Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth / Edition 2

by Jack Fritscher

Overview

    Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch’s Mouth, inspired by the British Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today, was the first book to be published on popular American witchcraft and remains the classic survey of white and black magic. Newly revised and updated for twenty-first-century readers, the author—an ordained but marvelously fallen exorcist—tells all about the evil eye, the queer eye, women and witch trials, the Old Religion, magic Christianity, Satanism, and New Age self-help.
    Jack Fritscher sifts through legends of sorcery and the twisted history of witchcraft, including the casting of spells and incantations, with a focus on the growing role of witchcraft in popular culture and its mainstream commercialization through popular music, Broadway, Hollywood, and politics. As seriously historical as it is fun to read, there is no other book like it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299203047
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	12/22/2004
Series:	A Ray and Pat Browne Book
Edition description:	2nd Edition
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jack Fritscher is the author of fifteen books and hundreds of articles on American popular culture. He was ordained an exorcist in 1963 by the Catholic Church, which later excommunicated him for his memoir, What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy. He is the founding San Francisco editor of the legendary Drummer magazine, and he has written the pop-culture memoir-novel Some Dance to Remember and the biography, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.

Editorial Reviews

"Jack Fritscher reads gloriously!" —San Francisco Chronicle

"Jack Fritscher writes wonderful books." —Geoff Mains, author of Urban Aborginals, The Advocate,Los Angeles

"What an unsettling, surprising, and scandalous . . . writer!" —John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter, Manifest Reader, San Francisco

"Fritscher’s highly perceptive and witty survey contains one of the finest interviews with Anton Szandor LaVey ever published. LaVey’s uncensored perspectives on Christianity, feminism, drug use, homosexuality, tattooing, and racism, as well as his tart evaluations of certain ‘occult superstars,’ are crowned by his most revelatory discussion of the nature of Satan."—Magus Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan, New York

From the Publisher