About this site
What it is, what it is not, and who it is for.
witchcraft.boo is a small reference site about folklore, historical belief, and the plants and stones that turn up in both. It is written for people who want to know what a tradition actually is and where the claim comes from, rather than a confident paragraph with no source behind it.
What this site does not do
- It sells nothing and collects nothing. There is no shop, no newsletter, and no contact form.
- It offers no services, readings or consultations of any kind.
- It gives no medical advice. Historical people believed a great many things about plants; that is a fact about the people, not about the plants.
On sources
Where a practice is attested in an early source, this site says which kind of source and roughly when. Where a name or festival was assembled by twentieth-century revivalists — which is true of more of the modern wheel of the year than is usually admitted — it says that instead. Both are interesting. Conflating them is not.
Further reading
The standard scholarly account of the British material is Ronald Hutton's work on both the ritual year and the history of modern pagan witchcraft. For the trials, Brian Levack's survey remains the usual starting point. Neither is hard to find in a library.