Every Witch Way: Spells and Advice from Two Very Different Witches

by Ellen Dugan, Tess Whitehurst

Every Witch Way
Just like two snowflakes, no two witches are alike. Journey with authors Ellen Dugan and Tess Whitehurst as they contrast their differences, illuminate their similarities, and generally give you the lowdown on the Craft as they know it. Investigate different sides of oft-debated magickal issues as these very different witches square off on subjects such as:
• Psychic and energetic protection
• Can you be a Christian Witch?
• Does “harm none” mean you shouldn’t eat meat?
• Angel magick: when is it appropriate?
• House cleansing/ clutter clearing
• Faerie Magick: Romantic idea or invitation to trouble?
Packed with plenty of useful charms, spells, rituals, and magickal principles- and served with a generous helping of wit, wisdom and humor- this fun little compendium will inspire you to happily live the magickal life, while letting your inner power shine bright.

Genres: Nonfiction, Witchcraft, Paganism, Spirituality, Religion

195 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 4, 2014

About the author

Ellen Dugan is the award winning author of over thirty six books and the Witches Tarot. She branched out successfully into paranormal fiction in 2015 with her popular Legacy Of Magick series. Her portfolio of work also includes dozens of articles in the Llewellyn Almanacs and Calendars and 15 non-fiction books. Ellen's non-fiction titles with Llewellyn Worldwide have been translated into over twelve foreign languages. She is a psychic-clairvoyant, and has been a practicing Witch for over thirty-five years.
With over 300K books sold Ellen has a global following. She currently has over twenty published novels, the eleven book Legacy Of Magick series and three other paranormal series: The Gypsy Chronicles, Daughters Of Midnight, and Hemlock Hollow. The first four books in her Legacy Of Magick series were made into audio books with Tantor Audio in 2018.
Ellen was featured on the cover of Witches & Pagans Magazine. She has been interviewed in the studio on KMOV News Channel 4 in St. Louis, done numerous newspaper and radio interviews, and a two hour guest spot on the national syndicated live radio show, Coast to Coast. In 2017 Ellen was also featured in USA TODAY'S HEA column. More information on Ellen's work can be found at www.ellendugan.com on Instagram at www.instagram.com/ellendugan/ or on Facebook www.facebook.com/ellendugan

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the premise of this book--two very different outlooks on paganism and witchcraft from two women who have been friends for ages. And in and of itself, it's a good concept. I found myself irritated by Ms. Whitehurst's insistence that in order to be truly healthy, one had to be vegan, as well as her babbling about GMOs. Genetically modified organisms are not the devil, people. That said, I liked some of Ms. Whitehurst's practices, and her way of writing about dealing with being an empath while living in a big city. That was really helpful, actually. I liked pretty much everything Ms. Dugan had to say--I think, in general, my sense of humor and my style of working is closer to hers than it is to Ms. Whitehurst. That was actually a really good takeaway--even though I disagreed with Ms. Whitehurst on numerous things, I, like Ms. Dugan, found value in what she had to say.

[Ron Fent · Rating 5 out of 5]

You may not believe in magick. You may think all of these so-called "witches" are just childish dreamers or Harry Potter wanna-be ciphers. Maybe they are just escapists. Those types of people DO exist. But neo-paganism, the umbrella which includes all "real witches", gave birth to a plethora of homemade belief systems dating back roughly to post-war Britain when covens worked against fascism. Though neo-paganism is a huge topic, I'll preface this review with my own summary of a journey through Paganism via Wicca and the writings of early neo-pagan witches. (Spoiler alert: This book is a "good read") There are some truly scholarly, outsider books which turn the cold eye of reason on these traditions which, again, get it right concerning the wanna-be and Potterite folk. Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon" is an example. But to truly understand the bones of neo-paganism, you really need to have gone through initiation into some form of shared beliefs and practices that ask of you to, as the Greek Oracle at Delphi commanded, "know thyself". This is the basic goal of any substantive spiritual practice from which all things - dark, light and lotsa grey - are brought to mind and thus brought to life as the only sign of life is growth.
I met the co-author of this book, Tess Whitehurst, while on location as official photographer for the Heartland Pagan Festival in 2017. She wasn't my first Pagan interview and I've met dozens of pagans all in various states of becoming and no two are the same. I instantly liked Tess as a person, beyond her physical attractiveness, and found her to be genuine, open and wise beyond her years. Her creative output is huge: Running an online business, touring, writing, producing videos and podcasts. She also teaches online classes. As she is a Los Angeles, California transplant to Colorado, you sense the worldly vibe of someone who has been through some shit. She is what I call a "professional witch". I'm always wary when spiritual folk make a living from their belief systems. They can easily twist and misuse information to gain power and wealth while taking advantage of the desperate and gullible. She is not one of those folk. In fact, those who try that shit in the pagan community are quickly un-masked and, well, banished!
I spent ten years in book learning about witchcraft and paganism starting in October of 2001 right after the 9/11 attacks on the east coast. My own dark tendencies mixing with the collective darkness of that time took my year-old sobriety to the Dark Night of the Soul. I picked up "A Book of Shadows" by Lady Sheba, who was still alive at the time, and began the magickal mystery tour of self. Pagans take what works and leave the rest, slowly forming their own belief system and rituals based on the natural world, the seasons and a hand-picked pantheon. Having grown up in a science home, I became a kind of secular witch upon studying "Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium" by British High Priestess and Jungian psychologist Dr. Vivianne Crowley. The parts of me that were lost for good became as a missing phantom limb that I had to learn to work around. Jungian psychology is closely tied to neo-paganism in some very useful ways.
So to the book at hand: "Every Witch Way", by Ellen Dugan and Tess Whitehurst - One older and darker and one younger lighter. Ellen describes the two of them as a "Valkyrie next to a petite, gorgeous fairy". They met on the road, became friends and produced this 2014 hybrid of shadow/light/earthy/airy wisdom that transcends most pagan literature. While falling short of the in-depth and historical "A Witches' Bible" by the Farrars, as all pagan books do, I can see clearly the energy created by complimentary opposites coming together to produce something unique and important. The book illustrates the seemingly polar opposites of the practical and the fanciful working together to seek new truths. Magick is not the movie version of things appearing and disappearing, shooting beams around like lasers (though lasers are quite magical) but the process of individuation of self. We are transformed by what we think and what we allow into our lives. To borrow a teaching exercise from the Farrars, I would ask you to move a potted plant with the power of your mind. As a new student, you would concentrate hard and try to use some kind of force field to make the plant float around. Then the teacher would tell you to go pick it up with your hands and put it down. There: You've just moved something with the power of your mind. No mystery. No tricks. You have to do the mundane, material work to achieve the magickal.
You don't win the lottery unless you buy a ticket.
Some quick takes on the ideas they put forth: Tess talks about the Gaia Theory, a real-life scientific study that defines earth as one living super-organism. Some scientists posit that earth is more than a "super-organism" but a "supRA-organism" wherein the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Never-the-less, Tess puts science to work. Ellen Dugan chimes in with the magick created from lifting weights and the mind/body transformations that mundane work did for her. She also touches on the fallacies of witch-to-witch criticism and how counter-productive and erroneous it is to judge what works for another. Being an omnivore, she does judge a little when saying how it "drives me up the wall to hear someone pontificate about how fabulous they are for giving up gluten or meat or dairy". Tess says that "without form you'd be a ghost, without spirit you'd be a slab of meat" and traces her spiritual journey back to becoming a vegan. She is completely correct in her criticism of meat production and consumption, but I would not make the jump as she has to thinking that people should be proselytized into giving up meat. Pagans mostly agree that "thou shall not proselytize" from a moral and practical perspective - It drives people away. Also, this very book is sold on Amazon, a monstrously huge corporation that enslaves and ruins workers' lives just as delivery trucks carrying all sorts of products produce pollution and kill the occasional road animal. (I only have the digital publication, but I've had plenty of Amazon deliveries.) Veganism is a spectrum of "harming none" and not an absolute. To exist is to harm SOMETHING. But it makes one at least realize our inter-connectedness as part of this supra-organism. It is true that vegetarianism and veganism are healthier for all concerned. But how far should one go?
Fractal reasoning is its own kind of harm.
As co-authors, they reveal their differences of opinion in discussing whether there should be such a thing as a "Christian Witch". Tess thinks yes, Ellen says no, though she and Tess do a whole section on how they both use Archangels. I've always had a hard time getting used to this idea. Paganism is pantheistic, not monotheistic by definition and the baggage of Christianity doesn't all fit into the Pagan hotel. As Ellen points out, Christians acted as soldiers through history, killing those whose beliefs didn't match their own. There was a women's holocaust of which Salem was a very small part. That's a lot of baggage right there. To look at a modern example, former President "W" did a whole bunch of dumb and harmful things, but now paints and was seen chumming it up with Ellen DeGeneres on TV. What does that mean? Ellen has been accused of a few bad things too, but none with the bloody consequences of, say, invading Iraq under false pretenses after 9/11. But then AGAIN we've all done some wrong if not horrible shit. And, of course, ancient pagans sacrificed animals and people for religious reasons. One could spend an eternity trying to reason through these things and not come to a definitive conclusion. But one of the strengths of this book, and there are many, is that it brings up these ideas for consideration, allows for differences of opinion, and ultimatly leaves us in a peaceful, though pensive place of enlightenment.
Tess gives a convincing historical explanation of where the fae or fairies came from which are a common Pagan belief. They do have a very real historical lineage in the real world. I was born with pointed ears myself, though they're not so pointed now, so I can accept that some kind of fae exist as a concept if not a real-world vision. Again, witch-to-witch criticism is a pointless path. You want fairies? You got 'em! Then there is Ellen's section on ghosts. Here is where I've had some very real encounters with SOMETHING that the science part of me can't dismiss or explain. A slamming door on a calm night alone. The bed sinking like someone was sitting down on the edge of the mattress. Might as well call those things ghosts until NASA comes up with another explanation.
One small issue I have with their "Every Witch Way" book is the way they've presented some, but not all of their spell-work. For you "mortals" out there, spells can be defined as prayers with attitude. They could also be a form of self-hypnosis. But every other pagan source I've read ends any spell with the magickal disclaimer: "An it harm none, so mote it be" which is derived from the Wiccan rede: "An it harm none, do what ye will." Tess covers this idea, though not specifically in presenting all of her spells. Within the logic of spells, if you cast without this disclaimer you could end up getting rich or whatever through someone else's misfortune which would be causing harm and, some would say, creating some bad karma that will inflict harm back on you. Speaking more psychologically, you'd feel guilty knowing the harm from which you've profited and suffer thusly. I would welcome an explanation for these few yet important omissions. Tess shares this concept in how she screwed up a love spell, and I have done the same thing. Shit got real... Real bad!
Ellen makes one unintentional error of omission while teaching the benefits of walking when she says that "Sidewalks are free, baby!" My dogged scientific side wants to say how costly sidewalks are since they, like roads, bury good soil and the very mining of concrete from earth contributes to Gaia's problems. She knows these things. In the larger picture, I think that all magick needs to be "green magick" while we pray to mend climate change.
Nothing else will matter if we don't make this a priority.
But pay heed to Ellen's council to support each other, relax and laugh together. The ultimate take-away of this delightful book is to embrace our sameness while respecting our differences. This becomes ever more needed today as capitalism has become it's own miss-cast, dark spell of greed and corruption harming everything. I and many others believe it to be the source of many evils now running rampant.
"Every Witch Way" is the real deal and covers a surprisingly broad spectrum of what witches do. Though an easy read, I would recommend it to beginner and advanced practitioners alike or to anyone beginning research into these topics. The Valkyrie and the faerie -They know what they are doing. Read their book and think on how we can bring "Every Witch Way" or simply "Every Human Way" together to face down extinction.
Shit don't get any more real than that.

[Jelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I very much like the idea behind this book, the execution felt half-assed and not well thought out. Furthermore, though this book isn’t advertised as being Wiccan, there is a heavy Wiccan influence throughout, which is tiresome if you’re looking for a secular view. However, it does do a good job of illustrating how witches can have radically different viewpoints and be no less authentic in their craft. The authors have sometimes wildly conflicting opinions but are still friends (at least I assume so, given that they published this book together).

Cons:
•Scattered, choppy transitions
•Hypocrisy/conflicting opinions touted by the same author between sections; primarily in regards to religiosity of witchcraft
•Assumption of Wiccan background for all witches
•Use of problematic terms/closed practices–i.e. smudging and chakras by Whitehurst, and karma by both authors

The book is organized by topic, with each author presenting a brief write-up of their opinion on the topic. While this is fine, the transitions between the authors and what they opted to discuss regarding the topics felt choppy and somewhat disorganized to me. For example, in the section on house cleaning and cleansing, Whitehurst focused on mundane cleaning as a way to renew the flow of energy, while Dugan focused on energy “ghosts” and manifestations of hauntings. The topics are related, but I would have appreciated some more in depth transitions. There was also a broad assumption by both authors that whomever is reading the book does so from a Wiccan perspective–a lot of 'Blessed Be’s’, references to the Rede, etc. My biggest beef with the book is inconsistency on the part of the authors, particularly Ellen Dugan. She touts diversity in the kitchen witch chapter, but in answer to the question 'can you be a Christian witch’, she says “No…witches are following a polytheistic religion” and regularly equates witchcraft to paganism. Since not all witches view their craft as a religion, not all witches are pagan, not all pagans are witches…this is an exclusive and inaccurate view. She also goes on to once again encourage tolerance when discussing the magickal diet, so the feeling I get is that she doesn’t like to be told what to do (i.e. that people disagree with the way she practices) but has no problem telling others that they should follow her practice. Whitehurst in general promotes tolerance and inclusivity (she believes you can be Christian and a witch), but she gets a little high-handed pushing veganism, claiming essentially that it is a pagan responsibility to not consume animal products rather than an individual's personal choice.

Pros:
•Concept: 2 different opinions/points of view
•Format: opinionated discussion with spells/charms thrown in to the first section, with organized spells in the second section
•Discussion of mundane as well as magickal
•Spell section of book features a “basic” spell by one author, and then a more “advanced/potent” spell on the same topic by the other author

Mostly the redeeming qualities of this book are the concept and organization. I like the idea of having a discussion of multiple Paths, and having the discussion with a few spells and charms separated from the main spell section makes it quite accessible in my opinion (since I was primarily interested in the discussion). Tying in the mundane solutions with magickal is also something I appreciate. Unfortunately, none of this was enough to overcome my distaste at the hypocrisy discussed above.

Overall, I’m not sure I would recommend this book to anyone. It was absolutely an interesting concept, but more coherence and less “this is what I do so it’s what you should do too” would improve it greatly. Though I liked the way some of the thoughts were framed, I’m honestly so confused by both of the authors and their inconsistent opinions that I think it’s doubtful I will read either of them again. I certainly won’t seek out any books by either author.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a fast reader but I got through this book in a week (that's good for me!). This was mainly because of the informal set-up of this book making it very easy to read and absorb.
The book is divided into 2 parts; the first, both authors differing views on the same subjects. The second part is their preferred methods of spell castings.
I would've preferred this book had it all been written as the first half of the book was. I don't really care much for spell work so I skimmed through a lot of the second part.
The first half was very interesting and both authors writing styles were wonderfully informal,witty and relaxed. It was like being sat around a table, drinking tea and listening to their views. Being privy to two friends exchanging ideas and stories.
I'd recommend this book purely on the first half. Maybe the less experienced would get more from the second half than I did.

[Roger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Heavy wiccan slant, conflation of 'witch' with wicca. One of the authors completely disregards that anyone might consider themselves a witch outside those who practice that specific religion, and uses a hamhanded and offensive metaphor in the process. The book is wholly useless to any experienced witchcraft practitioner, or really to anyone - if you want advice and perspective about witchcraft, go talk to other witches. In the internet age, a book giving you these things is completely useless.

[Ellinor · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is some good information in this book but it is well hidden among what I can only call nonsense. It felt less like a book of learning and more like a book of preaching. From both authors it felt like a longwinded morality sermon and I just got really annoyed.

[Kevin McNerney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two unique views on Witchcraft and living a positive healthy Metaphysical lifestyle. Was good too see both agree to disagree agreeably on subjects where their belief systems varied.
I highly recommend this to any level.of Practitioner.

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was good

They give practical ideas. There are a few things I will be taking away with me to incorporate into my day to day and for a rainy day as needed but if knowledge.

[Sparkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely little jaunt into the world of magic!

[Abigail Greig · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting idea

I enjoyed reading the opinions of two such very different witches. Not surprisingly, as a witch myself, many of my opinions differ from both of theirs. ;-) While I don't believe you can copy someone else's spell and get good results, and therefore I skipped the large chunk of book that was spells, I did appreciate that they went into basic information about each spell before writing out the details, as I find a lot more can be learned from the basic info and the "why" than from their particular choice of rhyming phrase.

[Benjamin Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Book

This book is very nice it cleared up some questions I had like can you be a Christian Witch. Worth reading.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read authors, very enjoyable.

[wanda black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book!


Helpful little book, 2 different insights.
The spells were very much appreciated and useful. I will be far-reaching it over and over!

[Ro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite entertaining.

[kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book

Nice to hear some different opinions on the same topics cause no two people are alike a nice read
Enjoyed it

[Warmdarksky · Rating 2 out of 5]

ehhh

[Megan Moyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved having two opinions!

This was a very informative book. Its helped feed my curious side about this topic. Wished there was more about how to gain sparkle in it.

[Jacquelyn Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will read again

A wonderful collaboration of two very different views. I loved it! Thank you again for so much insight and information.