Treasury of Witchcraft

Description

Some demographers assert distinctions between magic and witchcraft. They make formal classifications into ritual witchcraft and operative witchcraft, as Dr. Margaret Murray does. Again, they break down the Black Ar ts into wizardry and necromancy, divination and soothsaying, as if these were completely isolated and disparate branches. Such categories have their use, of course, in organizing the vast material of magic. But they all belong to witchcraft, or magic, or goety, or thaumaturgy, which are merely semantically distinctive but not generically different facets of one basically identical operation. For they are, in essence, variant phases, different approaches, techniques, or manifestations of one fundamental concept common to all the variants, that the normally accepted laws of nature can be subdued or transcended.