Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft

To find out why reasonable people are drawn to the seemingly bizarre practices of magic and witchcraft, Tanya Luhrmann immersed herself in the secret lives of Londoners who call themselves magicians. She came to know them as friends and equals and was initiated into various covens and magical groups. She explains the process through which once-skeptical individuals—educated, middle-class people, frequently of high intelligence—become committed to the ideas behind witchcraft and find magical ritual so compellingly persuasive. This intriguing book draws some disturbing conclusions about the ambivalence of belief within modern urban society.
Contents:
Acknowledgements
Part I — Speaking with a different rhythm: magicians in the modern world
    1. What makes magic reasonable?
    2. Initiation ritual: my introduction to the field
    3. Journey to Aquarius: the sociological context of magical groups
        Recent history
    4. The goat and the gazelle: witchcraft
    5. Meditations on the Tree of Life: the Western Mysteries
    6. Space between the worlds: ad hoc ritual magic
    7. The Old Ways: non-initiated paganism
        Satanism
    8. The ‘child within’: a portrait of the practitioners
        The novels
        Chaos and control in the practical literature
        Portrait of the practitioners
Part II — Listening to the Goddess: new ways to pay attention to the world
    9. Introduction: the magician’s changing intellectual habits
        The ideas behind magical practice
    10. Drinking from Cerridwen’s cauldron: learning to see the evidence
    11. Astrology and the tarot: acquiring common knowledge
    12. Seeing patterns in the jumbled whole: becoming comfortable with new assumptions
Part III — Summoning the powers: the experience of involvement
    13. Introduction: working intuitively
        Introduction
    14. New experiences: meditation and visualization
        Meditation
        Mystical states
        Visualization
    15. ‘Knowing of’: language and imaginative involvement
        The ritual
        Discussion group
        Discussion
    16. Ritual: techniques for altering the everyday
    17. The varied uses of symbolism
        The phenomenology of symbols
        The creation of mytho-poeic history
        Symbolism as a language of selfhood
        Secret knowledge
        Appendix: core texts in magical practice
Part IV — Justifying to the sceptics
    18. Introduction: coping with the dissonance
    19. The magical plane: the emergence of a protective metaphor
    20. In defence of magic: philosophical and theological rationalization
        The realist position
        Two worlds
        Relativist
        Metaphorical
        Theology
Part V — Belief and action
    21. Interpretive drift: the slow drift towards belief
    22. Serious play: the fantasy of truth
    23. Final thoughts
        Why magicians practice magic: the romantic rationalist’s religion
        What we learn: anthropological approaches
Bibliography
Index