Courting the Lady

After many years of work, my friend Patrick McCollum has finally published Courting the Lady, the first of an anticipated three-book series of his autobiography. Provoked by a mystical encounter with the White Lady he experienced during a near-death experience after a horrendous motorcycle accident he suffered in his teens, Patrick began a quest. He takes the reader along on his first couple of years of training with a mentor and a coven. Most of this training takes place out in the woods, mountains and canyons of Southern California and involves such things as gathering barks, roots, leaves, and herbs for ritual drinks and incenses, learning to make willow charcoal, finding and making the right tools (even finding a piece of meteorite in the desert to forge into the blade of his athame), learning and using a language and alphabet and symbols. Patrick details a very unusual course of training for its time (beginning in 1966) and place in the overall history of the magic, the occult, and alternative religions. Essential reading for the well-informed NeoPagan.