Reviews and Comments

This is an excellent book, a very quick read especially considering it's about legal challenges faced by members of ADRs (African Diaspora Religions). The legal persecution (on top of the social othering) of these marginalized religious practices is horrific a continues to this day. My one (soft) critique is that the author emphasizes that these are religions -- as antithetical to 'magical practices'. While I appreciate that, this is a deeply problematic position for those who do maintain magical practices, particularly people of color. The result of this approach is that "if you are BIPoC, you can practice religion, but you can't practice magic" which further stigmatizes magical practice (and the difference between magical, religious, and spiritual practices is functionally nebulous. I'd suggest a better legal argument (that would solve a whole ton of problems in the U.S.) is simply, "My body: my rules."

I read this a while back when I was trying to grok the Wiccan Sabbats (like -- Feast of Torches. My brain was just all, "Dude, how are you not just groundhog's day plus fire?") This is a very academic text, so you're warned. However that's precisely why I loved it. Hutton's methodologies are great and it was a fascinating read. This book is a bit older, and I'm sure there's new research on these topics. I don't know if Hutton plans a new edition, but I'd love for 1) an updated editon and 2) a similar text looking at which, when, and how these holidays continued to evolve after crossing the Atlantic.

Absolutely stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking book. It's one of those books I want everyone to read because it's just so full of feelings and humanity (and wonderful storytelling as a bonus.)

Recommended by @wstarter re: writing, poetry and hyper sigils.

I started this book a year ago and got distracted by other texts -- I'll come back to it for sure. It's framed as aphorisms on witchcraft but is really more an open-hearted manifesto on "what is a witch?" which of course is a beautifully challenging question. I'm enjoying it so far, but just got caught up in other stuff.

Shut up. The historical research was excellent and it was fun. And I'll fucking read it again. Don't be a hater.

I love this book and it was really important for me when I read it, but the femme characters in it are just incredibly flat, especially the more human ones and it just grates on me.

I started this book a year ago and got distracted by other texts -- I'll come back to it for sure. It's framed as aphorisms on witchcraft but is really more an open-hearted manifesto on "what is a witch?" which of course is a beautifully challenging question. I'm enjoying it so far, but just got caught up in other stuff.

I read this before Wachter's best known book #6ways and it was excellent. I mostly don't do the work from magical instruction books, looking for for overarching theories and philosophies instead, but this one was really superb (and spooky effective). I have to be honest that it runs in the vein of "manifestation" work that comes from New Thought in part, but Watcher really effectively anchors this is very different magical theory (him being sort of chaos magic 2.0, or chaos magic with Feelings (TM) maybe) and so it was easy work adapting it to my own world view. Highly recommend for anyone interested in creative writing as magic and hyper sigils in general.

I mean, I wish I could do half stars. Honestly, this book is fine, Horowitz's style is extremely readable and it's well researched for the most part. But it feels dated already and I think it's important to discuss the "occult" without also tackling definitions of religion, magic, spirituality, philosophy, and science. Which, yeah, is a lot. But it's important imho.

Oops trying this again