Deluxe edition 2022 297pp Black Letter Press. Quarter Night-Blue Cloth over marbled paper covered boards. Titling foiled in gold. Near fine.
 
Ltd. ed. 47/50. Free, pagan, transgressive: worshippers of Pan, devotees of Diana. The men and women who meet under a full moon in the wild woods danced, sing, made music, and made love; in the home they make potions and mutter spells, be it to curse or cure. The witch image infused the European imagination down the centuries, appearing in court records, prose, and poetry. The impulse the literature described finally became a practiced mystery religion in the twentieth century, in the form of Wicca as it coalesced in the New Forest in the 1930s and 30s. The poems and passages in this book illustrate the supportive imagination of the New Forest Coven and its most famous initiate, Gerald Gardner. They date from the late medieval period through the Edwardian age, and all were instrumental, influential - inspiring early pagans, and hopefully, too, readers today.