people who came before us and what we choose to pass on. That question has only become more interesting with time.
December 6, 2023
Enjoyed the book, it isn't the path i walk but i always like reading about other path to compare and see the similarities and differences in the paths. A couple of spots i wish he would have added more diagrams of certain things.
May 17, 2009
I LOVED this book! I was actually surprised by how wonderful it was - especially the part with the original teachings of Aradia!
May 6, 2009
I liked this one, and the one on familiars, best of all. All Raven's books are very well researched and well written. Really good personal touches, too.
March 6, 2011
I loved this one as well. Informative, easy to read, well presented.
April 26, 2014
Beautiful insights on Italian magick & folklore ;)
December 23, 2014
An engagingly-written informative volume about the Stregheria's history and practices.
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March 9, 2025I personally found this book very inspiring to my practice.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews