Customer Reviews

Wicca and the Christian Heritage: Ritual, Sex and Magic

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Routledge has put out another edition of this, which is the one I have and have read, but for some reason Amazon doesn't list it, so I'm putting my review under this edition. Where to start? First of all, most of the essays don't actually link Wicca to dissident Christianity. Instead, they talk about the idea of ritual within the Anglican church as well as some heterodox movements within the more pro-Catholic, pro-ritualist Anglican world. The first essay, which talks about the idea of a sort of priscia theologica of England, meaning the idea that there's a primordial, pagan, English spirituality that's manifested through Christianity and has been reclaimed by paganism, is useful, but beyond that there's really very little linking of Gerald Gardner or any other figure actually associated with Wicca with any of the movements listed. Pearson's perspective is very strange, considering that she's written on pagan topics before, in that she announces that she's not familiar with non-British Wiccan traditions and doesn't really care about them, then strangely enough puts large amounts of emphasis on Vivianne Crowley's writings as being good summaries of what Wiccans believe. It's very strange to see this, coming from an American perspective, because Vivianne Crowley is a virtual non-entity here, despite her books having been widely available for quite some time. Doreen Valiente isn't quoted, the Farrar's aren't quoted, only Gerald Gardner and V. Crowley. The limited perspective, which she acknowledges, comes across in her treatment of the "Episcopi Vagantes" or Wandering Bishops phenomenon, where at the beginning of the essay she says that since most of the information is in French, she hasn't read it, and so is basing the essay on two English books she came across. Perhaps she shouldn't have written the essay in the first place, then, if she can't understand most of the source material needed to really get a full understanding of it.

The subject matter has much room for exploration, but this book fell pretty flat in doing it justice.