You know I wonder how much of the whole Wicca fabrication about an ancient history is descended from the late medieval, early renaissance period where everything imaginable was “Solomon’s” book, re the character from the Bible? And then it just continued.
I recently discovered listening to a Stephen Skinner interview that the first books attributed to “Solomon” were actually almost certainly correctly attributed to a regular Jewish person named Solomon in byzantium and then people just drifted into mixing the two until everything was written by Solomon The King.
I mean if I open a book and the first thing I’m told is that this book is handed down from angels to Adam or written by a king that almost certainly never existed, THEN I see the contents are medieval Neoplatonist theory, i can safely assume that at least part of what you’re telling me ISNT factually correct.
that’s what initially turned me off about Wicca when I was younger and when I first came across asatru. This isn’t historically accurate, because i can read the sagas and mythology in Germanic culture, and can tell this other stuff is just a stripped down version of the Lemegemeton. Quit perpin’, nigga! lol.
I wonder how much those “neo” groups have been damaged by dishonesty over their origins vs being helped by a romanticized fable about Ye Antient Historia? I can’t ever forget how many times I met these teenagers in the 90s who told me they were from a long unbroken family of practicing witches back to the Middle Ages, except i knew their parents, grandparents and in some cases their great grandparents who said in no uncertain terms that wasn’t true. Just a complete coincidence that, like later descendants of “Vikings” in the 21st century, they only discovered this heritage AFTER whatever TV series came out.
in a side tangent to this, talking about Christian witchcraft in Europe, Dr Skinner talks about the goetia of dr rudd and how this was a local cunning man’s notebook that had passed through several peoples hands over several generations before being archived. It’s an interesting study in angels/demons.
i think about that sometimes, how our perception of this all has been distorted by the relative availability of occult texts. Even an expensive reprint costing 2-400 USD would have been virtually a giveaway for most magicians in history, and they copied whatever they could since, dammit, no xerox machines or scanners. The other thing is how expensive parchment and even later, laid paper was. Shit wasn’t a notebook at the dollar store. (I do love how magic oriented individuals seem to be preserving things like calligraphy and fountain pens and illuminating their notebooks, making grimoires, books of shadows etc).
anyway, great new thread!!!!
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