Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Butler was a Cambridge professor of German whose fascination with magical books, and the traditions they inspired, was coloured by anti-German sentiments, in the aftermath of the Nazi regime. The significance of Ritual Magic rests on extensive English accounts of the influential corpus of German manuscript grimoires.
Your next book, Ritual Magic, is all about the Germans.
Yes, Elizabeth Butler wrote a series of books just after the Second World War. Ritual Magic is one of them. She also wrote a seminal book on the Doctor Faust legends. Her view is that there is something specific in the German make-up which had led to centuries of fascination with magic.
And why does she think that?
Her views are never properly explained. Obviously the books she wrote are coloured by the Second World War and the Nazi regime and it’s difficult to know to what extent she held these anti-German views before.
It sounds like you’re sceptical of her views; what’s the value of the book for you?
Its value is all the translations of texts from German. So, any historian scholar who doesn’t read German can finally understand what the German grimoire traditions are all about. What they show you is that essentially they are no different from grimoire traditions elsewhere. In other words her thesis crumbles because as a specialist in Germany she is only studying German material. But actually all the traditions are linked up.
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Owen Davies is professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written widely on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts and folk medicine. He argues that despite persecution, magic has been with us since the first recorded written word and it’s still very much part of popular culture today.
