A Witches Natural History by Giles Watson

Trade paperback. Originally published as a series of essays in The Cauldron, is a meditation on the relationship between folklore and nature. The world’s dogmatic religions all have their devotional texts, and biological science, too, has its own rationalistic equivalents, from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle to Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale. Natural historians have written their works of devotion to the works of nature: a genre which has been recognisable ever since Gilbert White wrote The Natural History of Selborne. It is at work in the poems of John Clare, and the essays of W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies and Richard Mabey, but it also stands at the centre of the beliefs and practices of modern pagans. A Witch’s Natural History is intended as a small contribution to modern witchcraft’s own devotional literature of nature, drawing on scientific, folkloric and experiential sources. Giles Watson explores the lore, legends and life-histories of a selection of animals which are c