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I'm having a great time today with this vintage witchcraft interview with the Farrars on Irish television.

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It's amazing how very basic concepts can suddenly strike you and come back to life, like, every part of human life is of the gods, or every part of nature is divine, or just the idea of being able to make a magic circle whenever you like and consecrate it; the idea of being innately sacred and being able to bring out the sacredness in other things is, it's not a thing you can fake - especially when you're feeling down - and yet, how revelatory whenever you can know it to be true.

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RE: the Farrars' interview, something I find myself constantly wanting to remind (often, younger) people who go really hard on "actually witchcraft is DARK and bLOODY and EDGY and fairies are SCARY and what I do is DANGEROUS and I love HEXING PEOPLE", is that in the 1970s and 80s in Britain, there were these completely sensible interviews in everything from tabloids to the actual BBC, in which members of the audience ask "have you ever hurt anyone with magic?" and "do you sacrifice people?" and "are you like Aleister Crowley?" and "how can you claim to believe in God when it says here in Deuteronomy...?".

The latitude we have now is built on these older voices who, tell the truth, almost certainly did know how to hex people and did it routinely (because the drama, oh! the drama), and were in a very different social position for how they could articulate their craft in public. Gorgeous Janet Farrar giving the interviewer a hasty glare after he mentions sex, and she pedals back "the athame is the male principle" to "well, that's one of many things it represents".
 
She then goes on to explain (somewhat clumsily and, IMO, in language one probably ought not to use nowadays) that being a Witch is really just like being a Hindu, and its also identical to worshipping (Christian) God, & like. You have to imagine that there were elderly people watching this on the telly in 1970-something who had simply never come across this kind of radical syncretic all-gods-are-one before.

When you get into the original texts by our immediate witch ancestors, you generally discover that their craft is vibrant and messy and cthonic and unusual, personal and creative, underpinned by tradition and research (as far as they could access it) as well as poetry and experimentation. There's always been a fad for bashing Wicca, or for bashing early witches of the 1950s, and I can't get on with it at all; it's people who've rejected what they found on the Wicca 101 bookshelf at their local chain book shop,

I find learning about witches from this era so invigorating and inspiring, always.