Few could have predicted witchcraft’s improbable 21st-century revival. The zealous townspeople of 17th-century Salem would be exasperated to learn that more than 300 years later, we have still not got to grips with the problem to which they dedicated so much effort and terror. There are more than a million witches in the United States, compared with only a few thousand at the beginning of the 1990s. Belief in aliens is growing. So is belief in Atlantis. A third of British people claim to believe in ghosts.
For many, we live not in a time of reason but in an age of mythology. At the lurid fringes of modern supernatural belief are those who inhabit an archaic world of prophecies, witches, devils and ghosts. The
