ANGELA'S SYMPOSIUM 📖 Academic Study on Witchcraft, Paganism, esotericism, magick and the Occult

What is an Esbat, and is it really an ancient full moon ritual?

In this video, I trace the surprising history of the word Esbat, from its Old French meaning of “frolic” or “amusement” to its modern role in Wicca and contemporary Pagan witchcraft. I explore how Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, and Doreen Valiente helped transform a borrowed word into one of the best-known terms in the modern witchcraft ritual calendar.

Was the Esbat an ancient Pagan tradition, or a modern invention? The answer is more interesting than either option. I separate historical evidence from modern myth while recognising the real religious value of living practice.

This video is for anyone interested in Wicca, Paganism, full moon rituals, witchcraft history, and how modern magical traditions are created.

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00:00 Esbat: Origins, Meaning, and Modern Pagan Practice
01:22 What Is an Esbat in Wicca? Full Moon Rituals Explained
02:29 The Old French Etymology of Esbat: Frolic, Play, and Amusement
03:37 Pierre de Lancre and the First Witchcraft Use of Esbat
04:40 Margaret Murray Invents the Esbat as a Witch-Cult Institution
06:39 Why Scholars Rejected Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult Theory
08:07 Gerald Gardner, Wicca, and the Survival of Murray’s Vocabulary
08:38 Doreen Valiente and the Full-Moon Esbat in Modern Wicca
09:18 How Esbat Became Standard Pagan and Wiccan Vocabulary
10:17 Word-History vs Ritual-History: The Esbat as Invented Tradition
10:57 Modern Does Not Mean Fake: Esbat, Authenticity, and Lived Practice
11:59 Benandanti, Táltos, and Real Nocturnal Folk Traditions
13:11 The Real Meaning of Esbat: History, Myth, and Pagan Truth-Telling
13:52 Support Dr Angela Puca’s Project
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What if everything you think you know about the Witches' Sabbath is wrong?
The broomsticks, the Devil, the midnight orgies on remote mountaintops: this image has haunted the Western imagination for nearly six hundred years. But where did it actually come from? Was it an inquisitorial fantasy imposed from above? A distortion of real folk traditions of spirit-flight and nocturnal procession? A recycled conspiracy theory older than Christianity itself? Or something stranger than any of those?
In this video I trace the Sabbath from its origins in a handful of Alpine witch trials in the 1430s, through the great demonological texts of the early modern period, to its reinvention by romantics, feminists, and modern practitioners who know the image was constructed and use it anyway. I cover the Cohn vs Ginzburg debate that still organises the field, the Friulian benandanti who fought witches in their sleep, the antisemitic roots of the word "sabbath" itself, Margaret Murray's influential and almost entirely wrong witch-cult hypothesis, and why the Wheel of the Year is a twentieth-century invention. I also look at where the term "esbat" actually comes from (spoiler: not where you think), the connection between the Sabbath and the Wild Hunt, and what contemporary Italian folk practitioners make of all this today.
This is serious historiography made accessible, not dumbed down. If you want the real story behind one of the most persistent and misunderstood images in Western culture, this is it.

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RECOMMENDED READINGS 📖

REFERENCES 📚
(Check the related slide on screen)

MY SET-UP 🛠️
- Canon 90D camera 📸 https://amzn.to/3yQclh0
- Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 📷 https://amzn.to/3JjU1BS
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00:00 Introduction: The Witches’ Sabbath Explained
01:41 What Is the Witches’ Sabbath?
04:61 The Alpine Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath
09:01 Demonology, the Malleus, and the Stakes of Witchcraft
15:01 Cohn vs Ginzburg: Who Created the Witches’ Sabbath?
22:36 Folk Traditions, Night Travel, and Regional Witch Beliefs
25:26 From Michelet to Murray: How Modern Witchcraft Reused the Sabbath
30:50 The Witches’ Sabbath Today: Politics, Film, and Online Witchcraft
30:06 Flying Ointments: What the Evidence Really Shows
38:49 Reading the Witches’ Sabbath as a Palimpsest
41:33 Celebrate your Sabbaths in Angela’s vibrant Inner Symposium

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Join me for a livestream interview with Cherry Parra, author of The Left Hand Path of Tarot, as we explore shadow, divination, witchcraft, and the transformative power of tarot through a left-hand path lens.

Cherry Parra is a Mexican left-hand path witch residing in Mexico. She majored in Hispanic literature and has an innate and inherited connection to occult practices, with her magic stemming from a matriarchal lineage of healers. Her great-grandmother was a witch and curandera, a traditional folk healer from Oaxaca in southern Mexico, whom people in the community would seek out for healing matters of body and spirit.

Cherry’s work centres on illuminating the uncomfortable truths many prefer to avoid. For her, the shadows are both a second home and profound teachers. She lives and maintains a closed spiritual practice in Mexico, where she reads tarot for a select international clientele that includes artists, creatives, and visionaries.

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Join me for a livestream interview with Dr Gal Sofer on the complex histories of Solomonic magic, learned magical literature, and the transmission of esoteric knowledge across Jewish, Christian, and Arabic-speaking contexts. We will explore what it means to call a magical tradition Solomonic, how texts, images, and ritual technologies travelled across languages and cultures, and why the history of magic is far more intricate than simple questions of authenticity or invention.

Dr Gal Sofer (MD, PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on the history of science, magic, and Kabbalah from the late Middle Ages to the present, in both Jewish and Christian cultures and across multiple languages. His work examines the transfer of knowledge between languages in Europe, the visualisation of scientific and religious knowledge, and the visual aspects of learned magical literature. His first book, Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories, was published by Brill in 2025. His second book, Conjuring the Arab Magician: Intercultural Histories of Magic, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

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The Green Man was invented in 1939.
Not the carvings. Those are real, they are medieval, and they have a fascinating Christian history. But the god, the named figure currently worshipped across contemporary Paganism as an ancient vegetation deity, was assembled in the twentieth century from a misread folklore article, a collapsed witch-cult theory, and a Jungian response to ecological anxiety.
This video tells that story properly, with the scholarship, the primary sources, and the reception history. No gatekeeping, no debunking energy. Just the real genealogy of a god we made ourselves.

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MY COURSES 👩🏻‍🎓 https://drangelapuca.com/courses
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SUBSTACK ✉️ https://substack.com/@drangelapuca
BECOME MY PATRON! 🎩 https://www.patreon.com/angelapuca
SUPPORT ME ON KO-FI ☕️https://ko-fi.com/drangelapuca
ONE-OFF DONATIONS 💰 https://paypal.me/angelasymposium
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RECOMMENDED READINGS 📖

REFERENCES 📚
(Check the related slide on screen)

MY SET-UP 🛠️
- Canon 90D camera 📸 https://amzn.to/3yQclh0
- Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 📷 https://amzn.to/3JjU1BS
- Teleprompter 🗒️ https://amzn.to/3linWCB
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- DJI Wireless microphones 📡 https://amzn.to/3NWAVVQ

⚠️ Copyright of Dr Angela Puca, in all of its parts ⚠️
Music by Erose MusicBand. Check them out!