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Faeriecraft : Treading the Path of Faerie Magic
Book by Geddes-Ward, Alice
Paperback
First published May 26, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 12, 2018
I have a pragmatic, imaginative streak when it comes to magic -- hey, what works, works right? -- and in this spirit, I was excited to find this book. "Literary" fairies -- of the sort that graced fairy paintings in the 19th century -- are surprising underrepresented in witchcraft and pagan literature. Despite Wicca and much modern witchcraft embracing and playing creatively with new myths and "fakelore", pagan authors have preferred an mythological approach to the fairies that has little to do with the sylph-like creatures everyone is familiar with. Books of this kind were fairly uncommon until recently, and I make sure to snap them up when I come by them.
But this book is weird -- everything about it is contradictory to the point of being schizophrenic. One one hand, it is pink and perfumed, but on the other it contains some pretty advanced occult techniques. It tells you that your spirituality is yours alone, then it lays on pages and pages of New Age dogma. It's based on a vaguely Wiccan framework, but it makes frequent reference to God and angels.
There's some things to like about it. I love that it is filled to the brim with pathworkings, even if they are a little too pretty and clichéd, and its acknowledgement of sexuality is nice.
Although I am a pragmatist, I also think that witchcraft is an aesthetic experience as well as a practical one. Unfortunately, I think the system of witchcraft given in this book is ugly. There is way too much mention of things that have nothing to do with the fairies: guardian angels, chakras, psychoanalysis and so on. All of it makes this book into a colourless sludge of rehashed New Age ideas. Some of the things the authors think you should do are just tacky, like wearing a tiara and covering your altar with glitter.
It is said in this book that being a "Fairy Priestess" is a calling and a gift, but yet it also says fairy witchcraft is for everyone. If being a "Fairy Priestess" means anything other than just being someone interested in fairies, than how can that be? There needs to be a better separation between what exactly a "Fairy Priestess" is and what that entails and everything else. Ideally, this book would be written only for the priestesses and would contain some thought about her identity and her relationship with the fairies. Perhaps her role is to have one foot in Fairyland so she can mediate between the fairies and the mundane?
But this book just doesn't have the maturity to deal with those kinds of questions. As much as it borrowed from more thoughtful types of witchcraft, its still very much just a variant of that vapid Doreen Virtue spirituality. It tries to be innocent and light, and its pages are filled with stories about children interacting with fairies (as someone who doesn't think children should be doing magic, that's jarring). There are the seeds of a really nice, edifying tradition of fairy-based animism in it but they have been buried under pages of superficial nonsense and childishness.
But this book is weird -- everything about it is contradictory to the point of being schizophrenic. One one hand, it is pink and perfumed, but on the other it contains some pretty advanced occult techniques. It tells you that your spirituality is yours alone, then it lays on pages and pages of New Age dogma. It's based on a vaguely Wiccan framework, but it makes frequent reference to God and angels.
There's some things to like about it. I love that it is filled to the brim with pathworkings, even if they are a little too pretty and clichéd, and its acknowledgement of sexuality is nice.
Although I am a pragmatist, I also think that witchcraft is an aesthetic experience as well as a practical one. Unfortunately, I think the system of witchcraft given in this book is ugly. There is way too much mention of things that have nothing to do with the fairies: guardian angels, chakras, psychoanalysis and so on. All of it makes this book into a colourless sludge of rehashed New Age ideas. Some of the things the authors think you should do are just tacky, like wearing a tiara and covering your altar with glitter.
It is said in this book that being a "Fairy Priestess" is a calling and a gift, but yet it also says fairy witchcraft is for everyone. If being a "Fairy Priestess" means anything other than just being someone interested in fairies, than how can that be? There needs to be a better separation between what exactly a "Fairy Priestess" is and what that entails and everything else. Ideally, this book would be written only for the priestesses and would contain some thought about her identity and her relationship with the fairies. Perhaps her role is to have one foot in Fairyland so she can mediate between the fairies and the mundane?
But this book just doesn't have the maturity to deal with those kinds of questions. As much as it borrowed from more thoughtful types of witchcraft, its still very much just a variant of that vapid Doreen Virtue spirituality. It tries to be innocent and light, and its pages are filled with stories about children interacting with fairies (as someone who doesn't think children should be doing magic, that's jarring). There are the seeds of a really nice, edifying tradition of fairy-based animism in it but they have been buried under pages of superficial nonsense and childishness.
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April 10, 2013First impression: FLUFF FLUFF FLUUUUFF.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews