Arts diary: Witchcraft a 'durable, relevant' enough subject to merit the Very Short treatment

[icymist]

THE Oxford University Press has tackled everything from Anarchism to Wittgenstein in its "Very Short Introduction" series, designed to be informative primers on meaty subjects that "make often challenging topics highly readable". This month's new very short introductions are the Laws of Thermodynamics and Witchcraft.

The witchcraft volume is penned by Dr Malcolm Gaskill, historian at the University of East Anglia, where they do magical things with climate change statistics. He claims witchcraft is "hard-wired" into human society.

Witchcraft is far from being consigned to the past, he insists. Though Scotland famously burned its "last witch" in 1727, he cites everything from sightings of Satan's face in the Twin Towers inferno to "witchfinders" used to instil terror in Zimbabwe.

He says: "Witchcraft is culturally durable, relevant, and potent – hard-wired into us all, even those who have consigned it to history's dustbin with other relics of primitivism."

More at The Scotsman