Witches and Witchcraft - An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Essays

The motif of witches and witchcraft is a venerable one in weird fiction, chiefly because the witchcraft panic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance permanently embedded the theme into European society. In this new and expansive anthology, Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi have not only unearthed great stories and poems, old and new, about witches, but also chronicled the witch-hunts that resulted in the unjust deaths of hundreds of thousands of suspected witches over many centuries.

Treatises by Nicolas Rémy, Henri Boguet, Matthew Hale, and others cruelly portrayed witches, both male and female (but mostly female), as having signed pacts with the Devil. The sexual obsession of these male witch-hunters is evident throughout their writings. Their work led to the chilling portrayal of witches as evil crones, evidenced in tales, plays, and poems by William Shakespeare, L. Frank Baum, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Ramsey Campbell, and others.

This volume features original stories and poems on witches and witchcraft by such leading contemporary writers as John Shirley, Darrell Schweitzer, Wade German, Stephen Mark Rainey, Debra K. Every, and many others who exhibit the continuing power of this motif. Also included are distinctive illustrations from witch-hunting manuals, which reveal the twisted mentalities of self-appointed witch-hunters as they targeted innocent people in their vicious crusade.


Contents:

Introduction

Euripides, From Medea

Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, From Malleus Maleficarum

Mary A. Turzillo, Dollhouse

L. Frank Baum, The Search for the Wicked Witch

Nicholas Rémy, From Demonolatry

Debra K. Every, Beautiful Baby Bianka

Robert Herrick, The Hag

Stephen Mark Rainey, Foragers

Lady Wilde, The Horned Women

William Bell Scott, A Lowland Witch Ballad

John Kachuba, Why We Don’t Dig Up Witches

Henri Boguet, From An Examen of Witches

Dmitri Akers, Song of Fae-Land

Ramsey Campbell, Dolls

Cotton Mather, From Wonders of the Invisible World

Donald Tyson, Cotton Mather and the Witches

William Shakespeare, From Macbeth

Simon MacCulloch, Burnt Ghost

Robert P. Ottone, Donna and the Yaga

Matthew Hopkins, From The Discoverie of Witches

Im Bang, A Visit from the Shades

Clark Ashton Smith, The Witch in the Graveyard

John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft

Helena P. Blavatsky, A Witch’s Den

Ann Putnam, Confession

Ambrose Bierce, A Fowl Witch

Adam Bolivar, Géacspell

Darrell Schweitzer, Seeing Them

Michael Potts, Musings of a Conjurer

Eleanor Scott, The Old Lady

Edmund Clarence Stedman, Witchcraft

John Shirley, The Children of Glimbly

Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Witch-Mother

Alice Elizabeth Dracott, The Old Witch Who Lived in a Forest

Tony LaMalfa, The Eye of the Cyclops

Herman George Scheffauer, Lilith of Eld

Robert E. Howard, Sea Curse

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, The Witch

Éliphas Lévi, From The History of Magic

Oliver Smith, Witch’s Death Song

Joel Chandler Harris, A Plantation Witch

James Weldon Johnson, The White Witch

Margaret Alice Murray, From The Witch-Cult in Western Europe

Leah Bodine Drake, Witches on the Heath

Frank Belknap Long, The White People

Maxwell I. Gold, The Witch of the Pit (Our Lady Endor)

Dorothy Quick, Witch’s Brew

Mary De Morgan, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

Wade German, Hex House

Montague Summers, From The History of Witchcraft and Demonology

Katherine Kerestman, The Beldame

Anna Taborska, [Ir]reversible

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments