Aloha,
In the U.S. people occasionally make claims about family traditions of
witchcraft. Typically, these are inherited traditions that have come down,
often in secrecy, from the past. Family traditions by-pass questions of
revival Neo-Pagan Craft legitimacy through their claims of earlier
independent origins and transmission more or less via kin lines.
Claims about family traditions of witchcraft are, in my limited experience,
difficult to look into, at least when they stand, in part, on texts or
books
that must remain with the tradition bearers exclusively. But on the
couple of occasions when I've seen reports of family tradition texts or
books
offered up for an appraisal, they've turned out to be compendia of fairly
recent, many times published, material. The material may be a hundred
or so years old, but it doesn't hark back to any ancient continuity of
witchcraft.
Claims about family witchcraft traditions can serve to buff up kin
reckoning.
And to offer a range of social, psychological, and spiritual pluses pretty
much apart from the reality status of the claims. A great-grand aunt's
hand written collection of spells and her reputation as a *witch* may
offer a sense of pride and stability and rootedness in identity
construction.
Regardless of the actual age or sources of the spells.
These days, I look at the Neo-Pagan revivalists claims about the
historicity
of Craft in much the same way. They buffed up the kin reckoning, maybe
concealed sources, and maybe made some stuff up. If doing things like this
ends up relatively harmless in the scheme of things, then I don't find a
little
charlatanism discredits the entire endeavor.
Musing There Probably Are Family Traditions, But They May Be Incorrect
About The Provenance Of Materials Rose,
Pitch
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