Prosperos Isle - Rose Ankh Publishing Ltd

Prospero’s Isle

Gerald Gardner and Witchcraft
on the Isle of Man

By John Callow

Release:

early 2025

Priority purchases for subscribers with pre-registered interest.

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

Contents

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.

Fine:

£395*

Deluxe:

£95*

Standard Hardback:

£30*

Dr John Callow

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