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Tag: witchcraft

Roma Lister: A Haunting Vision in Florence

Posted on March 14, 2025March 14, 2025 by TheCustodian

Long ignored by scholarship, Lister was a writer, folklore collector, and occultist who served as an inspiration and adviser to the American man of letters Charles Godfrey Leland. Throughout her life, Lister, like her friend Lady Walburga Paget and others, often had strange, visionary experiences.

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Contract signed: new book on Roma Lister

Posted on January 24, 2025January 24, 2025 by TheCustodian

Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister will be the first-ever monograph on Roma Lister, a British-Italian folklore collector, occultist, and friend of the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland.

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The Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: An Interview with Dr Marinos Sariyannis

Posted on October 23, 2020November 16, 2020 by TheCustodian

“Evliya Çelebi, the traveller who toured almost every region of the Ottoman Empire…records stories of spiritual armies made of dead martyrs’ souls, armies of plague made of jinn, sultans whose souls exit their bodies, vampires of the Caucasus who fight in the night skies, and Bulgarian witches who turn into hens.”  -Dr Marinos Sariyannis For…

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Bolsas de Mandinga and their Makers: An Interview with Professor Cécile Fromont

Posted on October 16, 2020February 8, 2023 by TheCustodian

“We have in the Inquisition trials and elsewhere numerous testimonies of Africans and Europeans alike that describe how knives, swords, or even bullets from firearms have literally bounced off the skin of bolsa de mandinga wearers.” -Professor Cécile Fromont In 1730 an African slave and Vodun devotee named José Francisco Pereira was arrested in Lisbon…

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Narratives of Spiritual Warfare: An Interview with Dr Naomi Richman

Posted on September 13, 2020October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“Pentecostals everywhere train themselves to hear, to see, or to feel God’s presence in their daily lives. That kind of intimate relationship…is one of the defining aspects of evangelical religiosity.”  – Dr Naomi Richman Jesus famously predicted that the apocalypse would be preceded by “wars and rumours of wars”, pestilence, earthquakes, mass persecutions, and the…

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Johannes Praetorius and his Magical World

Posted on July 23, 2020October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“Praetorius’s world and his work were constructed of wonderment at the magical universe and of the speculations of the new science.” -from Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time (2006) by Gerhild Scholz Williams Among Germany’s many legendary sites, the Brocken (formerly known as the Blocksberg) is…

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From Spirit to Social Bot: The Familiar Shapes Documentary

Posted on March 2, 2018October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“They can assume all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves…they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant…”  -from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Almost four hundred years ago, a young Oxford graduate named Joseph Glanvill published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a…

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Categories

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Recent Posts

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  • Roma Lister: A Haunting Vision in Florence
  • Contract signed: new book on Roma Lister
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  • A 17th-Century Conspiracy Tale: Johann Cambilhon and the “Magick” College
  • Occult Egypt in the Victorian Popular Imagination: An Interview with Dr Eleanor Dobson

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