Caroline Tully - Academic Publications

Of all the types of work I do, I consider my writing to be the most important. I have been writing for publication since 1986. I started writing for witchcraft magazines back then and wrote for most of those available in Australia, the UK and USA. In 1999 I got a job at Australia’s WitchCraft Magazine (Federal Publishing) where for 6 years I was a feature writer, opinion piece writer, reviewer, and News & Events editor. That was popular writing and most of it was for hard copy magazines and books. I began learning academic writing from 2004 onwards when I was a mature age student at The University of Melbourne and much of my academic writing can be found on my Academia page. Here is a list of my existing and forthcoming academic publications.

 

BOOKS

Armour for the Soul: Amulets, Charms and Talismans. London: Reaktion Books (forthcoming)

Contemporary Paganism: The Basics. London: Routledge (forthcoming).

Sacred Geographies. Co-edited with Larissa Tittl. London: Routledge (forthcoming).

The Night Queen: Shamanic Witchcraft for Today. Munich: Theion Publishing (in press)

Minoan Transcorporeality. Munich: Theion Publishing (in press).

A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Co-edited with Stephanie Budin. London: Routledge, 2024.

Plague in Antiquity. Co-edited with Andrew Jamieson and Louise A. Hitchcock. Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement Series, Peeters, Leuven, 2024.

The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. Aegaeum 42. Peeters: Leuven, 2018.

 

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

‘On every high hill and under every green tree: open air cult sites in the Levant.’ In Sacred Geographies, edited by Larissa Tittl and Caroline Tully. London: Routledge (in press).

‘The Connecting Sea: The Aegean as Central to a Mediterranean Agorocracy.’ Co-authored with Louise Hitchcock. In Hydor: Water Resources and Management in the Aegean Bronze Age. Proceedings of the XXe Rencontre égéenne internationale / XXth International Aegean Conference, University of Amsterdam, 11-16 June, 2024, edited by Robert Laffineur, Gert Jan van Wijngaarden, Jean Paul Crielaard, Joost Crouwel, Jan Driessen and Jill Hilditch. Aegaeum 50. Peeters: Leuven (in press).

‘Minoan Transcorporeality: Female Bodies, Ritual, and Nature in Late Bronze Age Crete.’ In ΦΙΛΟΜΑΘΕΙΑ: Studies in Bronze Age Aegean Art and Archaeology in Honor of Anne P. Chapin, edited by Marie N. Pareja Cummings. Oxford: Archaeopress (in press).

‘Agonistic Scenes.’ In The Blackwell Companion to Aegean Art and Architecture, edited by Louise Hitchcock and Brent Davis. Oxford: Blackwell (in press).

‘Moon and Huntress: Frazer’s Arician Diana in Italian-American Witchcraft.’ In A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, edited by Stephanie Budin and Caroline Tully. London: Routledge, 2024.

‘Against Nature: Tree-Shaking Action in Minoan Glyptic Art as Agonistic Behaviour.’ In Gesture – Stance – Movement: Communicating Bodies in the Aegean Bronze Age, edited by Ute Günkel-Maschek, Céline Murphy, Fritz Blakolmer and Diamantis Panagiotopoulos. Heidelberg University Publishing, 2024.

‘When it standeth beside a man, yet none can see it…when it entereth the house its appearance is unknown…: Introducing Plague in Antiquity.’ Co-authored with Andrew Jamieson and Louise A. Hitchcock. In Plague in Antiquity, edited by Andrew Jamieson, Caroline Tully and Louise A. Hitchcock. Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement Series, Peeters, Leuven, 2024.

‘Lifting the Veil of Isis: Egyptian Reception and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.’ In Alternative Egyptology: Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt, edited by Ben van den Bercken. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2024.

‘What is the relationship between ancient and contemporary Paganism?’ In Pagan Religions in Five Minutes edited by Suzanne Own and Angela Puca. Sheffield: Equinox, 2024.

‘Can a Pagan follow more than one path or tradition?’ In Pagan Religions in Five Minutes edited by Suzanne Own and Angela Puca. Sheffield: Equinox, 2024.

‘Is there a difference between magic and magick?’ In Pagan Religions in Five Minutes edited by Suzanne Own and Angela Puca. Sheffield: Equinox, 2024.

‘Paradise on Earth: Feraferia and the Landscapes of the Mind.’ Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 17:4. 2023. 439–457.

‘Introduction to The Pomegranate special issue on Pagans and Museums.’ Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies 23: 1–2. 2022.

‘Understanding the language of trees: ecstatic experience and interspecies communication in Late Bronze Age Crete.’ In Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World, edited by Sarah Costello, Karen Foster and Diana Stein. London: Routledge, 2021.

‘Traces of places: sacred sites in miniature on Minoan gold rings.’ In Sacred Sites and Sacred Stories: Transmission of Oral Tradition, Myth, and Religiosity, edited by David Kim, 11–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

‘Cockles, mussels, fishing nets and finery: the relationship between cult, textiles and the sea depicted on a Minoan-style gold ring from Pylos.’ Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. Special issue the ‘Entangled Sea’ edited by Ina Berg and Louise Hitchcock. 8: 3-4. 2020. 365–378.

‘Enthroned Upon Mountains: Constructions of Power in the Aegean Bronze Age.’ Co-authored with S. Crooks. In The Ancient Throne. The Mediterranean, the Near East, and Beyond, 3^rd millennium BCE 0 14^th Century CE. Proceedings of the Workshop held at ICANNE in Vienna, April 2016, edited by Liat Naeh and Dana Brostowsky Gilboa, 37–59. Vienna: OREA, 2020.

‘Celtic Egyptians: Isis Priests of the Lineage of Scota.’ In Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination, edited by Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks, 145–160. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

‘Power Ranges: Identity and Terrain in Minoan Crete.’ Co-authored with S. Crooks. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 13: 2. 2019. 130–156.

‘The Self Possessed: Framing Identity in Late Minoan Glyptic.’ Co-authored with S. Crooks. In ΜΝΗΜΗ / Mneme: Past and Memory in the Aegean Bronze Age, Aegaeum 43, edited by Elisabetta Borgna, Ilaria Caloi, Filippo Carinci and Robert Laffineur, 749–752. Peeters: Leuven, 2019.

‘The artifice of Daidalos: Modern Minoica as religious focus in contemporary Paganism.’ In New Antiquities: Transformations of Ancient Religion in the New Age and Beyond, edited by Dylan Burns and Almut-Barbara Renger, 76–102. Sheffield: Equinox, 2019.

‘Introduction to The Pomegranate special issue on Paganism, Art, and Fashion.’ The Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies 21:2. 2019. 141–145.

‘The artifice of Daidalos: Modern Minoica as religious focus in contemporary Paganism.’ The International Journal for the Study of New Religions 8: 2. 2018. 183–212.

‘Thalassocratic Charms: Trees, Boats, Women and the Sea in Minoan Glyptic Art.’ Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Cretan Studies, 24th September 2016, Heraklion, Crete. 2018. 1–12.

‘Egyptosophy in the British Museum: Florence Farr, the Egyptian Adept and the Ka.’ In The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, edited by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford, 131–145. London: Routledge, 2018.

‘Virtual Reality: Tree Cult and Epiphanic Ritual in Aegean Glyptic Iconography.’ Journal of Prehistoric Religion. Robin Hägg memorial issue. Vol. XXV: 19–30. 2016.

‘Numinous tree and stone: re-animating the Minoan landscape.’ Co-authored with S. Crooks and L. Hitchcock. In METAPHYSIS: Ritual Myth and Symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age. Aegaeum 39. E. Alram-Stern, F. Blakolmer, S. Deger-Jalkotzy, R. Laffineur and J. Weilhartner (eds), 157–164. Leuven: Peeters, 2016.

‘Dropping Ecstasy? Minoan Cult and the Tropes of Shamanism.’ Co-authored with Sam Crooks. Time and Mind: The Journal for Archaeology Consciousness and Culture. 8.2: 129–158. 2015.

‘Museums of Israel.’ In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Claire Smith (Ed.) Springer: New York, 2014.  

‘The British Museum’. In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Claire Smith (Ed.) Springer:  New York, 2014. 

‘The Sacred Life of Trees: What trees say about people in the prehistoric Aegean and Near East.’ In Proceedings of the 33^rd Australian Society for Classical Studies Conference. 2012. Available online at http://www.ascs.org.au/news/ascs33/index.html

‘Walk Like an Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley’s Reception of The Book of the Law.’ The Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies 12:1. 2010. 20–47.

Report on the excavation at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel, 2009. Biblical Archaeology Review 36: 1. (Jan/Feb 2010). Available online at http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/scholarship-recipient-report.asp

                                        

Interview with Dr Caroline Tully on The Briefing about contemporary witchcraft

Deep Dive: Witches have re-entered the mainstream through the power of social media, which has also catapulted the prevalence of the Etsy and DIY witch.

But with so many witches entering your TikTok feed or telling you about your future through a screen, how do we know if what they’re selling us is magic or marketing?

In this episode of The Briefing, Helen Smith is joined by Dr Caroline Tully, a scholar of modern Pagan religions, who explains the rise of the modern witch and why, for many, witchcraft is more than just a trend.

Promo Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JDcita0pTs

Interview here, second half:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQZYePpOkew

 

Interview on ABC Radio show, God Forbid, on the ethics of witchcraft and hexing the far-right

Two days prior to the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, a group of writers at US-based feminist magazine, Jezebel, published an article stating that they 'Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk’. The magazine has since pulled the article, on the advice of their lawyers, so as not to cause any confusion about their stance on political violence of any kind. 

Is it ever ethical to wish harm on someone, even if that harm is theoretical or supernatural? What code of ethics are witches bound to? And why do witches have such a complex relationship with right-wing politics? 

GUESTS

Dr Caroline Tully – witchcraft maven, archaeologist, writer, tarot reader, and scholar of modern Pagan religions

Dr Kenneth Freeman – Adjunct Professor of social work at North Carolina Central University, author of the research paper Ethical parallels: an exploration of the NASW code of ethics, Wiccan Rede, and the growing influence of Wicca in the United States

Dr Megan Goodwin – scholar of politics, and American religions, senior editor of Religion Dispatches, and author of Religion is Not Done With You

 

Listen here:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/godforbid/witches-ethics-charliekirk/

105769446

Magical Art

 

Magical art is a hot topic right now, especially in the UK and USA. Australia has its own magical artist, Barry William Hale (b. 1969), a visual and performance artist and an occultist, who uses historical magical techniques in new and innovative ways to make original artworks.

Interest in empowerment through magic has never been more popular, and this explosion can be attributed to the internet. The BBC reports that “videos with the hashtag WitchTok have amassed more than 30 billion views”, while the “#witch hashtag has received nearly 20 billion views, #witchtiktok has nearly two billion views, and #babywitch, a hashtag for those new to the craft, has more than 600 million views.” While much online “magic” is about self-care and spruiking small businesses, magic is actually an ancient intellectual and somatic practice concerned with accessing supernatural entities and forces for knowledge, self-development, and power.

Magical art can be traced back to the Symbolists and Decadents of the late 19^th century. Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salons de la Rose+Croix combined Catholicism, Rosicrucianism and occultism. Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was directly inspired by spiritual entities. Well-known modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky were inspired by occultism, designers from the Bauhaus school were engaged with occult spirituality, and Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varro’s works are suffused with magic and mystical imagery.

While historically magical art is reasonably new, magic itself has an old pedigree, and this is what Barry William Hale taps into when producing art. His magical influences and methods span the centuries from the ancient world until today and include accessing the powers of ancient Egyptian and Greek gods, Kabbalistic mysticism, Renaissance Hermetic magic, the Enochian system developed by Elizabethan court magician, John Dee, and the ritual techniques of famous twentieth century magicians Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare.

Barry William Hale’s work, ‘Demonomania Rhizotoma’ is on display at the State Library Victoria until 31 May 2026 in an exhibition called Creative Acts, curated by Michelle Moo, Angela Bailey, Kate Rhodes, Nandini Sathyamurthy, and me - Caroline Tully. 

What is Magic? Barry William Hale's magic case in the Creative Acts exhibition

 

In my last blog post about the Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria I explained that each case of objects in featured artist Barry William Hale’s part of the exhibition would be explained. We will focus on the relationship between the cases and Hale’s commissioned artwork, his other artistic output, and magickal practice. In this blog post we will focus on the Magic case in general. Subsequent posts will examine individual objects within this case.

What is Magic?

The word ‘magic’ derives from the ancient Greek μαγεία (mageia) which referred to the ritual activity of Persian priests or magoi and which was so different to Greek religion that the Greeks categorised it as ‘magic’. Over subsequent centuries there have been many definitions of ‘magic’. As Wouter Hanegraaff says, ‘one will therefore receive very different answers depending on the historical period in question and the personal agendas of whoever is being asked’. Hanegraaff observes that magic has been defined as: ‘ancient wisdom’; ‘worship of demons’; ‘natural philosophy and science’; ‘occult philosophy’; ‘pseudoscience’; ‘an enchanted worldview’; and as ‘psychology’. Although ‘magic’ is understood differently within diverse historical and cultural contexts, in general it can be described as the use of ritualised words and actions, usually outside the sanction of official religions, which attract supernatural beings to influence events. British magician, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), used the spelling ‘magick’ which he defined as ‘the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’.

Magic may seem an obscure or fantastical practice but, along with religion, it is a method that has been used by humans to negotiate their relationship with the world for thousands of years. Barry William Hale’s magical influences and methods span the centuries from the ancient world until today. They include the power of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of the desert, chaos, storms and strength; the openness to inspiration characteristic of Bronze Age Minoan ecstatic religion; and the physical sensation and raw emotion typical of the worship of the Greek god Dionysus. Barry’s magical lineage continues through Jewish Kabbalistic letter mysticism, the Renaissance Hermetic magic of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and the system of Enochian magic developed by Elizabethan court magician, John Dee, up to the magical revival in late 19th century France and England. From there, the magical current manifested in the most famous and notorious modern ceremonial magician, Aleister Crowley. His channelled text, Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), received clairaudiently in Egypt in 1904 and the basis for the magical religion of Thelema (Greek for ‘will’), along with the grandfather of modern sigil magic, Austin Osman Spare, are other direct influences on Barry Hale.

Objects in Hale’s magic-themed case include: illustrations by Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) such as a double-headed herm; one of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettesheim’s (1486–1535) Three books of occult philosophy (facsimile); composer Larry Sitsky’s (1934–) Trio. No. 7 [music]: Enochian sonata: for two violoncellos and piano; an anonymous work from the David Halperin Collection, Kabbalah on the laws of the transmutation of letters and words of the Hebrew alphabet and its combinations (before 1864); Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) The spirit of solitude: an autohagiography, subsequently re-Antichristened The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929); Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, featuring a tattoo imprint by Hale.

Also featured are a statue of the Egyptian god, Set, from Hale’s personal collection, a Seth amulet dating to 1294–30 BCE and a Minoan gold signet ring with an ecstatic scene (facsimile of CMS II.3 No.51) both borrowed from the Chau Chak Wing Museum; a bowl in the form of a Silenus mask (2^nd–4^th century CE) and a Greek lekythos vase depicting the god Dionysus, both loaned from the Ian Potter Museum of Art. An Aramaic incantation bowl was loaned by the Australian Institute of Archaeology; and an obsidian mirror made in Mexico is a personal loan by Hale. 

The Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria is on until 31 May 2026. Come on down and check it out, You might even run into Barry or me there! We’re always happy to talk about the exhibition and related topics. 

 

Curating Barry William Hale: The Mystery of the Cases

 

The Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria explores the creative process and its intersection with cultural and spiritual practices that allow artists to transcend boundaries and push the limits of their experience. The exhibition features writer Peter Carey, artists Dr Deanne Gilson, Barry William Hale and Bundit Puangthong, and choreographer and dancer Dr Chandrabhanu, alongside State Library Victoria’s archive of Vali Myers, and incredible objects such as Annie Yoffa’s 4000 automatic drawings. These are complemented by display cases that explore the artists’ processes using objects from the collection, some loans, objects from individual artist’s own archives, and labels in the artist’s words. Objects from the Library’s collection are used alone and in combination to shed light on the artists’ practice, trace the roots of these practices, explain concepts and to elaborate on the artists biography or practice. 

I have had the great honour of curating renowned occult artist Barry William Hale for this exhibition. To complement Hale’s commissioned artwork, ‘Demonomania Rhizomata’, I curated seven cases which feature a mix of material including books from the state collection, antiquities loaned from other institutions, and personal possessions of the artist. In this series of blog posts, Barry and I will dive deep into the exhibition and explain he relationship between objects in the cases and Hale’s commissioned artwork, his other artistic output, and magickal practice. In this first instalment, I explain the cases generally. Subsequent blog posts will drill down and examine individual or groups of objects within the cases.

When explaining Hale’s work to an audience, I often start at Case BH1 which contains examples of various types of magical and ecstatic religious practice that span the centuries from the ancient world until today. To the right of this is Case BH4, which aims to evoke Hale’s use of notions of contagion, multiplicity, the rhizome, and zoanthropy or becoming animal, to think about non-filial modes of reproduction in reference to his automatism and the daimon / demon manifestation process. Moving around to the left is Case BH5 which focuses on the animate nature of Hale’s art, in this case, paper cutouts designed to be brought to life by ritual. Next to this is Case BH6, which elucidates how anthropomorphic elements emerge from Hale’s abstract mark making. At the north end of the area is Case BH3, which shows how the Spiritualist techniques of automatism applied in an artistic context replaced the spiritual agency with a Freudian model of the unconscious mind. Across from these cases nearer the center of the gallery is Case BH2 which contains Hale’s first automatic drawings that he produced every sunset for 144 days after performing Aleister Crowley’s ritual, the “Mass of the Phoenix” with a reading from “Liber Tzaddi” from The Holy Books of Thelema. Further down the gallery space is Case BH7, which displays many years’ worth of Hale’s magical diaries and artist’s notebooks. These feature various sorts of drawings and experiments with text and letters that demonstrate his devotion to magical research that informs his artistic practice. On the wall above this case is a series of slides depicting Hale’s student art performance work, and to the right, an Ipad featuring more of his work, Hypercube 210.

Photos by Eugene Hyland. Exhibition design by Barracco + Wright Architects

Artist Residency with the Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective

 

I am doing an Instagram artist residency with the Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective for the month of February. This residency was initiated by collective member Su Fahy @memoryartpalace in order to draw in new audiences to the work and themes of artist Monica Sjoo. There are no rules for the residency. They just ask for a minimum of four posts over a month of work inspired by the thematics of Monica as artist, activist, writer. Visit their Instagram site here.

The Images

I’m doing a tapestry. This is Day 1 of a woven tapestry project based on several topics that were of interest to Monica Sjöö - ancient matricentric civilisations, in this case Minoan Crete; women; and landscape. The design evokes some of my own favourite objects from Minoan civilisation: the faience votive dresses from the Temple Repositories at Knossos, Crete, dating to around 1750 BCE, in combination with landscape skirts as seen in the Minoan-style frescoes in the building Xeste 3 at Akrotiri on the island of Thera (Santorini), dating to no later than 1550 BCE. 

Caroline Tully Bio

Caroline Tully is a modern Pagan witch who is also an archaeologist, antiquities curator, and professional tapestry weaver. She has many areas of interest including ancient Mediterranean religions and contemporary Paganisms, particularly Witchcraft and Pagan Reconstructionism. Caroline is an expert on tree worship in the Bronze Age Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus, and has strong interests in the Environmental Humanities, nature, landscape, animism, ecology, ecofeminism, the Anthropocene, and posthumanism.