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Paper short abstract

This paper draws on long term ethnography with British magical religious Witches and Wiccans to explore how histories are lived, forgotten, and remade. I examine shifting historicities in unstable contexts to consider what happens when historically minded anthropology itself becomes historical.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers a reflexive, long-term ethnographic engagement with history in person among practitioners of modern magical-religious witchcraft in Britain, drawing on over twenty-five years of research with Witches, Wiccans, and Pagans. I examine how large-scale historical narratives are challenged, refashioned, and made meaningful through everyday practices, and how these micro-histories continue to reshape broader historiographies of modern Witchcraft.

In the early 2000s, practitioners actively scrutinised their past, rejecting claims of continuity since antiquity. Encouraged by historians such as Ronald Hutton, they acknowledged Witchcraft’s realist history: twentieth century origins inspired through rich roots that included Romantic philosophy, anthropology, occultism, mythology, and literature. This, despite some conflicts, were accepted as necessary for a public-facing Pagan Nature religion. At the same time, practitioners continued to privilege alternative historicities grounded in Celtic pasts, popular magic, cunning folk traditions, and European shamanism, drawing on expanded historicities: personal, experiential, and sensory.

Twenty-five years later, surprisingly, these formal historical revisions have not become the dominant histories of Witchcraft amongst practitioners. Instead, new mythic narratives are foregrounded, that rely on vernacular, practice-based micro-histories. These shifting historicities illuminate the politics of memory and forgetting, and the affective and temporal labour involved in living with history.

Methodologically, the paper reflects on what happens when a historically minded anthropology itself becomes historical, arguing for the necessity of historicising ethnographic data and attending to changing contexts, meanings, and subjectivities over time, as well as my relationship to this ‘old data’ and its shifting contexts.