This is my favorite time of year! Each night I go out into the back yard just to soak up the fall energy. It makes me feel so good that I don’t even mind that neighbors have their back yard lit up like an airport or that motorcycles are racing a few blocks over. Sometimes I have a brandy out there just to celebrate being alive. It’s been especially wonderful lately, because we’ve been having a lot of wind. Last night I did a brief ritual out back just for an added boost of protection for the house, because there was a ton of energy floating around out there. I felt like I got my personal battery completely stoked–and it was very depleted, let me tell you!
Because of a request by Trothwy of The Used Key is Always Bright, who was conducting a discussion group on it (and who will be posting on it shortly), I got a new (old!) copy of Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks, and Covens and reread it (that link is to the edition I reread, although I got it used on Abebooks, which still has reasonably priced copies of the hardback original, for you book collectors out there; he has a new edition that I have not read). I first read this in 1972, when I left home and moved to Chicago and was free to investigate magic as much as I wanted. How well I remember visiting the Occult Book Store there! I will never forget seeing a hard copy of the Equinox in its beautiful blue cover, looking like the door to an entire world. I could not afford that, but I did buy plenty of other books–777, Eden Grey’s The Complete Guide to the Tarot and A.E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot (both about the Rider Waite Deck, which I’d had for a while and traded for the Thoth Deck when I ran across it), The White Goddess, Budge’s translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and even stuff like Crowley’s Moonchild
Witchcraft was a whole different deal then. You could not generally go into a regular book store and find anything on witchcraft–or any sort of magic. If you didn’t have a decent library, where you could at least find old chestnuts like L.W. De Laurence’s Great Book of Hindoo Magic (it was months before I had the guts to take that thing off the shelf in our library), you had to go to an occult book store, and that took almost as much guts to go into as a porno shop. Because who would visit an occult book store other than dupes, kooks, frauds, and predators, right? That was the thinking. I only regret I didn’t have more money to spend on books back then.
The majority of the people who have written reviews of Mastering Witchcraft on Amazon seem not to remember those days. Probably most of them were not born yet, and for all the supposed reverence in contemporary witchcraft for tradition, there is a real disdain for history and for older people, especially if they don’t toe the party witchcraft line, whichever flavor it is today. Reviewers express outrage at such things as the very use of the word “warlock” or the opening of the book, which recommends saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards to cut oneself from one’s Christian past and step out into witchcraft. It was 1970. It really was a different world. History is not just a boring subject in high school. It’s real and it means difference, so that categories now can not make much sense of life then. Witchcraft was only starting to be talked about at all. Satanism was also coming out–I remember sneaking The Satanic Bible into the house in senior year of high school and being disappointed by what seemed to me to be an excess of showmanship and the obvious connections to Christianity. But it helped to see that coming out, because it represented how much things were loosening up. And once the occult started pouring out, it could not be stopped. It’s force, though, has in many ways been blunted.
The one thing that witchcraft did not have at that time–or at least, I sure don’t remember it–is a connection to religion. It wasn’t a version of Paganism, neo or recon. It was a practice to gain power, pure and simple. That’s precisely why it really took off, when folks in the women’s movement began taking it up in earnest and combining it with goddess worship–you had a practice to gain power + empowering spirituality, clearly a perfect match for many women, even if now that power/empowering connection has been all but lost and is even denied. But witchcraft’s original presentation of itself at that time as a practice to gain power rather than a spiritual path is one reason why I felt drawn both to it and to openly spiritual paths like Kabbalah or even Golden Dawn, which combined magic and spirituality (again, a little too Christian for my tastes, and the props were intimidating). Spirituality and witchcraft were, IMO, two halves of a whole. It has taken all these years for me to find a way to combine them that suits me.
It is strange for me to think–please bear with a codger-in-training–that it has been 40 years since I first became interested in magic. Forty years! Not that I have become wise or a great practitioner–far from it! Just that I am struck by what a long strange trip it has been. How much has changed, and how much has not. Right now, besides re-reading Mastering Witchcraft, I’ve been plowing through Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah, which is not an easy read. I cannot imagine the words “shamanism” and “Kabbalah” being used in the same sentence back then. For one thing, shamans were Pagan folks in Siberia, not urban Jews.
For a good taste of that time, check out George Romero’s 1972 Season of the Witch (NOT the Nicolas Cage film–it’s available on Netflix or get a used copy, and has the song by the same name by Donovan, which came out in 1966). It’s both hilarious (“We’re just ballin’, lady!”) and a reflection of just how different witchcraft was. And inadvertently, it reveals the connection between witchcraft and empowerment that was not at all swept under the rug.
I can’t speak for everyone but I was born in the mid 1960′s so while I’m still a youngster, its a rapidly fading young and I’m not just talking about my vanishing hair.
Huson’s book was one of the first I read… and still one of my favorites. Oddly enough I can’t decide about the content. I sometimes can’t still and I’ve read it a ton of times. Mostly CM with a Witchcraft slant or the other way around? I’m not sure. Nigel A. Jackson was one of the reviewers on Amazon and he spoke of it as a working and excellent system. There seems to be quite a bit left to be discovered by the practitioner. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere, potentially within, that Huson was a student of Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki but I could be wrong. That’s always kind of a head-tilter for me.
I also have Huson’s book on Herbalism and given your expertise, this seems like a great time to ask if you have it/read it and what your thoughts are?
Take care Harry, glad you survived the Taxes.
Sean
That’s true–Nigel Jackson does have a very good review of it. I like the way he points out that there is a lot of CM in the book without making it an accusation of lack of worth. From the history of witchcraft I have read, there has been a lot of CM in witchcraft for several centuries, at least in Europe.
I was thinking about this last night, and I think what I like best about the book is that it takes the position that witchcraft, as an act of gaining power, is dangerous. That’s one of the things that makes it so enticing. I noticed that a number of the reviews specifically caution against the book being used by people starting out, but that’s precisely who it is geared to. They object to the raising of Vassago, I guess, and some mention the negative magic. Maybe people have changed so much that the idea of a magical activity being dangerous (even if that means spiritually or morally) is something they just reject out of hand or can’t accept as possible.
I have not read his book on herbalism. I will have to check that out.
Thank you for reminding us of how different it was. I’m 50, but remember looking for books about witchcraft in the mid-seventies. Thanks especially for the reminder about reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards to separate one’s self from Christianity. It may seem silly now to some people, but it worked for me.
if the potential for danger/trouble isn’t there, then the potential for power isn’t, either, has been my experience.
I’ve never read Huson, sad to say. I ended up cutting my teeth on Dreaming the Dark, and then Drawing Down the Moon, because those were the only witchy book actually on the shelf at the Berkeley Public Library in the 1980s. Sorry, I also read Gerald Gardener’s Witchcraft Today, which doesn’t say a damn thing about anything. The Satanic Bible had been checked out and never returned for years. Both the copy at the downtown branch, and the copy at another branch. Not even that I was wondering what Mr. La Vey had to say, because I wasn’t. It was just interesting that books would be stolen like that. Added a real air of ill-gotten mystique.
And so I read these books, Starhawk, and Margot Adler, and Gardener. And then in 1988 I scored both volumes of Z. Budapest’s the Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries from a used bookstore, which was equal parts BS and bluster, for the most part. I was so annoyed by that, because I’d heard her speak on the Alex Bennett radio show one morning in highschool, and literally felt things clicking into place as I did so. It was like, “this is it???” Finding a used copy of The Spiral Dance at a swap meet the following summer was very helpful indeed. Jeanne Rose’s Herbs & Things was very helpful indeed, even though I completely skimmed over the goofy chapter where she messed with invoking demons for the halibut.
I think I even found a copy of Malleus Maleficarum at a library book sale. Did not hold onto it, it was one of those books that make a body feel dirty, and I say that even though I thought the Burning Times mythology propounded by the likes of Budapest and Merlin Stone was exceedingly exaggerated.
I’ve never been very book-ish about crafting, however.
I dont have a large Occult Library, per se, although, I do have the Goetia and the Greater Key, something on Astrology, two books on Voodoo by Denise Alvarado, an old 70′s era book on Voodoo veves, Cat Yronwode on Rootwork, an I Ching, a 70′s era Herbal, a Bible, and some 70′s era book on Wicca that could well be Huson’s book (its in an old trunk along with some of those other titles and I’d have to dig for a while to find it). I read it from cover to cover back when I first began taking steps towards getting seriously-involved in this Occult thing we do. Remember noting how they would emphasize the number three and multiples of three which I found confusing because the only witchcraft I’d ever been exposed to before reading that book was Hoodoo and in Hoodoo as in the other African Diaspora belief systems, the mystical numbers are seven and, sometimes, five. Three sounded to me like the Holy Trinity or, maybe, Shakespeare, but, the Wiccans seemed very big on it and I actually knew one of them back then…she was a 70′s-era Wiccan and belonged to a legitimate Wiccan coven and she read my Tarot several times. From what I could gather from her at the time, they had their athame knives, a cup ( she called it a “cup” not a “chalice”), and something that she would call a “scourge”, but which was actually a braided cord they’d use in their magic. I never saw that she had an altar with candles and a little iron cauldron, but, she did burn incense at times. Neither did I note any “Book of Shadows”. She had a handful of spells that she’d work, but, she always gave the impression that most of what she did was done in the group, and, less so, individually. I lost contact with her ages ago and no clue where she is now, but, whatever plane she now inhabits, dont doubt that she is still Wiccan and surely very wise.