Hello Everyone,
Having just joined the list I thought I should say a quick hello and briefly
introduce myself.
I did my PhD at King’s College, London, on the subject of modern witchcraft
and re-enchantment. I believe you can find it in the University of London
library somewhere. Necessity forced me to work as something completely
different for a few years, but during that time I wrote Witchcraft Out of the
Shadows (Robert Hale, 2004), essentially contextualising my research work
within the larger historical frame of witchcraft. Some people have
concentrated on the fact that I didn’t exactly treat Gerald Gardner like a
saint, which has certainly ruffled a few feathers. But what I consider to be
the most important contribution of the book is my presentation of a theory of
re-enchantment derived from Weber and tested against a sample drawn from
practitioners of modern witchcraft.
By strange coincidences and digressions I ended up writing a biography of
Faustus. Being intrigued and disappointed by EM Butler’s work on the subject
(so long the standard in English) I felt someone really needed to have a
serious look behind the legend and find out what it was all about. Some time
later I held in my hands a monumental study of about 250,000 words, which
has ended up as the rather more condensed (at 125,000 words) book
Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician (The History Press,
2009). I put out a few articles on the subject, appearing in Pagan Dawn and
Watkins Review, that you might have seen, and gave a paper at
the ‘Reinventing the Renaissance Occult’ conference at Anglia Ruskin this year.
My research interests thus tend to encompass the whole field of witchcraft
and magic, which, as you can imagine, keeps me up rather late at night. I also
run the website www.witchology.com, which had over 143,000 visits last year
(and not all of them from me).
I also want to say thanks to Dave Green for adding me to the list and look
forward to getting to know you all.
All the best
Leo
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