18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Badwitch's Review, July 8, 2009
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Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Review: The Book of English Magic
I wish all books on occult history were as clearly written, as entertaining and as full of fascinating facts as The Book of English Magic by Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate.
It is a big door-stop of a book and when I got it, about a week ago, I thought it might take me ages to get through. But it certainly didn't - instead I didn't want to put it down.
The Book of English Magic reminds me of The Dangerous Book for Boys - which teaches grown-up boys (and girls) how to thrash someone at conkers, race a go-cart or swot up on the solar system in a nostalgic style harking back to some golden childhood that probably never existed, while still imparting useful skills for adults, perhaps with their own kids. Although, of course, The Book of English Magic teaches how to dowse for water, cast a spell or swot up on the famous magicians in English history rather than anything as mundane as conker fights.
I'm sure the similarity between the books is deliberate, with this being published at the same time as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince reached English cinemas, boosting interest in anything schoolboy-wizard related.
But I would say the book's style is no bad thing, whatever the reason behind it. It makes it very easy to read while still being extremely informative.
The book begins with the ancient roots of magic - cave paintings and standing stones left by our early ancestors. These hint at prehistoric attempts to tap into the power of the land, honour the dead and ensure good hunting - although no-one today really knows their purpose. Chapters move forwards through the centuries, covering druids; Anglo-Saxon sorcerers; Merlin and the Holy Grail; witches and warlocks; alchemists' attempts to make the philosopher's stone; John Dee in the Elizabethan age; cunning folk; freemasonry; the 18th-century Age of Reason leading into the Victorian era and a renewed fascination with magic; Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune; and finally the modern era of "The Wizards' Return".
Each section includes potted biographies and personal accounts by experts in the traditions covered. You may not go along with everything these luminaries claim, but it is interesting to read their stories alongside those of others. One of the lovely things about this book is that it seems to encourage the reader to take what interests or inspires them and ignore the rest.
There are also lists for further reading - both fiction and non-fiction, ideas for places to visit to see the sites of occult history for yourself and suggestions for practical magic experiments to try at home (perhaps sometimes using metaphorical round-ended scissors). It even offers warnings called "Traps for the Sorcerer's Apprentice", including not getting too attached to theories that may be proved wrong and not letting fortune telling dominate your decision-making. Very sensible.
My only real criticism of The Book of English Magic it is that it sometimes claims for England important figures and movements that weren't entirely English. This includes author CS Lewis, as was earlier pointed out by a reader of my blog. CS Lewis certainly lived in England, and the book does state that he was born in Ireland, but I could understand the Irish feeling that he shouldn't have been in a book dedicated to English magic at all.
Nevertheless, as an English magician myself, I can't help feeling a little thrill of pride in reading a book that states "of all the countries in the world, England has the richest history of magical lore and practice".
And now I'm going to duck while I wait for the barrage of comments pointing out that other countries have just as rich a magical past...
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Attractively combines history with how-to, October 30, 2010
This review is from: The Book of English Magic (Hardcover)
It's an accessible history, guidebook, and how-to compendium. In a friendly, yet cautious, manner, the writers encourage readers to learn more about the traditions of England, as well as forms invented and revamped by hundreds of thousands of pagans, believers, and "Armchair Magicians" today.
(N.B. I am not a magician, but a medievalist, so my interest in this was more scholarly than as a grimoire. I am aware of the infighting that may rage here as among pagans about nomenclature, inclusion, and exclusion. But my review is for a general reader looking inside a realm that most of us on the outside know little about...)
Twelve fast-paced, illustrated and annotated chapters reveal this vast storehouse of lore. Ancient roots, starting with prehistoric cave-dwellers, dig down into pre-Celtic and Celtic foundations. Saxon sorcerers displace and follow Druids. Their descendants become medieval Catholics, grail searchers with their own complicated relationship to their magical peers.
Alchemy intrigued "puffers" close to Elizabethan courtiers. Witches met persecution, if in England far fewer being hanged than some have supposed. Astrologers, cunning-men (akin to fortune-tellers or psychics today), wizards, Rosicrucians, scryers, Freemasons, Theosophists, Spiritualists, and mediums populate the chronicles of the past five hundred years. Even if most who feared or welcomed magic lived in isolation, one city grew in its allure. Enduring in its attraction for England's spiritual and scientific explorers, London, the authors remind us, is better than Cairo or Calcutta, Paris or Prague, for anybody curious about the Craft. They detail its lore and its three occult bookstores lovingly.
Essays by adepts enrich this volume. Brian Bates, a psychologist and shamanistic researcher, laments the superficiality of how magic is treated. "People nowadays will happily read Harry Potter, but are wary of the real stuff." The reclamation of what popular culture distorts, while protecting the secrecy of lore and rituals entrusted to true initiates, characterizes many who guard their mystery traditions.
Some still remain anonymous here. One, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn that once attracted W.B. Yeats as well as a man whom he detested, Aleister Crowley, explains his search "for the mystery of being." He reasons that magic is both objective and subjective. It is created by the imagination and then takes on its own life; it is real and separate from human beings at the same time.
Few contributors claim, as earlier witches did a few decades ago, to inherit magical skills. Instead, they seek out the few who control them, who create them, and who teach them. Carr-Gomm and Heygate warn of the easy lure of spell-casting; the love charm they include should be used to bring love into one's life, but not a particular lover. For, he or she once enticed may turn out to be the bane of one's existence.
Websites, reading lists of novels and manuals, experts, locations, and schools append each chapter. While some oversight may be inevitable (I missed James Blish's erudite novel on medieval alchemist Roger Bacon, "Doctor Mirabilis" [see my review], and the fiction of J.C. Powys and Iain Sinclair), the authors succeed in navigating between the skeptical and the credulous among those whom they address and whom they include. For those wishing to find out about such lore, such guidance remains necessary. Nigel Pennick, a prolific scholar-practitioner, laments how people "no longer do things because their ancestors did them; it is no longer part of our culture to pass things on to the next generation."
The repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, Swinging Sixties appeal, and the ecological threats that increased awareness of earth-based religious practices in the 1980s contribute to the shift in perception among many English people that welcomed pagan or alternative forms of ritual and belief.
This sense of adventure, for perhaps more wary seekers, accounts for the rise in public perceptions of esoteric, and formerly shunned or banned, practices. Music's touched on within a summation of Chaos Magic, but the impact of film and television portrayals of magic, oddly, is absent from this survey. Compared to Margot Adler's magisterial account of American New Age and neo-pagan movements, "Drawing Down the Moon" (see my review), this counterpart appears more grounded in the living history which connects the English varieties directly to their dolmens and fields, their hideaways and chambers. This, after all, is the strength inherent in their magical legacy.
This book closes movingly, acknowledging the eclectic, syncretic nature of the corpus of a resuscitated English magical tradition. Deep down, the authors advise, one knows if one or more of the paths sketched in this book may direct one to fulfillment. This magical quest draws on a depth of awareness that contemplation and study may reveal.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Throws Down a Gauntlet, October 19, 2010
This review is from: The Book of English Magic (Hardcover)
Author John Michael Greer writes:
The remarkable relationship between England's green and pleasant land and some of the most influential magical traditions of the modern world forms the territory that Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate have set out to explore in detail in The Book of English Magic. The result is well worth reading, and for several reasons.
First, of course, there's the simple pleasure of reading, because The Book of English Magic is a lively and interesting book about a lively and interesting subject. It's also a very good general introduction to magic: not just the history and teachings of magic, though it covers these in quite some detail, but some of the basic practices as well, for Carr-Gomm and Heygate spice their narrative with descriptions of how to perform many of the elementary types of English magic. An abundant selection of resources for further reading and study makes The Book of English Magic among the best sources anywhere for those whose curiosity inspires them to go beyond what any single book can teach them.
Still, to my mind the best thing about this admirable book is that it draws the distinction none of the books I studied in the Seventies managed to make. It is, precisely, a book of English magic; it links the panoply of occult traditions it surveys to that small island off the northwest coast of Europe where so much magic, and for that matter so much of today's global culture, had its origins; in the process, in the friendliest possible way, Carr-Gomm and Heygate throw down a gauntlet that I hope many other authors around the world take up.
For there are many other traditions of magic that didn't originate in England, of course; every land and every people in the world have magical teachings and practices to share. By turning over the most popular occult traditions of the present time to show the "Made In England" label on the bottom, The Book of English Magic challenges today's magical practitioners--and the many other people interested in magic and the occult--to recognize that like every other creation of human culture, magical traditions are rooted in particular places and histories, and to look for the magic that might be hidden in plain sight where they live. Some of the readers who pick up that gauntlet may well write books of their own about the magic of their own homelands, or the lands in which they now live--and they would be well advised to take detailed notes, as they read The Book of English Magic, for they will find no better example of how to take on such a task and accomplish it with aplomb.
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