Huzzah! I received Chas Clifton's book, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, in the mail. The cover is great and the contents look fascinating, although I can tell at a thumb-through there's much here that we've discussed over the years. The few photos of individuals in the book were taken years ago in a pre-digital age, I guess, because they're obviously not in a resolution we've come to expect nowadays. That's not a big deal, though; I feel we're lucky to have any photos at all. This was a years-long labor of love, resulting in the clearest-eyed and best, so far, book on the growth of our movement in the U.S. It's right up there with Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, Magliocco's Witching Culture, and Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, an updated version of which is due out in September. For anyone who wants to know about us, including ourselves, this is an essential foundational read. Not only that, but I note one of my pieces, "The W Word, or Why We Call Ourselves Witches," referenced in the bibliography. Yippie!
More book recommendations coming soon.
1 comment:
I was totally tickled to find myself in the bibliography, too. Woo-woo! And I had to rush right out to Penny and Mike's to show them the references to their ideas and work.
I don't know if you've read Kirk White's Adept Circle Magick yet... probably, since I'm usually the last to know about good stuff like friends getting published. But it was also a real thrill for me to recognize a lot of ideas we'd talked about over the years in his pages.
I don't know but what being an "influence" on a writer isn't an even bigger thrill than seeing my own words in print. After all, with anything I write myself I'm always spotting new errors. Another writer's words are _lots_ more fun that way...
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