Hey everyone, welcome back to Seeking Witchcraft. It's me, your host, Ashley, and today I have on a special

guest, Dr. Amy Hale. Welcome, Amy. Hello, Ashley. I'm so happy to be here hanging out with you today.

Hello, hello. Would you like to introduce yourself to both listeners and our topic for today as well?

Sure, sure. It's one of my favorite topics, but I am Dr. Amy Hale. I

am living in the beautiful city of Atlanta, Georgia. I am a folklorist. I have a PhD in folklore from

UCLA. I'm also an anthropologist. I write about a number of things that are kind of interestingly

intersected. So mostly I write about women, art, culture, the occult, and Cornwall in various

combinations. And so today, Ashley and I are going to have a fun chat about the kind of history and position of women in the occult.

I'm super excited to talk about this.

And with your background and your education and everything, I think this is going to be a really cool topic.

I'm super excited to hear we are going to dive into today.

Me too.

The first thing that I want to do specifically for your listeners who are

mostly primarily, I would assume, interested in what we consider to be witchcraft, modern and

historical witchcraft traditions. I want to talk a little bit about how we understand and define the

occult because there may be some people who are

interested in witchcraft or who identify themselves as witches, who don't really feel any kind

of attachment to the phrase occult or occultism. There's kind of a popular understanding or

belief that witchcraft is low magic or traditional magic

and that the occult is high magic. It might sometimes be associated with Abrahamic or Jewish or Islamic

or Christian traditions. And those things are also very true. But for our purposes today, and in general,

I think that it's important that we look at witchcraft, particularly initiatory witchcraft,

...