Getting It Wrong: The Problems with Reinventing the Past

Abstract

This article is an examination of recent best-selling fictions and television adaptations which portray the history of witchcraft, often using outmoded historical theses, and often falsifying the known life histories of actual convicted witches. This article argues that these fictions, marked by problematically eugenicist ideas of magic, and in one case by a very uncomfortable appropriation of the Holocaust, are ultimately unhelpful to Pagans because they falsify history and deny the real needs of the contemporary Pagan communities.