Word: witchcrafts
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...mildly entertaining potful of scraps, Witchcraft would be more impressive had Seabrook, like a conscientious warlock, given it double toil and trouble...
...WITCHCRAFT - William Seabrook -Harcourt, Brace...
Last week Willie Seabrook, 54, announced: "I have outgrown . . . the attitude of willing and romantic wonder which characterized some of my earlier books." Between the covers of Witchcraft he has swept the years' litter of a disordered desk: a theory, anecdotes, old magazine articles, scraps from history, leftover items from former books, newspaper clippings, remarks on extrasensory perception-everything, in fact, but his blotter and pencils...
Seabrook's theory: witchcraft (black magic) is potent, can kill by autosuggestion, just as psychotherapy (white magic) can rid folk of fancy-induced but very real ills. Corollaries: 1) the witch's victim must fear, perhaps unconsciously, the power of magic; 2) witchcraft can affect only human beings...
...Pennsylvania in its birth was a planned society," Bates observes. To his mind Penn was a great political thinker, the Quaker Colony was democracy's brightest hope. While that prurient sadist and hypochondriac, Cotton Mather, was torturing old women for witchcraft in Massachusetts, Penn dismissed a charge of broomstick riding with the remark that there was no law in Pennsylvania against riding on broomsticks. Penn's incredibly dramatic-and in the end tragic-life has nowhere been better told...