Dewitched : What You Need to Know about the Dangers of Witchcraft and Wicca

Rating:
Summary: Transit Books and Tim Baker should be ashamed of this....
Review: After writing and publishing an actually decent book about world religions from a Christian viewpoint, Why So Many Gods?, I was expecting a lot better from Tim Baker and Transit Books. Instead, I found a contradictory, confused, propaganda-laden book that ultimately clarifies very little about this divisive issue.

One chapter in this book goes over "Myths about Wicca", and is actually fairly accurate and well-written. Too bad that most of these myths are very much present in the rest of the book. It states that Wiccans are not Satanists, yet repeatedly compares them to each other and makes special note of similarities. I can't help but wonder how Christianity and Satanism would look compared side by side, considering that they use some of the same source material! It does say that Wiccans don't cast spells to harm another or practice animal sacrifice, yet the fictional (but supposedly educational) story in the book features a so-called "Wiccan" who details the people she's harmed through spellcasting in her diary, and is part of a coven that is portrayed mutilating a cow during a Sabbat ceremony, and even sacrificing a human in a perversion of a traditional first-degree initiation.

Baker's bibliography draws heavily from Raymond Buckland, with a few other prominent Wiccan authors thrown in. While I credit him with actually doing research, which is more than many of his kind do, I can't really say he's gotten an accurate picture of Wicca. It looks to me like he's twisted what he read in those books to meet his own ends. That is, if he understood it... at one point in the fictional story, a character deciphers a set of runes marking a stick as belonging to the aforementioned "Wiccan" by eyeballing and matching the shapes with our common alphabet. Also, while I again credit Baker for bringing up some of the stickier points of Wicca and Christian relations, like divination being condemned in the Bible but practiced by the high priests of ancient Isreal, his explanations rely heavily on a "Christianity good, everybody else evil" worldview and will only convince the already converted. Before Christian books like these accuse Wiccans of slandering their religion, they may want to consider that Jesus didn't think much of hypocrites.


I can't speak for Satanism, which is also covered at length in this book, or for the "spiritual attack" Tim Baker claims to have been under while writing it. I will say that he takes what he heard from a few individuals of questionable credibility, combines it with a little research badly applied without truly understanding Wicca, and turns it into a generalization that all Wiccans are evil, black magic-using, disguised Satanists that are dangerous to themselves and their communities. I think it's time for a reality check: Not everyone who loves God likes the evangelical Christian church, and it's perfectly okay for people to be different. While Transit Books has come out with a lot of good Christian books in the past, this one is basically just trash.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good!
Review: First off, I am a Baptist Christian and this book, Dewitched, is a CHRISTIAN book. I read some of the reviews this book got, and all of the bad ones were written by pagans or people who are Wicca. If you are a Wicca, Satanist, etc you ARE going to find this book to be offending. It's just that simple.

Anyway, to all other Christians out there, I totally recommend this book to you. It tells you exactly how dangerous and evil the new, fast growing religion Wicca really is. It also tells you about Satanism and witchcraft itself. I give it 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: What a Joke!!!!!!!!!
Review: I have revued this text from cover to cover and couldn't believe what I had read. I have studied religions around the world for over forty seven years. I will be the first to warn you that this author couldn't tell the deference between a church and a school house. He is a joke. First of all the author has no understanding of religion in general and has no position writing books on these matters. After reading this I am surprised that Mr. Baker hasn't written a book on the necessity of white supremacy or called Judaism Satanism. The fact is Mr. Baker feels that anyone who doesn't see Christ as he does must believe in Satanism. Anyone that provides this book to any youth would be providing them with inaccurate, un-researched biased information. Take my advice as a Christian priest that Wicca is not a dangerous religion. It is only dangerous to those that don't understand the basic fundamentals and thru beliefs of Wicca. Unfortunately some of our youths combine other beliefs such as vampirism, Gothicism, and druidism to there beliefs and call it Wicca. My advice is that if you have a youth that believes in Wicca and insists on pursuing this belief. Help them to find the facts and lead them down the road to thru Wicca. If you do your research you will find that Wicca is a very peaceful nature loving religion. One more thing not only is Wicca not Satanism but they don't believe in Satan at all. So do your research but please don't allow this book to be a part of it.

Rev. J. Brown PhD
PhD's in
Psychology
International Religious Studies


Rating:
Summary: ARE YOU FOR REAL?
Review: I've been studying MANY RELIGIONS for several years. One, being paganism. Pagans do not believe in Satan, there for CAN NOT be satan worshipers. It's too bad that right wing bible beaters think any religion that doesn't see Christ as the savior automatically means it's a dangerous, evil religion. This author needs to grow up and not act his shoe size.
Last time I turned on the T.V.:
1. Priests are molesting little boys
2. "Money is the root of all evil" so why do churches keep begging for it?

Rating:
Summary: Should be a zero
Review: It's really sad that people can't research and understand something rather than assuming it's all bad. Christians may think that Wicca and Satanism are evil merely because it's against their Bible but they're missing the point, most pagans do not follow the Bible and therefore do not want to be "saved".

Rating:
Summary: A Step In the Right Direction
Review: There is a pressing need in the Church for a book on the dangers of the Neo-Pagan movement and the Occult. This book needs to give accurate information in a readable format to pastors, parents, children, teens, college students and anyone whose life may be impacted in any way by the Occult. "Dewitched" by Tim Baker is not it, but is a step in the right direction.

"Dewitched" consists of many short chapters that are readable and filled with information. Each chapter is then subdivided into two parts: a fictional story of teens dabbling with witchcraft and the occult and then a non-fiction section that provides accurate information on Witchcraft and Satanism.

"Dewitched" has many positive aspects. The first is that the chapters are short, interesting and informative. The reader is not left reading long, seemingly pointless portions of text. The second is that the book gives accurate information on the beliefs of the Neo-Pagan movement and compares them with Christianity. Finally the book shows that there is no such things as a "White Witch" or a "Black Witch", but rather that all aspects of the Occult are evil and that Jesus Christ is the only true God.

That being stated, "Dewitched" also has several shortcomings. To begin with the fictional story is fairly foolish and gets worse until it finally reaches a ridiculous, completely unreal climax at the book's end. The book also contains an excessive amount of information on Satanism; something I felt was unnecessary. My last complaint is that the author gave too much information on the actual practicing of Witchcraft and referenced resources that have been produced by the Neo-Pagan movement. This is extremely dangerous. I have to wonder why he did not list more resources that are similar to his own book.

Overall "Dewitched" is a good book for people whom the Occult is entering their life and who do not know much about it.



Rating:
Summary: Amazingly Stupid
Review: To be clear in the first place, I'm not a Christian, but am a practicing neopagan Druid and Witch. That said, there are a few not-terrible Christian critiques of Wiccan ideas out there. This book is terrible.

While the author makes some effort to provide accurate information about wiccan and satanist ideas and practices, he has plainly failed to understand the material. He consistently confuses satanic with wiccan ideas and his grasp of the history of Paganism, Witchcraft and modern occultism are laughably confused.

Just as an example of his confusion, he seems to think that HP Lovecraft's 'Necronomicon' had some sort of existence in traditional occultism!

The worst part of the book is the pointless attempt at fiction that takes up about half it's pages. The tale of a group of teens and their encounter with witchcraft is worthy of the worst sort of hollywood screenwriting, bearing no resemblance to anything that happens in the real world, in either wicca or in satanism.

This is tripe.

Ian