Prospero’s Isle
Gerald Gardner and Witchcraft
on the Isle of Man
By John Callow
Standard editions expected shipping Dec 2024
As rebel, adventurer, and religious visionary, Gerald Gardner forged Wicca upon the Isle of Man. His powerful re-imagining of modern witchcraft as a nature religion and source of female empowerment, stripped of its demonic current, was profoundly shaped by the folklore and landscape of this rugged Celtic island, set adrift in the Irish Sea.
It found its form in his writings and in the creation of The Witches’ Mill, a Manx museum devoted to the Craft, which for more than twenty years served to challenge and change popular attitudes towards the witch and her art, and to usher in a new and surprising age of tolerance to a figure that was once so bitterly feared and despised.
This modern day ‘Prospero’ had found both his Isle and his purpose, honing and defining a form of magical practice that was capable of reviving the worship of the ‘old gods’ and of inspiring feminist and environmental movements from the late Twentieth Century through to the new Millenium.
This book provides a gateway to his ideas and achievement, an insight into the genesis of a new religion that took on the mantle of the old, and to a magic that acted to dispel fear, to give delight, and to hurt not.
Editions
Contents
Editions
Available in the following editions:
Fine: £395 | TBA
Deluxe: £95 | TBA
Standard hardback: £30 | bound in cloth, with 120GSM watural Wibalin end papers and Brown & Oyster head/tailbands. Foil printed spine.
Body printed on 80gsm Munken Cream paper (UV Printing) with colour plate sections.
Size: All editions 234x156mm UK royal portrait
Contents
Full details coming soon
Dr John Callow
John Callow is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Suffolk, who has written widely on Witchcraft and Manx History. His books include The Last Witches of England (Bloomsbury); Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft (I.B. Tauris); and (with Geoffrey Scarre) Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).
The Isle of Man, its history, folklore and magic have fascinated him since childhood. And, Prospero’s Isle, though his first book for Rose Ankh Publishing, is the fulfilment of a long-standing desire to recover the essence of the enchantment woven by Gerald Gardner around a people and a place.
