Unbewitching: A Brief Guide to Countermagic in British Cunning Craft

Unbewitching is the archetypal stock-in-trade of conjure doctors, cunning-women, wise ones, healers, medicine people, witch-doctors, and spiritual workers the world over. It is the removal of the 'crossed' conditions that may arise from the magical violence of enemies against us. The dissolution of deliberate hauntings. The abjuration of demonic harassment. Not to mention the occasionally downright aggressive "best-defence" tactics against the sorcerous ruination of body, mind, and soul.

In this class, magician, diviner, and historian Dr Alexander Cummins will lead us through a host of early modern means of avoiding, countering, destroying, and even reversing and returning the maleficia of deliberately orchestrated hexes, curses, blights, and banes. We will do so by exploring the folk magical and grimoiric techniques of early modern British cunning-folk - those local wise-women, "white witches", village wizards, and conjuring parsons who served their communities by preventing, diagnosing, and curing the bedevilled, the haunted, and the pixie-led,…