Category: On Witchcraft
Witch-Children—Then and Now
Questioning children’s innocence is not popular. In a world that agonizes over perennial betrayal, cruelty, war, mass slaughter, and other failures of humanity, we passionately long for exem-plars of unadulterated goodness—and the child, like some sacred icon, has been traditionally placed upon an imaginary altar so that we might revere virtues lacking in ourselves. This …
Children, Witches, Demons, and Cultural Reality
A lively and creative imagination in children has always been regarded as a sign of their good health, and throughout the world adults enrich children’s imaginations with magical folktales and encouragement of beliefs in supernatural beings, both good and evil. Imagination helps both cognitive and social/moral development in the child; for adult agents of socialization, …
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