Occult, Magic & Witchcraft

by Charles Olliver

In this collection of essays, Charles W. Olliver surveys the origins of the occult, considers its relationship to religion and spiritualism, and discusses how we should deal with experiences outside our understanding through the proposed science of metapsychics. A comprehensive overview of the hidden histories of religion, sorcery, esoterica, and superstition, The Occult, Magic & Witchcraft is a wide-ranging classic work that delves into symbols, divinatory practices, mediumship, Satanism, witchcraft - and even vampires and werewolves. From bizarre beliefs and disturbing rites to the grisly details of various witch trials, Olliver presents everything with a spirit of scientific curiosity.

Genres: Witchcraft, History, Nonfiction

Paperback

Reviews

[Libby · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 This unfortunately means a lot of the views presented in the essays are outdated.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 · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 However the information is quite outdated and there are numerous mistakes in the text.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 · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[🤍 📖 Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dry read. Quite disappointing

[Spencer Kain · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.