Archive for category News & Reviews

Looking over what I’ve read during the past year that in my opinion has something new to add to the conversation, I find that—no surprise here to anyone that knows me—the cream are all difficult books: both literary and academic.

Fiction:

Alan Garner, Thursbitch (London: Vintage, 2004)

This is Alan Garner of Weirdstone of Brisingamen fame, all grown up, and has he ever got a tale to tell. If there had been an amanita-chewing, bull-worshipping Dionysiac cult still alive in 17^th-century Cheshire (!), complete with songs, prayers, invocations, and proverbs, what would it have looked—and more importantly, sounded—like? Here it is, and he’s such a word-wizard that he almost makes it work. He doesn’t get everything right, of course, but he goes farther than anyone else. “There’s nowt as He’s not” (proverb). “O Bonny Bull, come thy ways” (invocation). This book is entirely about what English would have been like if it had been continuously spoken by our kind of people, filled with material you’ll want to learn and use. Standard English, for example, doesn’t distinguish between a place where three and four roads meet; “crossroads” can mean either. Witches’ English, however—as one might expect—does distinguish between a “three-went” and a “four-went” respectively.

This is no easy read, Garner being a master of what’s not said. Be ready to read between the lines. But it’s richly worth the work: his words will sing in your head for days. All this so deeply rooted in the Cheshire landscape that it’ll make your American heart break with envy. The name of a standing stone in a field near where Garner grew up was “the Bull Stang.” I shit you not.

Allan Moore, Voice of the Fire (London: Indigo, 1997)

The British Songlines. Moore is the pagan James Michner (but can out-write Michner any day of the year). A dozen pungent Guy Fawkes/Samhain tales set in Northampton and environs from (literally) 4000 BCE to the present. The clearest articulation of the role of the Man-in-Black/witchman that I’ve ever seen (he calls him the “Hob” or “Hobman.”) Filled with November fires, severed heads, and giant black dogs. (He’s got an explanation for the Templar Head that you will never—I promise—forget.) Another book so deeply immersed in local lore it’ll make your teeth ache with envy.

This is yet another one with language as dense and rich as a Samhain fruitcake, studded with chewy nutmeats and piquant dried fruit. I hereby nominate “You’re wrong like Hob’s Hog” for “Craft proverb” status. (But you’ll have to read the book to find out what it means.) The opening story is the hardest, written in what English might have sounded like if it had been spoken 6000 years ago. It’s challenging, but persevere: force yourself to slow down and give the text time. Read aloud, if you need to. (It really does get easier, and the first story’s the hardest.) This has been one of my favorite Samhain reads since it first came out, and every year I come away from it deepened and enriched

Non-fiction:

Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005)

The British academic press that published this one was entirely taken aback when it became a runaway bestseller, as actual practicing witches snapped up the meager first run. Wilby is a historian who in this book focuses on familiars, which she defines broadly as spirit-helpers in either animal or human form who aided the early modern British witch in her magic. This she compares to accounts of shamans from various cultures and their experiences with their own spirit-helpers. Naturally, she finds a lot of commonality between the two. Hmm.

If the God of Witches is preeminently Master of Animals (to me this seems patently obvious), it makes complete sense that he should offer guidance to his witches through their relationships with animals. Here’s a how-to guide.

Stephen J. Yeates, The Tribe of Witches: The Religion of the Dobunni and Hwicce (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008)

This one gets my award for “Best Title of the Year.” (Well, the first half, anyway.) Yeates is an archaeologist, and he believes that the West Midlands Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce gave rise to the religion of the Wicce. This is impossible both linguistically and historically (since witchcraft did not become a religion until the 20^th century, to trace its origins to a tribal religion of a thousand years ago is simply not credible). Yeates has clearly taken modern Wicca as a point of departure and is reading backwards, doing his damnedest to find a Triple Goddess paired with a God of Hunting—and better it be if he’s horned. Also, he doesn’t write very well, and there’s page upon page of information about which English creek flows into which English river, which in turn—in case you wondered—is a sub-tributary of the Severn.

So why should you read this book? For this reason: because, like Garner and Moore, Yeates climbs down into the landscape itself in search of his Hwicce-craft. The work that he does for the Severn/Cotswolds region is the kind of work that all of us need to be doing for our own areas, and Yeates can show us how to go about it.

First read this book, and then go down to the nearest river. I promise you, you’ll see it with different eyes. Oh yeah: be sure to take an offering along.

David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)

Quite simply the best study I’ve ever read of how the human brain works and how it generates religious experience. The witch being one who thinks Third Thoughts—i.e. who watches herself think and thinks about her own thinking—this book is an indispensable guide to the varying states of consciousness, regular and altered. (Maybe that should be “altared” consciousness.) In language that even a non-neuro-physiologist like myself can (if not without some effort) follow.

This in itself would be worth the price of admission, but wait: there’s more! Lewis-Williams applies the insights of brain physiology into reading the art of the Upper Palaeolithic caves of south-eastern Europe. (What, for instance, if the walls of the cave were thought of as semi-permeable membranes between This World and the Other?) This book will give you insights into how the ancestors may well have thought (and hence—third thoughts again—possible new directions in which to guide our own thinking) that, like most good ideas, will seem utterly obvious—once someone has gone to the work of articulating them. Another hard read that’s more than worth the work.

OK, those are my picks for the “Thinking Witch (or Hobman)’s Top Reads of the Year.” Next?

Good Samhain and Happy New Year,

Steve

Poet and storyteller Steven Posch, known as “the pagan rabbi” and the “Father of Paganistan,” is one of the Twin Cities’ preeminent Men-in-Black. He is keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.