Italy's Witches and Medicine Women


Book Description

Karyn Crisis has been able to sense the "unseen world of passed-on relatives, angels, and ghosts since childhood. Training as a Spiritualist Medium as an adult, she became a popular platform Medium and healer in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2009, she took a fateful trip to Italy's Tuscany Region, which would have a lasting impact far beyond what she could have ever imagined: Goddesses from Italy's history suddenly began appearing to Karyn as clearly as other spirit people had, and they began transmitting to her the information of a most interesting cultural melting pot in Italy that gave rise to its unique and complex spiritual landscape. Among the information shared was the knowledge of Italy's own indigenous Lineage healing, a female shamanism hiding in-plain-sight that can be traced back to pre-pagan times. One thing was clear: Mediumship was and is the cornerstone of all these traditions by advancing the quality of life through previously hidden knowledge from the spirit world handed down to earth. Following the guidance of the Goddesses, Karyn returned to Italy where she embarked on a long and intensive research study. Taking cures from "streghe," meeting herbalists on mountain tops, experiencing a 6 hour ancestral fire ritual with secret shaman called Benandanti, interviewing local authors and museum curators and folk lore experts, and walking on the remains of the Goddess Diana's 2,000 year old temple, Karyn found the historical evidence to support what the Goddesses had shown her in visions. Volume 1 also provides a comprehensive spiritual history of the "Italian Witch" and reveals an important matrilineal living practice supplanted by the patriarchal invasions of pre-pagan times, whose acts of repression still affect the world today, revealing a groundbreaking history of women. Also find practical tips to reconnect with this female Lineage.




Italian Magic: Secret Lives of Women


Book Description

Looking for the meaning behind your Italian grandma's rituals?Curious about their source and wondering if there's more to the story?Seeking magic beyond what the Romans wrote about in fragments?Wondering why no one can seem to find the mythical witch cults?This book will answer all these questions and reveal a groundbreaking view into the hidden world of rural Italy: the ONLY pervasive holistic system of daily sacred magic indigenous to Italy and her islands, whose traditions existed in all rural communities regardless of cultural influences. In these communities: - magic was the daily medicine- women were the sole operators of magic- people lived an entire way of life in accordance with the cycles of nature and the energetic laws of the universe.- the spirit world was as real as the earthly word- psychic language was spoken in parallels- shamanic inheritances received from spirits were handed down for generations between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons.This lifestyle, whose threads of connection go back to the domestic goddess temples of ancient Europe, began to die out in what Italians call the deculturalization of the 1950s. Here, midwives and healers took care of their families and communities. There were no hospitals nor medicine. Romans wrote about these traditions existing before them, and they live on in fragments among all Italian families. This is the source of masculine conceptual magic that became popular in the middle period. Astral travel, cord-cutting, psychic illness and physical symptoms, fertility trees, euthanasia, spell-breaking, birth and death rituals,amulets and more can be found in these many pages, keeping in mind that this collection is only a small glimpse into a much more detailed way of life.




Witches, Midwives, and Nurses


Book Description

This book looks at the history of medical practice, argues that the suppression of female healers began with the European witch hunts, and describes the sexism of the current medical establishment.




Medicine Women


Book Description

Women have always been healers -- from the priestess healers in the temples of Isis, to the hedge-witches and herbalists of medieval times, to the physicians, researchers, and alternative practitioners of today. This glorious book celebrates the history of women healers from earliest times to the present. It includes profiles of women healers from all traditions. Some are well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Baker Eddy. Others deserve to be more widely recognized, such as Trotula of Salerno, who wrote gynecological and obstetrical texts in thirteenth-century Italy, and Mama Lola, a respected mambo or healing priestess in the Haitian Voodoo tradition. Text and pictures detail the many contributions of women to the healing arts, from the founding of nursing orders and the tending of soldiers, to the establishment of public health hospitals, to contemporary applications of the ancient lore of herbal medicine and therapeutic touch.




Italian Folk Magic


Book Description

In this fascinating journey through the magical, folkloric, and healing traditions of Italy the reader learns uniquely Italian methods of magical protection and divination and spells for love, sex, control, and revenge. "Mary-Grace Fahrun's Italian Folk Magic is an intimate journey into the heart of Italian folk magical practices as they are lived every day. Having grown up in an extended Italian family in North America and Italy, the author presents us with the stories, characters, saints, charms, and prayers that form the core of folk religion, setting them in context in an authentic, down-to-earth, and humorous voice. A delight to read!"—Sabina Magliocco, Professor of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Italian Folk Magiccontains: magical and religious rituals prayers divination techniques crafting blessing rituals witchcraft The author also explores the evil eye, known as malocchio in Italian, explaining what it is, where it comes from, and, crucially, how to get rid of it. This book can help Italians regain their magical heritage, but Italian folk magic is a beautiful, powerful, and effective magical tradition that is accessible to anyone who wants to learn it.




Italian Witchcraft


Book Description

Italian Witchcraft (previously titled Ways of the Strega) by respected author Raven Grimassi is more than just a book about Witchcraft. It is a complete Book of Shadows. In it you will find the history of this ancient tradition, its legends and myths, as well as the rituals and rites that you can do today. You can be a Strega! The book includes a full set of rituals that you can do. You'll find rituals for all of the Italian Witchcraft holidays including Shadow Fest, Lupercus, Tana's Day and more. You'll also find rituals for the Full Moon, births, funerals. There is a practical side to this book, too. It is filled with instructions so that you can cast spells and work with the powers of incense, oils, herbs, and candles. You'll learn to work with the magick of the Moon and Stars. You'll be able to do protection rituals and learn how to cure someone who has received the "Malocchio" (Evil Eye). Many of the mysteries revealed here have never been published before. You'll learn secret gestures of power and secret symbols. And you can use them all! Also revealed are the secrets of the tools of the Italian Witch. You'll learn how to prepare the "Spirit Blade" and the ritual wand. You'll learn how to make the Spirit Bowl and use to consecrate other tools and talismans. If you're looking to discover real Witchcraft, or if you're already a Witch but are thinking about other traditions, this is the book for you.




Ways of the Strega


Book Description

Discover, for the first time in one complete work, the rich legacy of magick and ritual handed down by Italian witches through the generations. Ways of the Strega reclaims the beliefs and practices of southern European Pagan spirituality. Learn the secrets of Janarra (lunar) witches, Tanarra (star) witches, and Fanarra (ley lines) witches. This book also details the how-to's of modern Strega traditions.




The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America


Book Description

The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of women and men for this offence. The trials resulted in as many as fifty thousand executions. These essays study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. They also relate these prosecutions to the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the introduction of new forms of criminal procedure, medical and scientific thought, the process of state-building, profound social and economic change, early modern patterns of gender relations, and the wave of demonic possessions that occurred in Europe at the same time. The essays survey the current state of knowledge in the field, explore the academic controversies that have arisen regarding witch beliefs and witch trials, propose new ways of studying the subject, and identify areas for future research.




Damned Women


Book Description

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.




Caliban and the Witch


Book Description

"Women, the body and primitive accumulation"--Cover.