Wicca: A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Religion in the Modern World

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent but flawed presentation of Wicca
Review: This was the first book I read when I decided to learn about Wicca. Although it contains a lot of the standard "how to" material that's found in every other Wicca 101 book, it's presented in a far more sophisticated way, and the book contains much else besides. The additional material may be characterized as theoretical or systematic, which I consider a big plus.

Unfortunately, the book has significant drawbacks. For one thing, Ms. Crowley endorses the thoroughly discredited Murrayite thesis of the primitive witchcraft religion that was suppressed by the Christian church, which then reemerged in the last century. To present this view as anything else but bad history strikes me as disingenuous, if not dishonest, especially as the book was first published in 1996, by which time even most Wiccans had admitted that the Murray thesis is untenable. Ms. Crowley also seems unable to resist the occasional, and almost always historically inaccurate, pot shot at Christianity.

Second, Ms. Crowley's heavy handed use of Jungian psychology makes it seem as if Wicca is just Jungianism with a kind of religious veneer. Instead of Jung's ideas being used as one way of explicating Wicca, one gets the impression that those ideas are at the very heart of the religion itself. By the same token, the Hindu system of the "Chakras" is referred to throughout (although the perspective on them is not quite the traditional Hindu one), without any justification or explanation of why, if one is a Wiccan, one should believe in the existence of chakras. It's just sort of assumed that chakras are part of standard philosophical anthropology, which is emphatically not the case.

Nevertheless, this is by far one of the best books about Wicca I've come across. It's extremely articulate, has a smooth and coherent progression, and Ms. Crowley's spirituality comes across with a certain authenticity that's almost wholly lacking from the cotton candy Wicca books out there that take up all too much space on the bookstore shelves.