The Folklore of Unwitching the Bewitched: Witchcraft, Cunning Folk and Unwitching Traditions in the Welsh Borders and Beyond (Witchcraft in the Welsh Borders)

Tamzin Powell is a Welsh Borderlands wise woman who has studied on the cunning folk and witches' path for over 20 years. Tamzin writes scholarly historical research, and she lives in the Wye Valley Borders at the edge of the Forest of Dean. She is surrounded by the ancient River Wye and is the author of The Witches Ways in the Welsh Borders: Ethnography of Contemporary and Historical Customs of Cunning Folk Magic. She holds a MPhil in Anthropology and Witchcraft.Local cunning folk and witches using traditional magic, healing and rituals have been part of the Welsh Borderlands around the Wye Valley and Forest of Dean for many centuries, with their ways and deities coming from the ancient past. This book will take you on a journey where the Faerie greenwood and thin places are.This rare insight into Wica (One C ) is an enchanted ancient practice ‘Unwitching the bewitched and the beguiled. It is curse removal. However, it was the cunning folk who practised long forgotten magic, keeping it amongst their own people. The Wizards of Wales, known as the Dyn Hysbys alongside the cunning women, healed and cursed likewise. These were the ones who lived at the edge of villages, where locals warned their young of the consequences of being in their gardens, the spells they wove, the cunning words they used, and the cures they swore by.This book therefore conveys the historical facts of practitioners of magic, witchcraft, unwitching, and rituals, where charms are kept in small red bags to be worn around the neck to cure a cough. However, there is also the comfrey of the bone knitters, the nettles, which are our friends, helping us with arthritis, and giving us natural willow bark for the headaches. For protection, we have the Holly and Rowan that defend us while walking in the faerie glades. All that grows prolifically in the Welsh borderlands is sacred to this place. Extensive research underpins the narrative, starting during an epidemic and concluding within a transformed reality.However, unlike my last book The Witches Ways in the Welsh Borders (2014 ), we take a deeper dive into richer soils, taking the reader on a powerful journey from the ancient beginnings, with an old spell for love in chapter one, found in Egypt, to the last of the cunning folk and their passing. Read more