#thomas waters

[the-killies]

thomas is secretly a drag queen

[ijustkindalikebooks]

currently reading.

[animekath]

Happy Valentines Day? :’D

[foxinom]

[animekath]

You May Now Kiss Your Husband <3

[animekath]

Mine and @for-theloveofchibi‘s OC’s having a winter walk!

[animekath]

[semper-legens]

177. Cursed Britain, by Thomas Waters

Owned?: No, library Page count: 265 My summary: A non-fiction book about witchcraft, and attitudes to witchcraft, in Britain from 1800 to the present day. My rating: 2.5/5   My commentary:

So if you know me, you know I have an interest in the occult. Witchcraft is a particularly interesting one - what can I say, I don’t live too far away from Pendle, the site of one of England’s most notorious witch trials. This book, however, interested me because it’s talking about witchcraft and the occult from after the time period it’s most associated with, from 1800 to now. Did it live up to its promise? I mean, ultimately it was fine, but I had a couple of nagging issues regardless.

The first is that, because of its scope, it’s really just an overview of shifting attitudes towards the idea of witchcraft, with a few more specific examples thrown in and given a few pages of detail here and there. Which is fine, honestly, it just wasn’t really what I was here for. The author makes some big and sweeping statements about attitudes and why folklorists at the time were wrong, and I’m not sure he evidences them well enough to justify the air of ‘I’m smarter than you’ that was emanating from the book.

The other is the race thing. Some kudos have to be given in that he correctly refers to the Roma and Traveller communities with their proper names, rather than the g-slur, which only appears in quotations. However, the chapter he has about witchcraft in the British Empire in the 1800s starts by asking the question of ‘does education kill superstition’, which plays right into the idea of people of colour (in these examples Indian, Maori, and African people) being inherently ‘pagan’ and ‘superstitious’. There’s a line between the spirituality of these various cultures and white English witchcraft, and the author does not draw it at all, equating things like Afro-British cultural practice and the cunning-men and women of 1800s Britain. It’s...uncomfortable, at least. Not helped by the fact that his examples of modern witchcraft cite cases of abuse linked to Afro-British spirituality, while the whiter people cited are presented as neutral to beneficial. The takeaway seems to be that Afro-British traditions are Bad and Wrong, whereas white British traditions can be bad, but can also be good. I don’t need to tell you that this view is racist and harmful.

That’s all about this one - ultimately, it’s alright, nothing to write home about. Next up, back to fiction, and a good old-fashioned ghost story!