This dissertation studies how seventeenth-century English occult philosophy and magical practice approached, apprehended, and attempted to affect the emotions. It analyses how these early modern people used magic to map, manipulate, and manage emotionality: how the classical elements and humoural theory were used to build up profiles of temperament and emotional proclivities; how divination was used to diagnose particular passional states, relationships, and processes; how ritual and sorcery was used to provoke and galvanise these imbalances and their consequent effects on body, mind, soul, and personal volition; and how magical objects, regimen, and regulatory practices were deployed to constrain and ameliorate passional imbalances.

This thesis offers a comprehensive study of Jean Bodin's treatise De la Demonomanie des sorciers (1580), seeking to reinterpret the importance of the text within the corpus of Bodin's four central texts, and within a larger corpus of contemporary texts published on the persecution of witchcraft in early-modern France. This will provide a new critical insight into Bodin and the Demonomanie, which considers how the context of the witch trials unites the two predominant strands of Bodin's thought, religion and politics, and which offers a more complete appreciation of Bodin in the broader context of intellectual early-modern Europe. A close reading of the text, which takes into account the broader politico-religious contexts, gives priority to what Blair (1997) has described as 'the intermediate being' or 'the middle term' operating as a spatial, temporal and symbolic interconnector between two opposing points. This study situates Bodin and the Demonomanie at the intersection of various interconnecting axes which interweave these aspects of the intermediary: that is, the humanist movement of sixteenth century Europe, the position of France within this movement, the function of the Demonomanie in terms of the political and religious concerns of Bodin's corpus, and the role of the witch-figure as an intermediary agent between the human and demonic worlds.

The use of curse tablets was an important method for ancient people to cope with life, as shown by the increasing number of tablets found across the Graeco-Roman world. They could address a variety of problems and crises, including sexual relationships, crime, legal trials and economic competition. The study of these enigmatic objects by archaeologists and ancient historians has been dominated by the evidence from the Graeco-Egyptian traditions of magic, as well as their value for linguistics and philology as evidence for vulgar and vernacular language. In contrast, this study focuses on the importance of cursing as a contextually embedded ritual within the everyday lives of people living in the Roman north-western provinces. To achieve this aim, the present study had examined curse tablets through the lens of a number of theoretical models and discussions that have been developed by other scholars, both within archaeology and in other related fields. Phenomenological thinking has played a particularly significant role, as the reconfiguring of humans as embedded beings-in-the-world has allowed a much greater understanding of cursing as a creative ritual process. This thesis also looks at similar ritual practices in modern social contexts that have been observed by anthropologists and ethnographers, and uses them to ask new questions of the ancient evidence, particularly with regard to the motives and motivations behind the curses. By thinking in these new ways, this study has moved the scholarly discussions on curse tablets beyond the preoccupations about categorization. I have also brought curse tablets into contact with ongoing scholarly discussions about identity and agency in the Roman provinces, and have shown that these objects have great potential for informing these debates, despite their relative neglect by archaeologists and historians.

Can evidence be found to demonstrate a continuity in the development of Western ritual magic from ancient times to modern? This study attempts to answer that question in the positive by examining the practice of theurgy as expressed in three critical authors and time periods to determine if they are substantially the same or to account for the differences. Iamblichus, in De Mysteriis, c . AD 300, gave a defense of theurgy and a description of its practice. From this work, supplemented by his other surviving writings, is extracted a paradigm for theurgy by modeling the cosmology, psychology, primary practice and secondary activities, and ultimately the attainment of the theurgist. Agrippa's Three Books Occult Philosophy, c. 1530, is queried identically to determine if the same structures are present. They are , when allowances are made 'for his synthesis of Iamblichan theurgy with Catholic Christianity by way of the Kabbalah. Likewise, the extant materials of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn are analyzed by the same means. lamblichus's paradigm , transformed by Agrippa's synthesis, is found in the Order's practices but shifted from material to more symbolic modes. Transmission lines are traced showing the path of knowledge transfer from Iamblichus through Agrippa to the Golden Dawn. Questions are raised about the utility of the category of magic , and a religious framing of theurgic practice is presented. Theurgy is ultimately presented as advanced and privatized spirituality.

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In this thesis it is suggested that witchcraft accusations and persecution are being used as a marginalisation mechanism of women. The re-emergence of witchcraft beliefs in contemporary society and the prevalence of the violence associated with such beliefs has received little attention within academic literature, yet witchcraft related violence against women is, progressively, becoming one of the most pervasive forms of violence facing women to-date. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature, discussing the re-emergence of witchcraft beliefs in contemporary society, whilst assessing the effectiveness of international human rights law in protecting women from witchcraft accusations and persecution. Owing to the complexity of the topic, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on feminist commentary from disciplines of anthropology, history, law, politics and sociology in order to embrace the importance of cross-cultural enquiry.

The familiar spirit was a phenomenon unique to early modern English witchcraft that, while appearing often in witchcraft narratives, has been the subject of little analysis. Appearing often as an animal, offering services in exchange for the witch’s soul, and forming a unique relationship with the witch, the familiar spirit often appears in the narratives supplied by trial participants as described in pamphlet material. This thesis aims to analyse the appearance of the familiar in English pamphlet material in the early modern period, showing trends in the details provided over time.

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This thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth-century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century.

This thesis investigates how ways of being in different ontologies emerge from material and embodied practice. This general concern is explored through the particular case study of Scotland in the period of the witch trials (the 16th and 17th centuries C.E.). The field of early modern Scottish witchcraft studies has been active and dynamic over the past 15 years but its prioritisation of what people said over what they did leaves a clear gap for a situated and relational approach focusing upon materiality. Such an approach requires a move away from the Cartesian dichotomies of modern ontology to recognise past beliefs as real to those who experienced them, coconstitutive of embodiment and of the material worlds people inhabited. In theory, method and practice, this demands a different way of exploring past worlds to avoid flattening strange data. To this end, the study incorporates narratives and ‘disruptions’ – unique engagements with Contemporary Art which facilitate understanding by enabling the temporary suspension of disbelief. The methodology is iterative, tacking between material and written sources in order to better understand the heterogeneous assemblages of early modern (counter-) witchcraft. Previously separate areas of discourse are (re-)constituted into alternative ontic categories of newly-parallel materials. New interpretations of things, places, bodies and personhoods emerge, raising questions about early modern experiences of the world. Three thematic chapters explore different sets of collaborative agencies as they entwine into new things, co-fabricating a very different world. Moving between witch trial accounts, healing wells, infant burial grounds, animals, discipline artefacts and charms, the boundaries of all prove highly permeable. People, cloth and place bleed into one another through contact; trees and water emerge as powerful agents of magical-place-making; and people and animals meet to become single, hybrid-persons spread over two bodies. Life and death consistently emerge as protracted processes with the capacity to overlap and occur simultaneously in problematic ways. The research presented in this thesis establishes a new way of looking at the nature of Being as experienced by early modern Scots. This provides a foundation for further studies, which can draw in other materials not explored here such as communion wares and metal charms. Comparison with other early modern Western societies may also prove fruitful. Furthermore, the methodology may be suitable for application to other interdisciplinary projects incorporating historical and material evidence.