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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.
in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.
Londoners used to paint it on their doors to ward off the plague in the 17th century.
She created a magic world that co-exists with our own, and specified the careful boundaries and techniques of how its magic worked.
Spells like these weren’t supplications or prayers, but commands to demonic entities. To get a demon to obey you, you needed two things: the demon’s full and exact name, and a physical way to make sure it did as it was told.
The witches are depicted as old and hunched, carrying a stick alongside their familiars: birds, goats, a many-legged sort of fish-cat and the devil himself. The illustrations in Fairfax’s book established the image of the bent-over, haggard witch that endures to this day.
In the 17th century and beyond, women were often disenfranchised and vulnerable within wider society, along with the disabled and mentally ill. They were easy targets and that’s what we’ve seen in the iconography of witchcraft ever since: the witch with a walking stick is really a vulnerable old woman.
Accusations of witchcraft were a way for societies to control what they viewed as ‘disruptive’ female behaviour.
The rider looking over the bristles of this domestic item suggested an inversion of power, a world turned upside down, women all-powerful over men.
They have been worshipped and feared, sometimes defenders against the dark arts and sometimes instruments of it.
Snakes are mysterious and wonderful. They slither along the ground without limbs and regenerate whenever they shed their skin. They can be horrifying as well, opening their mouths so wide that they can swallow their prey whole. They have symbolised poison and they have represented medicine. In folklore and mythology, they represent the duality between good and evil, light and darkness.
