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The Willow Path – Witchcraft, Hermetics and the Hidden Wisdom of the Magical Arts
320 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2020
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August 16, 2023
This is a book containing a fair amount of interesting detail on topics that are less common in other overview-type books on witchcraft/similar practices, but it's also a book I found very frustrating to read (which is, unfortunately, a pretty common experience for me with these sorts of books).
I generally find books covering specific traditions quite interesting, even when they're far from anything I'd ever want to implement in my own practice. I appreciate that this book covers (pretty much) the entirety of the foundations of the author's group tradition, as I think it's helpful and interesting for any sort of practitioner to see the overall structure of such a practice; I enjoyed the insight into the connections between different aspects of the Willow Path, as well as the author's attempt to explain the why of everything instead of just the how (as is more common). There were a handful of concepts and short passages in here that definitely resonated with me, and a fair amount of new information, but not much. The detail regarding the Celtic realms of reality was probably the most interesting and well-written aspect of the book.
Overall, however, this book exhausted me. There are a lot of errors overlooked in editing (spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, text formatting...), and the author's writing style is very frequently repetitive and often comes across a bit self-sanctimonious for me. There's a huge focus on the whole "divine feminine/masculine" thing, which I know is near-universal in neopaganism and witchcraft but is something I find pretty repulsive, and Wisner really hammers it home constantly here. I also found his approach to history very frustrating: he often introduces a topic with a bunch of caveats (pointing out how there's a lot of debate on the subject/not a lot of real evidence/etc.), but then continues to spout insubstantiated claims in a way that's clearly meant to present them as objective fact. This is especially tiring when it comes to the frequent refrain about how monotheism ~stole our heritage~ and the idea of "witchcraft" coming through in an unbroken-ish line over the centuries.
I also want to point out that I find the author's intense fanboy attitude toward Sybil Leek (the late author whose work is a big source of inspiration for the Willow Path) rather uncomfortable. He's clearly unwilling to really go against any of her claims, even when those claims are objectively questionable at best. It honestly just made me laugh that he felt the need to include a photocopy of a ~personal letter~ he received from Sybil Leek in the book, as it's irrelevant to the book's contents and the content of the letter basically amounts to "I'm not the right person, go talk to someone else".
This is far from the worst book on neopagan witchcraft I've read, but it shares a lot of the same problems that I see in so many of them. However, it might be worth a read if you're interested in learning about a specific small-group practice that blends "traditional witchcraft" and Western mystery tradition stuff (especially Hermetics) and Celtic mythology in a relatively unique way.
I generally find books covering specific traditions quite interesting, even when they're far from anything I'd ever want to implement in my own practice. I appreciate that this book covers (pretty much) the entirety of the foundations of the author's group tradition, as I think it's helpful and interesting for any sort of practitioner to see the overall structure of such a practice; I enjoyed the insight into the connections between different aspects of the Willow Path, as well as the author's attempt to explain the why of everything instead of just the how (as is more common). There were a handful of concepts and short passages in here that definitely resonated with me, and a fair amount of new information, but not much. The detail regarding the Celtic realms of reality was probably the most interesting and well-written aspect of the book.
Overall, however, this book exhausted me. There are a lot of errors overlooked in editing (spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, text formatting...), and the author's writing style is very frequently repetitive and often comes across a bit self-sanctimonious for me. There's a huge focus on the whole "divine feminine/masculine" thing, which I know is near-universal in neopaganism and witchcraft but is something I find pretty repulsive, and Wisner really hammers it home constantly here. I also found his approach to history very frustrating: he often introduces a topic with a bunch of caveats (pointing out how there's a lot of debate on the subject/not a lot of real evidence/etc.), but then continues to spout insubstantiated claims in a way that's clearly meant to present them as objective fact. This is especially tiring when it comes to the frequent refrain about how monotheism ~stole our heritage~ and the idea of "witchcraft" coming through in an unbroken-ish line over the centuries.
I also want to point out that I find the author's intense fanboy attitude toward Sybil Leek (the late author whose work is a big source of inspiration for the Willow Path) rather uncomfortable. He's clearly unwilling to really go against any of her claims, even when those claims are objectively questionable at best. It honestly just made me laugh that he felt the need to include a photocopy of a ~personal letter~ he received from Sybil Leek in the book, as it's irrelevant to the book's contents and the content of the letter basically amounts to "I'm not the right person, go talk to someone else".
This is far from the worst book on neopagan witchcraft I've read, but it shares a lot of the same problems that I see in so many of them. However, it might be worth a read if you're interested in learning about a specific small-group practice that blends "traditional witchcraft" and Western mystery tradition stuff (especially Hermetics) and Celtic mythology in a relatively unique way.
Displaying 1 of 1 review