The court cards are a common snag that tarot readers run into. One of my besties has been reading tarot for longer than I’ve been alive, and they still have issues with the courts. This book provides an interesting new take on the court cards, and how to approach them.
Basically, Robertson personifies the court cards into individuals, with wants and goals and jobs to do and advice to give.
I think this makes them more approachable than just listing the common meanings and expecting people to memorize them, or using the list as a reference tool. At the end of every chapter, Robertson has a tarot spread that uses that court persona as the basis for a reading.
I don’t think this is a beginner’s book, per se; it’s for anyone who’s having trouble interpreting the court cards. I’m going to offer it to my friend, see if they gain any clarity with this new approach.
3/5 stars, only because not very much of it stuck in my head. It’s a good thing I take notes.
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.
I get the seasonal catalogs from Llewellyn (dangerous, I know) and I had marked “Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration” as something I wanted to read before I listened to the 3PAAC review of it. 3PAAC had good things to say about it, so it was definitely in my book order last December.
This is a very practical guide for those starting an ancestor veneration practice, interspersed with personal stories of how ancestor veneration has impacted the author’s life.
Vaudoise is very clear in the introduction that, if your Tradition already has an ancestor practice, you should follow that tradition first and use this as a supplement with your teacher’s blessing.
There is a lot covered in this slim book (207 pages); I have three pages of notes in my smallest handwriting, which would probably turn into 10+ pages if I typed them up neatly. I might have put the chapters in a slightly different order, with Healing Ancestral Trauma after the practical chapters on building an altar, making offerings, and prayer. I found the chapters on mediumship particularly interesting, as I’ve been getting occasional messages from my ancestors over the last year or so. The last two chapters are about magic and spells; her stance on the ethics of magic, especially when calling on ancestral power, jives pretty well with how I feel about it:
Whether you like it or not, whether you mean to or not, you are harming others all the time. And yet, the world does not collapse in a fit of despair.
Cha. 10, pg. 169
It was occasionally a bit awkward for me when Vaudoise casually referenced Christian / Catholic parts of her practice. I understand that she includes those practices in her ancestor veneration because her Italian ancestors also had those practices and would recognize them. I’m half Polish, and the Poles have been Catholic for approximately the last thousand years… but I need to do a lot more research on my ancestors and their beliefs before I can decide what I’m comfortable including in my practice.
I’m going to stop here, so I don’t spoil the whole book, but I highly recommend reading it. I think I’m actually giving this 5 out of 5 stars, as my uncomfortableness with Christian practices is a me-problem, not a book-problem.
As a woman who has deliberately and consciously chosen not to have children, I’ve felt that the “traditional” triple goddess archetypes of Maiden, Mother, Crone were… Limiting? Confining? Proscriptive? They’re tied to and based on reproduction. I’m past Maiden, I am not becoming a Mother, and I’m not old enough to be a Crone, so where does that leave me?
“Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality” presents a new & unique goddess model, one that’s not based around the ability to procreate.
The book contains Journal and Action prompts, for reflecting and putting ideas into practice.
Allen’s fivefold model explicitly states that anyone can embody and honor any of the five goddess archetypes at any time. The first half of the book details the five archetypes: Femella (the Child), Potens (Woman of Power), Creatrix (Creator of Anything), Sapientia (Woman of Science & Art), and Antiqua (the Ancient One). I totally dig this, and have already started shifting my perception of Goddess and how the things I do are honoring one or a combination of aspects.
The second half was a very wordy treatise on “Reweaving Our Magicks,” and covered topics like consciously creating community; Power, Authority, & hierarchy; building relationships with the Divine, including how to study a deity from another culture without appropriating; and how to create rites of passage. I agree with most of the messages in Part 2, but the language she used feels like a poem or a prayer, flowery and passionate, rather than instructional. For example, in Cha. 13 Allen states that “you owe the land you’re standing on reciprocity”, which is true, especially as I’m a descendant of early colonial settlers, but she never explains or gives suggestions on how to do that.
I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Had Part 2 not disappeared into a haze of verbosity, causing me to have to reread the entire second half of the book and take notes to have anything stick in my brain, it would be 5/5. This is an incredibly unique and mind-opening approach to feminist spirituality, and it makes the Goddess more accessible to those who reject the tri-fold reproductive model.
I had been eyeing this book on Llewellyn’s online catalog for some time. You know how sometimes you’re just idly browsing and you come across something that gives you an internal zing like, “That. I need that.” — This was one of those books that gave me a zing. Pro Tip: Follow your enthusiasm.
“Of Blood and Bones: Working with Shadow Magic & the Dark Moon” is a good-sized book, about 6″x9″ and almost 300 pages. While it wasn’t quite everything I was hoping for, it’s certainly more than anything else I’ve found so far. I haven’t come across anything else quite like this.
This is a heavy book, not physically but mentally and emotionally. The entire first section of the book is devoted to shadow work and what the author calls “the dark moon current”. Blood & Bones is jam-packed with information and things to think about.
Not gonna lie, I cried several times while reading this book. Winter is a difficult time for me, especially February; My familiar’s passing three years ago was traumatizing for me, even though I knew it was coming. There were some chapters of Blood & Bones that just brought all of that right back, though Holly’s death was also the event that got me interested in the nitty-gritty side of witchcraft.
As stated previously, I haven’t seen anything else like this before. The author discusses the proper way to clean bones, safety measures for using blood and other bodily fluids in spellwork, and how to use a bone oracle, and includes spells and crafts at the end of every chapter. I especially appreciate this book because it’s so rare to find a published author that embraces cursing as a valid option, and is willing to discuss in detail all the gross, dark parts of ourselves and of life in general.
I would give this book a 4.5 out of 5 stars. She includes a bibliography, recommended resources, and a spell index that lists about twice as many dark spells (banishing, cursing, breakups, revenge, etc.) as light spells (love, money, protection, new beginnings, etc.). One of my close friends has already purchased this book because I wouldn’t stop talking about it.
Herbal magic is one of the topics in witchcraft that I want to study more. I would like to be able to do things like whip up a spell jar without having to cross-reference five different resources. I spent a long time comparing different herbal books, and it’s rough when I don’t want recipes, I want herbal profiles and correspondences.
Ellen Dugan is a Master Gardener, and I was hoping that her practical experience with plants would mean she’d know her shit. I was actually unable to finish this book, despite it being a fairly slim volume. I read the first two chapters, and that soured me so much that I skimmed the rest and decided it wasn’t worth my time.
Long story real short:
This is not the book you’re looking for.
There are a select few points that Dugan makes early on that I agree with, mostly about general correspondences like seasons and the phases of the moon and maybe some color references. … But that’s it.
It turns out that I have strong philosophical differences with the author. And I can’t emphasize that enough. Dugan takes a very hard stance on Harm None, Threefold Law, and Positive Magic Only, and presents it like this is The One Way to do things and if you go against these tenets then you’re a bad person who’s going to Witch Hell or something. Nowhere in the book did it say that she’s Wiccan, not even in the About The Author. She also never gave a disclaimer like, “This is what I believe, do some philosophical reflection to determine your own stance.”
Lady, if I wanted to be told what to do and what to believe, I’d go to church. (No offense meant to any readers from an organized religion.)
Additionally, the four chapters with the actual herbs are Love, Health, Protection, and Prosperity (Positive Magic Only, remember!), and the small handful of herbs in each chapter only get tagged with that one correspondence. I know for a fact that most herbs have multiple uses, so this was less than helpful.
The only reason I’m giving this book 1 star out of 5 is because she gets bonus points for both an index and a bibliography. I would be more upset had I paid full price for this slim volume; as it stands, I’m writing off the $10 as a loss and going with a different author next time.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the 3 Pagans and a Cat podcast this summer, and they often praise mention Jason Mankey. So I was scrolling through the sales on Llewellyn, building a massive cart that I then had to whittle down, as a reward to myself for doing well in my online class this fall, and I saw his name and decided to give him a shot.
“The Witch’s Book of Shadows” is not the first book in the series, but it was the one I was most interested in reading. I have Plans to make a massive tome of a grimoire, and wanted to see if there was anything my idle Pinterest searching hadn’t uncovered yet.
My first thought was, ‘Holy shit! This book is tiny! So much smaller than expected!‘
The book measures 5 inches wide by 7 inches tall.
This book is very readable; I read it cover-to-cover in one day. The language is very accessible. There’s a lot of information, but it’s not theory-dense. I did learn some things, especially about historical magical texts, and I had a few ideas for my own practice & future grimoire. I need to go back through and write down in my grimoire notes the bits that I underlined while reading…
The only real problem I had with this book is that Mankey sometimes uses “wicca” and “witchcraft” interchangeably. To me, “wicca” is the religion that touts Harm None and the Threefold Law, while “witchcraft” is using magic to affect real-world change. Mankey is very clear on his background as a Gardnerian Wiccan, though, so maybe he doesn’t make a distinction between the terms?
As it stands, I’d give this a 3.5 stars out of 5. If the above problem were resolved, it’d be 4 stars out of 5. Good, enjoyable, easy read, lots of information, not life-changing.
The Book, The Tree, & The Flame 