Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

Description

From the introduction to this edition:

In the context of a renewed interest in the history of Witchcraft and the rise of Christian civilisation, this book offers a significant contribution. In recent years, anti-capitalists and pagans alike have explored a radical analysis of these histories and have worked to understand the conditions by which patriarchy and capitalism have developed together as two heads of the same monstrosity. This line of inquiry is perhaps best illustrated by the widespread reading and discussion of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, and also the renewed excitement about Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan!

This radical faerie classic, first published in 1978 by Fag Rag Press, uncovers the hidden mythic link between homosexuality and paganism in an elegy for the world of sex and magic vanquished by Christian civilisation. From Joan of Arc to the Cathars and the underground worshippers of Diana, the author shows how every upwelling of gender transgression and sexual freedom was targeted by the authorities for total and often violent repression or appropriation. The concluding manifesto calls for pagan reconnection with the living world, the creation of armed anarchist cells, and the destruction of industrial civilisation.

This edition includes the essential new introduction by Feral Death Coven, which also makes clear the book’s failures and shortcomings.