Book Review – Cunningham’s Book of Shadows

Cunningham’s Book of Shadows by Scott Cunningham

Published posthumously, this is a compilation of Scott Cunningham’s personal Book of Shadows material supplemented with verbiage from his published works. It is charming in its simplicity and feels, to me, like it comes from a wide eyed, honest, feeling, trusting perspective. It is refreshingly direct, as all of his works are and incredibly useful. I will be referring back to this book for its sections on signs & symbols, and may actually copy much of it out into my own BOS. The Appendixes at the end of the book are personal reminiscences of Scott by a few of his friends. They give insight into who he was, and are a nice supplement to his biography ‘Whispers of the Moon’ by Harrington. I would recommend this book as a supplement to his other works. For a newbie, I’d still suggest starting with his ‘Wicca: a Guide for the Solitary Practitioner’.

Book Review – Essential Guide to Crystals

The Essential Guide to Crystals by Simon & Sue Lilly

A handy sized magical reference for rocks, gems, minerals, and crystals. The introductory material ‘The Power of Crystals’ includes healing traditions, a bit of geology, taking care of your collection, healing techniques, correspondences such as chakras and colors, and meditations. The bulk of the book are entries detailing each crystal. The word crystal is used as a synonym for all kinds of rocks and minerals. Since this seems to be the norm in the neopagan/new age genre I’ll not argue about it here. The crystal entries are arranged by color which is useful for identification purposes. Each entry has information such as the chemical composition, locations where the stone is found, identification and care, healing, practical ideas, magic ideas and a list of similar stones. The list of similar stones is particularly helpful for identification purposes. Great care has been taken to warn readers against doing things to the stones that would degrade them or using them for purposes that would harm the reader. I know there is no book that can include every polished stone found on the market, but this book lists howlite twice in the ‘similar stones’ section but does not give howlite an entry for itself. On the other hand objects such as coral and pearl are included though they are not stones. I appreciate these inclusions because the items can be used in many of the same ways and are found near each other in bead stores and rock shops. The Lilly’s have packed the book with a lot of useful information for anyone wishing to work magic and/or healing with stones. I would recommend this book to my friends.

Book Review – Practical Candleburning Rituals

Practical Candleburning Rituals by Raymond Buckland (amazon link)

A classic in pagan world it was originally published in 1970. This third edition includes Christian and Pagan versions of candle rituals. For good or ill the book includes both what could be considered black ritual and white ritual.  It is up to the practitioner to decide how or if these should be used.  Buckland includes a warning about this very thing in his introduction. There are correspondences for colors, day of the week, along with altar placements.  

I recommend this book since so many current books use this as a foundation for their candle burning ritual suggestions. 

The caveat to this is my belief that the magic is effective because of the witch not the ritual.  To me the correspondences and even the candles themselves are secondary to the belief and connections of the witch.

Chintz & China

Just finished the first four of a total of five books in the series. It is written by Yasmine Galenorn. Check out her website about the books here: http://www.galenorn.com/Mysteries/.

The series is set in a small town outside of Bellingham Washington. She must live nearby because the plants, animals, weather, environs all ring true.  So the setting is very well done.  These books fit within the cozy genre, in that nothing truly horrific occurs, though scary things do happen.  There’s romance, mystery, ghosts, and spells.  While the heroine is a tarot reader, she rarely does readings in the books.    The characters are admirable and make mistakes and are human. I’d love to meet them.  Magic, relationships, the spirit world, and compassion are real themes in the book. A spell or charm is included at the  end of each novel.  I really enjoyed the series so far and look forward to the fifth and last book.

Hugging trees

Flower & Tree Magic

I’m reading “Flower and Tree Magic” by Richard Webster. I’ve fallen in love with his hugging trees section.  He talks about finding an oracle tree to nurture and talk to. For hugging trees he suggests lining up the third eye and heart chakra, or to align all the chakras by putting your back to the tree and placing your hands on it behind you. There’s also the idea of asking trees to help you remove negativity. You wouldn’t do this with your oracle tree, but other trees that agree to help.  This book is definitely worth buying, just for this section. — Lirala

My Library

I had been using LibraryThing to catalog my pagan books.  The problem is that I kept running into the 200 book limit.  If I want more than 200 books in the catalog I have to pay a one time fee.  I’m already doing that for my complete library, so I started hunting around for other options.  I finally found what I was looking for this week.  Gurulib.

Gurulib is a free online library book catalog, but it also allows you to catalog movies, music, games, and software.  It’s quite splendid.  My library is at: http://www.gurulib.com/Lirala You can use the tabs across the top to limit the shelves to books or movies. I haven’t added anything else.  The shelf subjects on the left organize the whole collection into workable subsets–at least I think so.

I really like that I can add things to a wish list.  While searching for the titles of my books to add, I came across many things I wanted to buy.  It was very, VERY handy.

Caveat: If you have more than 1,000 items to catalog, you probably want to use LibraryThing instead.   — Lirala