The first European witch trials were for magick as heresy. In the 1350s, the Church sought and out and prosecuted learned sorcerers of text-based magicks. These were sorcerers accused of using demonic powers to achieve their own ends, but they controlled the demons they summoned, not the other way around.

Then in the 1420s, things began to change. It all started in the Pyrenees in 1424, in a mountain valley high in the Catalan range, where the local people believed there was a group among them who were following demons to go worship the Devil at night. This was an entirely new idea. These weren’t sorcerers controlling demons, these were people pledging fealty to demons—and not just any demon, the king Evil of them all: Satan. The Devil himself.

Women's Weeds

Women's Weeds: Witchcraft Chapter, Story 2 — Invention of the Satanic Witch

This is a song about how lies can destroy your hopes & dreams. Inspired by Eugenia Falleni who lived a lie because society couldn't accept her as a him. 

The Article

In its second episode "Unworkable" looks into surveillance in the workplace, from the powers that employers currently hold to the ways in which technology is making this monitoring much easier and all-pervasive. We talk to Uber and Deliveroo riders, as well as experts and researchers. Interviewees include Corinna Ferguson, a Barrister at Old Square Chambers, Privacy International policy officer Frederike Kaltheuner and Dr Phoebe Moore of Middlesex University. 

Hosted and produced by Emiliano Mellino for the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB).

Your boss is watching you

UNWORKABLE - Episode 2 - Your boss is watching you

Black Raven is a new English mis-translation of a traditional Cossack folk song that is well known in Russia, reworked through the lens of English folk and blues. We found it while researching world music about corvids – crows, ravens, magpies – which are a kind of clan emblem for us. The tune feels soaring, magnetic, with extremely deep roots. Something in the melody transports us, seems to open up a landscape, a trans-temporal space of connection with something very big, and very old, and very dark.

Special thanks to Sophie J of Thetford Grammar School, who won our competition to design the Black Raven image.

This Is Broken Folk

Black Raven

Romany Reagan is an Arts Council England funded freelance research fellow and creative partner, working with museums and heritage sites. Her most recent exhibition 'Women's Weeds' was a study of the hidden histories of women in medicine—from mediaeval cunning women and herbal witchcraft to 19th-century feminist botany, at the Museum of the Home in London, which ran July-September 2023. Romany received her doctorate from Royal Holloway, University of London in Performing Heritage in 2018. Her practice-based thesis explored the layers of heritage within Abney Park cemetery, which led to a study of the occult literary heritage of Stoke Newington, ‘earth mystery’ psychogeography, and folklore. Since completion of her PhD, Romany has documented her ongoing research into lost histories and place-based folklore and legends on her blog Blackthorn & Stone. 

BlueSky / Instagram / TikTok /: @msromany 

https://blackthornandstone.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@blackthornandstone

Women's Weeds: Witchcraft Chapter, Story 2 — Invention of the Satanic Witch

Romany Reagan — Historian of Lost Stories

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