Witchcraft Today

Gardner s Witchcraft Today in published, causing interest in Wicca as a religion. 

Thus, azallu (one of the names for Cannabis) is cited in connection with the term hand of ghost , which is apparently an as yet unidentified disease to us, the term has a superstitious connotation. The use of azallu to annul witchcraft may be somewhat difficult to demonstrate in animal models today. However, gan-zi-gun-nu (another name for or formulation of Cannabis) reputedly a drug... 

To be sure, men like Galileo and Darwin were opposed by clerical authorities. And so were heretics and witches. But men like Semmelweis and Freud were opposed by clinical authorities. And so are the men and women we treat as involuntary mental patients. This is not surprising. In medieval society, the Church supplied the ideology, the State the power. Today, the Scientific Establishment supplies the ideology, the State the power. Formerly, the inquisitor accused the citizen of witchcraft and proved him to be a witch he then relaxed the witch to the secular arm —that is, the State— and he was burned at the stake. Today, the institutional psychiatrist accuses the citizen of mental illness and diagnoses him as psychotic ... 

By failing to make connections between the story of masturbatory insanity and current psychiatric practices. Comfort himself becomes a victim of the mythology of mental illness. One has the uncomfortable feeling, he writes, of the multiplicity and uncontrollability of such reactions [as those of physicians toward masturbation here reviewed], and the utter inability of those involved in them to acquire more than a limited insight, and one begins to look for the counterpart of witchcraft mania and masturbation anxiety in our own, in public irrationalities of which all but a few unusually detached observers are unaware today. In our contemporary world. Comfort sees such irrationalities in the Bomb, the... 

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