Besom, Stang & Sword: A Guide to Traditional Witchcraft, the Six-Fold Path & the Hidden Landscape

＂The book returns the Craft to its primordial forces--animism, baneful plants, folk magic, ecstasy, and hedge-witchery--without gatekeeping, armchair pseudo-academia, or pretension.＂--Mat Auryn, author of Psychic Witch

Regional traditional witchcraft is an animistic form of witchcraft that moves away from the religious harvest festivals and fertility-minded practices associated with the more common Wiccan form of witchcraft.

Very few of us in this age are farmers or dependent upon crops and harvests. Regional traditional witchcraft teaches people to find their craft in their own backyards, in the uncultivated land or urban cityscape alike, and in their ancestors rather than in ancient foreign deities or in a neopagan-styled religious form of witchcraft. It’s not about where you’re from but where you are.

The material in this book is adaptable to any region in which the practitioner lives. Although the lack of deity worship and holy days is a significant part of the authors’ nonreligious approach, this book presents a complete system of practice utilizing ritual, chant, trance, the six paths of witchcraft as defined and explained by the text, and the practices associated with traditional witchcraft.

Christopher Orapello is an artist, witch, and animist with a background in Western occultism, ceremonial magick, and Freemasonry and has been on his journey for over 20 years. He cohosts the podcast Down at the Crossroads with his partner, Tara Maguire, and is a signature artist with Sacred Source, a leading producer and distributor of ancient deity images in North America. After a growing desire for a more locally based form of witchcraft, he and Tara founded the Blacktree Coven in 2014 and set out to forge a modern approach to traditional witchcraft for a new era of praxis.
Tara-Love Maguire has been a practicing witch for over 30 years. Her path has been crookedly influenced by Isobel Gowdie, Marie Laveau, and William S. Burroughs (among others). Growing up in and around the New Jersey Pine Barrens, she found witchcraft within the tales and shadows of that folkloric landscape. She cohosts the podcast Down at the Crossroads with Christopher Orapello and is one of the founders of the Blacktree Coven, which exists in the heart of southern New Jersey.