Persuasions of the Witch's Craft

Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England is a study of several Wiccan and ceremonial magic groups that assembled in southern England during the 1980s. It was written by the American anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann of the University of California, San Diego, and first published in 1989.

Persuasions of the Witch's Craft

The first edition cover of the book
Author	Tanya Luhrmann
Language	English
Subject	Anthropology of religion Pagan studies
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Publication date	1989
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	382

The work would be criticized by later academics working in the field of Pagan studies and western esotericism, who charged it with dealing with those it was studying in a derogatory manner.^{[citation needed]}

Influence

Writing in her paper within James R. Lewis' edited Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft anthology, Siân Reid described Luhrmann's work as "a solid ethnography". Nevertheless, she felt that the study "occasionally rings hollow" because Luhrmann failed to take into account the "subjective motivations for magical practice".^[1] In her anthropological study of the U.S. Pagan community, Witching Culture (2004), the American academic Sabina Magliocco noted that her work both built upon and departed from Luhrmann's.^[2]

Interpretive Drift

One of the key concepts developed by Luhrmann is that of "Interpretive Drift, the gradual shift in a person's interpretation of events and experiences so that, over time, the person comes to understand these experiences in terms of a new belief system or framework. Although it is rare for people to change their deeply held beliefs overnight, as they have new experiences their beliefs shift incrementally, leading them to adopt beliefs and practices that they might have previously considered strange. Although Luhrmann studied interpretive drift in the setting of modern witchcraft, it is a very general concept, and probably plays a role in almost every setting, most especially where someone is joining a new community, like that of religions, sciences, or any other kind of community or culture.

The concept of shifting beliefs and interpretations is similar to concepts described in other settings, such as Thomas Kuhn's "Paradigm Shifts", Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's "Social Construction of Reality", Leon Festinger's "Cognitive Dissonance Theory", "Symbolic Interactionism", and non-stage-based developmental theories, such as the "Overlapping Wave Theory", due to Robert S. Siegler.^[3]

Although the interpretive drift was intended to describe a feature of human cognition, it has parallels in Artificial Intelligence, especially regarding how machine learning (ML) models adapt slowly with experience, and specifically "Concept Drift" which shares with interpretive drift the core idea of gradual change over time, and the processes by which a starting point or understanding evolves due to new influences. ML models are trained on a specific set of data, and if the real-world data (on which predictions are made) begins to drift from the training data's distribution, the model's performance can degrade.

References

Footnotes

1. Reid 1996, pp. 146–147.
2. Magliocco 2004. p. 100.
3. Siegler1996.

Bibliography

• Carpenter, Dennis D. (1996). James R. Lewis (ed.). "Emergent Nature Spirituality: An Examination of the Major Spiritual Contours of the Contemporary Pagan Worldview". Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 35–72. ISBN 978-0-7914-2890-0.
• Hutton, Ronald (1999). The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820744-3.
• Luhrmann, Tanya M. (1989). Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in England. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-66324-4.
• Magliocco, Sabina (2004). Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3803-7.
• Orion, Loretta (1995). Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press. ISBN 978-0-88133-835-5.
• Reid, Siân (1996). "As I Do Will, So Mote It Be: Magic as Metaphor in Neo-Pagan Witchcraft". Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. pp. 141–167.
• Salomonsen, Jone (2002). Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-22393-5.
• Siegler, Robert (1996). Emerging Minds. UK: Oxford University Press.