Author Archives: Rachel McConnell

About Rachel McConnell

Rachel Christina McConnell is a witch, tarot reader, intuitive astrologer, and writing spider. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in the City of New York. Her short stories have appeared in Dark Moon Lilith Press and Minerva Rising Press’s The Keeping Room. Links to her publications are available here: https://rachelchristinamcconnell.wordpress.com

Song of the Dark Man, by Darragh Mason

Song of the Dark Man: Father of Witches, Lord of the Crossroads, by Darragh Mason
Destiny Books, 1644119099, 208 pages, August 2024

Darragh Mason’s Song of the Dark Man beckons readers down a crooked, thorn-riddled forest path to meet the Devil at the crossroads. Following the haunting melody of his Pan pipes through a captivating blend of folktales, historical records, and contemporary testimonies, Mason seeks the elusive figure of the Dark Man of the Witches’ Sabbath, whose children are “the witches and storytellers.”¹

Divided into two parts, this book delves into the historical context of the Dark Man, including the chilling accounts of the Scottish witch trials, and then explores the lived experiences of present-day witches who have encountered the Dark Man. Mason invites readers to sit beside an ancestral campfire, for “this is a work created in the spirit of the sagas and poems sung by our forebears.”²

Darragh Mason is an award-winning photographer, researcher, and author, best known for his work on the Djinn and the Aghori Hindu sect. He also hosts the award-nominated paranormal podcast Spirit Box. Mason doesn’t claim to be a scholar or an authority on witchcraft. “This book is for the curious and the haunted,”³ he says.

Mason asserts that the Dark Man is a spectral figure lurking in the shadows of our collective unconscious.

“Our folktales are remnants of the dreamtime memories of our ancestors, a memory of an age before the veil between the imagined and the material hardened over,” Mason says. “If our folktales are our dream history, then the Dark Man has haunted our dreams since the beginning.”⁴

He is the shadowy muse behind obsessive artistic expression, inspiring great works of art at a potentially destructive cost to the artist. “The Witchfather is dangerous, ruthless, and may devour you,”⁵ Mason warns readers. “Those who worked with him in the past were known as cunning folk for a reason, in that they could work with him and not get eaten.”⁶ Mason claims this book was written at the behest of Lucifer.

In many folktales, the Dark Man “is a composite figure of the Fairy King, Devil, and Lord of the Dead.”⁷ Mason delves into the paranormal phenomena associated with this dreadful specter, such as the infamous “Devil’s Footprints”⁸ and the eerie tales of black riders spiriting people away to fairy realms. One account that particularly resonated with me was the phenomenon of the “Hairy Hands.”⁹ During the 1920s, witnesses in Devon, England claimed that phantom hairy hands had hijacked control of their vehicles, leading to numerous accidents along the B3212 road.

This account gave me chills because of my own experience of seeing a disembodied hairy hand when I was about three years old. I lived in Florida, not England, and I have never heard of anyone else experiencing this phenomenon before I read this book. One morning, while my dad was getting ready for work and my mom was still asleep, I was sitting at our glass dining room table eating cereal, when I noticed a strange shadow on the chair beside me. I was startled by how much it resembled a werewolf’s hand, with hairy, splayed fingers and long claws. Feeling more curious than afraid, my eyes searched the room, trying to figure out what was casting the shadow, but found nothing. My father seemed oblivious to the phantom hand as he continued his morning ritual, pacing back and forth, gathering his things and adjusting his tie, so I didn’t mention it to him, and wondered if I was imagining it. Later that morning, I told my mother about the strange shadow, and she confessed that she had also seen this hairy hand, only it had appeared to her in the flesh, crawling up the wall.

Another account that struck a chord with me was that of Shullie H. Porter, a hereditary witch, who “was born dead with her umbilical cord around her neck.”¹⁰ While I wasn’t born dead, the circumstances surrounding my birth were strikingly similar. My mother described my face as purple, like a grape, due to the umbilical noose strangling my neck. Discovering that I share this rare birth complication with another modern witch, I can’t help but wonder if it might mirror the traumatic death of being hanged, perhaps for witchcraft, in a past life.

Porter was also given the same name for the Dark Man as he once gave me during a telepathic conversation. “I know who he is now,” she says. “I don’t mind saying his name—it’s Samael.”¹¹ This revelation, coupled with our shared birth trauma, has validated and reaffirmed my personal connection to the Dark Man and the chthonic current into which he initiated me.

In Jewish folklore, Samael, the venom of God, was the name of the satanic serpent in the Garden of Eden, who impregnated Eve with Cain. In traditional witchcraft, witches are believed to be descended from the Cainite lineage of serpent seed. This is the source of the so-called witch blood, which Mason prefers to call a “fire in the blood,”¹² and I love this poetic description, because I like to think of it as a bright etheric venom burning in the veins. In the foreword to this book, Peter Mark Adams, author of The Game of Saturn, further defines witch blood as “the inherited imprints of initiations and devotions undertaken within an ancestral line”¹³

After revealing his name to me, the Dark Man visited me in a vivid dream, clad in black and wearing a deer skull mask, bestowing upon me a pair of antlers that I felt physically fusing to my skull. Upon waking, my crown was still tingling with the sensation of the astral antlers, and I immediately recorded this experience in my dream journal. Through subsequent research, I discovered that horns are sometimes associated with the biblical Mark of Cain. This oneiric vision served as a profound confirmation of my initiation into the mysteries of the Dark Man and the witch’s Cainite inheritance of the mark of the crooked path of exile.

The magical significance and sacred power of horns and antlers is explored in an interview with Orion Foxwood, a traditional witch and Appalachian Conjure man. Foxwood says that horns “pierce the veil between seen and unseen,” and “the deer in the faery tradition is the psychopomp between the worlds.”¹⁴ With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that one of the Dark Man’s epiphanies is the deer. Mason also notes that, in the confessions of the seventeenth-century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie, sometimes the Dark Man “would copulate with the witches in the form of a deer or other forms, and they would never refuse him.”¹⁵

The sexual initiation of the Dark Man in the guise of a lusty horned beast is significant when one considers the historical demonization of sexuality by monotheism.

“Christianity’s virgin birth to a celibate God severed copulation from female sexuality in particular, removing it from its rightful place of veneration to a place of revulsion and fear,” Mason says. “This tragedy led to the desacralization of the earth which, combined with monotheism and the demonization of the Dark Man, is catastrophic.”¹⁶

“Thus,” Mason further observes, “the vulva cave became the hellmouth, changing from a source of wonder and the threshold of creation to a place of corruption and spiritual danger.”¹⁷ The Dark Man is a wild god who reclaims the kingdom of the earth and restores the sacredness of the flesh. His sexual initiation is a primal act, a defiance of the puritanical chains that bind us. His carnal embrace offers liberation to the untamed beast within.

I was intrigued to learn that this ancient ritual union of humanity with the wilderness is still preserved in the symbolic marriage of a girl to a feral goat during the annual Irish Puck Fair, which takes place from the 10^th to 12^th of August, in close proximity to the pagan festival of Lughnasadh, suggesting pre-Christian roots. “The Puck Fair’s main event is the capture of a wild billy goat that is then crowned King Puck,” Mason says. “King Puck has a bride, traditionally a schoolgirl from one of the local primary schools.”¹⁸ Queen Puck, the Goat Bride, brings to mind mythical brides of the Devil, such as Lilith and Persephone.

By transcending boundaries and limitations, often in shocking or taboo ways that invert monotheistic beliefs, the Dark Man and his witches challenge a dualistic worldview, which tends to separate humanity from nature and the divine. This rejection of separation can lead to a deeper connection with the natural world and a sense of unity with all beings. “The composite nature of the Dark Man and the shape-shifting of the witches all point to nondualism and a rejection of our separation,”¹⁹ Mason says.

The primal experience of encountering the Dark Man can make it difficult to interface with modern technology. Many devotees of the Dark Man, including the author himself, have felt guided to disengage from the trappings of social media. As Mason puts it, “the Dark Man experience pushes us to protect our imaginal spaces, to maintain their integrity from the encroachment of invasive technologies and their wake.”²⁰ This resonated deeply with me because I also feel he has urged me to limit my use of technology and abandon social media platforms. The incoherent, distracting white noise of social media fragments consciousness and interferes with our ability to hear the Dark Man’s song. His palpable presence demands that we turn within instead, realign with our intuition and creativity, and follow our soul’s purpose. As a deity of Fate, that purpose also serves his own mysterious agenda.

Whether the Dark Man appears as an eldritch black figure with a phantom hand upon the wheel of fate, or as a spectral stag, his cloven footprints leaving the devil’s mark upon virgin snow, he is an eternal symbol of the primal forces that shape our destinies. He is the embodiment of the void that lies beyond the veil of consciousness, the dark matter of the soul. Through the eyes of modern witches, we witness his presence, feel his power, and experience the profound initiation he offers.

Song of the Dark Man is more than just a collection of tales; it is a ritual, a summoning of the Dark Man into our collective consciousness. It challenges us to confront our deepest fears and embrace the unknown.

Rachel McConnell

Becoming Baba Yaga, by Kris Spisak

Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods, by Kris Spisak
Hampton Roads Publishing, 1642970514, 224 pages, September 2024

In Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods, Kris Spisak seeks the elusive roots of the Slavic crone goddess Baba Yaga in the dark forest of history. Following the trail of her iconic chicken-legged hut, Spisak tracks her transformation from ancient folklore to the present day, exploring her dual nature as both trickster and protector, and her evolution from a fearsome hag to a complex symbol of female empowerment.

Kris Spisak’s award-winning debut novel, The Baba Yaga Mask, was woven from the ancestral red thread of her family’s Ukrainian diaspora experiences following World War II. Her other works, such as Get a Grip on Your Grammar and The Novel Editing Workbook, are geared towards helping writers perfect their craft. Spisak holds a B.A. in English from the College of William and Mary and an M.L.A. from the University of Richmond. Becoming Baba Yaga is her fifth book.

A talented wordsmith with an impressive literary background and an intimate knowledge of Slavic folklore, Spisak spins lush, captivating prose that will leave readers spellbound by the magic of Baba Yaga. Interspersed throughout the book are retellings of traditional stories featuring the enigmatic hag, followed by insightful critical analyses that unravel the rich symbolism and hidden meanings woven into these folktales.

One of my personal favorites was “The Birth of Baba Yaga,” also known as “The Tale of the Twelve Nasty Women,” which recounts how the Devil collected a bag full of difficult, shrewish women and boiled them in a cauldron, inhaled a lungful of the garlicy steam, and spat out Baba Yaga.¹ This folktale was no doubt the misogynistic attempt of a Christian author to demonize and oppress her, but I can’t help but be delighted by the idea of Baba Yaga being a distillation of the nastiest feminist women the Devil has ever met.

Like any good fairy tale collection, Becoming Baba Yaga is decorated with beautiful, whimsical illustrations. The work of Davezilla, the creator of the Tarot of the Unexplained, graces these pages. His distinctive black and white artwork, reminiscent of silhouette portraits in an Art Nouveau style, are a lovely complement to the book’s exploration of Slavic folklore.

From Baba Yaga’s lolling tongue and iron teeth to her chicken-legged hut, encircled by fence posts of bones topped with skull lanterns, Spisak explores the symbolic significance of her character and attributes. For example, Spisak offers the intriguing theory that the strange image of the chicken-legged hut may have originated in an ancient Russian burial practice reserved for shamans.

“After death, a wooden coffin was constructed and raised up on stilts, allowing the deceased individual to exist between the sky and the earth, between the planes of life and death, not returning the body to the dirt from whence it came,”² explains Spisak.

Spisak suggests that Baba Yaga may have originally been an earth goddess, perhaps an elderly Mokosh, the Slavic mother goddess and weaver of fate, who has lost her fertility but retains her wise blood. “Different scholars have linked many figures to Baba Yaga’s origin over time, but each one is rooted in nature and the earth, its potential and its duality,”³ Spisak says. Just as nature is two-faced, both nurturing and destructive, so too is Baba Yaga. Her complex personality, with its blend of kindness and cruelty, is so compelling because it mirrors the multifaceted nature of humanity.

Baba Yaga echoes the behavior of my own grandmothers, who were both loving and cruel in their own ways. Their deep-seated beliefs about what was right and just could sometimes lead to harsh judgments and criticism, just as Baba Yaga rewards well-behaved children who meet her standards, and threatens to cannibalize those who don’t. This reminds me of how elders often demand that we conform to their expectations, and if we fail to do so, they may seek to control or even destroy the parts of us they perceive as rebellious. This metaphorical act of cannibalism can be seen as an attempt to absorb us back into themselves, rather than allowing us to grow and develop as independent individuals.

My paternal grandmother is a hypercritical Virgo with a sharp tongue. In retrospect, I realize that with her iron gnashing, she was trying to eat the parts of me she didn’t like, which seemed to be pretty much everything about me. In her presence, I felt pressured to conform to her expectations by wearing a mask, and stuffed the real me deep into my shadow, until I reached a breaking point and realized that, no matter how hard I tried to please her, nothing I did would ever satisfy her, and I cut ties with her altogether.

However, Baba Yaga is a goddess, not a fallible and judgmental human being. Although her methods may seem cruel, they are intended to awaken the hero within. Spisak points out that Baba Yaga never follows through with her cannibalistic threats. She just has a way of “scaring people into being a better version of themselves.”⁴

It’s often overlooked that, as a grandmother, Baba Yaga’s role is inherently maternal, albeit as a dark mother, or an evil fairy godmother. All the children that come to her are fed and given shelter, and, in exchange, they are expected to work for her and prove their worth by doing impossible tasks.

“She challenges them to ensure arrogance and entitlement are never pieces of their personality,” Spisak says. “She gives them the freedom to discover themselves and their own abilities.”⁵

This frightening initiation process serves as a catalyst for personal growth and awakens their latent potential for greatness. According to Spisak, “a good villain makes us reexamine who we are, who we’ve been, and who we could be.”⁶

One of my favorite chapters, titled “Horror & Escapism,” explores how Baba Yaga continues to captivate our imaginations due to humanity’s enduring fascination with horror and the terror of nightfall in the untamed wilderness. By vicariously meeting the cannibal witch in the woods through folktales, false fear can provide cathartic release.

Spisak says that the horror genre “can evoke an emotional catharsis and establish greater bonds in our own relationships or between characters we empathize with as we consume their stories.”⁷ This is why date nights often involve cuddling while watching scary movies, and it’s no coincidence that so many horror flicks take place in a creepy cabin in the woods. “Where the darkness stretches out its claws, there we find the essence of Baba Yaga,”⁸ Spisak writes, emphasizing the enduring power and primeval allure of this sinister goddess.

Spisak’s Becoming Baba Yaga is a masterful exploration of the Slavic crone. Through her insightful analysis and vivid storytelling, Spisak paints a compelling portrait of Baba Yaga as a symbol of both female empowerment and the embodiment of the dark side of nature that continues to horrify and fascinate humanity on the primal level. The book’s vibrant blend of scholarly research and imaginative retellings of traditional folktales make it a fresh and valuable contribution to the study of Slavic mythology and a fascinating read for anyone interested in folklore, feminism, and the enduring power of storytelling.

Rachel McConnell

Witchcraft, by Raven Grimassi

Witchcraft: A Mystery Tradition, by Raven Grimassi
Crossed Crow Books, 978-1-959883-59-3, 270 pages, July 2024

Neo-Pagan scholar and witch Raven Grimassi (1951-2019) was the prolific author of several books on the Old Religion. Initiated into Wicca in 1970, he founded the Aridian tradition a decade later, which blended Wicca and Italian witchcraft. In 2006, he established the Ash, Birch and Willow tradition with his wife Stephanie, which emphasizes the primal roots of European witchcraft.

Crossed Crow Books, dedicated to preserving Grimassi’s legacy by republishing his out-of-print works, has rereleased Witchcraft: A Mystery Tradition. In this comprehensive work, Grimassi explores the myths and universal deity archetypes at the core of the Mysteries, which he says are “applicable to any system or tradition of Witchcraft.”¹. This book was inspired by the Goddess of the Mysteries, Ceres, who Grimassi honored as his patroness because he was born on her festival day, April 12th. Before writing each chapter, Grimassi asked Ceres for her guidance.

For me, witchcraft is an ecstatic religious experience rooted in ancient practices, and Grimassi’s writings support that school of thought with meticulous research.

“It is my personal belief and experience that Witchcraft is a religion that has evolved over countless centuries (as opposed to a modern construction),”² Grimassi says. “Historians and archaeologists spend a great deal of time and energy trying to separate magick and sorcery from Witchcraft as well as other things that the Witch as a practitioner knows to be inseparable.”³

Grimassi’s traditional perspective is so validating and refreshing to read, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. It’s become trendy for witches on social media to deny that witchcraft is a religion, and I can’t help but feel that they are serving their egos instead of the Goddess and the God.

Grimassi provides supporting historical evidence of Wiccan concepts and practices that have supposedly been debunked by historians like Ronald Hutton as modern inventions. He traces the ancient origins of ritual nudity, also known as being “skyclad,”⁴ citing seventeenth-century woodcuts and classical works, such as Ovid’s Fasti, as proof. He also validates the threefold nature of the goddess of witches, who is mentioned in classical sources like Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as in “the ancient concept of the Three Fates,” in which “we see the classic Maiden, Mother, and Crone vision.”⁵

One of the greatest strengths of this book is that Grimassi helps readers see the Mystery Tradition from the perspective of our prehistoric ancestors. For example, he suggests that the ancient belief in an afterlife may have stemmed from the observation that sleeping people resemble the dead and visit the spirit realm in dreams. He also notes that “the Sun and Moon appeared to arise from beneath the ground and return each day or night,”⁶ suggesting the presence of an Underworld beneath the earth.

“It is the work of a Witch, as a practitioner of Earth Religion, to be a steward of nature,”⁷ Grimassi says.

Witches align with nature through the seasonal rites of the Sabbats, which Grimassi explores in detail. He explains how the waxing and waning halves of the years are personified by the Holly King and Oak King, whose animal forms are the stag and the wolf, and he analyzes the symbolism associated with the myths and legends of each Sabbat.

“The Mystery Teachings are designed to bring humankind back to its original relationship with nature,”⁸ Grimassi says. By studying these teachings, he believes we can reactivate dormant ancestral knowledge, which he refers to as “memory-chain associations.”⁹ Memory-chain associations are energetic currents that Grimassi likens to quantum threads in a spider’s web of non-linear time, weaving together the simultaneously existing past, present, and future.

By aligning with a “core concept” that is received upon initiation into the Mysteries, “one can interface with the memory-chain associations.”¹⁰ Once the memory-chain has been activated, the initiate can draw from the Underworld cauldron of ancestral memory hidden within the labyrinthine tangle of roots beneath the Tree of Knowledge. The wisdom that lies therein is meant to be shared, for the enlightenment of humanity, and “the cauldron will not offer its essence to those who serve only themselves.”¹¹

I believe Grimassi wrote this book in such a way that it activates those memory chains in the reader, stimulating initiatory insights, and this book is such a wellspring of information that it would take multiple readings to fully integrate what it has to offer. By shifting my mindset to the primal perspective of this work, I had a profound epiphany that deepened my understanding of the Horned God and my personal relationship with him.

I took the holy sacrament of psilocybin cubensis for the first time while reading Chapter Three, “The God of the Witches,” and it was a truly initiatory experience. Although Grimassi does not mention the use of psychedelic sacraments in this book, I felt guided to do so by my guardian spirits because the mushroom, with its phallic shape and ecstatic properties, is a sacred plant medicine of the Horned God. It was a fortuitous synchronicity that I received the sacrament from a church the day after I started reading this book. I was also given signs to take it by the presence of two large mushroom fairy rings at the local park.

After waiting several hours for something to happen, I was disappointed because I thought the sacrament wasn’t working. I gave up and watched an episode of the X-Files, in which Agent Scully was kidnapped and almost lobotomized by a serial killer who wanted to trepan out her demons. Before Mulder rescued her, I had an intense craving for Doritos. That’s when the magic mushrooms finally started to kick in.

I heard a spirit voice tell me that I was protected and it was safe for me to let my guard down and surrender to the experience. She told me I have a very strong mind, like barbed wire, and it took a long time for me to feel the effects of the sacrament because of my psychic barriers. I realized she was right. I was curious to see what would happen, but I was also afraid of being mind-raped by the mushroom, so I had a lot of subconscious resistance. Up until that point, I had been worried that I wasn’t feeling anything because I didn’t take enough, but she told me that the Universe had provided me with the exact dosage that was right for me to consume at that time. Left to my own devices, I could easily have overdosed and become Madame Psychosis. My guardian spirits know me all too well.

At the peak of my trip, Dionysos appeared to me in the form of a serpent crawling along the tiles of my floor. The serpent told me he knows me better than I know myself, and gave me a lot of insight into my own behavior. He revealed to me that he is like a chameleon, and if I try too hard to see him, I won’t find him at all. “Surprise!” he said. I am the Mushroom King. He was very playful and teased me for overlooking him when he’s all around me, giving me obvious signs of his presence.

On the eve of Lughnassadh, a few days prior to me consuming the sacrament, a catalpa tree fell in the backyard during a thunderstorm. Thankfully, no one was injured and there was minimal damage, but it was a really startling encroachment of nature. A forked stang was gifted to me from that fallen tree, and I learned from an internet search that catalpa wood encourages creative self-expression, embracing one’s uniqueness, and facilitates communication with spirits, including angels, fairies, and ancestors.

The garden has also been strangely wild and overgrown with monstrous weeds this summer, despite all my diligent efforts to tame them. The corn was mysteriously knocked over by some unseen force, which was a frustrating disappointment, but the berry bushes have been thriving. All of this excessive weedy vegetation has been the Horned God’s way of trying to get my attention. He confirmed that I am a maenad by giving me a vision of myself with green skin and wearing a flower crown, which aligned with me being born in May and the emerald being my birthstone. I reveled in this Dionysian ecstasy without worrying about whether or not these insights were real or a form of spiritual psychosis, and once it was over, I felt heightened creativity and wrote down everything I could remember and transformed my experience into a poem.

Dionysos taking the form of a serpent in my vision was significant because Grimassi writes that, according to Plutarch, during the waning half of the year, “Dionysos is lord of Delphi,”¹² while Apollo reigns during the waxing year. He likens Apollo and Dionysos to the Oak and Holly Kings of the waxing and waning and waning year who annually battle for regency. After re-reading this passage, I realized I had seen Dionysos in the form of the sacred python of the Delphic Oracle. This information was important for me to integrate because I’ve been wanting to incorporate Apollo into my practice as a complement to Dionysos, and seeing him as the king of the waxing year adds more depth to how I perceive his relationship with the Dionysian shadow.

I now see Apollo as the rational conscious mind, the Luciferian prince of dawn who wakes us in the morning and helps us remember and interpret the dreams and visions gifted to us in the Dionysian underworld of the subconscious mind. Light-bringing Apollo helps us make sense of it all and gives our visions deeper meaning by translating them into poetry, music, and other art forms. Apollo, the embodiment of reason, bestows the gift of discernment, enabling the mind to parse out delusions and fantasies from genuine prophecies and mystical experiences.

According to Grimassi, when the conscious mind attempts to digest illogical dream symbolism, “it discards what cannot be understood and retains what can be deciphered through logic and rational reasoning.”¹³ “The discarded information falls back into the subconscious mind where it later reappears in another dream state,”¹⁴ Grimassi says. This subconscious stew of dreams is symbolized in mythology as a magical cauldron, and as I read Grimassi’s words, I had a sudden epiphany that these dream fragments are reflected in the myth of the dismemberment of Dionysos, who was cooked in a cauldron and eaten by the Titans.

“The mystical theme of consuming is at the core of the Mystery Teaching associated with the Sacred King or Slain God,” Grimassi says. “The seed must go into the earth and the God must go into the soul. In essence, burial takes place in the soil and the stomach.”¹⁵ Grimassi also points out that the hearth was seen “as an entrance to the Underworld.”¹⁶ “The cauldron,” he says, “is not only a cooking pot but also a womb symbol from which metaphorical children are born.”¹⁷

Taking the sacrament while reading this chapter gave me a whole new perspective of the Horned God’s manifestation as the sacred serpent. The correlation between the Horned God and digestion got me thinking about how the human digestive tract is just one long snake.

“The serpent is a very old symbol of the forces of the Underworld and of transformation itself,”¹⁸ Grimassi says.

Part of the Biblical serpent’s wisdom must have been instinctual discernment of what is safe and not safe to eat. Practicing Grimassi’s prehistoric way of thinking, I imagined the process of trial and error for hunters and gatherers learning which plants were safe for consumption and which ones were poisonous. To consume the sacrament is to metabolize plant wisdom. Perhaps being cursed to crawl on one’s belly metaphorically means that the will to survive is driven by the pangs of hunger. In order to stay alive, we are slaves to the dietary needs of our bodies.

Perhaps this is why so many Christian ascetics used fasting as a method of resisting the Devil. I have come to the conclusion that the Tree of Knowledge is the human body, and the serpent is the digestive system. The serpent rules the literal bowels of the Underworld, the digestive system that alchemizes food into energy. By honoring the wisdom of the serpent, we treat all food as sacred and become more mindful of what we consume.

Witchcraft: A Mystery Tradition has blessed me with initiatory revelations and I can’t praise this book enough. I came to this work seeking to know the God of Witches better, but of course, Grimassi devotes the same amount of attention to the Triple Goddess. In the past, my practice has been primarily goddess-centric, so this book initiated me into an aspect of the Horned God’s mysteries because that’s what I needed most for my personal spiritual journey. I have no doubt that multiple readings will take me in new directions, and every reader’s initiatory experience will be different, depending on where they are on their spiritual path.

Rachel McConnell

Living Conjure, by Mama Starr Casas

Living Conjure: The Practice of Southern Folk Magic, by Starr Casas
Weiser Books, 1578638240, 208 pages, August 2024

Living Conjure: The Practice of Southern Folk Magic by Mama Starr Casas, a Conjure woman with over forty years of experience, is a comprehensive guide to traditional Southern Conjure that’s accessible to all skill levels, from beginner to seasoned practitioner. A native Kentuckian, Mama Starr’s voice is like a warm hearth fire crackling with wisdom and laced with the sweet smoke of magic. Her writing style emulates the way she was taught: through word of mouth, from her elders. This enchanting prose, delivered with the down-to-earth charm of a beloved granny, immerses readers in a legacy of time-honored Southern secrets. It’s clear that Mama Starr poured her heart and soul into preserving and sharing this invaluable knowledge.

“Don’t forget your roots,”¹ Appalachian Conjure man Jake Richards says in the foreword, and those words lingered with me like the whisper of a ghost. I’ve tried running from the South, where I was born, and I’ve rejected the Christian faith in which I was raised. When I lived in New York, some people projected negative Southern stereotypes onto me and wrongly assumed that I voted in a certain way, so I came to realize that I couldn’t run from the South. Wherever I go, she follows me, a phantom belle perfumed with magnolias, and when fate forced me to come back, she reclaimed me. Trying to escape my roots just buried them deep in my shadow. Studying Conjure and incorporating some elements of Southern folk magic into my personal practice has been a therapeutic way for me to reconcile with my roots by digging them up and putting them to good use.

Mama Starr honors the tradition of her elders by teaching Conjure through the lens of children’s folktales, like “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby,”² and the rhythms of old spirituals. These weathered yarns weave a rich tapestry of magic. “The ancestors of this work learned to hide the work in plain sight—that is why this work is called tricks,”³ she explains. This emphasis on subtlety and clever disguise is a core principle of Conjure.

“Conjure, Hoodoo, and Rootwork are all the same thing,” Mama Starr explains. “When I was growing up, I never heard Hoodoo being used as the name for this work. Hoodoo was a question: “Hoodoo you?” Meaning, “Who put roots on you?”⁴

These terms have evolved over time and their usage can vary depending on the region and the practitioner. However, they all refer to the same tradition of folk magic that has been passed down through generations in the Southern United States.

“Sometimes folks get upset with me because I share so much,” Mama Starr says. “I share it because if I don’t, when I’m gone what’s in my head is going to be gone.”⁵ She hopes to keep the work alive and honor the memory of the ancestors through her writing.

One chapter explores the use of “The Arms of the Cross”⁶ in Conjure, associating each arm with a cardinal direction and element. Mama Starr counsels caution when doing this type of work, because one could accidently nail themselves down with a crossed condition if performed incorrectly. In the sample workings she provides, a candle or a petition is placed on one of the cross arms.

“I’m what folks call a two-headed worker, which means that I will do what folks call ‘light’ or ‘dark’ work just as long as the work is justified,”⁷ Mama Starr says. She emphasizes the importance of performing divination before a working to ensure it is warranted and to take responsibility for your actions.

Most of the workings are very simple and require few tools. Mama Starr teaches how to work Conjure with objects most people already have lying around the house, such as scissors, keys, bottles, and jars. The use of blue bottles in Conjure held the most fascination for me because I’ve always loved decorating with cobalt blue glass bottles and I used to keep them in my kitchen window. It turns out they can be magically charged to keep ghosts away.

“Haunts can’t cross over water,” Mama Starr says, “and it is believed they don’t know the difference between the blue in the paint or bottles and the blue of the water, so they stay away from the homes that have the ceiling of the porch painted blue or have blue bottles hanging in the trees.”⁸

Before reading this book, I had no idea that blue bottles were used in Southern folk magic to ward off spirits, so I must have had an intuitive instinct to decorate my window with them.

Mama Starr teaches how to honor one’s personal ancestors by tending graves, creating an ancestor altar, and making offerings. However, ancestors need not be limited to blood kin. She also emphasizes the importance of honoring the ancestors of Conjure, “the folks who were brought over here during the time of slavery.”⁹ “Conjure was born out of slavery, from folks trying to survive during a time when white folks felt they had the right to own another person like they were cattle,”¹⁰ Mama Starr says. She admires their courage, wisdom, and cunning intelligence in the face of oppression and hardship.

The shadow of slavery looms large over the South, and it was one of the reasons why I tried to escape my Southern roots. Instead of being ashamed of being a white Southerner and trying to push the horrors of slavery out of my mind, Living Conjure has shifted my perspective to thinking about how I can honor the ancestors of Conjure in my personal practice. Mama Starr writes about them and keeps them in her prayers.

Mama Starr talks about the magical properties of animal curios, such as bird feet and alligator paws, and explains that the use of animal parts in magic can be discerned by observing the animal’s natural behavior. I have a flock of egg-laying hens, so her insights into using eggs and chicken feet in Conjure were especially significant for me. She points out that chickens are resourceful and scratch around in the dirt all day looking for food, so their claws can symbolically rake in money. Their feet are also protective because their claws are sharp enough to draw blood. She gives detailed instructions for multiple workings with the feet, as well as how to perform an egg cleansing.

The chapter on “Dirts and Powders” was also very insightful. Mama Starr points out that the virtues of various dirts can be like a double-edged sword. For example, bank dirt can bring prosperity, but one should keep in mind that banks also repossess property, and so the energy of loss and poverty may be mingling in that dirt. I recently started working with bank dirt this year, and this passage enriched my understanding of how to use it.

Mama Starr’s website claims that “she has tried to keep the work as pure as possible,”¹¹ and for her, that means you can’t take the Bible out of Conjure. If you do, it’s not Conjure. However, in this book, she adopts a more lenient approach, teaching the role the Bible plays in Conjure and leaving it up to readers to decide whether or not they want to use it.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with the Bible. Being raised in a conservative Christian household, I had a little pink Bible that I used to read in bed as a child. When my mother disciplined me, one of her favorite punishments was for me to hand copy Proverbs three times each. As an adolescent, I lost faith, read more critically, and became jaded with the misogyny I found in the scriptures. I’m against burning books, so I’ve done my best to make peace with the Bible. College taught me to read it as a work of literature, and Living Conjure is helping me reconnect with it as a powerful grimoire, rather than a source of judgment and condemnation.

“Since the ancestors were forced to become Christian, they put the Bible to good use,”¹² Mama Starr says. This passage spoke to my soul because my mother put the fear of God into me when I was a small child, and like it or not, that indoctrination is a major theme in the first chapter of my origin story, and a part of who I am. If you try to take the Bible out of Conjure, Mama Starr says it’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and “you are weakening the foundation that the ancestors built through their blood, sweat, and tears.”¹³

Mama Starr emphasizes that Conjure is a magical practice, not a religion. The Bible is a religious text, but it is also a spellbook. It can be used for divination in a practice called bibliomancy, and Mama Starr teaches how to receive messages from Spirit using this method. While many Christians believe that divination is a sin, Mama Starr cites biblical passages to the contrary, which describe divinatory practices and claim that the gift of prophecy comes from God. “Men of the churches have tried to remove God’s gift out of the churches, but you can’t take away what God has given,”¹⁴ Mama Starr says.

About five years ago, I had a dream that I was in an underground chapel with my mom, and a big black goat of the Witches’ Sabbath was standing on its hind legs in front of her, holding the Bible open like a living lectern. She was so spellbound by the Word that she didn’t even realize the Devil was the one holding the book. I woke up from that dream thinking of the Bible as the Devil’s Black Book, and from then on I recognized it as a powerful tool for witchcraft. Living Conjure has given me deeper insight into putting it to good use.

I may not like some of my roots, but I’ve chosen to own them. After all, if you want to find your power, it’s in your shadow. It’s in those potent roots you keep buried deep, the ones that don’t ever want to see the light of day. If Southern folk magic is part of your heritage, then Living Conjure is a valuable guide that can help you reclaim your roots and tap into that subterranean current of power.

Rachel McConnell

Spirit Marriage, by Megan Rose, Ph.D.

Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings, by Megan Rose, Ph.D.
Bear & Company, 1591434157, 448 pages, April 2022

In Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings, transformational psychologist Dr. Megan Rose explores the cross-cultural phenomenon of mystical union with a spirit spouse. Dr. Rose defines spirit marriage as “the bonded or intimate relationship between a human and a subtle or discarnate entity such as a deity, spirit, or extraordinary intelligence.”¹ Through case studies, historical accounts, and her own experiences, Rose explores how these relationships manifest in a wide variety of traditions, from the God Spouses of Norse Heathenry to the ceremonial magician’s union with the Holy Guardian Angel. As the first comprehensive survey of its kind, Spirit Marriage is a fascinating exploration of a complex and often taboo topic.

Dr. Megan Rose holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and an M.A. in Religion. She also identifies as an ecosexual priestess, erotic mystic, and faery seer. These diverse areas of expertise inform her approach to spirit marriage, which emphasizes the spiritual, emotional, and erotic aspects of these relationships, which she perceives as a “cocreative consciousness”² formed between the mortal and the spirit to whom they are wedded.

The foreword is written by Orion Foxwood, author of The Tree of Enchantment: Ancient Wisdom and Magic Practices of the Faery Tradition (2008), who has been married to a faery queen named Brigh for over twenty years. In the foreword, Foxwood points out that spirit lovers are often demonized, but reminds readers that the word demon is “derived from the Greek word daemon, which originally denoted a divine being, not an infernal one.”³

I was excited to come across this book because there is a relative dearth of reliable information on the subject. I’ve Googled spirit marriage in the past, and search results were dominated by Christian fearmongering, with a deluge of warnings about spirit spouses being demons that ruin lives and require deliverance through Jesus Christ. Wikipedia is the most reliable, identifying spirit spouses as helping spirits in shamanism, but there isn’t any practical information on how to form these alliances. Fortunately, Spirit Marriage offers a much more balanced and nuanced perspective, exploring the concept of spirit spouses across cultures and traditions.

In Spirit Marriage, Rose describes her journey to connecting with her spirit lover and discovering his identity, which culminated in union with a human partner whose spiritual essence (referred to by Rose as the Divine Self) is a vibrational match to her Faery Beloved. Rose describes her journey as one of “reconciliation with the Dark Goddess and Dark God,”⁴ which was initiated through a descent into her personal underworld, where she encountered the “archetypal devil”⁵ through two abusive relationships.

Dr. Rose’s personal story in the chapter titled “The Erotic Mystic: Encounters with My Faery Beloved”⁶ resonated deeply with me as a fellow Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) who has also navigated childhood bullying and abusive relationships. Her journey of overcoming these challenges to embrace the Divine Masculine mirrored my own realizations in recent years. Dr. Rose’s insights about the impact of religious upbringing and past trauma on our relationships with the Divine Masculine are particularly valuable. They validate the experiences of many women, who, like myself, struggle with connecting to the Divine Masculine due to religious trauma and partner abuse. Sharing these experiences highlights the importance of healing past wounds to cultivate a healthy connection with one’s Divine counterpart, a central theme explored throughout Spirit Marriage.

Dr. Rose’s memoir exemplifies the transformative potential of spirit marriages. While I resonated with her experiences the most, I enjoyed reading all ten interviews. Each account offers fascinating insights, showcasing how spirit marriages transcend race, gender, and sexual orientation. A common thread emerges: a sense of surrender to a predestined union.

Dr. Rose’s interviews with individuals like Orion Foxwood, a gay Traditional Witch and Conjure Man wed to a faery queen, and Kama Devi, a heterosexual white woman who married the Hindu goddess Kali Ma, effectively demonstrate the vast spectrum of spirit marriages. They can even manifest as a union with nature itself, as evidenced in “The West African Shrine Keeper,”⁷ which features a shaman wed to a deity embodied as a tree.

There are no cut and dry rules about spirit marriage, and the unions are as unique as the people who enter them. While many traditions insist that divorcing a spirit-spouse is impossible, Caroline, a witchdoctor from Washington, DC, has married multiple spirits from a variety of pantheons, and claims that she has divorced a spirit-spouse.

Throughout the book, Rose addresses safety precautions regarding the importance of establishing trust and maintaining healthy boundaries with spirit lovers, which can sometimes be challenging due to shared consciousness. For instance, she emphasizes the importance of discernment to ensure spirit communication is genuine. Each account addresses how the practitioner balances their spirit marriage with the mundane concerns of everyday life, including how they navigate integrating a spirit spouse with romantic relationships on the physical plane.

Given the unconventional nature of these spirit marriages, my main takeaway from this book is that a practitioner’s preconceived notions about who or what a spirit spouse is supposed to be could possibly get in the way of achieving union. A practitioner seeking a spirit spouse should be open-minded and need not limit themselves based on gender, sexual preference, or ethnicity. The right spirit spouse is the one best aligned with the practitioner’s life purpose, and it may defy expectations. Spirit marriage is a lifelong journey, and every experience is tailored to the individual.

Ultimately, spirit marriage is a co-creative union. Like the concept of twin flames, spirit and mortal unite to achieve a higher purpose.

“In the spirit marriage, an indwelling happens, a symbiosis, the grafting of the two into one,” Dr. Rose writes. “From this union a third entity arises: a love child.”⁸

For Rose, her love child is this book.

Spirit Marriage is riveting and I didn’t want to put it down. Each interview, beautifully rendered, showcases a distinct spirit spouse with a palpable presence—I swear I could smell cigar smoke while reading about “The New Orleans Voodoo Mambo”⁹ married to Baron Samedi.

Dr. Rose approaches the various cultures and traditions with the utmost respect, demonstrating how everyone’s path is different and there is no right way or any strict set of rules regarding spirit marriage. While some readers might remain skeptical or wary of entering these unions, Spirit Marriage offers a thought-provoking exploration that will validate and transform the intimate relationships of practitioners who seek congress with the spirit realm.

Rachel McConnell

The Chinese Five Elements Oracle, by Vicki Iskandar

The Chinese Five Elements Oracle: A 60-Card Deck and Guidebook, by Vicki Iskandar and illustrated by Candice Soon
Hay House LLC, 140197063X, 192 pages, 60 cards, October 2023

In Taoism, the five elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water are the building blocks of the universe. The elements present at birth shape our personalities and desires. Through Chinese astrology, we can attune to our own personal elemental compositions, promoting deeper self-awareness, growth, and healing.

The Chinese Five Elements Oracle combines the five elements with the twelve zodiac animals to create all sixty possible pairings. This deck was created by Indonesian-born Chinese Feng Shui consultant and astrologer Vicki Iskandar, and illustrated by Candice Soon, a self-taught artist from Singapore. It consists of sixty cards and a 185-page guidebook, representing Iskandar’s unique vision of the sixty Pillars, brought to life through Soon’s gorgeous illustrations. In her personal practice, Iskandar blends Chinese and Western astrology. Since 2012, she has shared daily astrological guidance on Twitter under the handle @5elementsoracle.

This deck is beginner-friendly, with the accompanying guidebook offering a comprehensive introduction to Chinese metaphysics, Taoism, and astrology. According to Chinese mythology, the ordering of the animal signs was established based on the outcome of a Great Race. The Rat hitched a ride on the Ox and leaped across the finish line first, winning the race and being awarded the position of first sign in the Chinese zodiac by the Jade Emperor, the Taoist ruler of the Universe.

The sixty cards, or Pillars, are divided into six cycles of ten Heavenly Stems, and the opening cycle explores the themes of Wisdom and Communication, beginning with the Wood Rat, the deck’s inaugural card and leader of the first cycle. I was born in the year of the Wood Rat, so I was thrilled to discover it was the first card in the deck when I opened the box.

Iskandar explains that the sixty cards are organized into a cyclical pattern known as the “great sexagenary cycle.”¹ Each ten-card cycle begins with Yang Wood and concludes with Yin Water, while the twelve animal signs follow their traditional order: “The Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Rabbit, the Dragon, the Snake, the Horse, the Sheep (also called Goat or Ram), the Monkey, the Bird (or Rooster), the Dog, and the Pig (or Boar).”²

Iskandar substitutes the more familiar Rooster with the Bird, often depicted as a phoenix, due to the sign’s Yin Metal elemental energy. The Rooster, with its masculine connotations, doesn’t accurately reflect the sign’s feminine nature. Iskandar emphasizes the importance of understanding the elemental composition of each animal sign rather than relying on superficial characteristics.

Intrigued by the potential insights offered by this oracle, I immediately began exploring the Pillars associated with my family, friends, and pets. I wanted to familiarize myself with the individual qualities of each sign before delving into divinatory use of the cards.

2024 is the year of the Wood Dragon, and I examined the corresponding card in this deck to contemplate how this energy might be influencing the collective. The wise Wood Dragon is the first of the “Power and Authority Cards,” and according to Iskandar, it “represents tremendous strength and faith in a positive outcome, even in the midst of adversity.”³ This card advises us to lead authentic lives, act with integrity, and use our personal power and influence for the greater good.

Feeling prepared to delve into the oracle’s divinatory potential, I turned my attention to the suggested practices outlined in the guidebook. Iskandar emphasizes the importance of a clear and receptive mindset, recommending a brief meditation before each reading. She also advises against using the cards during the energetically potent periods of the New and Full Moons, which are either too Yin or too Yang, as well as during stormy weather.

Iskandar offers a variety of oracle spreads, and I decided to start with the one card draw, which is called “One with the Tao.”⁴

“Taoism is about simplicity, and the simplest way to ask for guidance is to draw a card from the deck, especially when you’re seeking a quick answer, an insight into a specific matter, or an affirmation from your guides,” Iskandar says. “If a card jumps out before you pick one, it’s the Tao picking a card for you.”⁵

Turning the cards facedown to shuffle, I was dazzled by the beauty of the card backs, which depict the yin-yang dalliance of a phoenix and a dragon, the ultimate power couple in Feng Shui. They swirl in a galaxy of color, before a backdrop of stars. The phoenix has a rainbow of tail feathers with peacock eyes, while the dragon coils around her with sea green hair and a blur of pastel scales.

I didn’t have a specific question in mind, so I just asked for general guidance from the Tao. While I was shuffling, I saw a dragon’s head appear before my mind’s eye, signifying Yang energy. After I spent some time thoroughly shuffling the deck, the Tao flipped over a card for me: “Wood Horse: Live and Love Joyfully,” which depicts a horse galloping through a forest with sunlight streaming down through the canopy of branches and leaves.

This energetic card carries the elemental energy of Yang Wood, symbolizing expansion and growth, and the Horse is a harbinger of “unbridled joy.”

“Heaven is there to guide you to a bright future, while Earth stands ready to bring you opportunities,”⁶ Iskandar says.

What a beautiful and reassuring message!

This versatile deck is a wonderful tool for exploring Chinese astrology, delving into natal charts, and seeking oracular wisdom from the Tao. For those eager to dive deeper into Chinese astrology beyond their year Pillar, Iskandar’s website offers a BaZi chart calculator to reveal your Four Pillars of Destiny and more.

The Chinese Five Elements Oracle is a treasure trove of wisdom and beauty. This is the first deck of its kind that I’ve seen, and it will be a valuable tool for both beginners and experienced practitioners of Chinese astrology.

Rachel McConnell

The Occult Sylvia Plath, by Julia Gordon-Bramer

The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet, by Julia Gordon-Bramer
Destiny Books, 1644118629, 416 pages, May 2024

Poetry is a form of spellcasting, and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) continues to captivate readers as her following grows through BookTok. Plath was best known for her confessional poetry and her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which she published just before her suicide under the pen name Victoria Lucas. Beyond her iconic status as a tragic heroine, Plath was fascinated with the occult. Biographers have often overlooked this aspect, but Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer delves into this profound influence in her book The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet. A poet and tarot reader herself, Gordon-Bramer unveils Plath’s fascination with Qabalah, Jungian alchemy, astrology, tarot, and even the Ouija board, revealing the sorcery woven into her writing.

I first encountered Sylvia Plath in an undergrad poetry class. The lecture focused on lurid biographical details, reducing her to a tortured poet with daddy issues, who was driven to suicide by her husband’s infidelity. Dissecting poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” which were laced with disturbing holocaust symbolism, made my skin crawl. Reading her poetry was like eating wild honey straight from a swarming hive. The honeycomb was blackened with dust and mold spores, and dead bees were trapped in dark, viscous amber. There was a vague sense of danger, as if internalizing her words might infect me with the same madness that drove her to end her own life.

She instantly became one of my favorite poets. Plath gave me permission to harvest radioactive material from the dregs of my soul, to be raw and unfiltered in my writing. Nothing was off limits. While this provocative introduction to her poetry inspired me and granted me greater creative freedom, I now realize that I was so spellbound by her mythical image that I lost sight of the transcendent nature of her work.

In The Occult Sylvia Plath, Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer dismantles the oversimplification of Plath’s poetry as confessional, arguing that previous biographers have overlooked the influence of world events, Plath’s social circle, and most importantly, her fascination with the occult. Informed by over fifteen years of research, Gordon-Bramer deep dives into letters, journals, and even marginalia in Plath’s personal library, weaving together a web of occult connections that resonated throughout Plath’s oeuvre. Gordon-Bramer’s compelling insights have enriched my own appreciation of Plath’s poetry, as viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens of her spiritual journey.

“For over fifty years, Sylvia Plath’s story was controlled and severely restricted by the estates of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,” says Gordon-Bramer. “Until recently, editors of Plath’s and Hughes’s published letters downplayed their interests in the occult.”¹ It turns out that the tortured poet facade I had idolized as an undergrad creative writing student was carefully curated for mass appeal. “Even many of Plath’s better photos were not published, possibly in an effort to cast her as a dowdier, more depressive poet,”² Gordon-Bramer says. In this book, she hopes “to break the world from the habit of reading Plath’s work solely through the lens of autobiography.”³

Each chapter is named after the title of a Plath poem. In “April Aubade,” Gordon-Bramer humanizes Sylvia’s father, Otto Plath, a German immigrant who, during World War I, was flagged by the FBI as “an ‘alien enemy’ for having pro-German sympathies and expressing a desire to return to his homeland one day.”⁴ Otto was in fact a pacifist and a victim of the persecution that many German Americans faced during those troubled times. “Becoming a young man, alone with no family and few friends in a foreign country, Otto Plath endured it all, probably not without significant emotional damage,”⁵ Gordon-Bramer says.

Knowing these details about Otto Plath casts “Daddy” in a new light. The poem feels both intensely personal and transcendent. As Plath exorcizes the ghost of her German father and identifies with the Jews, she also seems to be grappling with a shared sense of horror for the atrocities of the Holocaust. The pain in this poem is visceral, and with the added context of her father’s struggles as an immigrant, the final stanza stings with deeper resonance:

“There’s a stake in your fat black heart/And the villagers never liked you./They are dancing and stamping on you./They always knew it was you./Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”⁶

Plath’s rage transcends the personal, becoming a powerful voice for collective trauma.

Bees are prevalent in Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and she inherited her fascination with them from her father, who earned the childhood nickname “Bee King” because he had a talent for “charming bees to steal their honey.”⁷ This passion continued into adulthood, as he studied and cared for bee colonies at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts from 1922 to 1928. Gordon-Bramer highlights the occult significance of bees, revealing that Otto was initiated into Freemasonry in 1928 and bees are a potent Freemason symbol, representing the alchemical transformation of pollen into honey through the hive’s collective efforts. Gordon-Bramer also notes that Sylvia’s mother, whose name, Aurelia, means “golden”⁸ in Latin, wrote her master’s thesis on the famed alchemist Paracelsus, which Otto read and admired.

Sylvia Plath was a Scorpio, born on October 27, 1932, under the looming shadow of the Great Depression. Gordon-Bramer explores how Sylvia’s early life was shaped by both environmental influences and her parents’ personalities. Her father Otto, an authoritarian Aries, exhibited a demanding and emotionally distant parenting style, while her mother Aurelia, a possessive Taurus, could be both smothering and invasive. The cross-pollination of Sylvia’s parents produced a precocious child who sought love and approval through academic achievement and perfectionism.

“Because of his ill health, Otto never hugged or kissed his family for fear that he might spread disease,” Gordon-Bramer says. “Perhaps, for reasons he thought were kind and sensible in those times before antibiotics, he kept his distance, rarely talked to or played with his children, and quietly stayed in his room, already existing like a ghost.”⁹

Otto’s death could have been averted if he had sought medical treatment sooner. In a vain desire to preserve an image of masculine strength and independence, he stubbornly soldiered through the pain, refusing to see a doctor until it was too late. He was suffering from pneumonia and advanced diabetes, and his left leg had to be amputated due to a gruesome gangrene infection that horrified his daughter, plaguing her with nightmares even towards the end of her own life. Otto died of a lung embolism on November 5^th, 1940, during World War II. Sylvia was only eight years old.

The name Otto means “wealthy,” but he failed to leave behind an inheritance that would sustain his family after his premature death.¹⁰] However, he bequeathed a Plutonian wealth of emotions to Sylvia, which she excavated at great length to fuel her artistic creativity. She mined a wide variety of emotional ores, from gilded veins of pride in his accomplishments as a “self-made man,” to the ancestral iron of blood and war she so eloquently smelted into poetry.¹¹

In the summer following Otto’s death, the precocious eight-year-old Sylvia published her first poem in the Boston Traveler. Her father’s passing was a catalyst for her pursuit of literary fame, and the lingering influence of his high standards had conditioned her to seek external validation through artistic achievement and academic excellence.

Otto’s death also initiated a profound spiritual crisis for Sylvia. Feeling abandoned by her father and resentful towards God, she declared, “I’ll never speak to God again.”¹² Despite flirting with atheism, Sylvia was fascinated with religion and spirituality, and her personal beliefs were influenced by a blend of Unitarianism and paganism, leading her to identify as a “pagan sunworshiper”¹³ in her college years.

In 1953, after a month in New York City working as a guest editor at the magazine Mademoiselle, Plath had a “nervous breakdown” and attempted suicide with sleeping pills. Plath was institutionalized afterwards, and her doctor used tarot as part of her therapy. After her release, Plath continued reading tarot “for creative and personal growth”¹⁴ rather than fortune-telling. The arrangement of poems in her manuscript Ariel was based on tarot, and her nervous breakdown inspired her novel The Bell Jar.

After delving into Plath’s life story, The Occult Sylvia Plath offers an intriguing exploration of her complicated relationship with her husband, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, through the lens of the occult. Gordon-Bramer weaves in vignettes of the couple using a homemade Ouija board to commune with a spirit named Pan, giving an intimate glimpse of how their shared creative process was influenced by the supernatural. Plath modeled her first poetry collection, The Colossus, after Hughes’s Qabalistic structure, which he used in his own poetry. “The title, The Colossus, and the inspiration for the title poem, probably should have been credited to Pan, the Ouija board spirit,”¹⁵ Gordon-Bramer says.

While it’s tempting to demonize Hughes as a monster who drove Plath to suicide with his philandering and alleged abuse, Gordon-Bramer paints a more nuanced picture, depicting him as a flawed but remorseful man. The pain and guilt he must have felt are palpable in Gordon-Bramer’s portrayal, and I was surprised to find myself moved to tears by the end of the book. Gordon-Bramer describes the lengths to which he went to preserve Plath’s legacy, leading one to believe he “had fallen more in love and under Plath’s spell than he ever had in her lifetime.”¹⁶ Thanks to his diligent work, so have we.

The Occult Sylvia Plath is a spellbinding biography documenting the volatile alchemical marriage of two literary titans. By the end of the book, I felt a sense of catharsis, as if I had vicariously experienced Plath’s struggles and emerged with a deeper understanding. This is a must-read for fans of both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rachel McConnell

Shamanic Teachings of the Condor, by Martha Winona Travers, Ph.D.

Shamanic Teachings of the Condor: Encounters with the Mystical Traditions of the Andes, by Martha Winona Travers, Ph.D.
Bear & Company, 1591435064, 192 pages, April 2024

In Shamanic Teachings of the Condor: Encounters with the Mystical Traditions of the Andes, Michigan-based author Martha Winona Travers, Ph.D., who holds a doctorate in English literature, writes about her twenty-two year apprenticeship to the Ecuadorian Kichwa healer Taita Alberto Taxo, who passed away in February 2022. This spiritual memoir is both a glowing eulogy honoring Taita Alberto’s life work and a guide to reconnecting with nature that shares his legacy with the world. Taita Alberto comes alive in these pages, imparting gentle, heart-centered wisdom. Through Travers’s recollections, we too can receive his teachings.

Taita Alberto (1954-2022) authored several books, including Friendship with the Elements: Opening the Channels of Communication (2010). Travers is also the creator of The Waycard Oracle: A Guide to the Inner Journey (2016), which includes 33 oracle cards and a guidebook.

Taita Alberto was a iachak, which is the Kichwa word for shaman. (The i in iachak is pronounced like a y.) Taita is an honorific title meaning “father,” indicating his role as a spiritual leader and teacher in his community.¹ In 2007, he gave Travers the title of Mama Iachak, giving her the authority to carry on his tradition and transmit his teachings.

Iachaks, also known as “bird people,”² identify with Condors. The Condor represents the Andean way of life, of “living from the heart,”³ in harmony with nature. The Eagle, the national bird of the United States, symbolizes “the people of the North,”⁴ who value technology and rationality, and live from the mind. “The Condor’s gift—the power of the heart—and the Eagle’s gift—the power of the mind—are two halves of a whole,”⁵ Travers says, and Taita Alberto taught that the time has come for the two to work together in harmony.

The iachak must bridge the cultural gap between the traditional way of life and the colonial one, retaining the native language while speaking the colonial tongue, and preserving the ancestral customs when most people in their community have converted to the colonial religion and adopted modern values. The power of flight enables the iachak to move freely between these cultural realms without being trapped in either one.

While many natives felt threatened by outsiders visiting Ecuador to study with the iachak due to the harm caused by colonialism, Taita Alberto claimed that it had been prophesied that the forces of mind and heart, the rational Eagle and the intuitive Condor, were now destined to unite.

“The Condor needs help with technology and science,” Taita Alberto said. “The Eagle needs help listening to the heart. We need both gifts—both the mind and the heart—for balance.”⁶

Travers met Taita Alberto (also known as Taita Haskusht, his Kichwa name) in 1999. In “Part One: The Eagle Visits the Condor,” Travers recounts her first journey to Quito, Ecuador, a part of the Andes Mountain range that includes multiple active volcanoes. She and a group of visitors were welcomed into the ancestral home of Taita Haskusht, near the base of the volcano Cotopaxi, which is itself a powerful spiritual guide. With vivid and immersive prose, this beautiful memoir floods the mind’s eye with the sights and sensations of her pilgrimage along the serpentine paths circling Cotopaxi.

Each chapter in this section revolves around communion with one of the five elements. In the iachak worldview, the physical realm is made up of the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, plus the fifth element of Spirit, which is called Ushai in Kichwa. “The Ushai is the animating force of the universe; it is the energy that moves Earth, Air, Water, and Fire,”⁷ says Travers.“We experience the Ushai when we have the awareness that we are not separate from the elements.”⁸ All of the elements have feminine names in Kichwa: Fire is Nina, Water is Yaku, Air is Waira, Earth is Ashpamama, and Pachamama is the all-encompassing Great Cosmic Mother.

Chapter Three, “The Loving Earth,” is a moving account of a healing ritual in which the author recalls the experience of giving her pain to Mother Earth so it could be transformed by her. Prior to the ritual, Taita Haskusht encouraged the group to pick plants they felt drawn to for healing, following the wisdom of the heart to select the right one. When Travers attempted to ask Taita Haskusht to identify the plant she had chosen, he covered her mouth and turned away, triggering a deep wound within her. This was her first time attempting to speak to him, and she was hurt that he had silenced her.

Travers saw a migraine aura and feared a headache coming on, but she felt guided by an inner voice to follow the light instead of resisting it. While Taita Haskusht chanted, tears watered the earth as Travers and a grieving woman beside her relinquished their pain to the Mother. After the ritual, Taita Haskusht revealed to Travers that the plant she had selected “heals the voice.”⁹ I was dewy-eyed while reading this chapter, as I could feel the healing power of the Earth Mother through Travers’s vivid description of her experience.

In Chapter Four, “The Sacred River,” Travers describes the group’s experience of being purified in a volcanic hot spring, then dipping in a cold shallow stream, and the remainder of the day was spent resting and fasting. In the middle of the night, Travers woke several times, feeling afraid, and she glimpsed a ghostlike presence in the room. The next day, Taita Haskusht revealed that there had been “a great battle”¹⁰ during the night, as the impurities the group had released the previous day were manifesting as they were leaving. He blessed everyone by smudging them with the sweet-smelling woodsmoke of palo santo, a plant he said “loves us very much.”¹¹

While reading, it felt beneficial to follow along by mimicking some of the actions described or by visualizing myself performing them with the narrator. For example, after reading about the smoke cleansing with palo santo, I burned some myself, asking the plant’s spirit to purify me.

Chapter Five, “The Speaking Wind,” invigorates readers with the breath of Andean air as Travers communes with the volcano Cotopaxi. When Travers first beheld the face of Cotopaxi, peeking through a veil of clouds, she thought it seemed sinister, and the words “grim” and “cruel” came to mind, but she realized this was how she was “dreaming up” the volcano, and she proceeded to listen with her heart instead.¹² I found her commentary on humanity’s tendency to project their personal experiences onto the world to be very insightful.

“Listening is an open condition devoid of human projection,” Travers writes. “The iachak learns to separate from human fear and desire—those aspects of ego that create projection—and, instead, enters into a condition of receptivity to the many voices, the many languages of the many beings who share our world.”¹³

As Travers and her group embraced the presence of Cotopaxi, listening with their hearts and absorbing the mountain’s powerful essence, “Madre Waira,” or “Mother Wind,”¹⁴ lifted their spirits, cleansing them of negativity.

Part Two is titled “Becoming a Runa: Purification and Sacred Communion.” “In Kichwa, the word runa describes a person who is walking the path of life in a sacred way,”¹⁵ Travers writes. A runa lives in intimate harmony with the natural world, as our ancestors once did. Taita Alberto taught that we can reestablish this ancient connection with nature through communion with the elements.

In the second part of this book, Travers provides exercises for revitalizing our relationship with the elemental powers. By recognizing the elements within and honoring the sacredness of our bodies, we become more conscious of what we consume, and are reminded not to pollute our inner rivers. According to Taita Alberto, “everything is food,”¹⁶ from the air we breathe to the books and other forms of media we ingest, which is important to keep in mind, especially for those of us living in the Eagle’s consumer culture. Regardless of what we are eating, whether it is healthy or not, we express gratitude to Mother Earth when we savor and enjoy our food.

In the section on working with the Earth element, I found the dietary advice to be insightful. Travers suggests eating foods individually to gauge how they make us feel, allowing enough time to digest in between meals so the foods don’t mix. She provides general guidelines for how long to wait, such as half an hour for fruits, which digest quickly, and four hours for meat.

Taita Alberto did not eat meat and neither did his apprentice iachaks. As part of his own iachak training, he was instructed to consume a small portion of animal flesh, and was distressed to discover that it cut off his intuition for six months. “A person who eats animals is eating the animal’s fear,”¹⁷ he said. He saw animals as his “helpers” and did not want to harm them.

To eat or not eat meat has been a lifelong moral quandary for me. I went through a vegetarian phase as a teenager, which frustrated some members of my family, who treated me like I was just being a difficult child and a picky eater rather than recognizing it was a choice based on my personal morals and spirituality (I was strongly influenced by Buddhism at the time and didn’t want to hurt animals). It angered my dad so much he stopped cooking for me altogether, claiming he didn’t know what to make since I wouldn’t eat meat, so I had to fend for myself. I started eating meat again in my early 20s when I was pregnant with my second child. I decided that since I was craving meat, the baby needed it. I received positive feedback when I started eating meat again, as people would tell me I looked healthier and had more color in my cheeks. Whether or not this was true, I don’t know, but I was verbally rewarded for conforming to my culture’s dietary preferences. To this day, I’m still troubled by factory farming, even though I eat meat purchased from the grocery store. I currently get my eggs from my own flock of hens, so those are at least guilt-free and not tainted with sadness because I know my girls are treated well.

Reflecting on the negativity I experienced when I chose to be a vegetarian as a teenager reminds me that our Eagle culture conditions us to consume meat without question. Those who deviate from this cultural norm are perceived as picky eaters who inconvenience others, and perhaps even troublemakers if they speak out against cruelty to animals. I think part of the problem is the fact that we get our meat pre-packaged in grocery stores and we are completely disconnected from the source of these products, which cuts off any empathy we might otherwise feel for the animals being slaughtered in factory farms. In contrast, Taita Alberto was raised as a vegetarian in the iachak tradition, and since he had a heart-based connection with the animal realm and saw animals as his helpers, eating meat was taboo for him, and doing so disconnected him from his spiritual Source.

Taita Alberto did not pass judgement on those who eat meat and his guidelines are not meant to be strictly followed as rigid rules. The ultimate teacher is experience, and he encouraged his pupils to see for themselves how following his suggestions makes them feel and shifts their perceptions.

Taita Alberto did not teach his students to ingest psychoactive plants because “all of nature is entheogenic,”¹⁸ or “god-filled,”¹⁹ including ourselves. We do not need mind-altering substances to experience the awe of “sacred communion with nature.”²⁰ Instead, he taught simple daily practices that “initiate us into primal identification with all of Nature.”²¹ Many of these exercises focus on simply being present in the physical body and communing with nature through mindful sensory experience.

For example, when you feel the wind whispering on your skin, recognize it as a salutation from the Air element. Allow it to cleanse you of your anxieties and negative thoughts. This type of feeling is intuitive, not emotional, as our emotions are generated in response to our thoughts. Instead, it involves putting “emotion aside in order to enter an expansive condition of full, sensory awareness, present-moment consciousness, and intuitive sensing of energy beyond the material.”²²

Taita Alberto’s teachings can be put into practice through three simple steps: “greeting, feeling, and expressing gratitude.”²³ Taita Alberto began his mornings by greeting the newborn day and the shining sun that brightens our lives. “Greet everything that appears before your eyes,”²⁴ he said. Greet the six directions, north, south, east, west, sky above, and earth below.

These teachings may seem too simple for those craving a powerful transcendent experience, but Travers says that “true power is a quiet, internal state,” not “a dominating energy,”²⁵ as our industrialized culture has programmed us to believe. The potency of these practices lies in their simplicity, for they are about creating inner transformation through how we perceive and engage with nature.

Shamanic Teachings of the Condor offers a heart-centered approach to communing with the four elements of nature and the fifth element of Spirit that unites them. Rather than just being mindful, the Shamanic Teachings of the Condor encourage readers to cultivate heart-centered awareness. This book has reminded me to drop my Eagle consciousness down into my Condor heart space, to be present with my intuitive feelings while deepening my communion with the natural world. By attuning with the wisdom of the heart, we can all reconcile with nature.

Rachel McConnell

Dance of the Sun Goddess, by Kenneth Johnson

Dance of the Sun Goddess: Pagan Folkways of the Baltic Coast, by Kenneth Johnson
Crossed Crow Books, 1959883240, 220 pages, March 2024

The eastern shores of the Baltic Sea glitter with amber, the golden tears of petrified resin shed by prehistoric pines. Nicknamed the Amber Coast, this magical region was the last part of Europe to be converted to Christianity, and forgotten pagan traditions, preserved in the lullabies of folk songs, rock its gilded cradle.

In Dance of the Sun Goddess: Pagan Folkways of the Baltic Coast, author Kenneth Johnson introduces readers to a vivacious pantheon of Baltic deities whose powers can be invoked with sacred trees and beautiful sigils that may be painted or carved on wood. Johnson draws pagan lore from Baltic folk songs to reconstruct the pre-Christian beliefs of the Latvians and Lithuanians.

Johnson is a professional astrologer who has a B.A. in Comparative Religions and an M.A. in Eastern Studies, and he has written several books paganism, astrology, and magic, including Jaguar Wisdom: An Introduction to the Mayan Calendar, Witchcraft and the Shamanic Journey, and Flight of the Firebird: Slavic Magical Wisdom and Lore.

While Johnson is not of Baltic descent, he is passionate about sharing the mythology and folk practices of the Amber Coast with the world because of what they reveal to us about authentic European paganism. In the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the book, he explains that the Lithuanian language is the closest living relative to the ancient Proto-Indo-European language.

“This original language had its own religion, and this vanished faith has been the origin of all our Pagan mythologies—Greek, Latin, Norse, Celtic, Slavic, and Baltic,”¹ Johnson says. Like a prehistoric insect fossilized in an amber coffin, these root pagan beliefs have been preserved in the living language and active folk practices of the Baltic lands, giving us a rare glimpse into the past.

In “Part I: The World Tree,” Johnson introduces readers to the Baltic vision of the cosmos. Heathen readers will be delighted to learn that Baltic paganism bears many striking similarities to Norse mythology, beginning with the Latvian World Tree, called the “Tree of Dawn,” which resembles the Nordic Yggdrasil.² The Tree of Dawn is invisible to mortal eyes. It is a bridge between heaven and earth, and only the gods and Baltic shamans can see it. In a Latvian folk song Johnson shares, the Tree of Dawn is poetically described as an iridescent rose that lifts one to heaven upon its ascending petals. This multi-colored rose may remind readers of Bifröst, the shimmering Rainbow Bridge that leads to Asgard, the realm of the gods, in Norse mythology.

Parts II and III introduce readers to the Baltic pantheon of deities, nature spirits, and folk heroes. As indicated by the book’s title, Dance of the Sun Goddess, the Baltic deity of the sun is the life-giving goddess named Saulė, while Mėnuo is the god of the moon. Saulė is one of the most important deities in the Baltic pantheon, since she sustains all life on this planet. The magical amber that sparkles on the Baltic shores is a gift of the sun goddess, and in the Bronze Age, it was the Baltic equivalent of gold, bringing prosperity through trade. Other prominent deities include Dievas, the Sky Father; Perkūnas, the god of thunder, who resembles the Norse god Thor; Velnias, the Lord of the Underworld; Žemyna, the earth goddess; and Laima, the goddess of Fate.

In the Baltic worldview, the gods are intimately associated with trees.

“Too often, we walk past a magnificent tree without even looking up from our cell phones, unaware that we are in the presence of Laima, whose sacred tree is a linden, or Perkūnas, whose tree is the stately oak,” says Johnson.³

Throughout the book, Johnson includes several magical workings that help keep readers mindful of the divinity in nature. For example, as a magical working for honoring Milda, the goddess of love and indolence, in the month of May, Johnson suggests readers “take a vacation from work and relax among the flowers and the trees as her contemporary devotees do.”⁴

An appendix at the end of the book provides nineteen Baltic sigils and guidance on how to use them to invoke the blessings of the gods. One of these beautiful sigils is Perkūnas’s “Cross of Thunder,”⁵ which protects one’s home and family, and may be carved or painted on the door of a house or barn.

Most of these deities were unfamiliar to me, so it was a real treat to learn a new pantheon. One of my favorite Baltic goddesses is now Medeina, a beautiful forest maiden with green hair who is the Lithuanian version of Artemis/Diana. Like her Greco-Roman counterpart, she is a chaste huntress who haunts the wilderness, accompanied by an entourage of hares and wolves, her most sacred animals. Even though she is a huntress, it is the animals she protects, not human hunters, and sometimes she shapeshifts into a wolf to defend her pack. Her Latvian name is Meža Māte,”the Mother of the Forest.”⁶

I have a preference for chthonic deities, so I found the Baltic Underworld to be particularly fascinating. It is ruled by the Lithuanian deity Velnias, whose name is etymologically derived from the word vele, meaning “the dead,”⁷ and “his world is the world which lies in the tangled roots of the great tree, the world of darkness and the dead.”⁸ According to Johnson, the Underworld mirrors our realm. “It even has its own World Mountain, Mt. Anapils, and this is where Velnias dwells, just as Dievas dwells upon Sky Mountain in the world above the great tree,”⁹ Johnson says.

Although the Christians associated Velnias with the Devil, his role in Baltic mythology was far more complex. “Velnias is a world maker,”¹⁰ Johnson says. The creation of the world was a joint effort by the Sky Father Dievas and the Underworld Lord Velnias, “the two opposite polarities of life and death working together.”¹¹ However, Dievas plays a passive role, and his will is carried out by his son Perkūnas, the temperamental Thunder God, who sometimes lashes out at Velnias when they don’t see eye to eye. Velnias escapes the wrath of Perkūnas by slinking in the shadows and hiding beneath stones or in the hollows of trees.

Being a shapeshifter, Velnias is a master of beasts, and since humans may reincarnate as animals, he is also lord of the dead who have been reborn in bestial form. I was particularly fascinated by this aspect of his character because it reminds me of the Devil card in tarot, and the bestial nature of both the Devil and Adam and Eve, who are depicted with tails. I was aware that shapeshifting can be a metaphor for dying in fairy tales, but it didn’t occur to me to link the Devil with humans reincarnating as beasts until I read about Velnias.

Ragana, the goddess of witches, is the Baltic Baba Yaga. Just as Velnias diametrically opposes the Sky Father, the winter goddess Ragana is the counterbalance to the celestial fire of Saulė, who must be banished on the summer solstice so that her life-giving powers do not overwhelm the earth with greenery and sweltering heat. Likewise, Saulė must regain her strength to break the dark spell of winter that binds the earth in chains of ice. At the winter solstice, Velnias leads an army of the dead and conquers the forces of darkness so that Saulė can return to thaw the frozen land. This divine tug of war between the forces of light and darkness spins the wheel of the year.

In the chapter on “Nature Spirits,” one of the most intriguing Lithuanian fairies is the aitvaras, a house spirit that looks like a rooster with a fiery tail when it is inside the house, and takes the form of a dragon or a meteorite when it streaks the countryside, stealing grain and gold for its master.¹² While the aitvaras is a source of prosperity for the household, it can also bring misfortune if the theft is exposed.

In “Part IV: The Wheel of Life,” Johnson guides readers through the Baltic wheel of the year, the seasonal festivals, and the Old Prussian zodiac. I was fascinated to learn that Cancer, the sign of the Crab in Western astrology, is called Azē, meaning “The Goat” in Prussian, and takes on the qualities of Capricorn, the Sea-goat, the opposite sign of Cancer, because “this is the time when Saulė has reached her fullness and is turned back upon her course by Ragana the Witch Goddess.”¹³

According to Lithuanian folklore, every person has a star in the heavens that appears when they are born and watches over them like a guardian angel. When they die, that star guides them through the Otherworld. In other star lore, the Big Dipper is “The Wagon of Perkūnas”¹⁴ and Polaris is his goat.

The deities and spirits I have shared here are just a sampling of the rich and vibrant pantheon of the Amber Coast, and any lover of mythology will relish in the pages of this book. The detailed descriptions of festivals and sigils will also enable readers to incorporate Baltic traditions and magical workings into their personal pagan practices as they celebrate the eternal Dance of the Sun Goddess.

Rachel McConnell

The Way of the Will, by David Shoemaker

The Way of the Will: Thelema in Action, by David Shoemaker
Weiser Books, 1578638267, 240 pages, May 2024

The vicissitudes of life can strip away everything that grants mortals an illusory sense of identity and stability, but hidden within the core of every human being is a microcosmic star, an immortal spark of divinity, which is the immutable true self. The mystical tradition of Thelema, founded by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), is a philosophical path for magicians seeking to discover their true selves and align with their life purpose, or True Will, through the alchemical Great Work of personal transformation. (Thelema is a Greek word meaning “will,” specifically the will of a divine being.¹) In The Way of the Will: Thelema in Action, author Dr. David Shoemaker provides Thelemic exercises for spiritual growth, utilizing Qabalistic psychology, the Tree of Life, astrology, and excerpts from Crowley’s writings.

Dr. Shoemaker is a Jungian clinical psychologist, magician, musician, and composer. He is the chancellor and prolocutor of the Temple of the Silver Star, and has been a member of O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis, which is Latin for the Order of Oriental Templars, or Order of the Temple of the East) and A∴A∴ (Astreum Argenteum, or Silver Star) for over thirty years. He is also the author of The Winds of Wisdom: Visions from the Thirty Enochian Aethyrs (2016) and Living Thelema: A Practical Guide to Attainment in Aleister Crowley’s System of Magick (2022), which is a companion text to this present work.

Part One of The Way of the Will focuses on working with the Qabalistic Tree of Life and how the sephiroth relate to the various initiatory grades of Thelema. The exercise provided in Chapter 1 helps the reader balance their internal Tree of Life by identifying how each sephirah is manifesting in their daily life and consciousness. For example, if one is being swept away by a tsunami of chaotic emotions and behaving irrationally, then Netzach may be out of whack, and that emotional energy needs to be sublimated in more constructive ways.

In Chapter 2, titled “Qabalistic Psychology in the New Aeon,” Dr. Shoemaker explains how parts of the soul correspond to the Tree of Life. Malkuth, the earthly sphere, is related to guph, the “physical body.”² Nephesh, the “animal soul,”³ which is the seat of our primal instincts and procreative drive, corresponds to the lunar sphere of Yesod. Dr. Shoemaker likens the nephesh to one’s inner child, which must be guided by the parental figure of ruach, the “breath”⁴ soul and conscious mind.

“The ruach needs to parent the nephesh in a compassionate and nonjudgmental way—a way that clearly conveys to the nephesh that its instincts, its drives, its sexuality, its life force, are all divine and perfect,”⁵ says Dr. Shoemaker.

Part of Thelemic initiation involves cleansing the nephesh of the shame, guilt, and body negativity of the Old Aeon, which Dr. Shoemaker compares to “child abuse”⁶ perpetuated by oppressive aspects of Christian ideology. In the New Aeon, the inner child, or nephesh, must learn to trust in the wisdom of the inner parent, the ruach, instead of seeking external validation from a spiritual savior or someone else’s ruach.

The ruach encompasses several sephiroth on the Tree of Life, including Yesod (intuition) and the five spheres of Jungian ego: Chesed (memory), Geburah (will), Tiphareth (the spiritual hub of consciousness), Netzach (emotion), and Hod (intellect).

The neshamah is the transpersonal aspect of the soul, or superconsciousness, and corresponds to the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, with an emphasis on Binah in particular. “This supernal consciousness transcends our everyday egoic strivings, wants, and desires and contains archetypes, spiritual ideals, and symbolic material in its highest forms,” writes Dr. Shoemaker. [40] It is through contact with neshamah (superconsciousness) that the ruach (ego/conscious mind) discerns one’s True Will, and aligns with the immortal true self, which resides in the khabs, or star-self aspect of the soul in the center of our being.

In terms of human evolution, humanity learned during the Old Aeon that we could transcend our animal drives (nephesh) and temper them by developing and identifying with our egoic higher consciousness (ruach). The downside of this process was the tendency to reject the animal aspect of the soul and feel ashamed of our bodies and primal urges, but the mind-body connection can be healed by recognizing the innate sacredness of both. As we transition into the New Aeon, human consciousness is evolving to transcend our over-identification with the ego and align with the superconsciousness (neshamah).

Reading this chapter was an incredible spiritual download for me and enhanced my personal relationship with the Tree of Life. Lately, I find myself drawn to working with the lunar sphere of Yesod in particular, and learning from this book that Yesod is associated with nepesh, the animal soul, aligns with my conscious spiritual work to heal the mind/body disconnect by honoring the sacredness of the animal kingdom and rewilding myself. Over the past few years, my personal healing work has involved nourishing my animal soul by caring for cats, growing more of my own food, and raising chickens for eggs. I daydream about working with goats and bees in the future.

I think Dr. Shoemaker’s parent/child analogy for ruach/nepesh is easily adaptable to humanity’s relationship with animals as their caretakers. I’m deeply disturbed by humanity’s disconnect from nature and the decline of traditional animal husbandry in favor of the unceremonious and inhumane slaughtering practices of industrial farming. We don’t value animal life or see animals as sacred, and that’s clear in how we treat them. We also shame our own animal souls, our physical bodies, and seek to transcend them, either through repressing and denying them via unbalanced spirituality or by trying to control or alter natural biological processes through pharmaceutical and medical interventions.

In Chapter 4, “Saturn and Jupiter in the Life of a Thelemite,” Dr. Shoemaker explores the magician’s juggling act of balancing the universal energies of expansion and contraction, represented by Jupiter and Saturn in astrology. The life challenges and constraints imposed by Saturn can sometimes serve as redirections that steer us back on the path of True Will rather than egoic will. I appreciate Dr. Shoemaker’s approach to the astrological taskmaster Saturn, as he encourages readers “to think inside the box, consciously striving to accept and learn from the restrictions that appear to bind us.”⁷

Saturn is associated with Binah on the Tree of Life, the archetypal womb of the Great Mother, and the Grail, or cup of Babalon. Dr. Shoemaker explains that the Saturnian Grail gives shape and form to creative energy in the same way that a chalice contains and restricts the flow of liquid. For an artist, limitations can stimulate creativity. By adhering to a certain structure or form, creative breakthroughs can occur.

Embracing the fated restraints of Saturn brings us into ecstatic union with the Great Mother. In Thelema, the Egyptian sky goddess Nuit, whose infinite body is spangled with stars, is “the goddess of all possibilities and realities.”⁸ One way to worship her is through acceptance of our current circumstances and surrendering to all of our experiences, regardless of how unpleasant they may be, rather than resisting, repressing, or denying them, which is an ego-based response. Dr. Shoemaker compares this to softening and surrendering to the sensation of physical pain, such as stubbing a toe, rather than clenching the muscles in resistance. Surrender as an act of worship enhances our intuitive receptivity to the superconscious wisdom of neshamah, which can help us navigate life’s challenges more effectively.

One devotional practice of surrender he suggests involves mindful and radical acceptance of everything one encounters by taking “regular walks through both attractive and unattractive surroundings,” and accepting “all of these things as perfect manifestations of Nuit.”⁹ This holistic approach should also be applied inward, through radical acceptance of one’s strengths and weaknesses and recognizing that all aspects of the soul are in service to one’s True Will.

Reading about radical acceptance was synchronous for me because lately I’ve been thinking about how certain negative experiences aligned with my soul purpose but were painful and traumatic for my ego to endure, yet I had no choice but to surrender to them, and seek a higher purpose through them. I personally believe that the Western concept of free will is more ego-based and illusory, while the Thelemic concept of True Will aligns with the Divine and the mysterious workings of fate.

“Part Two: Thelemic Practice in Detail” provides exercises for shifting from ego-centered consciousness to cosmic consciousness, as well as advice on how to craft potent invocations and achieve “a ‘talismanic’ state of consciousness”¹⁰ for divine embodiment in ecstatic ritual. This section also devotes chapters to exploring the magical symbolism of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass and the influence of the Golden Dawn on Thelema, as well as giving guidance on seeking out a Thelemic teacher or organization to join, if one so desires.

Part Two opens with a chapter on “Advanced Thelemic Meditations” that assist with “disidentification with the ego and its thoughts.”¹¹ For example, one exercise from Crowley’s Liber Iod involves breathing through the nose while imagining sending breath to the Ajna chakra (the third eye, or brow chakra, in the center of the forehead) instead of the lungs. With practice, other sensations, such as pain, can also be transferred to Ajna.

Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is the ultimate magical invocation, which involves the integration of one’s Holy Guardian Angel, or HGA, who is the angelic personification of their True Will, with their consciousness. The final chapter of this book is Dr. Shoemaker’s memoir of his personal epiphany of his Holy Guardian Angel, which he experienced in December 2004. This chapter is one of the most valuable in the book because so few magicians talk about this experience, and it will be inspiring for readers considering attempting the ritual because it gives them an idea of what to expect.

Dr. Shoemaker reveals that all the unique life experiences of the magician, both good and bad, are utilized by the HGA to make them a proper vessel for enacting their True Will, and the HGA will unite with the magician at the right kairos (the Greek concept of sacred time).

“Everything you think of as yourself has been there to enable you to be a better talisman of your HGA—an attractor and vessel for the indwelling force of the HGA,”¹² Dr. Shoemaker says.

I love that he likens the cleansing and refinement of the initiate’s soul to the consecration of a “talisman,”¹³ which empowers the initiate to live in accordance with their True Will. It’s such a beautiful analogy that emphasizes the sacredness of all aspects of the soul.

In my personal exploration of the Tree of Life, I’ve been working from the ground up, and after spending a lot of time contemplating the lunar sphere of Yesod, I feel like I’m about ready to enter the solar sphere of Tiphareth. When working with Yesod, I often have visions of a spider, which I think of as my shadow totem, and I recently learned that Crowley considered the spider to be sacred to Tiphareth, which is a startling confirmation of the significance of my spider spirit in relation to the Tree of Life. The sephiroth surrounding Tiphareth do visually resemble a spider’s web, and Yesod and Malkuth could be imagined as a spider descending upon a silk thread. I believe the spider of Tiphareth corresponds to the Native American Grandmother Spider, who carries the sun on her back, and I imagine she could also be a symbol of Nuit, whose starry body is the night sky, bearing infinite suns.

In Dr. Shoemaker’s memoir, he shares an insight regarding Tiphareth that makes me excited to move forward with that sephirah:

“The way I think of it, the HGA ‘lives’ in Kether, but you first encounter it with full conscious awareness in Tiphareth. This is your point of contact—the marriage bed where the balanced and awakened human ruach is joined with the descending power of the path of Gimel from Kether.”¹⁴

The Way of the Will offers a holistic approach to spiritual development, which embraces all aspects of the soul, from the lower animal self to the divine star-self. As someone who is not initiated into Thelema and has limited knowledge of Crowley’s teachings, I found this work to be accessible and enlightening, and it’s been a wonderful complement to my own personal exploration of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.

However, this is not an introductory text, as it assumes that the reader has some basic knowledge of Qabalah and other Thelemic concepts. Throughout the book, Dr. Shoemaker recommends that the reader refer back to his previous work, Living Thelema, which I haven’t had the opportunity to read yet, but I managed to follow along without much difficulty. I’m grateful that Dr. Shoemaker is making his insights available to the public, and I’m adding Living Thelema to my reading list so I can reference the two works together in the future.

Rachel McConnell

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