Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth

Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth, inspired by the British Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today, was the first book to be published on popular American witchcraft and remains the classic survey of white and black magic. Newly revised and updated for twenty-first-century readers, the author--an ordained but marvelously fallen exorcist--tells all about the evil eye, the queer eye, women and witch trials, the Old Religion, magic Christianity, Satanism, and New Age self-help.
Jack Fritscher sifts through legends of sorcery and the twisted history of witchcraft, including the casting of spells and incantations, with a focus on the growing role of witchcraft in popular culture and its mainstream commercialization through popular music, Broadway, Hollywood, and politics. As seriously historical as it is fun to read, there is no other book like it.


About the Author
Jack Fritscher is the author of fifteen books and hundreds of articles on American popular culture. He was ordained an exorcist in 1963 by the Catholic Church, which later excommunicated him for his memoir, What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy. He is the founding San Francisco editor of the legendary Drummer magazine, and he has written the pop-culture memoir-novel Some Dance to Remember and the biography, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.