The first part of the article addresses the increasing supply of merchandise aimed to attract a Pagan audience, and it questions the need for all of this excessive (and expensive) stuff for a spiritual life. While that is certainly a serious issue especially for a fairly new religion (it was also this issue that most of those who wrote SageWoman in the following magazine addressed when commenting on the article), I do not believe it to be the main point of the article.
The second portion, in my opinion, addressed the real purpose behind the writing of the article: "To me, religion is about the ways which we experience and exhibit and practice faith. I am concerned about what our actions say about the nature of our religion." Ms. Pierson then follows by giving some rather disturbing examples which question on whom our religion is truly centered: ourselves or Deity. I felt that this piece poses some of the most important questions to be asked of Neo-Paganism and also serves as a challenge to begin looking for the answers. One of the strongest statements made by the author relates to the immanence of the Goddess:
Popular authors tell me that "I am the Goddess." No, I am not. She is immortal; She is everlasting; She is the source from whom I seek solace and inspiration and guidance. All too familiar with my faults and weaknesses, I am aware that I, unlike the Goddess, am mortal. I seek the Divine, I pray to the Divine, I aspire to the Divine, and while, like any other Quaker, I recognize that of the Divine in every being, I am not the Divine. I am of Her, but I am not Her.I completely agree.
While Reed shows definite consideration to revering Egyptian Deities in ways conducive to how the ancient Egyptians viewed Them, she freely acknowledges that she and her coven have no intentions of reconstructing ancient Egyptian religion; ancient knowledge is set in the context of modern Wiccan practice, and she makes no apologies for that.
Most of this book is dedicated to introducing various ancient Egyptian Deities to the reader. These introductions are fairly comprehensive in regards to more well-known Deities, e.g. Osiris, Isis, Horus the Younger, Ra, Anubis, Amen, etc. and they include both historical information on how They were perceived and worshipped in ancient times as well as how these Gods have personally interacted with Their modern followers. What originally caused me to purchase this book was the segment on Nephthys/Nebt-Het. Although Her name is well-known, most books say little of Her other than listing Her relationships to other Gods. I was particularly impressed with the quality and quantity of Reed's writings about Her. The thing that especially caught my attention was a song/poem for Her, which, in my opinion, beautifully captured Her essence. Many of the other Gods she introduces also have song/poems to illuminate Their natures. Also included are the names (in English tranliterations and in hieroglyphs) of and very brief statements about lesser known Deities. In order to make sure that such knowledge of the Gods does not remain vicarious, Reed makes sure to have a chapter which gives information and techniques on establishing a connection with a specific Deity. This section covers such tried and true methods as meditation, rituals, songs, as well as recipies for both food and incenses, all of which come in handy when invoking a God's presence.
Reed also discusses the rudiments of ancient Egyptian language and includes a chart of alphabetics (i.e. phonetic hieroglyphs that represent one sound) as well as a list of common determinatives (signs that are tacked onto Egyptian words to indicate a word's meaning). Other topics the book covers includes common Egyptian symbols and their potential for use in magic; a few Egyptian-inspired divinatory methods; a list of Egyptian names one may choose to adopt upon dedication to Egyptian Gods; a calendar based on the Egyptian's own; and instructions for making a wand, sistrum, nemes headcloth, scarab, and kilt.
I did not discover a great deal of flaws with this book either in regards to its faithfullness in depicting Egyptian religion and culture fairly accurately, or with its presentation of Neo-Pagan religion. The things I did notice were relatively minor. For instance, she seems to rely on the work of E.A. Wallis Budge, a rather prolific writer and museum curator, especially in the section on hieroglyphs. The only problem with this is that Budge's work is no longer entirely accurate and up-to-date and so the information she based on his work is also rather outdated. Earlier in the book she made a point about not claiming to be reconstructing ancient Egyptian religion and that the Gods were viewed through an admittedly modern lens, but I think in some cases adapting ancient Egyptian knowledge too much can be detremental. One particular case of this is Reed's addition of a fouth season (which she labels "Spring" and is symbolized by a contrived heiroglyph of what appears to be a bloated butterfly) to Egypt's traditional year consisting of only three seasons. I think she does this in order to make the seasonal theme work on a square divination cloth, but she could have addressed that issue differently by using hieroglyphs that refer to months and days of the Egyptian calendar that correspond to the duration of our seasons. In spite of these issues, I would still recommend this book as a good beginning resource for Pagans seeking to incorperate ancient Egyptian culture and religion into their practice.
1/2 You'll meet people who tell you they don't care whether you accept them or not, while at the same time, stomping their feet and screaming, 'Accept me as a witch or I'll hold my breath until I turn blue.' Can we stop these others from calling themselves Wiccan? No, we can't. But we can say that theirs is not the kind of Wicca we practice, that it is not the way we view this path.I did not feel there were any major flaws in this book, but there were a few minor annoyances. For one, the intended audience of the book does not stay consistent. It seems that some chapters were written with the intent to be published in a book with wide circulation, but other seemed as if they were right from Ms.Reed's documents that she gives to potential members of her coven. There is nothing wrong with including material you give to coven members, but I thought those sections should have been prefaced by a description of the original purpose of those documents.
Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca is an engrossing, entertaining, and lavishly-illustrated essay which aims to trace the figure of the witch from the middle ages to modernity. Although it is in large part scholarly and well-researched (it is published by the British Museum Press after all), it is still highly accessible as a leisurely read.
There is definitely a woman-centered focus to the work, but while the lens through which the author approaches the material is often palpable, it is understandable and even justifiable by the nature of the historical information itself. The branders of witches and witch-hunters themselves specifically targeted women, and they promoted a worldview which demeaned women as spiritually weak and morally inferior to men, viewing females as agents used to taint the more righteous gender. The primary resources of that era makes those ideas quite clear. The quintessential witch is always envisioned as female. And, of course, the proportion of women arrested, tortured, and/or killed under pretense of witchcraft verses that of men is undeniable. Thankfully though, the author does not go so far as to paint the witch persecutions as the "women's holocaust" and she rightfully identifies the figure of nine million individuals killed during the infamous "Burning Times" to be inaccurate. Overall, I found it to be a highly enjoyable, informative book, however, it definitely has its faults.
The author asserts that medieval intellectuals and theologians essentially invented the witch as a diabolical threat to the order of the Christian universe in order to deliberately accomplish certain social and political goals:
For a start, this scholarship suggests that the idea of the female witch was largely the work of spin doctors. Rather than emerging authentically from medieval folk culture, the witch was the brain child of theologians, lawyers, and other intellectuals who (with the deepest sincerity) conjured her up to satisfy their own political and cultural needs.(9)While the author certainly presents ample evidence that those intellectuals did give the specter of the witch greater definition as an individual who had made a pact with Satan to obtain supernatural powers, fully outlining her role, her habits, her demeanor as well as how to deal with her upon capture (even artificially projecting their definition onto the distant past), they could not have invented the witch whole cloth. I found it odd that there was no mention of etymology whatsoever, even when the modern religious incarnations of Witchcraft as a constellation of Neo-Pagan belief systems are briefly touched-upon. The word "Wicca" is simply thrown into the mix in the last chapter without any sort of background information as to the origin of the word and its original meaning as the Old English word for witch (specifically a male witch as a female witch was referred to as a wicce). No real effort is made to discern what "witch" implied before said paranoid, misogynist, intellectuals took hold of it in the dark ages to mark a peculiar sort of heretic. They did not invent a word to label her from thin air, so there must have been some raw materials, however nebulous, to work with in the first place. Unfortunately, Savage does not even attempt to investigate that material; she only accompanies the witch from the middle ages onward, and the middle ages, understandably so, occupy the majority of her attention.
Another significant disappointment arises in the last chapter where the author hopes to address contemporary Neo-Pagan religious Witchcraft. While the previous chapters show signs of rigorous research on the author's part (evidenced by the bibliography and quotations from primary source material), the last chapter seems to have fallen by the wayside. Her overview of the modern Witchcraft movement is regrettably simplistic and one-sided, and in this particular case her chosen feminist lens proved to be extremely exclusionary of fundamental information which did not tie in nicely with the woman-centered thread of her book. For instance, she defines Wicca as "feminist witchcraft" and considers it only as a dimension of the "feminist spirituality movement." Her quoted primary source material on religious modern Witchcraft originates with only two books, The Spiral Dance and Dreaming the Dark, which are by the very same author no less. While there is most certainly a very strong feminist current to some modern forms of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft, including some strands of Dianic Wicce which are explicitly women-only groups and Starhawk's own ecofeminist Reclaiming Tradition, it is inaccurate and short-sighted to label the entirely of Witchcraft as simply a permutation of "feminist spirituality." One gets the impression from her writing that Witchcraft in the modern religious sense only arose in the late 1960's and early 1970's, a suggestion that is at least a decade too late. She completely ignores the true roots of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft in what is referred to these days as British Traditional Wicca, and absolutely no mention is made of important (male) individuals including Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders, Robert Cochrane, Raymond Buckland, etc. The omission of Gardner is especially grave since she devotes an entire chapter to Margaret Murray's thesis; I would have imagined that Savage would have turned up some information on him if only because Murray wrote the foreword to Gardner's seminal book Witchcraft Today. One might also think that since Savage was familiar with Ronald Hutton's books Stations of the Sun and The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, both of which she cites under the heading "Witches and (Neo)Pagans," that she would also be aware of his highly relevant Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, but apparently not . I was also puzzled by the fact that significant works of literature relating to witchcraft including Leland's Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches and Michelet's La Sorcière were only mentioned in very brief captions and not within the bulk of the text itself. Despite these drawbacks though, Witch is still a worthwhile, concise overview of the witch in history.
She discusses the aforementioned ideas of power-over and power-from-within extensively in the first chapter, while other chapters contemplate such topics as mythology, group work, magical ethics based on immanence (probably one of the best writings on NeoPagan ethics I have yet to read), the erotic, language as magic, willpower as magic, and rituals as activism. In the appendices is also practical information regarding groupwork in addition to chants and songs. Throughout the entire book, Starhawk includes personal accounts of her own experiences with ritual and political activism. Although she did not specifically write this book for Witches, Wiccans, or other NeoPagans, so very much of the material can be directly related to those paths.
Starhawk's work is primarily known (and at times ridiculed) for its Goddess-oriented approach. However, in this book as with The Spiral Dance, she does not deny or truly degrade the male aspect of of the Divine or men:
The female image of divinity does not, however, provide a justification for the oppression of men. The female, who gives birth to the male, includes the male in a way male divinities cannot include the female. The Goddess gives birth to a pantheon that is inclusive rather than exclusive. She is not a jealous God. She is often seen with a male aspect - a child or consort. (11)Neither does she claim to speak for anyone but herself: "I am not however, speaking for Witchcraft in this book, or for any other political or spiritual group. The view of the Craft I present is my own vision, and it is meant to be challenging, to present not only what is but what could be" (xxvii).
One could disagree with her opinions on feminism and the "patriarchy", her extremely Goddess-focused spirituality, or with her desire to unite her political with her religious life, but one has to admit that her books (this one in particular) are filled with a great deal more food-for-thought than an overwhelming percentage of other Pagan books out there. Appendix A features a deep look into the time period known as the "Burning Times," and although some of the information there is definitely invalid, it gives one a whole new perspective in viewing the development of the culture in which we now live.
