Customer Reviews

Witchcraft: A Concise Guide or Which Witch Is Which?

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had the pleasure of hearing Bonewits speak at the Starwood festival this year and while he ticks people off, the guy does his research. He is also willing to admit when his own work has been disproven or when he has made mistakes, and how many pagan authors have done that? I don't recall hearing of any retractions for the terrible research and half truths presented in McCoy or Conway's work. (see reviews of "Witta" if you want to know what I mean by that)

Years ago when I started exploring the pagan path, I slogged through many books hoping to find the "right" way of doing things, hoping I would find authors who knew what they were talking about. Had I had this book, I could have cut my slogging in half. Bonewits provides some very concise arguments against the many fam-trads, would be gurus, and overall self appointed holders of the truth, without bashing the true intent of this path which is to connect with the divine and grow as an individual. He points out that just because something is new and created, it doesn't invalidate it. Neopaganism is a growing movement that, like all spiritual systems, is going to change over time. Those of us in the movement shouldn't feel so insecure as to have to claim our beliefs and practices descended from a matriarchal tribe existing 10,000 years ago. What he points out with refreshing clarity is that right here, right now, we are creating something that is exciting and enlightening.
Knowing that there is no undisputed tome which will give me all the "right" ways to do things (hmmm, kind of like the bible) is a weight off my newbie shoulders. I await the next book in this series with great excitement and hope they hold other pagan authors a little more accountable to something besides their wallets.

I read most of this book and found it well worth reading: informative, entertaining, and provocative. Certainly, I got the impression that there was far more to be said on the topic, but no one book can say it all. You could say that what Isaac did give us in this handy little work was "concise", and so the book does exactly what it says on the tin. I would not hesitate for a second to reccomend this title to a first-time buyer of a pagan book, and to those of us who have been around a bit longer, Isaac may have a few things to teach as well.

It seems to me that the negative reviews seen here on Amazon are a bit unfair. If someone who has been in the Pagan community for decades cannot draw upon his experiences and present his ideas with a modicum of authority, then who can? I can think of other equally well known authors who have not the talent, the wit, the deadpan humour, and the sheer breadth of knowledge, as Bonewitz has

All in all, Witchcraft: A Concise Guide made excellent reading, and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.

After reading so many fluffy books on Wicca I found Bonewits' book refreshingly honest and blunt. In one thin book he managed to put all the really important stuff anyone needs to know about all the different kinds of witchcraft. Some of it is well known in the Pagan community, but only because he's been saying it to us for twenty years. Some of it, especially the ritual material, is both new and brilliant. Of course he did step on a lot of toes in the process, but that's no reason to dis him or the book. Read it and decide for yourself.

I've been reading Pagan and craft books for ten years now, and I have to say this book is user-friendly, engaging, concise, and very much lends to further study (should the reader so choose) due to its exquisite and purposeful scope, notes, structure, clarity, and bibliography--Beginners and more advanced readers can learn from and with it.

Isaac Bonewits' characteristic conscientious, honest, and careful treatment of the topic serves well as a reality check (and he does reality checks and corrections on his own work as well), which will not sit well with everyone, of course. It was important to me that he did not fabricate, has exquisite interpretational skills, and continually researches a wide array of resources thoroughly. This lent very well to his coverage of what was done to witches, their paths, and their reputations over time (both by practitioners and by others) ...for nothing exists in a vacuum, does it (and history was written by whom, usually the "victors")? I would have loved this book to be far more in depth, but then, the book is exactly what the title claims - a concise guide.

I wrote in numerous notes in the page margins-something I do only with my favorite well-thumbed books.

Bonewits rudely exposes the BS that phony "experts" (pro and con) on Witchcraft have been selling for decades. This book is gonna tick off everyone who's been teaching their students garbage about their so-called "Ancient Family Traditions" of Witchcraft (not to mention the people pushing propaganda about how "Witchcraft=Satanism").

Complaining about the conclusions reached (while refusing to put forth competing evidence, just unverifiable claims) won't change the facts that Bonewits, Hutton, and lots of others have put together, annoying as they are to some. Every teacher in every public college in the world will agree that, "the world is not flat." This isn't a conspiracy, it's just what people who know what they're talking about say.

Bonewits says that the Goddess is alive and magick is afoot and that the folks who invented Wicca in the 1950s blended beliefs and practices from dozens of occult and spiritual sources. He argues this well, with plenty of logic and facts, and suggests that the Craft's future is a lot more important than it's invented past. And he gives readers many of the tools they need to begin creating that future. My only complaint is that I would have liked more magickal instruction included for those who don't own his "Real Magick."

So don't let fundamentalist Wiccans or fundamentalist Christians stop you from learning a few truths about Witchcraft!

This is an early edition of what became Bonewits's Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca. That edition is even more annoying to True Believers than this one was, because it includes even more evidence of Wicca's 20th century origins. No, the case isn't completely closed, but 99% of the evidence points to this wonderful religion being a modern creation.

Facts themselves are not conclusions, they are bits of data. It is what one chooses to do with such data that defines a work. Bonewits appears to want to dismantle the beliefs of others with his book. I suppose he believes his motives to be noble, but I found the approach unpleasant.

One reviewer seemingly writes with delight that Bonewits' book "Blows the posers out of the water" and appears self-gratified that some people will become upset with the material, particularly those who claim to practice "Ancient Family Traditions" of Witchcraft. I guess the desire to burn or hang heretics who don't conform never goes out of style. How sad that anyone would be happy to see others hurt in one way or another by this book.

Historians often change their views over the course of time, and state they no longer believe such-and-such to be true, or now they believe that such-and-such is true. However, people seem to believe that the current beliefs held by scholars are infallible. How many reputations have been distroyed by scholars in the past when they themselves were in error and opposing views were dismissed by the "learned" of the time!?

For a non pagan just wanting to know more about neo-paganism, the book was a disappointment.

The rancor runs so deep on all things Christian there are times you can forget which religion the book is supposed to be about. To read it you would think that he was describing belief systems defined more by how they were persecuted than by the beliefs themselves. Far from the "scholarly work" it misrepresented itself as in many areas.

Well..hmmm, where to begin!? Doreen Valiente has pretty much covered the Gerald Gardner 'thingy' in her own books. She seems to believe that Gardner was filling in what he felt were the missing pieces of an old fragmented tradition of an English based system of Witchcraft. Since she worked with Gardner, and helped him flesh out his Book of Shadows, her insight seems important to note and take into consideration.

Bonewits appears to believe that Gardner and others created/invented the Craft, drawing upon Rosicrucian, Masonic, and Celtic pagan themes. Such a view lacks any real depth of understanding, for it ignores the common pre-existing elements that such systems themselves were constructed upon.

Bonewits and a few others look at elements appearing in non-Craft systems that predate the writings of Gerald Gardner, and conclude that their appearance in Gardner's version of the Craft is evidence of a direct borrowing. What it is actually evidence of is simply the time period in which older tenets and practices were documented in any given system. It is not evidence of their creation, but simply documentation of when someone wrote this or that down. The "this and that" pre-dates any of the systems in which this appears, for the concepts pre-date Rosicrucian and Masonic systems themselves. This shows up in different places not because someone is lifting it from this or that system, but because such things are the commonality shared by all from an earlier source rooted in pre-Christian religion. Because someone likes the way another phrases it, and therefore incorporates any given text into their own material does not demonstrate invention, it demonstrates expansion.

Even when direct borrowing takes place, it seems odd to label the receiving system as "inventing" something. Religions evolve and grow just as everything does. I think that people who believe that Witchcraft/Wicca as a religion is a modern invention, are people who simply want to (or need to) believe it to be so. Modern witches who believe this are essentially "witches in mind only." They have embraced the Craft on an intellectual level, and as a community of fellowship, but have apparently never really experienced the Old Ways.

Mr. Bonewits is not a true pagen...just check out his homepage...He`ll sell anything to make a buck! He knows NOTHING about True druidism,wicca, or "real magick".