Wednesday, 9 April 2014

New Publication: "Devil's Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft" in Folklore 125(1)

I am very pleased to announce the online publication of my fourth academic article, which has appeared in Folklore, the UK’s foremost journal of folkloristics. The article is titled “Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft,” and started life as a paper presented at the first “Popular Antiquities: Folklore and Archaeology” conference held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology back in October 2011. The (unusually short) abstract is as follows: 

During the middle years of the twentieth century, British pioneers of Wicca, the neopagan witchcraft religion, adopted prehistoric megaliths as ‘sacred sites’ and appropriated the folklore that surrounded them for their own magico-religious purposes. In turn, Wiccan interpretations of such sites resulted in the creation of a new ‘alternative archaeological’ megalithic folklore.

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