Know going into this that this is his second book. I have not read the first one, yet, but I liked this one enough that I’ve decided to get the first book.
I enjoyed this book for a few reasons. The first is simply because John Beckett’s day-job is engineering. As a person who loves sciences, it still feels rare to find an author of spirituality books who is also deeply involved in science. And he’s honest in his writing about how that came to be and how he makes it work.
“Paganism In Depth” did not fill a need, but it did give a framework and methods of approaching building your own spiritual path… Which is another reason I enjoyed this book; it’s not a detailing of all the author’s practices, but is more a broad description of his polytheist practices and why he does things in this way.
The full title is “Paganism In Depth: A Polytheist Approach” so Beckett goes into detail on why his paganism is “polytheist, ancestral, devotional, ecstatic, oracular, magical, and public” and what each of these means.
It’s hard to say what the best part is, because most chapters have something quote-worthy, but there were two parts that I think have had the biggest impact on me. The first was in Chapter 1, wherein Beckett describes how to build & evaluate your Model of How the World Works: a continuously updated living model that’s open to new input and new interpretations. The second was in Chapter 7 (Divination & Oracles), where he says that divination is more like headlights than a map:
Divination will show you where a given path or course of action is likely to take you, but it’s up to you to determine if that result is good or not.
Cha. 7 – Divination and Oracles
This is not a beginner’s book. This is an intermediate book intended for those who feel called to go deeper into their spiritual practices, to go off the maps and into mostly-uncharted territories, and leave markers for those who come after us.
Here there be monsters. Beckett discusses those monsters in Chapter 12.
4/5 stars
The Book, The Tree, & The Flame 