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"When she arrived at her building, she noticed a beam of silvery light shining down on the front stoop. Even after all those years, the moon still knew where she lived."

--Elizabeth A. Gould (The Well of Truth)

The Well of Truth is a creative synthesis of novel with metaphor plus myth, allegory, symbolism, and archetypal experiences of truth. I’ve never read another book quite like it—it blends the fictional story of a woman’s life with larger mythical understanding and lessons and reads more like a “teaching” than like strictly fiction.

They're burning books in Tennessee. Supposedly "witchcraft" books, and I would tell you all to go read them, except they mean Harry Potter.

Read that too, if you wish, and if you haven't already. I haven't read it myself, but some younger people I know loved it as kids. The controversy over Harry Potter is that it supposedly promotes witchcraft. The author has become controversial due to anti-trans statements on social media, but the book series does not have much to do with that. There are ways to read a book without putting your money into it, if that is a concern for you.

“…I believe that ‘slowness’ is a power that we can and must bring to our magic because the modern need for speed has invaded this practice too. A while back, I picked up a book [of swift spells]. I was struck by the word associations – to be modern is to be speedy, swift and efficient. I am very keen to represent a counter idea – of slow magic: easeful rituals, gentle enchantment and leisurely spells, as well as magic to be found within the process of slowing down and being still. Not as a ‘better’ option, but merely a different one, something that maybe we can embrace, so that we can have options to take things slowly when the mood takes us, or seek it out in our practice. This is the heart of yin magic.”

—Sarah Robinson, Yin Magic

Are you afraid of being still? This is the question that kept arising for me as I made my way slowly through Yin Magic, by Sarah Robinson and published by Womancraft Publishing. Sometimes the most meaningful books are those that take me the longest to read. Yin Magic is a companion book to Yoga for Witches (previously reviewed here), but it also beautifully stands alone. In the book, Sarah invites you to, “dare to inquire: what could stillness look like for me? What does stillness from the busyness of my life look like?”

1st anniversary of book launch!

Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path was published on August 1st, 2020. I put off doing a book tour hoping I'd be able to go on a post-pandemic belated book tour in 2021 but it's not yet time for a lot of in person events this year either. Hopefully next year! So, instead of a book tour:

Review party week!

Post a new review of my book on Amazon, Storytel, etc. (wherever you bought it) or your blog, post the link as a comment here, and win a surprise prize! (You'll get a choice of 3 different surprise prizes. Must message me on social media or email me in order to choose and claim your prize.) Or if you've previously posted a review on Amazon, your blog, etc., post a link to that review and you still win a prize! Because what is time? (Oh but that's another story lol.) I'll share your review link across my social media platforms (that includes a link to your blog, magazine, podcast, etc. if that's where your review is.)

Review party week goes from today (Saturday July 31, 2021) to next Saturday  (August 7, 2021.) Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path is the new, longer, updated version of my out of print book Asatru For Beginners.

Find all the links to buy the ebook, paper, or audiobook on the following link, or ask for my book at your local bookstore or library.

https://www.erinlaleauthor.com/asatrua-beginners-guide.html

Mythic Moons of Avalon
by Jhenah Telyndru
Llewellyn Books, 2019
(www.ynysafallon.com)
Reviewed by Molly Remer,
brigidsgrove.com

Rich with insight and lore from Celtic myth and legend, while also steeped in a steady structure of contemporary spirituality, Mythic Moons of Avalon is best for people with a specific interest in lunar workings, lunar magic, and Celtic traditions, and specifically, the stories of Avalon. It makes no pretense at being an authoritative historical compendium and is clear that this is a specific and modern approach with some ancient, historical roots and a deep connection to the physical landscape and terrain of the mystery, culture, and spirit of Avalon and Arthurian Britain (for a modern age).

The book is organized in month by month sections, some of which can feel repetitive, though the workings do build on one another as the book progresses. I did find it somewhat easy to inadvertently start to skim parts of the book due to repetition.

Excellent for a small group study as well as a personal journey of devotion and exploration, Mythic Moons of Avalon is definitely best suited to serious practice rather than casual curiosity. This is a book that is meant to be working into and through. It is meant to be treated respectfully and approached with dedication by someone serious about journeying into the depths of Avalonian mystery and tradition as well as into their own psyches and souls, applying the stories, wisdom, lunar phases, and herbal correspondences to their own lives.

Note to Reader:

I thought that I'd posted this one years ago, but--if so--I can't seem to find it. So here's a repost, following the news of Kingsnorth's recent reception into the Orthodox Church.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (2015). Graywolf Press

If you read only one novel this year, let it be Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake.

The emergence of post-apocalyptic narrative in early “twenty-first” century fiction, cinema, and television is an intriguing and suggestive phenomenon, offering rich possibilities for satire, cultural critique, and reflection on direction for possible futures.

But of course, as every heathen knows, when it comes to Apocalypse, we've already been there and done that. In human history, Ragnarok comes again and again. This is how Kingsnorth can characterize his novel, now newly released in the US and currently long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize, as “a post-apocalyptic novel set 1000 years in the past.”

Imagine that you've lost everything: your property, your possessions, your family, your culture itself, even your gods. This is the tale that Kingsnorth tells in The Wake. The year is 1066.

Buccmaster, the novel's protagonist and narrator, is a sokeman—an independent, landed farmer—in the Fens of northeastern England's Danelaw, on the eve of England's most cataclysmic event: the long echoes of which, as Kingsnorth judiciously notes, are still to be felt in our day. A millennium after the Norman Invasion, 70% of land in England still belongs to 1% of the population. 1000 years after Hastings, you can still look at my friend David and I and say: that one's the Norman, that one's the Saxon.

I've withheld some important information about our hero. He's also heathen.

it is like my grandfather saed to me like what I saed to ecceard to these wapentac men this hwit crist he lies. it is hard to sae these things they moste be saed in thy hus only if thu is hierde the preost and the thegn and the gerefa and the wapentac they will tac thu down. but it is lic my grandfather saed before the crist cum our folcs gods was of anglish wind and water now this ingenga [inganger = foreign] god from ofer the sea this god he tacs from us what we is. there is sum of us saes my grandfather still cepan alyf the eald gods of angland efen in these times and he wolde spec to me of these things when my father was not lystnan a thrall was he to those who wolde tac from him what macd him man (Kingsnorth 23).

The language of this tragic and compelling novel is, as you can see, a time-travel English, an English entirely Anglo-Saxon, lacking French vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation: what English might have become had Hastings never happened.

As a boy, Buccmaster's grandfather took him to the drowned grove where the old gods once lived.

and the gods he saes the gods them selfs waits still beneath these waters for us to cum baec and when angland is in need if we call them they will cum all of them from the old holt [grove] below this fenn mere and feoht again with anglisc men agan any and heaw [hew] them down (Kingsnorth 54)

In the face of the death of his culture, Buccmaster cries out: