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Against Everyone with Conner Habib

AEWCH 98: THOMAS WATERS or THE VICTIMS OF WITCHCRAFT & THE WITCHCRAFT OF VICTIMS

Against Everyone with Conner Habib

Against Everyone With Conner Habib

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.8679 Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2020

⏱️ 93 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

I'm joined by witchcraft and magic scholar, Dr. Thomas Waters (Imperial College, London), to talk about misconceptions about witchcraft, why we should take victims of witchcraft seriously, and his excellent book, Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

0:05.0

countercultural figures and presenting complex philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging

0:11.1

and accessible way. It's a show not about small talk, but about big talk. And this episode is

0:18.9

Big Talk, and it's one of my favorite episodes I've ever done.

0:22.4

It's with Dr. Thomas Waters, a witchcraft and magic scholar from the Imperial College in London,

0:28.9

an author of the amazing book, Curst Britain, A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern

0:34.5

Times. I've been preoccupied for a long time with the ways in which

0:40.5

witchcraft has been prevented and occultism has been prevented from entering into serious

0:47.5

philosophical and political, especially leftist political discourse. If you listen to the show,

0:52.9

you know that I bring those kinds of things up

0:54.8

again and again. I'm really interested in it. And the way that it used to sort of take place,

1:01.3

or the way witchcraft used to be dismissed, was just ridicule. Oh, this is just stupid. These are

1:05.7

fairy tales, all that. But I think over time, historians have really begun to understand that because witchcraft and the occult were so important to so many groups of people, and why is that, it might be worthwhile for academic study and has been, you know, the historians and academics have therefore sort of said,

1:30.5

well, we declare witchcraft, you know, serious and worthy of attention. As such, different groups

1:37.9

with different political aims have claimed witchcraft as a kind of expression of or proof of their theories.

1:47.1

So we see this with Marxists, we see this with feminists, and so forth.

1:51.7

And not to say that any of those explorations or those claimings don't have value.

1:56.5

I talk about this quite a bit on this episode.

1:58.5

They do, but they tend to dismiss the reality and the

2:04.6

importance and the interest and also kind of the fun of witchcraft and occultism as a phenomena,

2:11.7

as a structure, as a framework in and of itself. Thomas's book, I think, is kind of a nail in the coffin of that kind of

2:20.4

theoretical revisionism. And so I really love it. It's a challenging book. It's a dense book that

...

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